Tahmima Anam - The Bones of Grace

Afterwards, I said, ‘Tell me what to do.’

You turned your mouth towards my ear and spoke so softly I could hardly hear you. ‘I can’t.’

‘Please, love me.’

‘I love you desperately.’

‘Then tell me.’

‘I’m not going to do that, Putul.’

I leaned back and examined your face. There was so much more of you, the skin around your mouth clear so I could see the tiny green flecks where your beard used to be.

‘Why not?’

‘Because it has to be you.’

I closed my eyes again and pressed my mouth against you. You were holding me now, and stroking my hair, and telling me I was the love of your life, and my blood burned when I heard your words, burned under my cheek where I felt your face against mine, and on my shoulder that had housed your chin, and where you had whispered, that place between my neck and my ear, that was scorched too.

Because I was in love with you, I absolved myself of the feeling of wrongdoing, even though I knew I was betraying Rashid with every hammer of my pulse. Because I was in love with you, I told myself things would work themselves out. Or perhaps I didn’t think about it at all, because we created a closed world between us, and there was no one else in that world, not even our other selves who might have raised a finger of doubt.

We couldn’t bear to be apart. We got up to eat and change the music on my laptop. Mo left things for us on the dining-room table, and when he came back they were eaten and there would be some money left for him to go shopping. ‘Let’s go somewhere,’ you said. ‘Okay, let’s go. Let’s go to the Hill Tracts.’ We would hire a car. You need permission to go to the Hill Tracts, Bilal at the Shipsafe office said.

I telephoned Rashid. ‘You sound happy,’ he said. I told him yes, I was. I was eager to get off the phone, but he told me a long story about dinner with his Chinese partners. I would see him in a few weeks, when he was back from Shanghai. ‘Za-jian,’ I said, remembering the greeting from my undergraduate Mandarin class, feeling clever and immortal and like I was on top of the world.

What will you do? You, the other, didn’t ask. Instead, you sent me messages, sometimes from the other room, or from the beach where you were running. Black is the Colour of My True Love’s Hair . And: Feeling Good . And: All the Things You Are . I had trouble replying. Once, I wrote: I Wish I Knew What It Is to Be Free .

I told Bilal I needed a few days off. We went to Foy’s Lake and convinced one of the boatmen to remain on shore while you rowed. ‘I was on the crew team in college,’ you said. ‘What, a hippy like you?’ But you steered the boat expertly, keeping your eyes trained on me as you moved your arms in large, even circles. We stopped in front of a set of stone steps that led out of the lake and into the forest beyond. ‘Shall we get out?’ ‘Of course.’ The dangers of the jungle were nothing against the force of our bond. After a few minutes the trees closed behind us and you kissed me while mosquitoes hummed in my ear. I didn’t care, even this sounded to me like music. ‘Let’s get out of town. We’ll pretend we’re married. Let’s get married.’ I looked down at my wedding ring.

After a week, Gabriela insisted I continue with some of the work we had begun, so I left you at the apartment with Mo while I collated my interviews and detailed the ongoing destruction of Grace . On one or two evenings Mo and I had our meetings in the dormitory with the pulling crew. At night, you and I behaved as if we were free to do whatever we liked, free to kiss in public or marry each other or just do what people did these days, fall out as easily as we had fallen in. We said nothing to each other about when we would meet again, or under what circumstances, but our fantasies carried us out of Prosperity, out of Chittagong and Bangladesh and out of this hemmed-in moment. You insisted on making no plea to me about Rashid. You would say things to me like ‘If you think these pancakes are good, you should sample the ones my father makes. When you come to Vermont, you can try them.’ Or ‘Let’s go to Paris.’ Or ‘Should we have three children, or four?’ And ‘What do you think about a bathtub at the foot of our bed?’ Instead of ‘Why don’t you leave your husband and marry me?’ When I asked, you just repeated what you had said to me that first night, that I had to decide, that everything was up to me. You said I would have to have the will. This terrified me, and I didn’t bring it up again.

There were things about you that I noted would annoy me later. Your feet smelled vinegary. There were towels draped over the backs of chairs and glasses half full of water on the floor by the bed. You would get engrossed in whatever you were reading, or listening to, or you would plug in your headphones and run your fingers along the chipped edge of the dining table, and I would suddenly cease to exist, and because I had been in your orbit just moments ago, this would feel like a slight, and I would be jealous of your book, your headphones, the chipped edge of the dining table. After we undressed, out of habit I reached over to play some music, and you stopped me. Everything was embarrassing to me and nothing to you. You didn’t care if Gabriela could hear us, or if I spied you from an unattractive angle. There was no music to float between us, caulking an awkward moment. And you said things. Out loud. Not loving, tender things, but particular things about the particular act and my particular body and its parts.

There had been no sex education in my life. They didn’t teach us at school, and my mother was prudish on the matter. I thought sex was pornography. Or the other thing, whispering and moaning while the slap and shuffle of bodies was muted by the blanket pulled over your head. Actually, it was the saddest thing in the world. Afterwards, I thought I would die.

Whatever I’d been doing before couldn’t be called sex any more. Or maybe what you and I were doing couldn’t be called sex — I wasn’t experienced enough to know the difference. All the same, things happened. Unbuttoning. The graze of cheeks, one bristly, one smooth. Tongues. Orgasms. But it wasn’t anything like the familiar motions I had made before. It was whatever made all the blood rush to the lower half of my body, whatever made me dream of your mouth, whatever made me want to say the word ‘pussy’, whatever put the scent of you in my head like a song I can’t shake when I am trying to devise a taxonomy for whale bones, whatever that is. Call it love. Call it insanity. Call it coming home for the first time. Call it my mother, living in my blood. I am yours and you are mine. Call it the beginning of the world. The sex was everything and it was nothing, only a small fragment of the whole, magnificent truth of it.

When the weekend came around again we took a bus to Noakhali, crossing the Brahmaputra to Bhola, then on to Khulna, where we found a boat bound for the Sundarbans. It did not occur to me until the moment we boarded that I might be recognised, but there were only tourists: a group of Korean men who worked in a glass factory in Chittagong, an elderly German couple, a Swedish diplomat and his family.

You paid attention to every small thing about me, every scar, every pucker of my skin. We slept together in the lower bunk of the tiny cabin and I felt you breathing into my ear all night and when one of us wanted to turn around we would both have to turn, because the bed was so narrow. You held me and stroked my hair and sometimes, after we made love, you would cry softly into my shoulder. When the boat stopped at the mouth of the Bay of Bengal, we were ferried down a tributary and led through a patch of trees to a beach with black sand. I rolled up my trousers and waded into the water. You tore off your shirt and disappeared underwater. I thought almost constantly of your death, that if you were in a plane crash or if you had a heart attack on your way home, no one would think to tell me. I would have been the closest person in the world to you, but no one would have known it. You repeated this to me every day. You said, ‘You’re the closest person in the world to me.’