Текст книги "Broken Verses"

Автор книги: Kamila Shamsie

Соавторы: Kamila Shamsie
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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

‘Words appeared, bright against their dust-covered surroundings,’ I said, that line from the second set of encrypted pages falling instantly off my tongue.

‘Yes. You see? All I did was imitate him. The distinctiveness of his voice was what made it easy. That, and your desire to believe.’

‘I don’t understand,’ I said, again.

‘I know.’ We were both leaning against the desk with our hands clasped together, not making eye contact, not daring to touch. ‘I just wanted you to wake up. No, no, that’s not true. When you looked through me, Aasmaani, you made me feel powerless, and worthless. It set off, I think, a little madness in my brain. You will not ignore me, you will not treat me like scum, I thought. I will make myself important in your life.’ He unclasped his hands and looked at his palms as though trying to find, in their intersecting and dividing lines, an explanation. ‘I wasn’t thinking very clearly.’

‘Keep going.’

‘And so I wrote another message. Oh, here—’ He pulled open a desk drawer and I saw an inkpad and stamps from different postal districts in Pakistan rattling around. ‘When I moved into my office, the CEO handed over boxes of supplies and it included all these postmark stamps. I don’t know what he used them for. Something shady, I imagine. But anyway, I dropped the second envelope into the letter slot at home. When my mother saw it she told her driver to give it to you – and the idiot handed it to me instead. I took it to the office, unsure what to do. Finally I realized I was acting crazy. I took the envelope and I was heading towards the shredder downstairs. But I stopped in your office on the way, and you saw the envelope.’

‘And made you give it to me.’

‘Yes. I was sick with guilt, again. That’s why I went over to your place that evening. To tell you. To explain. And then I got there, and I just couldn’t. Because it would have meant saying goodbye to you.’

We were both silent, thinking back to that evening.

‘I couldn’t tell you the truth. I couldn’t even tell you it was impossible that he was writing the pages. I just couldn’t. It just kept going from there.’

‘Things keep on and keep on.’

‘Yes.’

‘For how long were you planning to keep it going, Ed?’

‘Today’s was to be the last. I thought maybe – I hadn’t thought it through properly – but maybe I’d send you a final letter from one of the Minions to say the Poet had died peacefully in his sleep.’

‘You were going to make me lose him again?’

‘I would have helped you get through it. I’m sorry, Aasmaani. It got beyond my control. I couldn’t continue lying to you any more than I could tell you the truth.’

‘One letter from the Minions and it would have been over? You really believed that?’

He lifted his hand in a gesture of futility. ‘I knew I had to find a way to make it stop. I just didn’t quite know how.’

‘The crosswords. Why, Ed? Why intensify the fantasy by making me believe I could speak to him?’

‘I had to. For your sake. How else could I keep you from continuing your public enquiries about what happened to him? God, you terrified me when you said you were doing that.’ He took my hand, finally. ‘I loved you almost from the first moment we met. I knew instantly that something was happening between us, something that I couldn’t control or stop. You knew my heart, Aasmaani. You had my heart, it was beating in your chest, my damaged, obsessive heart.’

I gripped his hand more tightly. I wanted to kiss him quiet, kiss him wordless, but he was looking at me so intensely that I couldn’t move.

‘And those letters, they were the only way you’d let me into your life. As the delivery boy.’

‘You didn’t have to be the delivery boy. You were you, that’s enough. You don’t have to jump off a tree and break your leg to make someone stay with you, don’t you know that?’ But even as I said it, I knew it wasn’t true. I had become so adept at walking away from people. Ed was here with me now because he’d found the one chink, the one part of me which was wound instead of armour.

‘Let’s be honest. The only way I could get into your life was as Merlin, possessing the information you needed. I’m sorry about that letter – the one about your mother’s perversions. I was so angry when I wrote that one. But all the others, all the others, Aasmaani, they weren’t cruel, were they? When I saw all that unhappiness in your life, I knew I could use the letters to make it better. I only wanted to make you happy in the end. I couldn’t do it on my own. But in the Poet’s voice, I could. This one today, it was to be the final letter. The one you could go back to and know that he and your mother had something together which no one could take away from them. I didn’t know that myself until I met you. Isn’t that strange? Between you and the letters, you rewrote me. Turned me into someone who could understand love, and what a blessing it is. Two nights ago after we saw Boond together, when you fell asleep in my arms, I knew I couldn’t continue the deception any longer. I had to put an end to it. I realized that as you slept. I started working out the contents of that letter in my head as you slept – your breath my only metronome.’

