conviction

He came back, a handful of years into the grim hell played out every day on TV screens across this country and every other country on earth. He’d grown up, standing at the door with his finger still pressing down on the doorbell while the sun set, disappearing already over his left shoulder and casting its red blight on them both, father and son.

This was not a story of a prodigal son. For one thing, the son was the one with ambivalent smile, and the father wore his tired, put-upon look as though the wind had changed and his face had collapsed into these furrowed lines. He stood aside to let his long lost, finally found son past, blinded by the red blinking light, blinking like the numbers on a ticking bomb over his son’s shoulder as he stepped into the house.

His mother came out of the sitting room holding the remote firmly in her hand as though it was a weapon. She stood in the doorway, just staring at him. He had played this scene over beforehand, but in his version, she tentatively said his name as she stared, and then there would be the sudden smile like a cartoon sunrise and she would quickly step forward and pull him away from the sagging nagging terrible grey disappointment on his father’s face. He’d built it up from scenes he’d seen a hundred times before, but he’d known it wasn’t going to happen, just as he knew that if he’d come back earlier, even a year ago, it would have been safe enough. All over town, there were streets with homes and families missing sons, and those who had come back the first, second, and third year even had roused the neighbours the night of the homecoming.

But his parents were drawn and aged, and this homecoming had the ugly look of secrecy, something he’d had enough of, for now. And to think all they wanted was what every parent wanted, only slightly altered by the anxiety, the wait for long-distance phone calls that never came, and the emails of reassurance he sent them with each headline. Their faces said enough was enough, it was time for him to settle down, marry and retire to that obscenely empty beautiful ghost house, white and accusing and blank even seen from behind the smeared glass as the taxi rattled and coughed up the road. He’d taken the first taxi he found, the first car with a bright purple can of insect repellent prominently on display, visible even through the grey glass. Where taxis were non-existent, there were always people who weren’t above making money, any way they could. The black cockroaches on the royal purple seemed to come alive as the can rolled gently from side to side with the heavy vibration of the car coughing uproariously to life.

He’d slung his suitcase in the back and pretended to sleep, making it clear he was not in the mood to talk. The last few years had confirmed his conviction that it was boredom - the mind-killing chance-choking absence of the possibility of the pursuit of happiness - that stimulated an excessive concern with the interlocking forest of family trees in this country. It was like a game everybody played almost instinctively upon meeting someone, worming out every forgotten aunt and second cousin, until they were satisfied that they had seamlessly connected this tiny part of the network, pulled the sparking crossed wires out of their disconnected tangle.

He was not going to play that game, he was going to sleep. The part-time taxi-driver slid a tape into the cassette-player and a deep, resonant voice reverberated through the car, rising into a crescendo O eye, O night, O night, O night. “Turn it off, please.”

The taxi-driver glanced at him, turned it off, then lit a cigarette and vengefully smoked all the way from the airport to the house, the stink seeming to rise up from the torn black leather, disturbingly lifelike, a diseased animal’s hide. He’d felt nauseas with expectation, and the road hadn’t helped, full of holes and bumps to slow ancient cars down to a crawl, on the narrow streets were the children played piercing the frigid winter air with their shrieks. He only had to close his eyes to hear them, playing on a different street, wrapping fireworks round toy cars with duct tape.

Aliya was hanging clothes on the roof, snapping the clammy sheets in the stiff cold air, when the taxi came rattling up the rocky road. She peered down, automatically, watching as the passenger got down, paid the taxi-driver, picked up his bag and stepped up to the metal buckled blue outside door opposite her, shoving it lightly, familiarly, knowing it was always left open. She put the sheets back in the plastic pink basket and leaned over, but she didn’t have to see him, or need someone to tell her to know who he was. She dropped the basket and the washing and ran down three flights of stairs, knocking and not waiting for an answer before she opened the door to her mother’s room so forcefully the door banged on the wall and swung on its hinges. Her mother sat bolt upright and frowned at her, and she could only stand there, smiling, because she had no breath left to tell her story.

Father and son dragged the one bag in between them up the steps and across the threshold. Not that it needed two to do the job. It was wrinkled and half-empty, like a bag of wrinkled skin.

They herded him solicitously into the sitting room, giving each other small parent-looks. The new TV was turned on in the same small sitting-room he remembered, throwing blues and reds against the cold white wall. Another bomb, another market. What a muddle it had all become, when it had started out so clear, so self-evident. It made everything so much more difficult. The cat on the sofa curled its paw and licked at the pink underside. On TV, the camera focused on a pool of blood on the pavement, gleaming with an oily purity. The picture changed to a long line of bodies wrapped in white sheets, and women in black kneeling next to them with blank faces, and then to barbed wire holding back an angry crowd and a soldier on the other side, looking on, sunglasses masking his eyes.

