Abstract
In a new short story,
After she has been walking for several hours and can no longer feel her feet because of the cold, Analli decides to call it a day. Tonight at six they will make another Skype call. It will be nearly midnight at home when they do so, a balmy breeze cooling the day’s heat, the jasmine bush brushing scent against the front wall, while here, now, it is still only a quarter to eleven and colder than a refrigerator. The hostel does not open its doors for another hour and there is nothing else but the cafe. She is resigned to spending money, buying a coffee, while hoping the waitress who dislikes her is not there, hoping she won’t be stared at by the manager. It does not help that there is only one cafe in the town, small, and full of prying eyes. With people who speak their native tongue so fast and fluently in the language that Analli struggles to comprehend on a daily basis. She and her husband go to classes once a week but he, for some reason, is better at it than she is. Perhaps because he has more purpose to his life even in this grim backwater, her husband enjoys conjugating verbs, learning vocabulary, forming simple, grammatically-correct sentences. Last week when the teacher praised his accent Analli had caught a glimpse of his expression. Had her husband been able to blush he would have. He was too dark for that but the pleasure in his face was palpable. Analli had looked away embarrassed by such unashamed delight.
‘Why do you care?’ she had asked afterwards, unable to stop herself, feeling acute, incomprehensible hurt. ‘Why do you want to sound like them?’
‘Don’t be jealous,’ he had said. ‘It doesn’t become you.’
Her eyes filled with hastily suppressed tears. She was not jealous, just terribly sad that another little thing, their shared accent, was being removed, distancing him from their old life.
‘Forget the old life,’ he told her. ‘That’s gone. Haven’t you noticed?’
Sitting on the hard cafe seat now, she wonders if forgetting is any sort of option. Her husband had once been, still is, an important figure in the fight for freedom of speech.
‘Once a journalist, always a journalist,’ he used to say.
In that old life.
They used to laugh a lot. She had her work cut out proofreading the newspaper he edited. When the death threats came they didn’t take it too seriously. Life, the vigour and certainty of it, coursed through their veins. They had not long been married, there were plans for the future. The paper was his baby. She wanted, but did not yet have, a baby of her own too. So preoccupied were they with this new life together it came as a shock when her father returned home one night, without hands. Her mother’s screams down the telephone were the first that Analli heard of it. The next day their newspaper was the only one to carry the story. ‘Human Rights Abuse Continues,’ said the leader. ‘Journalist’s Father-in-law Has Hands Severed.’
Two weeks later came the next threat. Her father was still in hospital and the result of the pregnancy test Analli took was positive. They had no time for threats.
‘How do you feel about us going to live abroad?’ her husband asked her as they lay in bed talking late into the night.
She had burst into tears, and then, before this train of thought could develop further, the very next night, his father disappeared. A white van was seen driving off into the jungle.
‘You Are Next,’ said the note pinned to their front door.
And when the following morning two of the newspaper’s staff were gunned down on their way to work they knew it was time to leave.
On the United Nations-assisted flight Analli had only one thought. Why hadn’t she told her mother she was pregnant? When the hot frangipani-scented air of the departure lounge gave way to the shudder of the aeroplane taking off she had cried out so loudly that the woman in the aisle seat had glared at her. Her husband, holding her hand tightly in his, had been white-faced with grief. Beneath them glittered the night view of the city they were swiftly leaving. Suddenly all the principles they had were as nothing. For what had they fought so fiercely and with such passion? Was it so the people they loved should be disfigured? Disappeared? So that they would never see their parents again? By the time they were flying over Europe the tears that had fallen were crystallised white on their tired faces and the thin clothing they wore was crumpled and useless against the onslaught of the air conditioning.
‘Would you like a blanket?’ the flight attendant had asked, noticing they were shivering.
Nodding, they huddled together for comfort. A comfort that Analli now associates with an old life. An existence that is today as insubstantial as a dream.
A new order had begun on the flight out. It had begun in the toilet of the aeroplane when she began to bleed. No, she had thought, no, no!
‘Are you all right in there?’ the attendant had asked politely.
‘One thing less to worry about,’ her husband said when she whispered the news to him on returning to her seat.
He had squeezed her hand, his face haggard. And yes, she had agreed, dully, they could focus on themselves for the moment. A baby could always come later. He nodded, full of admiration at her bravery, and then he told her he would not give up his fight for freedom of speech.