I smiled. ‘It was the first detail you got wrong, as far as I know. I would have realized it if I’d had time to think it over. He didn’t write when she slept. He wrote in the mornings after they’d had breakfast together.’ I said that, and then I saw Omi, bent over his desk. I saw him, because I was in the room with him. I was the only person in the world he allowed into his study when he wrote. I’d sit there, and read one of the books from his library – Elizabeth Bishop and Mir were two of our joint favourites – learning to love their word combinations before I really understood what they meant.

I pulled my hand out of Ed’s grasp.

All the while he’d been talking, I had followed along his story, Ed the conflicted hero at the heart of it. It was his story I was listening to and concentrating on, the camera was on him alone. How could it have taken so long to think what I should have thought instantly?

‘Omi died sixteen years ago.’ I stepped away from him.

‘Aasmaani?’

A hammer smashed down, all the weight of a grown man’s body behind it. A bone split in two. Omi called out, ‘Samina!’ The hammer lifted again, smashed down again. Another bone split. They pulled his teeth out, one by one. Took the hammer to his bones again. His body becoming pulp. ‘Samina. Samina.’ My mother every day after his death had to imagine this. Every single day she could not help but imagine this. They cut out his tongue. He continued to mouth her name. Samina. Their fists on his face, his nose, his cheekbones. Bruises spreading across his face like rivers melting through ice, crawling together into a mass of blue. The only thing recognizable in him any more the shape his mouth kept forming. Samina. My love. Samina.

I was down on my knees. Ed was crouching next to me, saying something, but I couldn’t hear him through the screams. And then the door was flung open, and Beema ran to me, Rabia and Shakeel and Shehnaz Saeed behind her. Beema put her arms around me, pulling me close to her, never letting go until there was no voice left in me and then Shakeel lifted me in his arms, and they thought I had stopped screaming as he carried me down the stairs and into the car, but I hadn’t. I didn’t stop screaming for a very long time.

XXIV

They have it easy, the ones who can mourn the dead.

I sat hunched over in bed, in the spare bedroom of Dad and Beema’s Islamabad house, staring into the red bars of the electric heater. If I looked long enough that image would sear itself on to my retina and when I shut my eyes those bars would be all I’d see. Not Omi, not rivers melting through ice, not my mother drowning in the thought of those rivers.

I had never properly mourned Omi. I realized as much the day Beema packed my clothes and took me away from Karachi and Ed and Shehnaz Saeed, into the green, unreal calm of Islamabad. That he had left my life, yes, I mourned that, but never the manner of his dying. And now that I tried to complete the process of grief, the man I mourned was the Omi of the encrypted pages. The man who shouted, ‘Frass! Frass!’ to the Minions, who wanted to grow maudlin in the moonlight with Shehnaz Saeed discussing the woman they both loved, who spoke of my mother’s ‘peachjuicemouth’, who wondered if I had overshadowed him yet. I mourned him and, while mourning, remembered that the man I was crying for had never even existed, and I had no language then to articulate my loss.

And Ed. I tried to tell myself that the Ed I loved had never really existed either, but I knew that wasn’t true. I had loved Ed most for the pain he carried around, and the secrets which he revealed that night in his room did nothing to lessen the pain – quite the contrary. And also, that voice in the pages, the voice I thought was Omi’s, the voice I had loved, that was Ed’s voice, too.

A shadow fell across the red bars. I looked up and saw Beema standing in the doorway.

‘Do you ever sleep?’ she said.

‘I suppose I must. There are lost hours of almost every day, these days. Do you?’

She partway lifted her shoulders, and then dropped them before the gesture could become a shrug. The doctors had said there was nothing more they could do for Beema’s mother, so we’d brought her home to die. Beema spent hours at a stretch sitting by her mother’s bedside, holding her hand, moving only when someone opened the door to let in a draught – then she’d smooth down the goosebumps that appeared on her mother’s skin, though the old lady was well past being aware of such things. Watching her, I sometimes felt envy.

