Dreams of Water (11 page)

‘My name is Sita,' she says with a smile.

But Salah is too shy to reply.

They walk side by side on the street parallel to the one where the university is situated. Salah has decided to take a slightly circuitous route so that he can study Sita further. She has a plain dress on but there are gold bangles on her right wrist that jangle as she moves and her hair is braided so that it falls flat and thick against her back. He thinks perhaps he will help her when they cross the street to protect her from oncoming trams and motorcars.

‘What is your name?' she asks as they prepare to cross the street.

Salah holds on to the young woman's arm and hopes he is not squeezing too tightly.

‘Salah,' he says under his breath once they get to the other side. He lets go of Sita's arm.

They are approaching the fig tree by the hospital where Salah's mother had a small operation only months before. Once they're past that, they'll turn left and go down towards the main university entrance. Salah is aware that he is nervous but cannot understand why. Suddenly, he hears Sita cry out.

‘Oh, no!'

He is right behind her as she collapses into his arms. He takes one or two steps backwards but still manages to hold on to her. He looks at her face. Her skin has gone grey and her eyelids are fluttering. She is leaning heavily against him and there is nothing he can do but wait for her to recover. Moments later, Sita pushes herself up and tries to stand straight. Salah holds her by the shoulders and tells her to take a deep breath.

‘Are you all right?' he asks nervously.

The young woman nods and, pointing across the street, turns her head away with a loud sob. Salah follows the direction of her finger to the butcher shop where a sheep has just been slaughtered, its head lying intact beside its lifeless body.

‘It's barbaric,' Sita says through her tears.

But Salah can think only of the feel of her body against his own, the suppleness of it and of the realization that it had disturbed him. A few days later, he finds out that Sita has returned home to India.

He spends much of his time indoors at first, going out only when Samir returns from work and the two of them would walk to the high street for some groceries or for a quick meal at the corner café. Eventually, Salah feels brave enough to go out on his own for a walk to the park or down to the train station to watch commuters pushing their weight through the turnstiles and scurrying up and down the stairs.

He discovers a new freedom in anonymity, in the studied indifference of the strangers who walk past him, their eyes pointing straight ahead, their stride confident and
uninterrupted. It is also there in the apparent endlessness of this huge city, unbroken movement and a luring promise of novelty in its buzzing streets. He grows increasingly confident, venturing beyond the immediate neighbourhood of the house on most days, even risking a quiet hello at the newsagent's where he buys his Arabic newspaper on the way home.

When Samir arrives from work one day and hands him a bus pass, Salah examines it slowly, rubbing a finger over the photograph he'd had taken at the automatic machine inside the railway station a few days before.

‘It's free, wherever you want to go,' Samir says, flashing a rare smile, both arms held wide open in front of him.

He begins to take buses everywhere, looking at the sign on the front of each of them as it approaches and quietly mouthing the strange-sounding names as he prepares to step on. He goes across town and back, through bustling commercial districts and untidy neighbourhoods that are very unlike the one he now lives in. He begins to feel as if the city has several hearts that beat separately, each at the centre of its own world.

Standing at the front door one chilly morning as he prepares to go out, Salah looks down the now familiar street, into the distance, and thinks of the roads back home that twist in and out of one another without apparent purpose, leading to untold journeys, catching sunlight in their wake.

‘Do we live in the suburbs?' he asks Samir that evening.

‘No, of course not. We're right in the centre of town. You should know that by now,
baba
.'

While Salah has always excelled at athletics – his slim shape and long limbs help him run and jump with ease – the one thing he cannot do is swim. It is a source of constant embarrassment to him during his days at university since he is loath to admit that his body betrays him in some way.

One day, Salah's athletics instructor decides to take his students to the beach.

‘We'll do a few laps and play some games in the water,' the instructor tells them. ‘It encourages flexibility and endurance.'