‘I will edit the paper from Europe,’ he said. ‘You’ll see. I will tell the world what’s going on. I’ll write and write. The rest of the staff … those that are left, they’ll send me information. You’ll see.’
He had become excited when really it was simply that he had lacked sleep. In the dirty snow-grey dawn she had endured the stomach cramp, waiting for it to end.
But still, she thinks now, her husband had been true to his word and had not given up. Even on that first day in the detention centre he had struggled to keep abreast with what was happening at home. Slowly she saw how, as the weeks passed and they were allocated a room in a refugee house, he began to gain strength. The newspaper would be reborn, rising like a phoenix as an online publication. Her husband’s contacts would supply him information which he would then download onto a communal computer during the two hours allocated to him. He began to write furiously, found a refugee web designer, agreed to engage with what was happening in that man’s country too, met other journalists and, through discussions, decided to enlarge the scope of the paper’s brief. At night, in their bed, he still talked to Analli excitedly about his dreams.
‘One,’ he whispered, ticking an imaginary list off on his fingers, ‘I want a computer of my own. I need to be able to work for longer than just two hours. Two, I can see that for this project to work, for it to be truly global, I need to include stories about other conflicts around the world. Three … are you asleep?’
She was not.
‘I need to learn their bloody language too, so I can read the papers here, use the library. Oh God, there’s so much to do!’
They had heard nothing of his father. Sometimes this got him down badly and he would weep. At others he worked more furiously at the computer, reading every scrap of information he could find on the internet.
When Analli woke up this morning, she had known today was one such day. They had rung home on Skype the night before. Perhaps that had been the problem. Analli’s mother had taken Analli’s father to the neighbour’s house where there was a computer. Of course they could not have any privacy with Skype but at least they could see each other. The neighbour was eating rice. There was some fish on his plate. Analli’s husband swallowed. The food in their host country was bland. Then Analli saw a distorted glimpse of her father in the background, his no-handed frame looking very frail, his eyes half closed. The lump in her throat had grown unwieldy and the sight of the rice and fish made her want to vomit. Her husband had talked rapidly, shooting questions, making notes while Analli stood patiently by his side waiting her turn to speak. She had had plenty of questions but when it came to it she only had one.
‘How are you?’
And her father, having shrugged, replied like an echo, ‘How are you?’
‘I’m fine,’ she said.
She saw her mother’s eyes filled with a kind of acceptance often seen in bullocks after pulling a heavy load. Silent, forbearing, spent. Her mother had just such a look. Yet they were all fine, they said.
‘We’ve been to the police station,’ Analli’s mother-in-law told her son. ‘Many, many times. They tell us nothing.’
Analli’s husband nodded.
‘Mother,’ he said, ‘we’re getting a computer of our own tomorrow.’
Credit: Andrew Thomson/Sector 4 Illustration
In the distorted frame of the video camera Analli saw other members of her extended family float by. They were all there, she realised, surprised. Even though they weren’t talking, they had come, risking their lives, to hear the voices of the free. She caught a glimpse of her brother. In the pale bluish light, Analli, who had become used to looking at healthy people, thought her brother looked like a ghost. In what context could she address a ghost?
‘Once we are fully up and running,’ her husband was saying, ‘I will write at length on Father’s disappearance. I will ask questions on the internet, send letters to the UN. Wait, wait, I promise you.’
Everyone on the other side of the screen nodded. Analli saw her mother’s face freeze. The connection was lost for a moment. There was a gasp. Was someone tapping into the conversation? Fear bit her lip.
‘No,’ Analli’s husband told her quickly, looking into the darkened screen as if it were a crystal ball. ‘No, they can’t hack into Skype,’ he lied. ‘Just switch off and switch on again.’
When they were connected once more Analli told her mother that she would send her something by email.
‘I’ll send it to Father’s email address,’ she said.
Her father, looking as though he might cry, recovered before her and nodded.
‘I’ll tell her how to open my email,’ he said. ‘We come here often.’
‘You can use a mobile phone,’ someone shouted. ‘I’ll get them one that downloads emails.’
There followed a certain amount of nodding but before they could say goodbye, the screen went blank once more.
