Blood Kin (4 page)

9
   
His barber

The portraitist has asked the man who brought us bread and tomatoes if we can go for a walk in the courtyard. Why he wants to walk is beyond me since he has been struggling just to get to the bathroom and back and when he stands from sitting, he keeps one hand on his belly and uses the other, palm spread, to support his lower back like a pregnant woman. The man surprised us by agreeing, but he said he’d follow behind us a few metres, keep an eye on us. The chef has scuttled off sideways like a scavenger to attend to his crustaceans.

My pyjamas cleave to me like a second skin, filthy, and my beard is encroaching on virgin territory. We leave the room like an old married couple going to church, the man trailing us at an uninterested distance. The portraitist shuffles along the corridor next to me.

‘What is it?’ I ask him. ‘Why are you walking like that?’

He looks at me as if he’s surprised I noticed. ‘Lower back. Must have pinched a nerve in my sleep.’

‘There are exercises you can do, you know – to release it. I’ll show you back in the room.’

We turn the corner into the passage that opens onto the courtyard below. It is full of people. We lean on the railing and look down at the tops of their heads; many of them are women, sitting in small groups, bucolic in the late morning light.

‘Party officials,’ the man who has been trailing us says. ‘They arrived last night.’

He has joined us at the railing, and leans a little too far out over his arms, ogling the women. The portraitist, too, stares at each woman like a hungry man. At first I wonder that his eye could be roving so soon, but then I realize that he is only staring in the hope that one of them will be his wife. No wonder he was so desperate to get out of the room – he wants to find her, or see her, or glimpse her. I turn my eyes back down to the courtyard. Something is not right: I find that each person I look at seems to jolt some recollection in my mind, to reignite some memory pathway.

‘Every person I see looks vaguely familiar,’ I say to the portraitist softly. ’Should that worry me?’

‘In a strange place, your brain does things like that,’ he says. ‘Seeks out familiarity. A survival tactic.’

Perhaps. I have almost accepted his explanation when I see her – not vaguely familiar, but intimately known: my brother’s fiancée, who disappeared when he did. She is sitting on the grass in the sun, her face offered up to it like a sacrifice, with her closed-toe shoes kicked off and her pencil skirt keeping her legs chastely together, crossed at the ankles, toes curled as she soaks up the warmth. That thick hair. I used to find strands of it on my brother’s pillow when I was younger, so young that I would snoop about his room, desperate for clues about things older boys did, for clues about women, and sex, and intimacy. I collected what she had left behind, the only evidence she had been there, thick enough that even singly I could tie them into knots without snapping them. I couldn’t believe those hairs were dead.

She opens her eyes and the angle her face makes with the sun means she is looking directly at me. Do I flatter myself to think she would recognize me? That she has banked my face in her memory? She closes her eyes again, uncrosses her ankles and lies down completely, her head against her palms, relaxed.

‘I just want to see her,’ says the portraitist. ‘Not even speak to her or touch her, I just want to see her.’

His wife. The man guarding us, in the intimacy that comes from looking at women together, says, ’She walks in the rose garden in the mornings, on the other side of the courtyard. We let her walk and stretch for an hour.’

The portraitist grips his forearm. ‘I have to see her. Please. She doesn’t even need to know I’m there.’

The man is feeling good in the sun. Maybe he has his own lover amongst the women milling below. He hesitates, then agrees. ‘You can see the rose garden from the opposite passageway. I’ll take you there.’ He turns to me. ‘I’ll watch you from across the courtyard. I know you won’t move.’

I won’t move. She is beneath me, in the sun. An image of my mother flits into my mind like a fly that needs swatting: in the hospital, disguised by tubes, thinking I was my brother and crying with joy that he had found her at last. Her last words were: ‘My son’, but she wasn’t speaking about me.

I say my brother’s fiancée’s name, then call it more loudly, and a few people in the courtyard look up at me, registering my presence. I shout it and she opens her eyes and sits up, looking around her to source the voice. A man points up to me, to the railing where I’m standing, and she looks up, shielding her face from the sun with one hand. She can’t see me because of the glare. She stands and walks barefoot towards the edge of the courtyard and looks up, then disappears from my sight, into the passageway beneath me. I am relieved, relieved that it isn’t her, that I don’t need to know. Somebody touches my shoulder gently and I turn. It’s her. She stands before me, barefoot on the cement floor, her hair ruffled from lying on the grass, slightly out of breath from running up the stairs.

‘My God,’ she whispers. ‘For a moment I thought…’

I know what she is thinking, she and my mother, wishing me away, wishing he were back.

She reaches out a long limb to cup my face. ‘With that beard…’ She can’t finish the sentence. She doesn’t need to. ‘What are you doing here? Are you with the movement? What section are you in?’ She is holding back tears unsuccessfully; they bank and spill, bank and spill.

‘I’m being held captive. I was taken in during the coup. They’re keeping me with two other men in a room.’

‘Captive?’ She wipes her tears away impatiently, trying to concentrate on my words. ‘But that’s impossible, there must be a mistake…’

‘No mistake. I’m one of the old guard. I shaved him each day, plucked hair from his nose, made him look presentable…’

‘The President?’ she says, incredulously.

‘The President.’

‘You mean you held a knife to his throat every day and never slit it?’ Her tears begin to collect again. ‘After what he did? To me, to your brother?’ They are spilling hopelessly now. Her face is blotched with the effort of her grief.