She moved towards the heater, and held her hands inches from the red bars, her back towards me. ‘You know, you shouldn’t give up on yourself. You shouldn’t just decide you’ll never be OK again.’

I didn’t respond and a little while later she said, ‘What he did to you was unspeakable, and if I ever see him again I’ll probably draw blood. But there’s a part of me that’s almost grateful to him.’

‘To Ed?’

‘You’d been slipping, Aasmaani, away from us and from yourself for so long now. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t worried about you. And you’d just say, I’m fine, I’m fine.’

‘So now I know I’m not fine, and how does that help me?’

She straightened up and turned towards me. ‘Fight for yourself. My God, child, what you’ve been through, from such a young age. It’s a wonder you’re still standing. My guess is, you’re stronger than all of us.’

Strong? I could barely get out of bed any more.

It might have been two minutes or two hours later that Beema left the room. I heard her whispering something to someone outside, and then my father’s voice, carrying clearly through the night’s silence, said, ‘You have to allow her this.’

‘That’s what we said about Samina.’ Beema’s voice was fierce with anger. ‘For God’s sake do something. I don’t know if I can bear this any longer.’ And then I heard something from her that I hadn’t heard in all the hours I watched her sit by her mother – weeping. I tried to feel some sympathy, some shame, but there was nothing in me to give, however hard I tried to locate it.

I suppose I slept at some point that night. It was something my body did while my mind proceeded relentlessly with its continuous feed of images – hammers and rivers and a thread of blood on Omi’s tongue as the razor cut through it. Or maybe I didn’t sleep. Maybe I just closed my eyes for a moment, and when I opened them there was daylight and my father stood beside my bed with a book in his hands.

‘This was your mother’s,’ he said, and placed the book beside me before leaving the room.

It was the Poet’s collected works. The book that lay on her bedside in the years after his death, which I was unable to pick up without picking up her grief along with it. Or my own grief, perhaps.

I opened the front cover. Turned to the table of contents. Turned past that. Kept going.

And there he was, rising out of the pages.

So many of the poems carried memories of Omi reciting them, Omi listening to my mother sing them, Omi talking about them. Here he was bawdy, here funny, here tender, here impassioned. In some places he sounded exactly like the man who had written about frass and minions, and in other places he sounded like someone else entirely, a voice that could never be imitated. It was mostly in his poems about my mother that I heard that inimitable voice. What struck me most about his poems – what I had quite forgotten – was not his mastery of form, or the complexity and concision of his thinking, or even his extraordinary sensitivity to the sound of each syllable. What struck me most was, simply, the greatness of his heart. Here was a man who faced exile, imprisonment, betrayal and deprivation without losing his sense of wonder. In his prison poems, the bars on his windows are merely the grid through which he sees shooting stars, each lash of a whip is a reminder of the insecurity of tyrants, and a rumour that orders for his execution have been dispatched is reason to weep for the executioner.

As I read I found with surprise how many of the poems were still stored in my brain, allowing me to anticipate the line ahead when I paused to turn a page. I found the girl I had once promised to be within the pages of that collection. The girl who knew his poems, who listened to him argue God with Mirza, poetry with my mother, political responsibility with Rafael. The girl who believed without question – I owed this to both him and my mother – that some things in the world you fight for, regardless of the cost to yourself, because the cost of not fighting is much higher. The girl he would have fought for, the girl my mother would have fought for. The girl I had to fight for.

I didn’t move from my bed all day as I made my way through those 312 poems, and as I read the last line of the final poem and turned to the end-page I saw, tucked into the inside flap of the back cover, a sheet of thin blue paper.

I think I knew what it was even before I unfolded it and saw the encrypted writing, with a date on top—28 April 1979—which told me this was composed just days after General Zia had Omi imprisoned.

I read the first three words of that letter, and for a moment it was Ed writing to me. And then I continued through the sentence, and it was no one but Omi speaking to Mama.

Forgive me, beloved, but your last letter was a thing of such absurdity I had to tear a corner off it and place it beneath my tongue as I slept, knowing it would fill my dreams with barking cats, suns that revolve around the planets in zigzag courses, and Siamese twins on stilts trying to tie each other’s shoelaces.

You can’t help worry, you wrote, about my imprisonment.

