The Worlds Within Her (4 page)

“YOU GOIN' OUT
, ma'am?”

The anxiety in the desk clerk's voice brings Yasmin to a halt. “Just going for a little walk. I need to get some air.”

The clerk — Jennifer, according to her badge — picks up a pencil and twirls it between her fingers. Yasmin recognizes the gesture: a smoker might have reached for a cigarette. “Pardon my askin', ma'am, but — somebody meetin' you?”

“No, is there a problem?”

Jennifer says, “Is better not to take a chance, you never know.”

The guard says, “Things not really back to normal yet, ma'am.”

Jennifer nods reflectively. “An' even then,” she says. “Normal …”

“You know, ma'am, maybe you heard about the little trouble we had here some time ago?”

Yasmin nods. “More than heard about it. I introduced — that is, I saw the
BBC
reports on the news at home.”

“So you know …”

“It must have been a terribly difficult time for you.”

Jennifer's eyes shift uneasily. Then she says, “Well, ma'am, nobody used the word war, but is what it was. A little war, no-holds-barred.”

“I wasn' supposed to come to work that evening, ma'am, but the girl working the desk take sick and call me up to replace her. I had some studying to do — I taking a secretarial course, nuh, computers and everything — but I figure I could bring my books, it usually pretty quiet around here in the evenings, so I say, Sure, girl, no problem. My brother give me a ride over. It was jus' beginning to get dark when I get here …”

They had emerged from the brief dusk, heads encased in knitted caps, some in jeans and running shoes, others — those in charge — more elaborately outfitted in flowing gowns, white, sky-blue, the dun of desert sands. They had brandished rifles and revolvers and submachine guns. They were said to be well-provisioned in ammunition and sticks of dynamite. They moved with quick efficiency, spreading by the carload through the city,
heading for the police outposts, startling the small garrisons and easily overwhelming them.

“Is the most frightening sound I ever hear, ma'am, coming from everywhere, as if a ton o' iron was falling from Heaven itself. I freeze right there, jus' outside the door for I ain't know how long before the girl I was coming to replace pull me inside.”

The insurgents had believed that confusion would carry the day. They had convinced themselves that public joy would greet them. But the army, so long viewed with derision, had proved disciplined, and the people so long thought to be malleable showed that fear was more persuasive than discontent. The disturbances that did arise were contained with more loss of property — what could not be stolen was destroyed — than of life.

Within hours the police outposts had been surrounded, one group isolated from the other. The largest — a dozen men who had taken a dozen cabinet members hostage — found themselves besieged in a meeting room of the parliamentary building. The ministers were tied to their chairs and dynamite strapped to their chests.

Then they waited.

“It go on for days, ma'am, the whole island shut down. From time to time, night and day, you hearing gunshots, sometimes jus' one or two, sometimes so much at firs' you think is an explosion but after it go on for two, three minutes … I spend the whole time here, ma'am, in the hotel. We push some furniture up agains' the doors, jus' in case, nuh. The telephone was still working so I manage to talk with the family to make sure everything okay, but nobody knew what was going on. Everybody was saying
coup, coup,
but who, why, where, nobody could say.”

One by one the police outposts were retaken by soldiers wearing ski masks. A few prisoners were taken, many others
were shot. Two of the outposts exploded in flames, the fire spreading quickly to adjacent buildings.

Around the parliament building they continued to wait.

“And then early one morning we hear a boom. Then nothing. Then a lot o' wild shooting. Then it was over. We watch it on. Fellas coming out with their hands up, soldiers aiming at their head, pushing them rough-rough to the ground.

“I give it a couple of hours before heading home. You know, ma'am, when I step out the door, everything felt different. Even the air felt kind o' dead. It was like the whole world had changed. I mean, here, at home, we had people countin' bodies.”

Yasmin feels the evening darkness weighing on the town, feels it tightening around the hotel, feels the hotel tightening around her.

Jennifer says, “Is like everybody just waitin'.”

“What for?” Yasmin asks.

Jennifer shakes her head. “Just waitin'.”

The guard, gesturing towards a glassed door beyond the desk, says, “Maybe a drink is better idea than a walk, ma'am.”

Yasmin considers the suggestion. She imagines pushing that door open to ferns and Tiffany lampshades, to a worldly and timeless elegance of long evening dresses and white jackets, as in countless old black-and-white movies. Claudette Colbert would be nursing some exotic drink at the bar. Over in the corner, Leslie Howard would be picking out a melancholy melody on a grand piano. Yasmin says, “Is there a piano in there?”

“Yes, ma'am,” Jennifer replies. “There's a piano.”

“Is there a piano player?”

Jennifer smiles sadly and opens her palms in regret.

The room has grown warm. She kicks off her shoes and stretches out on the bed. For the first time she regrets Jim's absence. She
closes her eyes, listens to the air squeezing through the air conditioner, squeezing into her lungs, and waits for the regret to pass.

Regret begets regret.

She regrets that her memories come in bits and pieces — sound bites of the mind. What she wants, what she yearns for, is memories that unroll like film: a long and seamless evocation of mood and nuance.

