The Worlds Within Her

THE WORLDS WITHIN HER

NEIL BISSOONDATH

Copyright © 1998 Neil Bissoondath

This edition copyright © 2008 Cormorant Books

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Printed and bound in Canada

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Bissoondath, Neil, 1955-

The worlds within her: a novel / Neil Bissoondath.

Originally published: Toronto : A.A. Knopf Canada, 1998.

ISBN 978-1-897151-10-5

I. Title.

PS8553.18775W67 2008     C8I3'.54     C2007-900418-0

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for

Anne

and

Élyssa

who make it all worthwhile

Serafino shows me the little blue shack where Che supposedly lived. There was a photo of him on the wall inside for many years, but they had to take it down in the 1970s. Yes, I say sympathetically, it wasn't safe to keep a photo of Che during those reactionary times. “No,” Serafino says, “they had to paint the place.”

— Patrick Symmes, “Ten Thousand Revolutions”

Harper's,
June 1997

SOME SILENCES VIBRATE
with a voiceless chaos, felt but unheard.

It is into such a silence that Jim says, “You can still change your mind, Yas.”

And it is because of that silence that she replies, “You won't forget to water the plants?”

“Yas —”

“You worry too much. It's only three days, not much can happen. My father's relatives'll take care of me.”

“Just the same, I wish you weren't staying alone, in a hotel. If your mother's family were still here …”

“What difference would that make?” Yasmin turns away from his quiet fervour, her hands tucking with fruitless busyness into the suitcase. She is, at this moment, unwilling to engage the old discussion: his accusation that choice is, for her, the possibility of redemption; her accusation that choice is, for him, the avoidance of possibility. A discussion that has failed to find resolution through fifteen years of marriage.

She is forty, Jim seven years older. And yet his fears make him wish for the impossible. Yasmin's grandparents are long gone, and her mother's only brother, Yasmin's uncle Sonny, lives in Belleville, where he taught school for many years before sliding into a lonely Alzheimer's twilight. There are cousins perhaps, but too distant in blood and time to be sought out. Her mother never spoke of them, and so Yasmin has no memory — has been given no sense — of having known them. She is unlikely even to
recognize their names. And a knowledge of common maternal blood is insufficient.

Jim says, “I could still come with you, you know. It wouldn't be too difficult to rearrange things —”

She busies herself at the closet, shuffling through clothes, rejecting, selecting. “I haven't changed my mind.” She tosses a pair of slacks onto the bed.

He picks up the slacks, folds them neatly into the suitcase. “But why do you have to go alone? I still don't —”

“Neither do I, Jim. I just know I have to.” She sees his hands clench. “It doesn't have anything to do with you, I swear. Really.”

“Really?” he echoes. His tone is skeptical, but after a moment his fists unfold, and she watches his palm reach into the suitcase to smooth out the slacks: hands that have not lost their gentleness but have, even so, grown subtly inadequate over the years.

He forces a smile through his melancholy, offers a decisive nod of the head. “Okay,” he says. “Just don't forget to call. I want to know you're okay.”

When the packing is done, she sits, weary, on the edge of the bed as Jim locks and belts the suitcase. Checking the name tag, he hefts it into the living room. She follows his stockinged feet as they flop silently across the carpet.

And she wonders with a start when it was, and why, that this peculiarity of his walk — the large feet turned outwards, once endearing, long unremarked, now seen afresh — became disagreeable to her. She has not misled him in insisting that her going alone has nothing to do with him, but now, as she feels herself grow queasy with tension, she is no longer sure.

Jim says, “You all right?”

Yasmin nods. “The Aspirins are helping.”

“You have your ticket and passport?”

“It's a little late to ask, isn't it?

“We're early. There's time.”

Yasmin reaches into her purse for her sunglasses. It is a bright, lucid morning, traffic heavy but flowing.

Jim says, “Your father must've been a strange man.”

“Why would you say that?”

“Your mom must've mentioned him once or twice, no more. And you've never really talked about him.”

“There's not much to talk about. I know it must seem strange, Jim, but I've never been all that curious about him. If I had any memory of him, it might've been different, maybe I'd have wanted to know more, about him and the island. But you can't miss someone you don't remember knowing. And I had Mom, you see. She was enough.”

“But she must have told you
something
about your father.”

Beside the highway, in the railway marshalling yard, a locomotive tugs at its sluggish tail of metal containers.

“Oh, sure. He was a politician. A hard worker for his people. He might have ended up prime minister if he hadn't been shot.”

Quickly, the train is gone, left behind.

“But didn't she ever talk about the man? Did he read books or play cards? What'd he do in his downtime?”

“She didn't tell many stories about him. They seem to have had pretty separate lives. As far as she was concerned, he played politics all the time.”

“Do you think they were happy together?”

“I think my mom admired him.”

“But were they happy?”

“The way she spoke about him, yes, I'd say so. She once said he was extremely devoted.”

“To her?”

“She didn't say.” Yasmin looks away. On the other side of the highway, the rush hour proceeds lugubriously towards downtown. “She never really wanted to talk about him, I don't think. And you know my mom — she's good at keeping her mouth shut when she wants to.”

“Was, you mean,” Jim says gently.

“Yes. Was.”

“Are you nervous?”

“A bit apprehensive. Yes.”

An ambulance flashes by, cars ahead weaving out of the way. Jim concentrates on his driving.

When the flow settles down, Yasmin says, “I know it's what Mom would've wanted.”

“But does it really matter?”

“Doesn't matter if it matters or not. It just feels like the right thing to do.”

“For her or for you?”

A sliver of pain knits a passage across her eyebrows, and she turns away from the cars halted now on the other side of the highway, sunlight glinting off their glass and chrome.

She says, “There was a movie on
TV
many years ago, I've forgotten the title. About a white woman who'd married a Japanese-American man just before Pearl Harbor. He was interned, I think, and he ended up dying. I don't remember how. But the last scene, it was very quiet, very moving. The woman was washing her husband's body, gently, in total silence. Tears running down her cheeks.” Her voice trembles and she pauses to swallow the tightness away.

On the railway tracks, a commuter train buzzes by. She glimpses heads in the windows, people heading from the suburbs to downtown office towers. And she senses a growing disconnection from them, as if she were already being lifted out
of the context they share. But she feels no sense of liberation.

“It wasn't her immediate tragedy, it wasn't what had happened, wasn't the loss of someone she loved that was so moving. Or maybe it was all of that. Mostly it was the derailment of possibility. The life they should have lived. Together.”

“You can't guess at what might have been, Yas. Might-have-beens don't get you anywhere. They're useless.”

“It's not what might have been, that's not the point.”

“So what is the point?”

“When I find out I'll let you know.”