O my beautiful jailer, why would you wish upon me the indifference of freedom? These bars, those walls, the guards who shoot at unauthorized shadows which slide towards me in the prison yard – do you think I haven’t yet recognized them for what they are? Do you think I don’t know you’re responsible? You have always been so literal about the metaphorical, and I can’t deny that there are moments these days – particularly around meal times – when I wish it were otherwise. I know all the things I’ve said to you – I’m held captive by your heart, imprisoned in your grey-green eyes, and if you hold out the key of freedom to me it will melt with desire the instant my fingers touch yours to take possession of it.

That, Samina, was figurative language.

So I really didn’t expect to wake up within this cell, and at first, I’ll admit, I was a little irritated. But now that I’ve learnt to look more closely at the metaphor – did it turn concrete or have I become an abstraction? – I can’t help but applaud what you’ve done. In here, I am nothing but the man who loves you. All else is stripped away. Love and separation and longing – those are the stages of my day. The sun rises in one and sets in the other and darkness embraces me in the third.

1 think of Qais in exile, so consumed with the rapture of his love for Laila that love becomes entirely self-obsessed, unwilling to drag its gaze away from itself long enough to recognize the object of that love walk across the surrounding wasteland. The object of my love, Qais thinks, would make the ground grow verdant at the touch of her feet, not like this sensibly shod woman who creates only shadows as she walks, her clothes sweat-stained from travel. And as I recall Qais I begin to fear – for how can the woman in my head really exist, how can such a love bear reality? That is the only fear I have in here. The only thing they could do to hurt me, Samina, is to make you other than the woman I believe – no, I know – you really are.

I will not be in here for ever, I promise. All metaphors need to come up for air. When I can bear no more of separation, when I have learnt all that absence can teach me of desire, the walls will shimmer and I will step out of the mirage, into your arms, to lose myself and find myself inside you.

Give Aasmaani the largest possible embrace from me. Ask her to explain metaphors to you if you find yourself struggling with your tendency towards the literal – she understands these things better than either of us could imagine.

Forever and always yours, entirely.

Aashiq

Aashiq.

The name he was given at birth, which no one but my mother used once his childhood had passed. ‘It’s not a name, it’s what I am to Samina,’ Omi used to say. ‘No one else can use that word for me. I’m her Aashiq, her Beloved.’

I turned my head away from the page so that my tears wouldn’t smudge the already smudged words. Only now did I have the answer to the question I’d been unable to stop turning around in my mind: how had Ed done it? Even given his obsessive mind, his intelligence, his copies of all those letters to Rafael, how had he been able to re-create Omi on the page, having never known the man at all? And now I knew: he hadn’t.

If I had put the letters to any kind of serious scrutiny – if I had really looked at the conditions under which the Poet was allegedly writing and considered the things he chose to write, or rather the glaring omissions from the letters – I would have known instantly. How many times in all those weeks after getting the first letter had I thought of Laila and Qais, Iblis and Allah, the Sufis and their interpretation of Hell? And yet it had never crossed my mind. Even when I read those lines in which he declares Merlin and Nimue to be his favourite love story – those lines I read the very day I met Mirza and remembered how the Poet loved Iblis aur Aadam, recalled him saying, ‘This is the first and final love story, the one in which we all live’—even then I didn’t allow myself to see that I was reading lies.

In all his poems, that is the one trope he always returns to: The absence of the Beloved is Hell, is imprisonment. And that absence fuels love until the prisoner becomes a conflagration of yearning. Sometimes the absent beloved is a woman, sometimes it is democracy, sometimes it is the dreams of youth. But always, always, separation is just a catapult to a new level of love.

Each time he was imprisoned, each time he and my mother were forced apart, he would write to her – half-teasing, half-tender – of his immersion in that metaphor. In part because he believed it; in part because he would do everything he could to keep her from pain. That great heart of his – it would never have written of broken fingers or of love slipping away, not even if there seemed only the remotest possibility she would ever see the words.

How had I been so blind?

Ed had known. Ed had known that the greatest assistance to his deception didn’t come from the poet’s letters to Rafael or his memories of my mother’s stories. It came from my desire to believe. Why had I so suddenly convinced myself that the letters were genuine? In what moment had that decision taken hold? I leaned forward, so that my forehead touched the back cover of the Poet’s collection as though it were a prayer mat. It was in the Archivist’s room, with news cuttings in front of me telling me how Omi had died. Face this, the news cuttings told me, or else convince yourself it wasn’t him who died. And I had taken the latter option. I chose to believe an impossible life over an unbearable death.

