Authors: Shamim Sarif
Sam nodded.
“Good,” said Omar, more to himself than to them, and he picked up the plates that had remained on the table since breakfast, and placed them in the sink, where Robert would wash them when he returned the next day. He disliked mess, it disoriented him, and he wrapped up the bread in waxed paper, and straightened the bench. He then pointed at it and the children sat down, reluctantly taking their books from their satchels. Once they were sitting down, Alisha spoke.
“I don’t have any homework.”
“Why not?”
“I’m only four,” she informed him. “You don’t get homework until big school.”
“Oh.”
Alisha regarded her father, and seemed to feel some pity for his confusion.
“I can make a picture,” she offered. “With my crayons.”
Omar looked pleased. “Good,” he said, and he waited while they arranged themselves at the end of the kitchen table.
“Where’s Mummy?” his son asked, and Omar stared at him. He had not anticipated this most obvious of questions and he was unsure of how to answer.
“She’s upstairs,” he said, a moment before they heard Miriam shout in pain. The children looked at him, fearful. Sam began to cry. Omar stared at them, uncertain of what to do.
“What are you crying for?” he asked his son finally. He was answered by a continued sobbing, and he saw his daughter’s mouth begin to tremble.
“She’s fine,” he said, desperately. “You mother is fine. She’s having the baby, that’s all.”
The crying stopped, to be replaced with wonderment at this unexpected development.
“Why is the baby hurting Mummy?” asked Alisha. Omar sighed, and sat down at the table. He passed his hands through his hair and thought hard.
“It’s not hurting her,” he said, talking firmly over the sounds emanating from upstairs. “It’s just that having the baby is a bit difficult. It won’t be long. You’ll see.”
Sam watched his father closely. “Is that how Mummy felt when she had me?”
Omar nodded, and the child’s eyes began to fill up again.
“No!” he said, back-pedalling as quickly as he could. “I mean, it was difficult for your mother, but she didn’t mind, because she had you – and Alisha – afterwards.”
“How small was I, Daddy?”
The word “Daddy” seemed to surprise Omar for a moment – it had been a long time since he had heard it. It had been a long time since he had spoken to either of his children except to give them an order. He looked at his daughter, with her short hair and huge dark eyes and button nose. That was his wife’s child, he thought to himself – the resemblance was astounding. He held his hands about a foot apart.
“You were about this big,” he said. “With the smallest toes in the world.”
This made the children laugh, and Sam wanted to know who had been bigger as a new-born. Omar had no idea, but he told the boy that he had been the biggest, and that that was because he was a boy and because he would grow up tall and strong.
“So will I,” said Alisha, and Omar looked at her, surprised at the feisty tone of his daughter’s words.
There was a thumping above them as Mrs Benjamin began her descent.
“Hello, Mister Husband!” she called as soon as the family were in sight. She gazed with great satisfaction at the three of them sitting around the table. “Or should I say, Mister Father!”
Omar stood up, and the old lady nodded. “Yes, it’s all over, everything’s fine, they’re both tip-top.”
“Is it a boy?” he asked.
“What a question!” Mrs Benjamin exclaimed, glancing at Alisha. Omar looked down at his feet.
“It’s a beautiful, healthy girl,” she told him, and he nodded and looked to his children, but they offered no support; they only looked back, waiting for some sign from him. He turned back to Mrs Benjamin, forced a smile, and tried to mutter something approving, before she told him to go upstairs and see his wife.
T
HEY ROSE EARLIER THAN USUAL
on the first Sunday in May, to journey to Pretoria for lunch with Omar’s family. During the previous week, Miriam had found out that Rehmat, Omar’s other sister, was due to arrive back in South Africa. Since her marriage, she had heard nothing of Rehmat from her husband, and all her information had been gleaned from the slim shards of gossip passed to her secretly by Farah. In fact, Miriam had almost forgotten that she had ever existed at all, which was a state of affairs her husband seemed to prefer. Unexpectedly, however, Rehmat had sent her brother a short letter from Paris, a slim airmail missive that had stood out from the sturdy brown envelopes of their usual mail like a delicate blue flower. Miriam had admired the exotic stamps and the words “Par Avion” that were stamped across the paper, and had pictured the letter being written with a silver fountain pen upon a polished wooden bureau in a tasteful French salon so very far away. She had looked to Omar for an explanation, but he had only frowned as he ripped open the letter, and had frowned harder after reading the meagre lines. It was only three days later that he told her that his sister Rehmat would be arriving in Pretoria that weekend.