Her daughter is sitting on the carpet in front of the door. She is struggling with the straps of her new shoes; they are stiff and will not slip easily into the buckle.

Jim, briefcase in hand, waits impatiently beside her, car keys already jingling in his hand.

When her daughter sighs and begins again, a shadow crosses Jim's face. Yasmin is about to rein in his impatience when, inexplicably, his features soften. He puts down the briefcase and crouches, his hand lighting on the curve of her daughter's back.

Their daughter's back.

As the unskilled fingers slip the strap into the silver buckle, as they tighten and secure it, Jim gently runs his thumb down her backbone: a long and languorous caress. He is as if in awe: of the shape, of the solidity, of the very reality of the child. He has, Yasmin sees, stopped the world.

His love, she thinks, rarely glitters. Rather, it glimmers in subdued constancy; and only occasionally — as at that moment years ago; as at that other moment years before that when he first held their newborn daughter — does it sparkle.

This waiting for the regret to pass: it is, she thinks, the only wisdom she has acquired in her fifteen years with Jim.

THE ONLY TRICK
, my dear, is patience. The preparation is really quite simple. You see this little implement?

Yes, you're right. It does rather look like a miniature milk pail with handle and spout, doesn't it?

I bought it specially, you know. It's used for making both Turkish coffee and Moroccan mint tea. So, at least, I was told by the man in the shop. You put the mint leaves in with the water and you let it boil for five minutes, until it grows thick and fragrant. Then you add mounds of sugar and sip it piping hot.

Exotic, my dear? I suppose so, but that is no reason to fear it, is it now? I don't mean to compare myself to tea, but I know what it is to be exotic, my dear, to be seen as being so different you are disliked for it … But I've told you the story about my husband in the London hotel, haven't I?

It was soon after my husband's posting to London. Springtime, I think. I remember it was wet and cold, humid — but not the unpleasant, piercing humidity of fall and winter. No, there was a weak sunshine, with the promise of much more to come, and the sense of a great drying up, of grass turning green and hints of indiscreet colour. So it must have been spring — but the season actually is beside the point. This could have happened in any season …

What's the matter, my dear? Don't you fancy the tea?

So what's the meaning of that face then? Sweet? Of course it's sweet. It's supposed to be sweet. Just sip at it, dear. Gently does it.

In any case, we were walking around, exploring the city, acquainting ourselves with it. We weren't far from Buckingham Palace, as I recall, but I may be mistaken. There was a large park —

Hyde Park? Who knows? Possibly. There are other parks in London, you know.

My husband experienced a sudden and rather urgent need to visit a washroom. We spotted a row of hotels on the far side of the park and headed quickly towards them. He chose the closest and we went in.

The lobby was not large but it was grand in a sombre, conspiratorial sort of way. All dark, polished wood and heavy drapery that absorbed the light from the chandeliers. There was a clutch of American tourists at the desk, so he turned to the doorman who was standing in his uniform — a cherry-red affair, with brass buttons and gold tassels — rather grandly surveying the scene. My husband asked if he would be so good as to point out the nearest washroom. The doorman cocked a cold eye at him, surveyed him with obvious contempt from head to foot — and said nothing.

My husband repeated his request — positively offending the man. I thought he was about to spit! “Look,” my husband said, “either you show me where the washroom is or you and I are both going to be very embarrassed in a moment.”

The doorman froze, just long enough, I imagine, for him to decide that this savage was indeed capable of, well, you know, embarrassing them both. Then he flicked his gloved hand in the direction of an unmarked door beside the main desk.

Afterwards my husband made a point of thanking him as we left — but he was seething inside that the English, as he saw it, were the kind of people to make a man beg even to have a pee in private. He tended to elevate an individual's bad manners to a judgment on the society as a whole, you see. Of course he didn't forgive the man, either. He understood that the fellow was simply performing his duties, but he felt he was doing so at the expense of his own humanity. He always insisted,
my husband, on the superiority of individual conscience over group or professional demands. He felt the hotel doorman had sold his conscience, and so his dignity, to a place where he himself would be welcome only as hired help. He was the living embodiment of a lackey — and lackeys earned nothing but contempt from my husband — unless they happened to be
his
lackeys.

So you see what I mean about being exotic, my dear. It means you are never at the centre of things, and the centre was where my husband always wanted to be. He used everything, even our wedding, to get there.

But more about that in a moment. First, shall we indulge in another drop or two?

IT HAD BEEN
warm, too, and moist, that day in the wine bar. Yasmin had paused, uncertain, on its aluminum threshold. But Charlotte was already inside scouting out a table.

They were both single, still close friends despite the many years they had known each other. Yasmin no longer counted the number of times she had found herself enlisted by Charlotte in activities calculated to benefit her mind, body or soul — in yoga sessions, ceramics classes, art appreciation seminars, badminton lessons, kite-flying, egg painting. No enthusiasm, though, ever lasted beyond the next man, and a few men lasted beyond the lure of an enthusiasm. Charlotte, in a rare moment of insight, had once said of herself that she feared being the kind of person who enjoyed falling in love but detested being in love.