Читать книгу The Pact We Made - Layla AlAmmar - Страница 9

‘So I’m going to start a film club,’ Yousef said, plopping himself down on the corner of my desk and sending documents drifting to the floor.

I scowled and bent to retrieve them. ‘Like a movie club but pretentious?’

‘Ha ha,’ he replied. ‘No, seriously. I want to start a club and every month we’ll screen a film and discuss it. And it won’t be blockbusters or even festival darlings, it’ll be little-known movies and adaptations … like that Tempest film we watched. That was fun, right?’

I nodded. ‘Sure.’

It had been fun. He’d set up a projector in the apartment he had created for himself by converting the basement of his parents’ house. He had low, squishy sofas that swallowed you when you sat in them and a large blank wall onto which he projected movies. The copy had been of poor quality; he’d said it was from the 60s and had been meant for television.

Less fun had been the discussion, though it was more of a lecture, that had followed the film. We’d both read the play in our respective schools, but he maintained that sixteen-year-old me couldn’t have hoped to contemplate something so complex. I couldn’t say twenty-nine-year-old me fared any better, but I could see how into it he was. He spoke of how the sprite Ariel and the monster Caliban were facets of Prospero’s identity – how Prospero wanted to protect his daughter, Miranda, while also lusting after her in some subconscious beastly manner. Putting his psychology degree to some use, Yousef went on about ids and super-egos and the renunciation of power and dominance.

It was all well and good, but such concepts flew right over my head. All I’d gotten from the film was a strange crush on the actor playing Ariel, captivated by the shapes his body made as he flung himself around the rudimentary set. I was left with a desire to sketch him – the pointy ears and sharp features and wiry hairs sprouting from his blue-silver head.

‘So, yeah, I’m going to start one out of my house. Spread the word,’ Yousef said, twisting his torso so he could see his reflection in the window of my cubicle. He wore fancy shirts to work, with slim-fitted jackets and pocket squares and tapered pants, instead of the standard dishdasha. In all the years I’d known him, I’d never seen him in one, and I always suspected it was more to do with not wanting to wear the ghutra, which was notorious for causing premature baldness, in order to preserve the thick, black hair he kept gelled in a perfect wave rising up and away from his forehead.

We left my cubicle and headed for the staff room. Yousef busied himself making a pot of coffee while I dug around in the cabinets. As the coffee started brewing, Yousef lit a cigarette and started smoking out the open window, trying not to set off the smoke alarms.

‘You’re going to get in so much trouble one day,’ I said, shaking my head.

He shrugged like trouble was inevitable. ‘I forgot to ask,’ he said, tapping the cigarette against the window sill, ‘did your mom bring that guy over to see you?’

‘Yeah,’ I replied with a grimace.

‘And?’

‘Disaster.’

He chuckled. ‘As expected then?’

‘Yeah,’ I said with a little laugh.

He nodded and poured out half a cup of coffee. Taking several puffs from the cigarette, he put it out on the sill and tossed it in the trash. He held out the pot of coffee, but I shook my head. ‘Well, I wouldn’t worry about it.’

‘Why would I worry?’ I asked with a frown.

‘Just because …’ We made our way back towards the office, and he paused at the elevator. I was going up two floors to a meeting. ‘You know …’ I did know. I adored Yousef, but I felt like stabbing him with a pen. Forcing a smile and a nod, I waved him away.

Yousef, like everyone else, it seemed, was tremendously worried about my next birthday. Still months away, and its significance had already grown to mythic proportions. If I remained prospectless at thirty, I may as well give up on life entirely; the pool of acceptable men, already quite small, would shrink further as they set their sights on younger and younger girls. My aunts would start calling with questions like, ‘Is it okay if he’s a divorcé?’ and ‘How do you feel about raising another woman’s children?’ As though these were questions with clear-cut answers.

With arranged marriages you’re asked to pass judgment on people you don’t know and on situations you don’t fully understand. Those initial queries of interest have nothing to do with personal compatibility. They’re as impersonal as questionnaires. I wondered what potential men were told about me … ‘Well, she doesn’t wear the hijab – is that okay?’ ‘She’s a bit tall for a Kuwaiti girl.’ ‘No, I don’t know how much she weighs, but I’ll ask.’