Salah makes his way down to the stretch of rocky beach that is also part of the campus with a sinking heart. Once there, Salah is momentarily distracted by the activity around him. He and his fellow students have changed into their swimming suits and are standing on the concrete platform that abuts the water. Around them are dozens of other young men and women either lying down on towels or standing around chatting or splashing noisily in the sea.

‘Right, all of you, get in and swim up to the plank over there and back,' the instructor suddenly belts out. ‘No dawdling now.'

Floating on top of the water a short distance from the shore is a platform with several students sitting on it. The platform does not look too far away and Salah thinks he might be able to make it that far if he can rest at the other end. He slips into the water and waits for his classmates to move ahead of him, then, slowly letting go of the concrete ledge, he begins a reluctant dog paddle. For a moment or two, Salah thinks he will be all right but as he moves further away from the shore, a panic suddenly overtakes him and he imagines he is being pulled downwards into the depths of the sea. His
head goes down and he struggles to lift it up again. He splashes his arms and calls for help and out of nowhere, an arm appears and lifts his head up above the water. Salah feels his muscles suddenly relax and realizes he was only moments from drowning. His rescuer holds on to him until the instructor, now surrounded by a group of students, lifts him out of the water and on to the concrete slab where he is standing. Salah sits up and begins to cough. Someone taps him gently on the back.

‘Are you all right?'

He looks round and into the face of the woman who rescued him. She is smiling and he notices that her eyes are green and her lashes sparkle with sea water. Salah breathes hard and manages to nod in answer to her question.

‘He must have had cramp or something,' the young woman tells the instructor. ‘He was doing fine until I saw him go down.'

‘Just rest there for a while.' The instructor bends down and pats Salah on the back. ‘I'll get the others and we'll head back to campus.'

Salah has never felt so ashamed and wishes the young woman would go and leave him on his own for a while.

‘My name is Huda,' she says with a chuckle in her voice. ‘What's yours?'

‘Salah. I … Thank you.'

‘I could teach you, you know.'

‘Teach me?' Salah looks up at her again.

‘You'd only need one or two lessons. Then next time you come here with your classmates, no one will know you couldn't swim before.'

The brown suede jacket lies on the bed. Samir bought it for him during a Saturday shopping spree that had included lunch and a walk across the park. It is the kind of thing that Salah would never have thought of buying when Huda was still alive. Too young for you, she would have said, smiling, before putting it back on the rack and reaching for something a little more staid, in blue and green plaid or dark charcoal with fine grey stripes.

As a young woman, Huda had black hair and skin so fair that everything she wore seemed only to intensify the contrast between them. She was slightly older than Salah and, on first meeting her, he had admired her confidence and her sensual grace and the muted assurance that pervaded everything she did.

He hangs his head and caresses the soft leather. Then he gets up, stands in front of the mirror and pulls on the jacket, zipping it up over the camel-hair scarf he bought to go underneath it.

At the graduation ceremony, Salah's family, his parents and sisters, stand waiting for him after all the diplomas have been handed out. His father, Salah knows, is disappointed that his son had not studied medicine but a diploma in civil engineering is a great achievement, nonetheless.

The family takes turns hugging and kissing Salah.

‘We're proud of you,
habibi
,' they all say.

Then his father tells him they must talk.

‘How would you like to travel for a few months after all your hard work? Your mother and I have arranged
for you to go on a tour of Europe with a friend of the family. He's not much older than you are and has spent time travelling there and will be able to show you around.'

Salah is not sure what to think. He imagines himself standing on the deck of a ship gazing at a disappearing shoreline, but he cannot conjure images of foreign countries in his mind. He feels excitement bubble up inside him.

It is at this moment that he sees Huda approach with a couple whom he assumes must be her parents. She is wearing a soft green dress that matches her eyes and her hair is held up with a black velvet ribbon. She smiles and waves at him. He watches as she leads the couple towards his own parents. His heart sinks. Everyone will have to be introduced now.

‘Father, Mother,' Huda says, ‘I'd like you to meet Salah, my classmate and special friend.'

