The Reader Berlin - HOME IS ELSEWHERE - An Anthology

Searching the kitchen-floor tiles with total dedication as Sally bubbles. Hasn’t she to get to the airport for the romantic weekend? In the hall she whispers how she’s surprised there’s no visible marks showing on the poor devil, no sign of what they’ve done to him. You want to ask her if she’s blind. But she’s down the garden path eager as a swallow heading home.

Hardly a word of English, she chose not to mention that, the kitchen shrinking to what neither of you can say, even if you wanted to say it, the hall clock ticking desolation while the two of you sit shackled in your skins, staring from the tea ageing in your cups to the walls beyond each other’s shoulders.

First time a man’s been in the house since Peter. Can’t count the handyman, the randy aul git.

Outside, the garden’s awake: branches waltzing, shrubs alight, casting his statuary nature into sharp relief. Oh, you’re going to be some company for each other.

You rise, to lift the pot from the stove again. A smell of stale sweat. Could be coming off you, tighten the arms to the sides just in case.

You’re just his halfway house so make the most of it, hot sups of tea with the apple tart by his plate while you talk slow and loud, saying there’s a Kandahar Street in this city, though you don’t say it’s spelled with a C. Afghan though he is, he’s blank at the mention of his own hometown. He lets you stagger on while he demolishes your Eve’s pudding with apple and cream, and you give the finger to the grim fella in your mind.

While he’s showering, you discover you’re the one sweating. You take your sister Manny’s old pink sheets off the bed and put on white ones, then change them back again; the white’s too like a shroud. You forget to tell him the catch is faulty on the bathroom door and through the open crack you sight him stepping from the shower with his kaleidoscope of scars, the map of his country scored on his back.

You sweat even more and make a bolt for your room, spending the night planning English lessons, drafting them out.

But he shows himself a match for you in resolve, the Saturday dragging by with you stuttering and him silent. Finally you shut up. And as if he’s been waiting for a gap, he begins to mumble the odd word, pointing to objects about the house, question marks floating in his eyes. Allah be praised, you want to tell him, as you struggle with frowns, careful smiles, actions, drawings, gestures, mimes. By Sunday evening, you get the feeling both of you might be enjoying yourselves.

He sleeps with his door open, drinks his tea black, wolfs down your stew with some word for it in Pashto, but you can’t get him to say vegetable. Is it stubbornness or his lack of teeth?

He doesn’t ask where you go Monday through Wednesday and you don’t explain how the charity you work for bypassed the grim reaper and brought him to you.

At the market, he’s a hotshot searching out sweet cabbages, the freshest fruit, produce he sold in Kandahar.

Browsing the freebie box outside the bookshop on the way home, you find a poetry book, shove it into your bag. He looks at you askance. You laugh, pointing out the word free. He brightens, sifts through the box, withdraws a gossip magazine. You’re bemused. But it’s either that or tattooed bodybuilders.

Back home, he skips the garden, sitting instead in the conservatory, studying the magazine. Attacks it with your scissors, cutting out pictures, snipping forever, careful and precise.

You give up on interesting him in a game of cards, turn off the TV, rinse the supper dishes. Is this what he learnt to do in the camps, passing time like you playing Solitaire? When he’s in bed, you gawk at the leftovers from what he’s been snipping: headless film stars, celebrities, severed torsos and trunks, a horror hotchpotch of cuttings scattered on an editing-room floor.

You recycle these but still he roots in the box when you pass it. The bodybuilders he ignores. He takes a boating magazine along with some cookery ones, but later discards the rich on their yachts.

The smell of his socks on the landing threatens to gas you and he hangs his washed clothes so badly you sneak out into the garden to rehang them while he’s busy cutting.

He spins the globe in the dining room every night before bed, tracing his thumb from Ireland to Afghanistan, and in the mornings he prays in the pointy corner of your garden. On his knees, doubled over, a sort of Pilates pose. Seems like the fuchsia, all red and purple-faced, might be facing Mecca. What inner compass lets him know?

Sometimes, still sleepless at dawn, you peek out at him prostrate on the dew-laden grass. Brings you back in time to you and Manny spying on Sister Immaculata, flat-out under an apple tree in the convent orchard, arguing with an imagined serpent, shouting her prayers from fleshy lips, the rest of her jailed in her long black habit. The least amount of body exposed, lest God or man, or, God forbid, woman, take pleasure.

You get him to pronounce his name and what he says is You-sef. You repeat it after him, saying it must be Joseph in English. He doesn’t understand when you tease him about using the Angelus bell as one of his calls to prayer. Would his own holy honchos think it heretical, blasphemous, or what? You no longer have this problem yourself since God and you let go of each other.

Sally calls in, romance plumping her, all rosy. Now Yousef’s settled, there’s no hurry finding him a permanent home, is there? You’re delighted, but after her tricking you, you’re parsimonious with your smile.

He discovers Peter’s old tools in the shed, fixes the catch on the bathroom door, then sharpens the shears and fits a strip of wood under the back door to stop the woodlice, his grooved face taking on an air of purpose. It gives the air that you breathe purpose too, as if it really is there to buoy you, save you from yourself.

He eases the lawnmower out of your hands one evening, taking over the grass. Later, when you bring him out tea, he’s lingering at the rosebush Manny planted before she died. Drinking its scent, slightly stooped, green eyes shuttered under the jutting brows, his lids dark as his arms, from times of lifting his face to the sun. Times of peace for him, long gone. The thought scalds.

You drag the iron seat across the grass, gouging tracks into the lines of his mowing. Peter would have a fit, but Peter isn’t here to frown at this lawn he nursed for thirty years, its army of green blades more dear to him than you proved to be.

You set the seat beside the biggest rose, bowed, velvety, petals of blood drifting down. He reaches out a hand, catches one, strokes it with his thumb.

He drinks his breakfast cup out there while the weather lasts, leaning back, absorbing the sun. You watch him while you re-wash his plate at the sink, getting the grease off.

You grow hungry for his footsteps about the house, his cough at night, the creak of Manny’s old bed when he turns. You’re catapulted out of sleep when he shouts from his dreams, once you even had to wake him, afraid whatever it was would break him altogether.

One day while he’s in the garden, you go into his room, set down fresh sheets upon his bed. You’re just leaving when you glimpse something under his pillow. You struggle for a bit, but your conscience legs it. Your own plump fingers lift the pillowcase’s corner; such a small effort to see what’s underneath cannot be a transgression.

Moments pass while you stare at what he’s hidden: the sum of his saved cuttings, the faces he’s snipped from magazines, young, old, and in between, including children, a newborn infant. A dog, for Christ’s sake. All of them, gazing back up at you, arranged and pasted with care, this grouping, dark-haired, olive-skinned as himself, all of them smiling into the void of his life. You stare for a long time, piecing together his family, the searched-out likenesses of strangers to his own loved ones, filling him up, taken with him into sleep to counteract his dreams.