Bu Faisal was there when I arrived, sipping at a Turkish coffee and reading the front page of the paper. He rose to greet me with a smile and firm handshake, purple prose spilling from his lips like it always did. There were at least fifteen minutes of embarrassed laughter as he ran through his ‘There’s my favorite account manager’ and ‘They should put your picture up in reception: boost business!’ routine. He was of my father’s generation; they’d gone through the same bureaucratic training ground before heading off to their careers. Our families had been quite close once upon a time, spending weekends at each other’s beach houses and meeting up on summer trips to London or Paris. His dark eyes were kind, but practically disappeared beneath low lids when he smiled, the crow’s feet extending far and deep. He had a generous mouth and thin black hair that was salted at the temples.

Our ceremony done, he tugged at his pants’ legs and took a seat. Bu Faisal with his three-piece suits, always the same design, whether it was blue or black or gray or brown. He must have had a dozen of them made – all of them expertly stitched in heavy fabrics, twills and sharkskin wools, with Thomas Pink shirts peeking out at the collar and sleeves, and color-coordinated silk pocket squares. Like Yousef, I’d never seen him in a dishdasha.

‘How are you, my dear?’

‘I’m good,’ I replied, settling into my seat across from his at the small meeting table. ‘How was Tokyo?’

‘Oh, you know the Japanese,’ he said with a wave of his hand.

I shrugged and chuckled. ‘I don’t actually.’

‘Everything’s so small there. Makes me feel like a bear blundering through a museum gift shop. I did find this for you though.’ He reached under the table for a black gift bag.

‘You shouldn’t have,’ I said with a small frown. Bu Faisal had a habit, which I could not break, of bringing me little things from his business trips. Chocolates, perfume, scarves and trinkets. I tried to hint that it was inappropriate to accept gifts from clients, but he never got it, or more likely chose to ignore it.

‘It’s nothing at all,’ he said, waving his hands as I peered into the bag. ‘Just a little thing I saw that made me think of the flowers you draw everywhere.’

I pulled out the item nestled among the white and pale pink gift paper. A Japanese folding fan. It was made of light-colored bamboo, overlaid with scallop-edged ivory silk. The design on it looked hand-painted and very old: a winter landscape, all white fields, black trees, gray skies and crystal blue ice. Snowflakes fell from the sky, looking like cherry blossoms coming to earth. There were ladies walking through the scene, ducking beneath parasols, the reds and oranges of their kimonos like red-breasted robins streaking across the snow. The trees were black and bare and laden with powdery white; bent with hunchbacked heights, they made me think of this ukiyo-e art I saw in a book, floating worlds, like Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa.

I turned it over, gently running my hand over the delicate silk. ‘Is this an antique?’

‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘I found it in a shop and thought you’d like it.’

I shook my head, trying to think how much it might have cost him. ‘I can’t accept this.’

He pulled back with a look of mock horror. ‘Don’t be silly! What will I do with it if you don’t take it? Keep it. It’s nothing, I promise you.’ I was of a mind to protest further, but he changed the subject. ‘My accountant still needs to send you some documents, but you should have them within the week. How’s work anyway?’

I shrugged, returning the gift to the bag and laying it on the table. ‘Hamdilla. Work is good.’

‘And our boy, Yousef?’

‘Really good. We can stop by and see him after the meeting if you like.’

‘Yes, yes, after the meeting,’ he repeated with an officious nod and a grin. ‘Let’s talk risk, shall we?’

And we did. We talked risk and premiums and protections. We went through all the accounts, for all the many holdings across all his many businesses, all of them insured by our little firm because our chairman was an old squash buddy of his. I didn’t know exactly how insurance schemes worked, and he had so much money that at times I felt like he must have been insuring himself as well as all our other clients in some roundabout manner. I was not qualified when I took over his accounts a couple of years ago. Bu Faisal and I had run into each other by chance when he came by to say hello to the chairman. After asking how the family was getting on, he’d asked Bu Mohammad if I could handle his accounts. I was given some of his smaller holdings to start with, but he preferred dealing with me rather than Old Haithum, who’d been with the company thirty years and always smelled like cardamom and paprika, so after a while I was given all of his accounts to manage. For the most part, the work took care of itself, and when it didn’t, he usually knew what I needed to do to fix it.

Bu Faisal was married to an old friend of my mother. Despite how close they used to be, I only saw his wife every once in a while, at a wedding or reception of some sort. She looked how most Kuwaiti women of her generation would like to look: hair long and thick, with highlights that looked natural; a face kept young with regular injections of Botox and collagen; a body that didn’t bear witness to the four children she’d had. She would get up and dance with the younger girls at weddings, tying a scarf around her hips when the belly-dancing numbers came on. She wore the outrageous jewels and big-name brands that she told you were from Paris or Milan, even though they all had branches at the local mall.