Her husband would have collected the computer by now, Analli thinks. He and his web designer friend would be installing it in the room, checking the connection, sorting out the router, drilling a hole in the wall, taping down the wires. They would be talking excitedly as they worked. Lately Analli noticed her husband was more animated with his web designer than with anyone else, including her. She herself was still not pregnant. You had to do certain things to get pregnant and in this time of urgency, what energy was there for such things? Analli’s husband hoped to have the website up and running within a month. He was convinced the online newspaper would cause a stir, help find his father. Analli did not believe this would be the case. How do you find the disappeared? By sifting grains of sand on the beach?
Because her husband would by now be in possession of his own computer, because he was perhaps momentarily happy, Analli did a mean thing. She ordered a small pastry with her coffee. She would feel guilty afterwards but for the moment, as she eased her frozen feet out of their sodden shoes, her hand shook with greed as she took the plate from the waiter. It was the nice waiter who served her and his smile sweetened the almonds in the pastry. She had not known how to tell him she did not want one with almond paste. Almonds, the smell of them, reminded her of darker things and for a moment she saw again the small capsules the boy soldiers used to wear around their necks. ‘Kill yourself or be killed’ had been the motto when they had bitten through to the cyanide. Not many people here knew that cyanide smelt of almonds. Analli sipped her coffee. It too, like her thoughts, tasted bitter.
The two hours she had spent walking the outskirts of the town had not been simply to escape her husband’s excitement but to fulfil a promise of her own. When she had told her mother she would be sending her something by email it had been with only the desire for giving. Giving brought comfort, brought the giver closer to the gift’s receiver. Giving was for her like touching and, as touching was no longer possible, ‘to give’ was the only verb she had left. But afterwards she had wanted more, something tangible, something she, Analli herself, might touch. So she had gone out into the grey slush that passed for snow, coat on, shoes on, scarf around her face, gloved, alone. She had no idea what she was in search of.
For three days she had walked timidly around the edge of the town avoiding the shopping areas, seeking out the little bits of uncultivated land that were considered recreational grounds but were just a place for dumping rubbish. The land here was flat with a few clumps of birch trees. In the distance it was possible to make out the piece of frozen ground that was, in high summer, a lake. A caravan, destroyed by years of neglect, rested on three wheels next to a rubbish bin. Each day Analli walked as far as it took for this to come into view before turning back. On the fourth day she took a photo on her mobile phone. The image was grainy but captured the distressed feel of rusting metal. Moving closer she noticed that some of the rivets in the caravan were missing and there was a curtain attached to the window in the rear, the side facing the frozen lake. The curtain had an intricate pattern. Like the henna shapes drawn on the hands of Hindu brides. There was no one around. The snow was fresh, untrammelled, clean, and Analli felt a fleeting pleasure in marking it with her feet, as if somehow she was violating the landscape. And when, on her next visit she found the footprints were still there, she got an even stranger pleasure in adding to it. Was that how the thugs in the army felt when they killed? Was there pleasure in violating people as though their bodies were landscapes? She was ashamed of the unspoken question, ashamed of her solitary thoughts, ashamed, for it marked her out as being different from others, of her loneliness. To combat these thoughts she took another photograph on her mobile phone. It set in motion a series of other images.
The photograph that inspired the story, by Sri Lankan refugee Sharmila Logeswaram
She took a picture of the door to the caravan with its red handle toned nicely against the rusting silver of the body.
She took a picture of the interior as glimpsed through the dirty lace curtain.
Getting bolder, she tried the handle on the door and, when it opened, went in. Then with only a moment’s hesitation she took seven pictures of the room inside.
The sink with two plastic plates (dirty).
An old sofa bed (orange and also dirty).
A stained pillow without a case.
A cigarette lighter.
Two empty bottles of Schnapps.
A small cracked glass.
Then, hearing a noise outside, she fled. Already it was getting dark. A stone-black bird led her back in the direction of the town.
That day, back in the place that was now home, she waited patiently for her turn on the computer.
‘D’you know how to download them?’ her husband asked, amusement for the very first time on his face.
He was looking at her, she felt, in a way that was part of the old life. Some memory stirred deep within Analli but there was no word to describe it.
‘Of course,’ she said instead. ‘I haven’t forgotten.’
Memory, she wanted to say, could not simply be flushed away. But her husband was sending a text message and had turned towards the window where snow fell unhurriedly. So she kept silent. She wondered if tomorrow her footprints around the caravan would have vanished.