“That cat still there?” The black and white spattered face turned towards him curiously.

“This is her kitten. The mother disappeared.” His mother said. Her voice trembled a bit.

His father looked at her, and spoke her name, questioningly and softly, like it was something fragile. “Sabriya?”

She cleared her throat and waved him away, making a gesture that meant she was fine. He nodded at that, looked around the room as though he was looking for something, something elusive, and then went into the kitchen, leaving the door open. His mother sat down and indicated the space next to her. He sat beside her. She took his hand and held it, quiet for a moment or two, and then started dispensing information, rather flatly and quickly, as though afraid he would interrupt her, thin-skinned hand stroking his gently as she spoke. His sisters were busy, happy, healthy. His oldest sister was doing very well also, but hadn’t had another child. She’d said she wanted to make her name as a doctor first. His mother frowned as she related this. “There shouldn’t be so many years between children?” his mother said, quietly. “Don’t you agree?” There were six years between his sisters and him. He agreed.

“When you last saw your niece she was still in swaddling clothes.” His mother said then. “Wasn’t she?” There was an edge of accusation in her words. “Yes.” He said.

He remembered how it had been, a week after the baby’s birth, with the house full and everyone still with an opinion on the child’s name. His sister looking on, her expression somewhere between faint displeasure and resigned exasperation, as her mother-in-law insisted that whatever the textbooks said, babies needed to be swaddled to feel safe and to grow properly. His sister had still been muttering mutinously about cot death statistics when those wrinkled, tattoed hands had set the kicking baby down on the white cloth and wound it efficiently around the squirming baby. “Safe and secure.” Her mother-in-law had said, laying the child on her back and surrounding her with cushions.

“She’s three now.” His mother said, quietly, breaking into his memories. “Does she still stay with you?” He said, to keep her from thinking about everything that had happened in the intervening years.

“Of course.” His mother said, turning to look at him with a frown. “Who else would take care of her when Donia has to stay at the hospital at night?” There was a rattle from the kitchen and then his father appeared. He set down the tray in his hands. His mother put down the remote to pick up her cup. There was a small silence, then the cat jumped down and sauntered into the kitchen, and the door opened, and his niece appeared, wild hair sticking up. “Hello.” She said, staring at him. “And how are you?” He smiled at her unhesitant way of speaking. She tilted her head and regarded him with wise, laughing brown eyes. She spoke with the confidence and rhythm of an old woman.

His mother smoothed her granddaughter’s hair, smiling wryly at his surprise. “She spends a lot of her time with her other grandmother. She picks up a lot from her. And she stays with us some as well. We’re old too, you know.” Her smile faded slightly. Her voice was still light, but the indictment was as blatant as an open letter, legible writing, unwavering.

A little later, he unpacked and went to sleep. She turned off the TV for the first time in three years and picked up the phone, with her green address book in her hand. When she was finished, she didn’t turn the TV back on.

Early next morning, Aliya looked on from the roof as a car stopped outside the house and Donia and her husband came to pick up their daughter, as they always did on Mondays. She hadn’t gone back to sleep after the dawn prayer. She couldn’t have slept if she tried. She watched carefully, trying to read the expressions on their faces, trying to see the thoughts behind their words. They both stepped out of the car, and that wasn’t usual. They moved with urgency and their voices were quick and faltering and Donia laughed, once or twice, and she hadn’t laughed for a long time. Aliya wasn’t looking for confirmation. The whole street knew it was true. His mother hadn’t left anyone in the dark yesterday, and the pleasure and pure happiness in her voice had been like a balm. Aliya looked up to the house opposite and saw the neighbours watching and smiling. She imagined she saw the tears in Donia’s eyes as she pushed open the blue buckled door.

Donia ran lightly up the stairs and rapped on the door, full of sleepless, nervous, coffee-driven energy. Her red-rimmed eyes locked onto her mother’s when the door was open, and she fell into her arms as though she was the long lost child, holding her tightly and crying soundless tears. Her husband edged around them as he came in, smiling and awkwardly holding a cardboard box full of piping hot bread. He set the box down by the door and shook his father-in-law’s hand warmly and murmured the formulas that slipped so easily from the tongue and had never seemed to mean so much as they did now. The house filled with the smell of fresh bread. Amira came to the door and bit off the end off a loaf, sitting down to put on her shoes with an air of importance, informing her father that she had seen her uncle yesterday.