When I was younger, when our families used to spend time together, Mama would bring up their marriage a lot. ‘Look at how Bu Faisal treats her,’ she would say, pointing at him serving his wife tea, so unlike my father and uncles, who expected their wives to do that sort of thing. Or when his wife would show off a ring or necklace he’d bought her, and Mama would turn to me and my sister and say, ‘That’s the sort of man we want for you,’ as though lavishing someone with gifts made for a perfect marriage. She painted him as the ideal man, and my sister gobbled it up, but I wasn’t so easily convinced. At an early age I’d learned about men and the masks they wore.

Evening fell and with it the temperature. There was a definite chill in the air: on the tip of your nose; in the soles of your feet; across your shoulders. I sat in the garden, giving in to my desire to sketch Ariel from the film I’d seen with Yousef. I was attempting to duplicate those delicate features and lithe form, but my sprite was looking nothing like the actor.

It was something I often did, try and replicate things I’d seen in films or famous paintings in galleries I visited on vacation. Usually I would alter the paintings in some way, twist them into something relevant to my own time and place; I’d add Bedouin tents to a background or turn an English nose into one more reminiscent of a Saluki. Less often an image would come to me, fresh and original, and I would rush to transfer it to a sketchbook, but I was, for the most part, powerless to execute these things my mind conjured. I found more success with paintings and illustrations that were already created. When I was younger, I’d dreamed of going to art school, of becoming an artist, but Baba maintained that art was a hobby and not a career and besides, copying work rather than creating it probably wasn’t what art schools looked for. I’d done business at university because I was ‘meant to’, and I subsequently took a job in the finance industry because I was ‘meant to’. It was expected of me, like it’s expected of most of us.

I abandoned Ariel and started doodling my namesake in a halo around his head, petals curling around his pointy ears. I’d been drawing dahlias since I found out my name was a flower. My father had come back from a business trip once and brought me a coloring book of different flowers. When I’d colored them all, I tried drawing them from scratch. He bought tracing paper and taught me how to secure it with paper clips, then, his hand over mine, he showed me how much pressure to put on the pencil as I followed the lines and curves. Over and over, until I could do it with my eyes closed.

My dahlias were everywhere: on old schoolbooks; on the knees of the faded jeans I ran around in; along the borders of other illustrations I attempted; on steamed-up car windows, notepads at work and paper place mats at restaurants.

Raju, the houseboy, startled me, wheeling out the duwa – the tea trolley with built-in charcoal pit. It was brass and silver with shiny black wheels. A tea set was loaded on the bottom shelf: little glass cups; sturdy metal teapot from the old souq; mini-cans of condensed, tooth-rotting milk. He set it before me like I’d asked for it and went about lighting the charcoal cubes. Baba stepped out the front door with a ‘Ha!’ when he saw me curled up in the wicker chair. He swung his arms to the front and side, an akimbo Macarena, a bastardized version of the routine we’d all done during morning assemblies at school.

He stepped off the porch and into the yard, surveying the grass for bald spots and inspecting the date trees. It’s a barren land, but you wouldn’t know it looking at our garden. The proper names of trees and vegetation aren’t common knowledge in Kuwait, at least not among the younger generations. If pressed I could possibly have identified an orange tree, but only if it were blossoming. Baba wandered over to his herb corner as Raju finally got a proper fire going and left the duwa in my care. My father squatted down on his chicken legs to check the nets protecting his rosemary and mint. He was happy, enormously happy, his only concern whether the street cats were messing with the herbs again. There was a particularly fierce tom, a wall-prowling howler with a personal vendetta against mint, who tore through the nets Baba set up and gnawed at the baby stems and leaflings. This infuriated him. I’d suggested, more than once, that he move his herbs inside, but he said they would taste different if they were grown through glass.

The front gate opened, and Nadia and her brood spilled into the yard. First came the twin boys, tearing across the grass to the trampoline Baba had set up for them in the corner. ‘Shoes off!’ I called as they hoisted themselves over the bar, a directive that was ignored until their grandfather sent over a quelling look.