I am beginning to resent her accusations. ‘What
did
he do to my brother?’

She has covered her face with two hands, blocking me out and everything I recall in her.

‘What happened to him?’

She moves her hands, holds them out to me, to take my hands in hers. I relent, and she holds them, rubbing them with her thumbs, looking at me with pity. ‘You don’t know, do you?’ she whispers. ‘Of course you don’t. Why does nobody
know
?’

She pulls me towards her, nestles her head against my chest. I am taller than her, but only just, and she has to stoop slightly. Then she pushes me away as suddenly as she drew me to her, and steps away from me, remembering some forgotten propriety. She looks around us, looks down at her bare feet, feels with her hand for her collapsed hairbun. Fraternizing with the enemy. She glances over the railing, down at the people grouped below. Nobody is paying us any attention. She looks over her shoulder, her neck tendons diagonal for a second, as if expecting somebody to be lurking, eavesdropping behind the columns of the passageway, then she rubs the inside of her right arm compulsively. Whom is she conjuring?

‘He died in the mountains,’ she says quietly. ‘We were ambushed. We left the village to make a difference, to change things.’ She looks over her shoulder again, keeping her distance from me impersonal. She opens her mouth, takes a breath to relaunch.

I have to interrupt. ‘I know he’s dead,’ I say, trying to keep my bile masked. ‘I got the letter. I suppose you saw him being buried.’

She burns at this, catches alight like a holy bush in the desert. ’So you did know.’ Then she turns her back to me, lifts her hands to recoil her hair, and says softly, ‘Traitor.’

She walks down the stairs, pointing each graceful foot before it lands. I watch her ease onto the courtyard grass, pick up her shoes with one hand, and merge with the shade boxing in the sunswept courtyard.

10
   
His portraitist

‘There she is,’ the man says, and pulls me behind a pillar so I’m not exposed.

She is walking as fast as our child will let her around the small rose garden, forced by the narrow path to turn comically often. From this level, I can see her full head of hair from above, her parting straight until halfway back her skull where it veers sideways. The grey strands have gathered courage and refuse to be flattened into a ponytail; she doesn’t have her hair dye as an ally anymore. On Saturday mornings she used to look like a mad surgeon, emerging from the bathroom with two plastic gloves held up as if she were waiting for a nurse to remove them, and a showercap covering her hair, the dye coaxing the plastic red against its will. If she were careless, the rims of her ears would be slightly pink for days.

To give birth in captivity. If I think too long about the position I’ve put her in, my mind begins to seize up like a crushed windpipe. She looks fine – healthy and vigorous – but what is the stress doing to our child, unseen? Coursing through her into the baby, a fatal kind of nourishment. Will they let us go once she has had the child? Why are they even keeping me here, insignificant player that I am? Why has he dragged me into this cycle of confession and witnessing? Stop. Stop it. My kidneys pulse in response; they have a muscle memory of their own.

She has done another abrupt turn and is pumping her arms, propelling herself forwards, eyes level, face determined. Her breasts bob slightly from the motion, getting in the way of her arms on every backward swing. She stops and bends to touch her toes, stretches sideways, lifts her arms in the air. What would we be doing right now if none of this had happened? She would be sitting in the sun after her bath, topless, rubbing lemon juice onto her nipples – she said this prepared them for the onslaught of breastfeeding – the small potted palms on our balcony keeping this a secret from the street. I would be in my dressing gown in my studio, music blaring, working on a drawing I was planning to give her after the birth – charcoal, like the ones she’d originally admired at my exhibition. She used to wander around the kitchen with just a sarong tied around her waist and faint traces of lemon pulp and sometimes a stray pip sticking to her breasts. Our fridge was stocked with champagne and each time I opened the rattling door it felt like a mini-celebration just from the sight of the gold foil and green glass; this was in case her milk didn’t come quickly enough after the birth – she said a few sips of champagne would get it flowing.

Now she is lying on the grass between the gravel, lifting each leg slowly in the air and holding it in the stretch. She looks like just another stone sculpture planted in the surrounding garden – conventional shapes: cupids, half-naked women, tentative sprites. The rigidity of the sculptures reminds me of a boy I saw on the beach when I was young enough not yet to have chosen a profession. He was on his hands and knees in the sand, sculpting life-sized sand creatures – buffalo, crocodiles, lions, giant tortoises – his only tool an old detergent bottle filled with sea water. He sprayed the sand and then used his hands to mould animals so realistic they scared me; it was as if they had bones and muscles and sinews and were waiting for the sun to set so that they could stand and stretch and begin to hunt. He had no pictures with him; the animals were entirely in his mind’s eye. I sat and watched him until the light was gone and I could no longer see, further down the beach, obedient swimmers swarming in a thick triangle between the flags. Choosing to be an artist never seemed like a risky thing to do; in fact, it seemed to be a guarantee against risk.

A soft voice with fishy breath speaks into my left ear: ‘The child is getting impatient. It wants to greet the world, meet its father. She’s looking well, no?’

I turn to look at the Commander. He is picking his teeth with a twig, working away at something caught in the gum next to his incisor. He keeps his eyes fixed on my wife. She is still on her back in the grass, leg pulled towards her in a stretch, and I wish she would stand up, get out of that ridiculous position.