The images, when she placed them on the desktop, were interesting. Was she reading too much into it or did they all speak of loss?
‘What the hell are these?’ her husband asked, peering over her shoulder.
‘A caravan,’ she said.
‘Don’t tell me you broke in!’
‘It was the curtain,’ she said. ‘It reminded me.’
‘We must stay above the law,’ he chided her, not unkindly, misunderstanding.
She agreed. Breaking and entering might cost them the newspaper, that Holy Grail that would lead them to the truth. She promised not to go to the frozen lake again.
‘Besides,’ he said, kindly now, for perhaps he had been too harsh, focusing on her face, ‘I would worry in case something happened to you.’
It already has, she thought.
‘And there isn’t much phone signal outside the ring road,’ he warned her.
She worried about the graininess in the photographs. In the library in the town there was an exhibition of work by a local photographer who had visited an oil-rich country punished by war. The man had taken wonderful images blown up into huge panoramas of blue skies and perfectly proportioned vacant buildings. There was symmetry in destruction, she had decided, looking at them. Something she had not achieved in her own pictures. Her husband, observing her preoccupation, was pleased. She needed a hobby to keep her busy. In a few days they would make another Skype call. It was important Analli should look happier. It was important that her handless father should feel that some good had come from the empty spaces below his wrists.
In the cafe, eating her almond-scented pastry, she looks through the images she had just taken. Would her mother make sense of her world from these images? She had not been back to the caravan, but what did these new photos have in common? A blind cat, an empty beer can, a bus ticket? Wasn’t it too fantastical to be strung together to send to the woman who had borne her and now bore the grief of separation? What did her random harvest of photos add up to, in the end? Did they reflect the freedom they had clawed out for themselves and, if so, was the pain of her father’s phantom hand any worse than the heaviness in her own heart? Without warning, the heaviness shifted to Analli’s eyes which, in turn, to her horror, began to overflow. No! Not now, she thinks. Not here, surrounded by strangers. Bending her head, she searches in her bag for a tissue but finds instead, like a sword in her hand, her ballpoint pen. Because she feels she is being stared at, because she imagines the waiter coming towards her, she places the pen on the table and pretends to send a text message, accidentally taking another photo in the process. It is time to go before she makes a fool of herself.
At home and after the meal she cooks in the communal kitchen, Analli waits her turn on what is their own computer. Her husband has invited all those who helped acquire it to the meal.
‘It is a triumph,’ he says, squeezing her shoulders. She hears real gladness in his voice and is glad herself.
She understands his need to give something back to these kind people. Beyond the blueness of the blank screen, filling the space beside their bed, resting on two cardboard boxes, is the past and all they have left behind. Switch it on and they will be united with it in a fashion. Her husband is testing something out. There is a discussion going on about why the internet is still slow, what needs to be adjusted. Uncomprehending, Analli clears away the plates, stepping over big friendly boots, acknowledging the sheepish grins from these fair-skinned gentle giants. They all know she wants to use the computer too. Finally they are done and her husband moves away like a man leaving aside a new lover, giving her a last lingering look.
‘Your turn Analli,’ he says, spoiling the moment by adding, ‘Guess what? She wants to download her mobile phone photos!’
She doesn’t mind. She understands that he would rather be alone with his new toy. That he wants to Skype home, that he wants these helpful people to leave but can’t ask them because it would be impolite. And because of this he will have to wait another day before contact with his mother is possible. She knows he will have to go out with these new friends, take up their generous offer of a drink, uncomplaining. So, smiling her acknowledgment to their thanks, yes, she is a good cook, she begins downloading her photos instead. They are all there, the blind cat, the searing blue bucket left out to catch drips from a roof, the tired-green firs heavy with snow. She watches dully as the images appear one by one. There is no point in sending any of them, she thinks, as the last image fills the screen. She is about to press the delete button when she pauses and looks closer. For some reason the photograph of her ballpoint pen, taken by accident, uncomposed and pointless, is in sharp focus. Maybe because she had been so close to her subject the primitive lens worked best. The ballpoint, given to her by her father on some no-longer-remembered happy occasion, lies beside her empty coffee mug in the cafe. With light from the window illuminating it she sees on its silvery surface what had until now gone unnoticed, an unexpected splash of tears.