Donia broke away from her mother long enough to dash the tears from her eyes and smile at her daughter. “Don’t put your shoes on.” She said, smiling. “We’re not going anywhere today.” She put the shoes back on the shelf and picked up her daughter, hugging her impulsively. Amira squawked in outrage, and squirmed to be put down, smoothening her dress when she had recovered her dignity.

Donia washed the sleep from her eyes, rolled up her sleeves and herded her mother into the kitchen with restrained impatience and bridled joy, and eyes that darted around everywhere. Between them, they turned the house into a hive of activity. Within an hour, Maryam arrived, parking her car in the garage. Their voices rose above the radio, the quiet murmur of weather and exam results read out in a monotone in the background, and their mother watched with quiet delight, and a growing feeling of warm satisfaction. While the oil began to spit as the sfinz batter puffed up, she walked up to the radio and turned it off, with a sharp, decided, vengeful click. That radio had been the only sound interrupting their breakfasts, when Amira wasn’t there. They’d grown accustomed to their loneliness, the quiet house holding two growing-old worn souls. They’d peeled their boiled eggs and fed the cats at the table. But that was all in the past.

“Is he still asleep?” His father asked, every so often. His tone and the movements of his hands were irritated, but a small smile would appear every so often on his face, and he didn’t move from his seat by the window, face turned to the sun, basking in its blessing.

When a pile of sfinz was wrapped in clean checked towels and the table was groaning with food, Donia put down the last plate and rolled down her sleeves and left the kitchen, with a look of determination and her words, the words she had been thinking of since late last night, all ready on her lips. But he was coming down the stairs, and she hadn’t expected to see him so quickly, and somehow the sight of him appearing on the landing above stole the words, and her breath, away from her. She had to try twice to speak, and then what she said wasn’t planned and came out too quickly and with an edge that made both of them flinch. “We’ve been waiting long enough.” She said. It came out, dry and brittle, before she could catch it. She could only be thankful that she hadn’t raised her voice. They wouldn’t have heard her in the kitchen. This was between them.

He came down the steps slowly before she could think to move, while she was still biting her lip and agreeing silently with everyone who chided her for being rash and impulsive. “I know you have.” He said. “But I’m here now.” It was as close to an apology as he could come. She smiled and moved forward to hug him as she recognised his way of dealing with reprimands, at the familiarity of his words even though he had changed much more than she had expected. He let her hold him, detachedly, not moving until she stepped back to look at him properly, wiping her eyes on her sleeve. His voice had had a strange, foreign inflection, but that wasn’t all that had changed. His eyes were ringed with dark circles now, and he was browner and much thinner than he had been. He couldn’t have gotten taller, yet it seemed to her that he had, somehow.

“Have you gotten taller?” She asked.

He laughed at her, shaking his head.

She smiled at him and then turned and steered him towards kitchen, watching the family reunion from the doorway until her mother pushed the black and white cat off the extra seat that was no longer extra, and looked up to meet her look.

He went back to sleep. It was Donia who harried them into letting him go, diagnosing sleepiness when his eyes slid shut of their own accord and he leaned his head against the ornate cushions in the sitting room. “We’ll have time to talk.” She’d said, meeting his eyes in a direct look. “Won’t we?” He’d smiled at his mother reassuringly. They went back into the kitchen while he slept, and sat round the table, chopping parsley and hollowing out bell peppers and aubergines and courgettes.

He came down at noon. He walked around them, and opened a can of fool beans. “Anyone want some?” He asked, stealing some of the chopped parsely and a red hot pepper. They shook their heads and watched as he cracked two eggs in the battered pan, and slid them on top of the olive oil drenched foul. He ate standing up, leaning against the counter, plate in one hand, pita bread in the other.

“Is that what they eat for breakfast over there?” Mariam asked. Her voice was cautious, like a mouse expecting a trap.

He looked at her, strangely. And then he offered her the plate silently and because she didn’t want to push it away, she tore up a tiny piece of bread and scooped a tiny amount of beans and soft eggs into her mouth, chewing thoughtfully and without expression. “What’s it called?” She said, when she had swallowed her tiny mouthful.

“Baqla.” He said.

She hesitated. “It’s… heavy.” She said, after a while. And then, defensively and quickly, with a flash of an uneasy smile. “A breakfast like this would keep you going all day, wouldn’t it? But then, I suppose, nowadays, breakfast is a luxury for many people…” Everyone turned round to look at her. Donia frowned, but it was Sabriya who spoke first, with a little edge to her voice. “Maryam, over there is not another world.”

