The Reader Berlin - HOME IS ELSEWHERE - An Anthology

What makes for pain is that it wasn’t always like this. You replace the pillow, your heart knocking against your ribs.

The photographs you once had of Peter. Strange how you can be ambushed, the way it sneaks up. But the truth is your future was never fixed or assured either.

Next time you’ll just hand Yousef the sheets.

One evening you come home to him pacing the hall.

“What,” you say, alarmed, “Yousef, what’s the matter?”

Is he annoyed you’re not home on time to heat dinner? There’s enough stew from last night to feed a battalion; you’ve told him to go ahead if you’re delayed but so far he’s balked, won’t eat till you’re at the table together. Almost as if you two have a life like others.

There’s seduction in that, though you try not to be seduced.

He mutters now in his own language, taking your arm, urging you upstairs. You pause on the landing, panting from the climb.

“God Almighty!”

Still winded when you notice it; the closet at the far end of the landing barren as your life, its light illuminating the slatted wooden shelves. Stripped of duvet covers, sheets, even nightdresses, now piled across the bannisters.

And him ushering you along the passage to the open door, kicking the toolbox out of the way as he pulls you inwards to look. You’re resistant. You’ve never seen these shelves bare since Peter built them, since you lined them with hope, the bedlinen of wedding presents.

And now he’s pointing it out: woodworm. The rot of your life.

He lifts the crowbar, a question in those ridiculous eyes, but you grab his hammer, bring it down repeatedly on a shelf, till the wood splinters with deafening satisfaction. Then you toss it. The light bulb smashes and you race into your room, slamming the door as he begins hacking away at the little that is left.

At least you haven’t blinded him. The hacking takes forever, injecting you with a torpor that curls you into bed fully clothed. The light’s gone out of the sky when the noise finally stops. You sleep then, long, fitfully, wading through dreams of wreckage and abandonment.

In the morning, sunshine. A crackling in the garden, the smell of woodsmoke through the bedroom window. And Yousef with his grey thatched head and serpentine eyes tending the fire diligently in the corner opposite Mecca. You take advantage, run downstairs, grab a cup of tea, return to bed, glad to avoid those eyes. Doze fitfully, vaguely aware of the hammer again in the distance, maybe you even hear the saw?

It’s late when you wake, the air clear, a sense of warmth in the room. Footsteps maybe? Outside the door? Your phone says noon. So does the birdsong through the window. Otherwise, silence. It’s over at last. What’ll you say? Sorry I acted like a madwoman.

But when you open the door your heart rears up. He’s sitting near the gouged-out closet, his crooked little back to the bannisters, hugging something. How long has he been here?

“Yousef, I’m sorry,” you begin, but he’s grimacing with stiffness, hauling himself from the floor, handing you a small wooden box made, he signs to you, from what he’s salvaged.

Inside, the astonishment of your name, carved alongside some Arabic.

“Yousef—” you manage. But already he’s descending the stairs. Somehow you get back into your room before the sobs start, hard and punishing.

You’re gritty-eyed and worn out coming downstairs later, needing to thank him properly, offer some vague excuse for last night.

But he won’t let you, he’s poring over the photos on the sideboard, mesmerised. This has to be a pretence, given he’s looked at them all before.

You let him take your arm now, in atonement. He makes you point to yourself when small, examining your sepia curls, laughing warmly, as at a well-loved child. Your heart speeds up. He points at you and Manny in your teens, arm-in-arm, standing in this very house where you grew up together, then out at the rosebush.

“Yes.” You nod. “That’s Manny.” Dead before the first flower bloomed, before her twenty-first birthday, though you don’t air the words.

He touches the blocky young hand and arm around you at your other side, though you’ve sawn it off at the shoulder. You look away. You’ve managed to hack most of Peter out of your life, your photo albums.

Yousef then leans into your face and raises his brows. You turn back to the photograph again and shake your head. But he senses something.

Shame makes you avoid his eyes. Cutting’s also what you do when you’re walked out on after a lifetime by a man you’ve loved beyond all else, one who’s not seen fit to tell you he’s going, one you’ve gone to the police for, sent out search parties for, only to discover him living with a woman in Canada, a woman heavy with his child.

No. You can’t tell Yousef about your soap-opera life, this man whose entire family has been wiped out by war. And so you walk away from his mystified eyes.

*

Early morning, arriving at the office to missed calls from Sally, a message on your mobile phone.

Though you knew to expect this, it’s a shock. Somehow, you’ve managed to lull yourself into forgetting why he’s come to you in the first place, that he’s forever lost his home. You don’t answer Sally either, when she rings again, you don’t want to hear the words.

On your way home, you buy him a holdall the green of his eyes, but avoid looking at the bookshop as you pass.

They’re in the kitchen, waiting on you, excited, his eyes over-bright, Sally fizzing with the finding of his cousin in London, her belief in serendipity, how everything always falls into place.

To have all torn from you, something given back. Your heart, too, sings for him, in spite of what it longs for itself. Caught up in his joy, you say this calls for a celebration, you’ll make tea. But he’s all packed, there’s a plane to be caught.

So soon? You sit heavily, trying to hide your desolation. Sally, sensing the shift, stuffs his bag into the new holdall, heads out to the car.

For a moment longer you sit together as you did the first day, but now the air is thrumming between you. Then you’re both on your feet, hands clasped, his warm and rough, encasing yours like clamshells. And you, you’re afraid to breathe or think.

Finally, Sally’s back, shattering the air, hustling him too quickly out down the garden path.

You follow them to the hall door, stricken. Manage to wave, holding the rictus of your smile till they’re gone, a short blast on the horn.

He’ll catch sight of his home again when he reaches his cousin.

You stand there, gripping the empty air he’s vacated, holding on to his image.

Presently you’ll go inside, past the clock in the hall, moving through the house, absorbing the silence. Then, into the back garden, to his chair, beside the roses.

You will not succumb.

Sally will give you his address. You’ll send a postcard. He’ll send one back. Because he’s courteous, because he has a warm heart still able to beat over what was done to him.

In the meantime, he’s made you the box, carved his name and yours, in a circle, the circle of the world.

It’s home to you now, and in it you’ll place him, bending to sniff Manny’s rose.

Alissa Jones Nelson

The black stallion reared up on my bedside table sometime between my last night of twenty-nine and my first morning of thirty, twenty years to the day after he’d melted into a plastic puddle in a heating vent at Nana’s. I heard the pale ochre whinnying before I saw him. It was that human hive, honeyed kind of city dark that never really falls. I rolled over to face a spot of perfect blackness in the gloom, as if the dark itself had solidified into a tiny spindle-legged horse, balanced on his hind legs, his tail creatively useful as a prop. I knew then, without believing.