This lunch was to welcome her, but it was not to be a large, extended affair; there was to be no showing off, or overt demonstrations of devotion for the benefit of friends and neighbours. It would be only the brothers and their wives, and Jehan in her back room. Still, considering that her in-laws all seemed to spend their lives pretending that she did not exist, Miriam was amazed that any effort was being made at all in Rehmat’s honour, but she was curious to see her other sister-in-law. She had seen her picture once. It was a photograph that stood on a chipped coffee table in Sadru’s house, on a hand-crocheted doily that was yellowed from the shafts of sunlight that had fallen onto it everyday over the past two decades. The picture was fading too, and had two illegible words scrawled in one corner - a date and a place perhaps. Omar, Sadru and Rehmat were standing against a car, squinting into the sun. Omar was smiling, his arms crossed as he leaned back - he must have been about nineteen, and Rehmat was watching him, laughing, her face in profile showing the planes of angular cheekbones and a straight, pointed nose. Miriam had looked at that picture so often, for there were many aspects that drew her to it - the feeling of the sun on those young, laughing people, or perhaps her husband’s relaxed attitude, so alien to her.
She did not dare to question Omar too much, but she did venture to ask about Rehmat one night as they lay in the cool darkness of their bedroom waiting for sleep. She had waited to see if he would reply, but he said nothing for a few moments; then he simply stated that Rehmat had always refused to take on her responsibilities, that she had driven their mother to her grave with her strange notions and continually spoken back to their father. She had felt their father’s belt more than the rest of them put together - but what did she expect when she read so many smart books and then thought that she was smarter than everyone else?
“Where has she been for so long?” asked Miriam. This was the longest paragraph her husband had spoken to her for some time, and she liked it, this possibility of conversation. Carefully, as though trying to grasp a small but slippery fish, Miriam asked her quiet question.
“Europe. France.” He turned over, so that his back was to her.
“Paris,” Miriam had said softly, almost involuntarily, and he had turned to frown at her.
“Yes. How do you know?”
“Farah told me.”
He had not replied, only muttered something unintelligible and had turned again and tried to sleep.
“She went there with her husband?”
Omar turned again and viewed his wife over his shoulder, as though she were a stranger.
“She went to get married.”
“A professor?” said Miriam.
“Yes.” His tone was abrupt, and there was a short silence before he spoke again. “He had an offer of a job there. In Paris.”
Miriam opened her mouth to form another question - about the circumstances of their departure - but Omar looked cold now, and angry, as though he were daring her to continue this conversation which was obviously distasteful to him. Miriam looked into his eyes for the briefest of moments before she lowered her head down onto her pillow and closed her eyes.
So this Sunday morning they dressed early, and the children waited in a state of anxious anticipation, except for the baby who slept peacefully after her early morning feed. Their excitement slowly seeped away when they realised that they would be forced to wait through three hours while the shop was open. They were always open on a Sunday morning, and nobody’s arrival from the shores of Europe was going to change that.
Miriam opened the shop alone, except for John, who stopped before leaving to help her with the padlocks, and she waited in the quiet for any sign of a customer, before she moved back to the kitchen, where the children sat toying with their bowls of porridge. She shook her head at them.
“Eat, now,” she said. “I can’t sit here waiting for you, I have to mind the shop. Eat up, Sam.”
“Why can’t Robert mind the shop?” asked Alisha.
“Because he goes home on Sunday,” said Miriam, irritably. “You know that.” The children looked down at their plates.
“When are we going to see Aunty Rehmat?” asked Alisha.
“We’re going soon,” Miriam replied. “But not if you don’t finish your food.” It was an idle threat, and the mother and the children both knew it.
“I’m not hungry,” ventured Sam.
“Eat,” said Miriam, and she turned and went back into the shop.
She waited, knowing that at the very least, Christina from Mr Weston’s farm would probably come by for a can of peas, or a piece of dress material or some such thing. She always shopped for the household on a Friday, but she inevitably forgot something. The clock ticked slowly above her, and Miriam glanced up at the ceiling where her husband’s steps made a muffled noise in the bathroom. He was taking an unusually long time to get ready today, and Miriam smiled to herself, then walked to the open door and went out to the
stoep
. The sun was sweet on her face, and warm for the time of year, with a cool breath of wind which moved through the grass and trees now and then, lifting her hair as it went. Somewhere birds were singing, but when she looked up at the trees she could not see them. Walking back inside she called to her children, asking them had they eaten, were they getting ready? She heard them scrape their chairs, then she heard the clatter of their heels and the echo of their giggles as they flew up the stairs. They ran straight into their father. He made a sound of surprise to have his children crash into his legs, and then he told them to hurry up - even though, Miriam thought to herself, they would not leave for another two hours.
Omar walked into the shop dressed in a stiff white shirt and his best tie, his face carefully shaven, his hair trimmed and neatly combed. He always looked smart, but there was an air of effort about him today, made more apparent by his deliberately careless manner as he walked about the shop, and the way that he managed not to look his wife in the eye.