Then came the little one, Sarah, tiny hand clutched by Nadia as she had a distressing tendency to sprint towards the street. She tugged and tugged, but only when the gate was firmly shut behind them was she released and allowed to fly through the yard and jump in my lap. Nadia couldn’t get so much as a greeting in until Sarah was done telling me about her day: there was the spring show rehearsal and the girl next to her who didn’t know any of the words; there was the PE class where she wasn’t chosen in Duck, Duck, Goose; there was the teacher who was having a baby, and why couldn’t Mommy have one too?

I laughed over at Nadia, who had a horrified expression on her face. ‘Maybe in a few years, baby,’ I consoled Sarah, running my hand over her curly hair, so much like mine when I was her age.

‘But I want one now,’ she whined into my neck.

‘I’d sooner shoot myself,’ Nadia mumbled, jerking her chin towards the boys, who were half jumping, half wrestling on the trampoline.

I cuddled the little one tighter in my lap. ‘It’d be okay if you had another girl.’

‘Can I get a guarantee?’

Mama came out to join us, and Nadia rose to greet her. Sarah wanted to stay put, but I nudged her to her feet and over to her grandma.

‘Hayati!’ Mama lifted a wriggling Sarah up into her arms for a hug and a smattering of kisses. When she put her down, she scurried back and climbed into my lap. ‘Go play with your brothers.’

‘La Yumma,’ Nadia said with a shake of her head. ‘They’re too rough with her on there.’

Sarah didn’t seem inclined to move anyway, snuggling up to me while we talked over her head. Eventually Baba abandoned his garden to come get her; he pushed her on the swing set, trying to teach her to propel herself. I’d forgotten about the duwa, but Nadia always had impeccable manners, and she got up to serve Mama. The tea might have been too strong at that point, but she tipped the pot over a cup so it came out in a steaming, perfect arc. She filled the cup almost to the brim, knowing how our mother liked it, then cracked open a can of condensed milk and filled the remaining space with the white, syrupy liquid before handing it over.

I was a mistake. Various members of my family, at various times, have said it. Always with a smile or a wink, but the words don’t change. My parents, though they married young, had problems conceiving. Mistrustful of Western medicine, my mother watched the moon instead, counting her cycles, frequenting the lesser pilgrimage, and drinking teas of sage and fenugreek and anise. After six years, when the dismay was so entrenched that Mama had broached the topic of my father taking a second wife to give him children, she finally conceived. Nadia was received like an heir to something greater than what my parents had to offer. They took their miracle baby and wished for nothing more. Eight years later, I announced myself when Mama vomited at a table laden with four types of fish.

‘Oh,’ my sister said, turning to me, ‘I forgot to ask how it went the other night.’

I winced. Mama frowned, but I couldn’t tell if it was because of the topic or because the tea was too hot. ‘No effort from this one, as usual.’

‘Yumma, don’t start,’ I said, shaking my head.

‘What? She should know what I go through with you. I set out a beautiful dara’a, blue and silver and bright, and she wears black like she’s going to a funeral. He’s a wonderful man. Tall, smart, lovely eyes, and she stares at her knees all evening.’

‘I was being demure.’

‘Ekh!’ Mama said, flicking her hand at me like I was a fly that required swatting. ‘Allah forgive me, it’s almost like you don’t want to get married.’ She shook her head, giving off an impression that was equal parts martyrdom and disappointment. If she were Catholic, she’d have been crossing herself. Turning to Nadia, she added, ‘Talk to your sister before she becomes a spinster and—’

‘Dies,’ I finished, making Ariel’s wiry hair a bit too dark.

‘Allah forgive you,’ she hissed, smacking my thigh. ‘Don’t say such things.’

‘You’re the one talking about spinsters,’ Nadia retorted in my defense.

‘Well, we’re getting there.’ She sighed like she was carrying an impossible burden and folded her arms over her stomach.

I dropped the sketchpad and pencil on the floor and went to join the kids. The boys were running screaming circles around Baba. They would never have to concern themselves with this. Their lives would be so easy. They would have freedoms my sister and I never contemplated: the freedom to study anywhere in the world; the freedom to live their lives without constant scrutiny, where society responded to their mistakes with ‘boys will be boys’ instead of ‘you bear the family’s honor’; and, perhaps most meaningful of all, the freedom to not marry without shame or guilt. My heart slumped at what was in store for Sarah. She was still in the swing, whining about not being strong enough to propel herself yet, so I obliged her. Nadia and Mama continued to talk, my sister tossing out gentle reprimands that my mother deflected like a ninja.

Let them talk. It was all just words.