The Worlds Within Her (38 page)

YOU KNOW, MRS. LIVINGSTON
, it is every parent's melancholy thought that, God willing, there is a good part of a child's life one will never know. It is only right, it is part of the natural progression of things, almost a law.

Yes … Yet, it can be painful, for one would give anything to be able to watch over the child, do anything to ensure the child's happiness. And to die with so much unrevealed feels like a kind of abandonment.

You would go further, my dear? Yes, you are right of course. Indubitably. The only thing worse would be to live knowing it all. To have seen the end of the child's life story, as Yasmin has. What horrid knowledge it is to have. I felt a part of her freeze solid when her daughter died — I felt it happening even as I held her in my arms, do you see what I mean? — and it has never unfrozen. I expect it will be so forever. It is a way of surviving, you see: freezing within ourselves things that would otherwise kill us.

IT WAS WEEKS
later, as her mind worked at reconstituting itself, that she first wondered whether her daughter was now privy to a knowledge that lay beyond human possibility. Did she have an answer to the question Yasmin had never truly asked herself, that she had only idly speculated on? Had little Ariana gone beyond her parents, journeying alone into an unseizable light —
or had she merely vanished into a void so total there was room for neither questions nor answers?

Yasmin resisted the void, wanted to believe in the light: was tempted by its hope but fearful of it. And as she wrestled with herself, tossed from one to the other with metronomic regularity, Icarus came to her, arms awash in feathers, flying towards the sun, bathed in a brilliance she could see but not embrace.

A SILENCE HAD
settled on the house.

A silence that was porous and layered, and as if clotted onto the walls.

The silence absorbed sounds and noises. It absorbed speech, all those words sincerely offered and gratefully received — draining them of weight, sucking them into itself and threatening, at times, to pull her in too.

It was into this silence, and because of it, that her mother, sitting beside her on the sofa, clasped Yasmin's hands in hers and said, “I am, as you well know, dear Yasmin, no philosopher. And no matter how much I wish I did, I do not have the means to lessen your pain. But I do have something to say that might … Well, make of it what you will.

“This is something your father's brother, Cyril, said to me many years ago, minutes before you and I boarded the aircraft to come to this country. Although he had been at moments almost incoherent with grief for your father, Cyril was extremely lucid when it came to looking after our welfare. I remember that there, at the airport, he suddenly spoke to me about what
he called partings. He said that birth and death were the most momentous, for they changed everything, but that there was between them a host of other partings, grand and small, that exerted influence on the direction of our lives.

“I remember he took a long look at you and said that, while parting was always painful, fighting it was useless, it was an unavoidable force in human life and so we had to seek ways to embrace it. He was speaking of your father, of course, and how we all had to come to terms with his loss.

“Yasmin, dear, his words have stayed with me through the years, often coming to me in my idle moments. And I believe that they have influenced my life, and through me, yours. Make of them what you will, my dear, now and later.”

Yasmin sighed, the silence, held at bay as her mother spoke, surging back when she fell silent.

“It doesn't offer much solace,” her mother continued. “I know that. It may be that no solace is possible. But at least looking at things this way might help you put order in what seems like chaos. I have lived through many partings in my life and I've survived them all. As, my dear Yasmin, will you.”

Then she raised Yasmin's hands and pressed them to her lips.

CYRIL SHUFFLES THROUGH
a handful of photographs, peering at each before tossing it aside. He seizes another handful and repeats the process.

Yasmin asks what he is looking for.

“There was this mark,” he says vaguely. “His lucky charm.”

He examines another photograph. “You see it anywhere, Penny?”

“You wasting your time,” she says. “I mean, you could hardly see it on him, after all. It was long —” She turns to Yasmin, index fingers drawing vertically away from each other in an imaginary six-inch line. “— but it was so thin. People knew it was there only if Vernon pointed it out. He was conscious of it, you know?”

Yasmin says, “What's this about it being his lucky charm?”

Cyril sits back, crossing his legs, relaxing. A smile comes to him. “It wasn't funny at the time. A brawl broke out at a political gathering one evening. I couldn' begin to tell you what it was all about. All I know is, suddenly everybody was fighting and we were trapped up at the front. Eventually the melee reach us and somebody take a swipe at Ram with a razor. He was lucky-lucky-lucky. It din't go very deep, he ain't even bleed much. Din't take long to heal up either, but it left this fine-fine line. For months he kept looking at it in the mirror, hoping it'd go away, nuh. And finally one morning, he run his finger down it, give it a fond slap, break out into wild laughter and announce that it had to be his lucky charm because if the razor'd come any closer it'd have cut his face off like a mask. He thought it was really funny.”