Not one single customer arrived in the following two hours. As soon as the clock struck the hour, Miriam put baby Salma into her carrycot and ushered the children into the car, around which they had been playing for the last hour. As he started the engine, Omar looked at his wife, his glance moving over her dress and hair for a moment, and he nodded, very slightly and to himself. Then he turned and surveyed his children, who looked back with their liquid black eyes. “They look nice. Did you bath them?” he said.
“Yes. They are wearing their best things,” she added, and he nodded again.
“Good,” he said. “Very good.”
When Sadru’s house came into view at last, Miriam was astonished at the noise around them. There were people everywhere, out in their yards, walking along the dusty streets, lingering with bottles of soda beneath the gnarled laburnum trees, visiting neighbours. Children shouted and shrieked, playing in the road. She understood for the first time that she really had become used to life in Delhof, in the countryside. Now it was the quiet humming of the grassland and farmland that seemed the natural state to her, not this bustle and activity, which she had barely noticed when she lived here. After her neat, wooden framed home, the ramshackle series of houses, whose roofs sloped at odd angles, looked stifling to her. Walls of corrugated iron leaned lazily onto brown brick ones. Groups of men looked up as they drove by, slack-jawed, momentarily curious.
Miriam turned and looked at Sam and Alisha, sitting mute as waxworks in the back seat, having been forbidden to speak for the last half an hour by their father, who peered tensely from the windscreen as they slowed to a halt before his brother’s house. The children had been arguing, and had become boisterous with the baby, stroking her head and moving her arms, causing her to wake and start crying. Now Sam’s eyes were filled with tears, but Alisha refused to acknowledge her mother’s look, staring steadfastly from her window, her little arms crossed defiantly over her chest.
“Come on,” Omar said, and he waited outside, straightening his tie as the children struggled with the door handles. Once they had all emerged, he took the baby’s cot in one hand, put the other on his son’s shoulder, and led them all into the house.
At first glance, everything seemed to be as it always had been - Farah was in the kitchen, out of sight, but still somehow managing to emanate waves of discontent at having to cook even greater quantities than normal. Her children were running around upstairs, providing a background of shrieks and laughter. Only the sight of Jehan sitting in the living room was unusual. She was dozing in a chair, having been put into her best dress. Her hair had been washed too, Miriam noted, although no one had bothered to dry it. Omar’s brother walked over to the door to greet them, his frame tall and lumbering, his face smiling and harassed at the same time. He shook his brother’s hand nervously, pinched the new baby’s cheeks, and greeted Miriam with a gentleness that she appreciated, knowing that it did not come readily to his heavy body. He tousled Sam’s hair and in a smooth, swooping movement bent and picked up Alisha and tossed her up into the air like a bag of sugar. The child laughed hysterically and Miriam smiled as she watched, but her heart had skipped a beat, and it was only when her little girl was back on the ground that she relaxed again.
“Farah!” Sadru called, ushering them to seats. Farah made no reply but they all knew that she had heard and would emerge when it suited her. Miriam guided her children towards the stairs, telling them to go up and play with their cousins. Alisha and Sam looked at her plaintively, as though willing her to reprieve them from this inevitable ritual, but she looked sternly at them and made them go. Then she went towards the kitchen to help her
bhabhi
with the food, but her brother-in-law stopped her, insisting that she sit. Omar ignored the chair that was offered to him, and paced up and down.
“So, how’s business? How’s tricks?” asked Sadru, settling back into his armchair, from one arm of which tufts of stuffing protruded.
Omar looked towards the stairs. The noise upstairs had suddenly ceased.
“It’s fine. Everything’s fine,
bhai
,” Miriam volunteered. Omar spun around.
“Where is she?”
“Who?”
“Your sister.”
Even Sadru had to smile at this.
“She’s coming. She’s not here,” he added, following the impatient darting of Omar’s eyes. “Our sister went to meet her husband at his hotel.”
“That’s a stupid thing to do,” Omar said. Miriam watched her husband. He looked angry and somehow helpless. “Are they trying to get caught? I can’t even believe they came back here together.”
“His father is dying…
”
said Sadru, unhappily.
Omar turned away. “So what? He’ll be dead in a week, and they’ll be in jail. Do you think the police care who’s dying?”
Miriam looked at Sadru in the silence that followed. She had learned from Farah some time ago that Rehmat’s husband was white, and that this was the root of her family’s displeasure, but the realisation that since the 1948 laws Rehmat’s marriage would also be illegal only occurred to her now.
“Which hotel is her husband at?” she asked finally, to break the silence.
“The Royal, if you can believe it.”
This information came from Farah, who came out of the kitchen adjusting her dress.
“Who do they think they are?” She looked directly, almost accusingly at Omar, and what surprised Miriam was the was the way that Omar looked back at her, holding her glance with a casual intimacy that she herself had rarely experienced with him. She looked back to Farah, but by this time her
bhabhi
was continuing the story of Rehmat’s arrival and her unrelenting tone of sarcasm had caused both men to look at the floor, as though not seeing her might somehow block out her voice as well.