Just as I had done with Mama.

I raised my head and closed the book.

My mother suffered from profound clinical depression. She lived with it for over two years until, unable to believe in the possibility of recovery, she killed herself.

I said the words to myself, silently and then aloud. They didn’t seem to mean anything.

So I got out of bed and went into the lounge, where Dad was cutting an apple carefully into eighths and reading a book which I recognized from the package Shehnaz Saeed had couriered over to me last week.

‘Mama killed herself because she was depressed and didn’t think she could get better,’ I said.

Dad took off his glasses, put the book to one side and looked up at me. ‘Yes.’

I sat down beside him on the sofa. He picked an unbruised apple slice off his plate and handed it to me. He seemed to be waiting for me to say something more but I was overtaken by a curious sensation of flatness, as though all metaphors had fled and what remained was irreducible, irrefutable fact.

‘Why weren’t you able to accept it all this while?’ he said finally and not without hesitation. ‘Did you think if you had to face her death you’d react the way she reacted to the Poet’s death?’

I shook my head slowly.

All those things my mother had done in the first fifteen years of my life which outsiders saw as signs she wasn’t a good mother – every time she left, every occasion she followed the Poet to another city or another country, every school play she missed because she was in prison or at a rally – I had, at the time, forgiven, understood, even been proud of. All those things could be understood as signs of her strength – strength of love, strength of purpose, strength of belief in my ability to understand why she couldn’t be ordinary. I forgave her all her strengths. But I couldn’t see her collapse for what it was because that, to me, would have been a sign of weakness – and I would have regarded that as betrayal.

‘I wasn’t willing to accept that she was human, Dad. I wasn’t willing to accept she could be broken.’

And that was it – so small a thing, and yet it had defined every aspect of my life. It was the conclusion with which I had started when I tried to understand her disappearance – and I had worked backward from it, interpreting and reinterpreting my notions of the world to make the conclusion seem plausible. I didn’t stop and see the idiocy of what I was doing even when the only way to retain the myth I had created was to jettison the things she held so dear – her faith in activism and her love for me.

‘Do you see her suicide as desertion?’ He held my hand as he said it.

I shook my head again. I had played myself as victim of my mother’s lack of love for too long, had wrung myself out thinking it. It would be easy enough to go on, step from one narrative of desertion into another – but when I closed my eyes to allow in that old familiar, almost comforting, story I saw Ed scribbling an encrypted note to his mother to make her believe the woman she loved was still alive; the intended cruelty there double-edged, shredding his own heart as he watched it shred hers.

‘I think Shehnaz was right. In the end it wasn’t about the Poet, or me or anyone. It was about a minute, five minutes, ten minutes in which she believed, with utter certainty, that she simply could not endure any more.’ It seemed impossible, already, to have denied this truth for so long.

‘You know what?’ Dad said. ‘She really was the bravest woman – the bravest human being – I ever knew.’

I smiled at him for that. ‘Really?’

‘Really.’ He tapped the spine of the book he’d been reading. ‘I’ve been rethinking her, too. And I’m sorrier than I can say that I didn’t try to understand earlier.’

I gripped his hand tighter. ‘I would have liked to have known her.’ Then, feeling so self-conscious I had to rush the words out, I said: ‘I’d like to know you.’

Dad put his arm around my shoulder, with only a slight trace of tentativeness. ‘Let’s start with this. Your mother and I had one conversation a little before she died. She was sitting in the garden one evening when I came home from work, and she said, “I have to confess something. When we played ‘chicken’ from KDA to Clifton and I said I made you run three red lights, I lied. I made you stop even when they were only just turning amber.” And I replied, “Samina, I didn’t love you because you were the girl who ran red lights. I loved you because when you covered my eyes with your hands, I knew I could trust you to get me home.” She was afraid of running red lights, Aasmaani. She wasn’t an unbreakable creature of myth. She was entirely human, entirely breakable, and entirely extraordinary.’

I rested my head against his chest. ‘I miss her,’ I said, and at last I cried for her death.

Maybe a bird didn’t start to sing outside the window in notes of heartbreaking beauty. But when I recall that moment, that’s how I remember it.