Maryam folded her arms. “I know. I have friends from over there. Some of the teachers with me have been here over ten years. They have children who were born here. And the new ones. They’ve become part of the tribes and everything.” Her defensiveness bristled. She looked over at him as though she was saying something he didn’t know. As though she was waiting for a sign, for him to begin talking, persuasive and argumentative and full of conviction. To tell her it wasn’t enough. Nothing was ever enough, for him, before. But he only smiled at her, a lop-sided, unironic smile, and Sabriya patted her arm. Donia tore off a chunk of bread and scooped up a healthy mouthful of the baqla, but didn’t offer any judgement. He sat down next to her and they finished the plate in silent understanding. When he’d finished the last mouthful, he drank his coffee, and informed them he was going out to see some friends. They said nothing, but Donia could see the faces around the table suddenly became cautious, guarded. She saw her father look up, his eyes narrowing. But he didn’t leave immediately.

He washed his plate, put it away and walked into the sitting room to turn on the TV. Sabriya heard the brittle, almost hostile sound of the button clicking on and left the room quickly, blindly. She reached the toilet, feeling physically sick, the sickness that had filled her as the dry voice of the newsreader began to read out numbers and names, the numbers of people who had died today and the numbers of children in hospitals and the numbers of hours neighourhoods had electricity and the number of random shootings and unresolved massacres, and she had to laugh chokingly at the idea of an unresolved massacre and children wrapped in flower-patterned blankets even as she folded to her creaking knees and was neatly sick into the toilet seat. Donia hovered in the doorway between the hallway and the sitting room and listened to her mother retch. Mariam had gone to help her, her concerned, panicked voice blocking out the numbers and names still rolling out in an endless, macabre list from the TV.

She looked in on them, and then went back to the sitting room, knowing that her brother hadn’t realised what was happening. The TV was still on. The newsreader was asking an expert about cholera and its causes. “They have cholera?” She said, to try to chase away the tight-mouthed expression on her brother’s face, to change the worry in her father’s eyes to decisive action. Her brother sent her a swift look. “They have a shortage of clean drinking water and a deteriorating sewage system.” he said. Then, with a strange smile, “You’re the doctor, Donia. You know.”

She’d known about the cholera, and he knew she’d known. Sometimes words were just a way of lifting tensions, even when they only slightly alleviated the thickness of the atmosphere. He changed the channel. On the screen, an official with a pale, pallid face and small, squinting sun-blinded eyes was talking at an incredibly fast pace about reconstruction, power plants and job opportunities, as though afraid the interviewer would interrupt him, or worse, laugh.

“I always wondered about the use of that word.” She said, walking around the sofa and sitting down next to him, looking down at her cupped hands. “What word?”

“Reconstrucition.”

“How do you mean?” he asked.

“It makes me think of Amira, knocking down her building blocks and then trying to put them back together.” She said, without smiling. Sabriya appeared at the door, face glistening with droplets of water that could have been sweat or tears. Her eyes were large in her pale face. She wiped away the water with a towel and asked Donia, in a controlled voice, to please turn off the TV.

He left a little while after. They milled about the house, aimlessly. Amira lay flat on her belly, kicking her legs, watching cartoons about shape shifting robots clashing in a pink sky until a breaking news bulletin bought pictures of new graves being dug in a crumbling grey city full of pock-marked houses and apartment blocks without roofs or walls. Donia turned it off hastily and snapped at Amira when she began to whine, her face so cold and closed that Amira shut up abruptly, got up off the floor and strategically retreated, going to play with the cat. The hours dragged. Her father drummed on the table, foot tapping on the floor. Her mother hid in her room for a while, and then made tea with slices of lemon in it and went into the garden to water her flowers. When she came back she was shivering with cold because she had forgotten to put on the cardigan she always wore in the garden, and she had gone out in her bare feet. Donia buttoned the cardigan for her, and went out into the garden to collect the cup of cold tea and pour it and the dead fly floating in it down the sink. In the sitting room, her mother reached out automatically to turn on the TV, stared at it helplessly, and then turned it back off. She shooed the cat off the sofa and sat down, combing back her greying hair with her hands.

If he had come home earlier that night perhaps there would have been a different ending to this story. Perhaps Aliya would have heard something different at the funeral, perhaps, very likely, she would not have gone to the funeral at all, because there might not have been one. She might have been invited to a wedding instead. It might even have been her own wedding, and everything they had planned together might have come to pass exactly as they had planned it before the war and the convictions that had led him to break everything off and leave. But he came back as night fell like curtain, in stifling folds flapped by damp winter gusts and his father stood in his way at the door, face set.