She is so enticing then, so strong and sure of herself that Salah knows he will not be going on that promised trip to faraway lands.

The first time Salah sees Aneesa she is waiting at the bus stop around the corner from the house. Her brown hair is frizzy and flies in the wind and she is dressed entirely in black with a pair of huge, bulky boots.

Salah sits beside her and is met with a breezy perfume of citrus fruits and jasmine. He cannot help staring at her profile. Her skin is luminous, he thinks, and that is what makes her beautiful.

The young woman suddenly turns to him and says hello but he is so surprised at the greeting that he cannot bring himself to say anything at first. Eventually, as they wait for a bus that is a long time in coming, they begin
to talk and Salah feels his spirits lifting at the gentle rhythms in her words.

Living so intimately with a woman surprises him. Salah wonders if the experience of marriage for most men is like his own and is suddenly aware of a fastidiousness in himself that he had never known he possessed. Huda is as cautious as he is at first, tiptoeing around his emotions delicately, treating him with a deference she did not show when they were merely friends. Their love life consumes them in the first year of their marriage and he is happy with the secrecy of it, the fact that he can appear reserved and unperturbed to the outside world when his senses are reeling with thoughts of his young wife.

After a few weeks in his parents' home where the young couple enjoy limited privacy, they move to their own flat. Salah watches as Huda blossoms into something else, into a woman preoccupied with setting up a home and tending to it. They look for furniture together, going from shop to shop on Salah's days off and at the weekends, but Huda is the one who makes the decisions on what to buy and where to place it. Salah does not mind that his wife seems to have claimed everything domestic in their lives as her own. He notices also how, in subtle ways, she begins to push him out of her world, sometimes temporarily, sometimes indicating that this is a place to which he will never have access. I don't want you to worry about the housework and cooking,
habibi
, she says. Let me take care of that and you concentrate on your work. And to his surprise, he seems to love her more not less for this, as if in distancing herself from him she is introducing him to a more grown-up world where
responsibility comes before friendship and a more rigid idea of love before unruly passion.

In time, Salah comes to love their flat, its elegant style and pervading comforts, their streamlined bedroom and, especially, the enclosed balcony overlooking the sea from where he can ponder his fate. Yet he senses a nagging inside him, not quite a longing but a feeling that is less defined and more worrisome. Huda seems to have slipped away from him into a life of her own, into the mundane details of every day and the secret ambitions that she harbours for them as a couple, as though each no longer existed separately from the other. By the time he discovers what it is unsettling him, Salah cannot begin to imagine what to do about it and, anyway, Samir appears and their lives are tossed and turned and filled with joy and frustration and all the things between.

He likes to watch Huda bathe the baby, the way she slides her forearm under his tiny arms so he is held firmly up, above the water, as she gently cleans him with a flannel in her other hand. Salah stands there, fascinated but feeling useless, until Huda asks him to fetch the baby's towel and he can scoop his son up in his arms, wet, slithering, a breathing, living thing, a beating heart and the source of so much love. Salah is often left bereft when Huda eventually takes Samir away to dress him and make him ordinary again.

He is a quiet boy, though Salah cannot really tell since he has had no previous experience with young children and does not really remember being one himself. Perhaps, he sometimes thinks, it is because Samir is an only child. When he broaches the subject with Huda, asks her if it wouldn't be a good idea to have another, she bristles with
annoyance and surprise. He is all I want in this world, she tells her husband, and Salah is effectively silenced, for what could he say then?

With time, Salah feels a gap between himself and his wife that is only remedied with Samir's presence, as if the child provided some kind of link between them, not in terms of being something to converse about and busy themselves with, but in being their common feeling, the place where their separate emotions touch and do not recoil. Although this truth worries Salah, makes him apprehensive about a future empty of connection, he does not see a way out and begins to wonder if his preoccupation with having another baby is only an attempt at stalling an inevitable decline.