“Well,” Penny says. “At leas', sometimes.”

Yasmin cannot share the humour. Her mind has already gone beyond the story. She thinks: So no photograph shows the mark. Had Cyril not thought of it, it would have been lost forever. What else is there? she wonders with a certain sadness. How much more remains unrecollected, unearthed, untold? Her stomach tightens at the thought, but she knows she will reconcile herself to this, too, as she has to so much.

PHOTO: A NEWSPAPER PHOTO, EIGHT BY TEN, LOOKING UPWARDS FROM THE GROUND TO A DAIS WHERE HE IS IN FULL RHETORICAL FLIGHT, EYES NARROWING OUT TOWARDS AN UNSEEN CROWD, THE REACH OF THE GAZE AND THE ANGLE OF THE HEAD SUGGESTIVE OF LARGE NUMBERS. HE IS PLAYING TO HIS AUDIENCE — THAT IS OBVIOUS — BUT ALSO TO THE CAMERAS, ENERGY DIVIDED BETWEEN THE HEATED EXPECTATION OF LISTENERS AND THE COOLER EYE OF THE LENS. HIS POSE APPEARS CADENCED FOR POSTERITY, A FLUTTER OF VANITY LIFTING HIS CHIN AND LENDING ELEGANCE TO HIS GESTURING HAND — A HAND SHARPLY DETAILED IN THE BLAST OF LIGHT. THE WRIST THICK AND ENCIRCLED BY A NAME-BRACELET OF HEAVY SILVER, THE SPLAYED FINGERS PLUMP, THE NAILS BROAD AND TRIMMED SHORT. A HAND SOMEHOW SUGGESTIVE OF A CERTAIN EASE, A SELF-SATISFACTION. THE KIND OF HAND, SHE THINKS, THAT WOULD ENGAGE WORK WITH ENTHUSIASM BEFORE CONFERRING ITS COMPLETION ON OTHERS. BUT A HAND OF RELISH, TOO: EASY TO IMAGINE THE FINGERS PINCHING A SCRAP OF BREAD INTO A PLATE OF FOOD, SCOOPING UP RICE AND CURRY SAUCE WITH THE DEXTERITY OF A MAGICIAN.

She thinks: Eyes may be the mirrors of the soul, but hands are its agents.

She searches for herself in his hands.

In vain.

ARIANA LIES PROPPED
up on pillows in a bed. She is flicking slowly through a book, waiting patiently — as she knows, as Yasmin knows — to die.

Evening comes. Yasmin and Jim — at least possibly Jim, she is not sure, is merely aware of a presence beside her — enter a hospital operating room. Her daughter lies on the operating table, propped up still on pillows, eyeing with serene curiosity the actions of the operating team gathered in white around her. The doctors, Yasmin sees, have removed both of her daughter's knees and are sewing her calves to her thighs. When they are done, her daughter stands up and walks stiffly around the bed.

Yasmin feels a surge of hope: She's going to live!

But quickly the hope recedes. She cannot deny what she knows: This evening Ariana will die.

She awoke to a tightness of breath, her daughter still briefly with her: that innocent serenity in the face of horrific knowledge. A sob broke from her chest: a full, liquid emptying.

Jim stirred, switched on the bedside lamp.

She told him, with difficulty, of her dream.

Jim was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Yas, when you look at me, I cease to exist.”

Yasmin made no reply, for she knew it to be true.

PENNY HOLDS UP
a small book, hard-covered. A child's book. “But what this doing here?” she says.

Yasmin's heart skips a beat. A child's book among her father's things.

Cyril looks, shrugs.

Yasmin reaches out for it.

“I wouldn' go jumping to any conclusions,” Cyril says, raising a cautionary hand.

The book slips easily from Penny's grasp into Yasmin's. The top part of the cover is ripped away, only the letter “T” left of the title. What remains shows a faded painting, of sky and sun and a solitary feather drifting away, and when she opens it, even with the greatest of care, the spine cracks with the reluctance of age. The first page is blank, but on the second, she sees in the upper right-hand corner a name.