“Where have you been?” he said, with the deceptive quietness that, with him, was a reliable prelude to rage.

“I told you that I would be late.” His son said. Then, after a pause, “I haven’t seen my friends for some time.” It was his way, to come so close to an apology without giving one, until he could offer it on his own terms, of his own accord.

“Friends don’t come before family.” His father replied, struggling to keep his voice from becoming curt and clipped and unfriendly. His son nodded, without taking offense.

It did not take too long to extract, like a kernel from a cracked nut, the promise that he would stay, marry and take up residence in the empty new house across the street the children were already calling haunted. Big white solid house, the sort of house any father would be happy to help his first-born son plan and build. He promised to stay.

The sitting room, empty and silent just the day before, was full, noisy, dizzying today. His sisters were all still there, wreathed in smiles, with their mothers-in-law, with the neighbours and too many people he had not seen for too long. His mother lead him into the room with something that was almost and yet not simply pride, while some of the older women adjusted their scarves, got up and shook his hand. Their faces swam in front of him, like a mirage.

He felt light-headed, the re-introductions bewildering after months and months of shoving them away to the back of his mind and forgetting all this. Yet suddenly he realised that the familiarity of these faces anchored him in a world that was wholly his, he was surrounded by it, and it would not give him up. There was a small serenity in that. He sat down by an elderly neighbour, now going deaf, but still residing over the tea tray. She handed him a cup of tea, silently, with a handful of peanuts glowing gold on the bottom of the cup, and giving him an extra scoop in his palm, reminding him of her name with the gesture, without having said a word. He drank, complimented her on the tea, and was finally allowed to retreat to the men’s room. In the kitchen, and all along the hallway, on the walls of the garage and in the garden, his mother had put up the festive lights she had bought for her daughters wedding. Stars blinked at him, suns exploded in a burst of coloured light. If they could not celebrate openly, they would celebrate within four walls.

When the washing-machine upstairs thudded and thumped its complaints, he would flinch. Weeks later, over dinner, he sometimes knocked over his glass or dropped his spoon, startled by the suddenness of the sound above his head. He started going out to see his friends more often, and the one he went to see most often had shared his convictions.

He stayed away so long on those nights that his mother turned on the TV to fill the house with noise. It was as though the house was dead now, when he was no longer there, as though they had slipped back somehow to the three empty years when it had been just the two of them and a black and white cat, and, twice a week, a granddaughter who reminded them of how long he had been away, growing up before their eyes from the baby in swaddling bands their son held in the last photo they had of him, the last photo before he had left. His mother bought a new digital camera and learnt to use it, snapping photos of him when he wasn’t prepared or aware of her, a photo a day, as though she was trying to find the face beyond the photo, see what he looked like when he wasn’t carefully looking at the camera, collecting natural memories and protecting them against an invisible enemy. She made videos of him trying to talk to her, awkwardly, telling her to stop filming because he couldn’t talk. The video followed the abortive, small movements of his hands when he talked. Everything he did was controlled and studied, like a surgeon who knew that every decision he made put a human life in the balance. It was little things like that that made his father feel everything was hanging by a thread, and that things would never go back to how they were before he had left, and that perhaps his son would never need or want the beautiful white house across the street. He didn’t feel that he would have a warning.

Three years ago, it had begun without a word or a hint before the fact. It had begun with a sudden sharp blow. They had woken up to hear that he had broken off his engagement to Aliya, a neat clean break, born, he said, of a mutual agreement. Until he’d done what he was convinced he had to do. Just like that, he cut himself loose off the life that was waiting for him to step into it. It had been done easily, and it could be done again. A decision made in silence and executed in secrecy hung between their family and an empty wasteland. It was that more than anything that convinced his father to make his own decision. He grew convinced his son would run from this too familiar, distant everyday sort of life and that his mother would not survive it, this second time. So he did something about it.

He tricked his son into the hands of the police. He did it, he said later, floundering in justification, because he was a father desperately gathering and clutching at anything that would keep his son rooted to the ground. He walked out of the house empty-handed, son safely locked up behind him and the sky flowering pink and inspirational above, promising security, safety, rainbows. They’ll scare him so he’ll stop, he thought, terrified of his own actions and struggling through the waves of irrational thoughts to reach some sort of calm acceptance. They’ll scare him so he’ll stop, he’ll stay, and he’ll tend the garden, watch the sky, read the paper and stop listening for the sounds of war in the rumble of the washing machine upstairs. But three months later, the truant son’s name was still missing in the lists and his father died exactly three days after the three months were up. Aliya went to his funeral.

11/07

tasnimx@hotmail.com