Thinner Than Skin (4 page)

“They like the valley bottoms,” she was saying. “And the floods, though not too often, and they like the fog belt. They like the nonstop drip of dampness. Nadir could never be a redwood.” She turned to me.

I smiled. She leaned very slightly, as if to kiss me, and I pulled back very slightly, reminding her where we were. She got up to use the bathroom.

Irfan absently chewed on the burnt edge of a naan and suggested
that Farhana would enjoy the forests of Kaghan Valley. “It’s very lush, she’d like that. And not so out of the way. We have time. There are glaciers there too.”

Then I thought about it. Yes, she
would
love the valley. It was damp, shadowy, fecund. It was Farhana!

So we decided. And we forgot to tell her till it was time to change buses in Abbottabad. We didn’t take the one to Gilgit in the Northern Areas but the one to the town of Naran in Kaghan Valley, in the Frontier Province. It was just to be a three-day detour before heading north to the landscape of vertical wildernesses I’d described to her once. She sat with Wes on the bus and he must have told her and it must have pained her that he’d been told while she had not—I do remember Irfan explaining it to Wes, but where had she been? The bathroom? Shopping with my sister? I couldn’t remember!—and it was uncharacteristic of her, the way she said nothing till that time in the shop, when she tossed off the shawl.

But then the night before we trekked up to the lake I believed she’d forgiven me, and I believed the same in the morning. I believed it even when I heard her complain to Wes about the detour, as she fed him those cold, tri-colored eggs, moments before we left the cabin. I believed it even on the walk up the glacier, when she turned her back to me, and I had to—how swiftly she and Wes moved on the ice!—I had to hold back—with what ferocity I wanted her just then!—reminding myself that the best reunions are like the best stories, and the best sex, raising questions while delaying answers. Yes. I believed she’d forgiven me, but I did not entirely believe I’d forgiven her. Because though it’s true that I left out the most important detail about Karachi and that I then disclosed it, it is also true that I continue to leave out the most important detail.

Kaghan or no Kaghan, what was she doing here at all?

Sometimes, after Farhana untangled the knots of her braid and tossed a wad of hair in the dustbin, she’d pull me out of bed, to recline at her five-sided bay window in San Francisco. It pitched so far out into the street, she claimed it was the one that caused the city to pass an ordinance limiting the projection of all bay windows. We’d sit there, nestled in glass in a purple house. Even by the city’s standards, the house was spectacular. Slender spiraling columns at the alcove, each with gold rings, like cufflinks on a white and crinkly sleeve. Halfway down the door of unfinished wood ran a tinted oval glass.
Mirror mirror
she’d giggle, the first few times I kissed her there. The bedroom balcony—with little gold-tipped minarets—was where I left her calla lilies, like an offering to the god of extravagance. Art-glass windowpanes under the roof.

At the window, we watched others on the street.

At the window, she asked, “What’s the most beautiful thing you ever witnessed? I mean a moment.”

At the window, we played opposites. The Mission, where she lived, was once moist, fecund. In contrast, the stark, windswept Richmond, where I lived, was once a desolate bank of sand. We said
she sprang from marsh, I from desert. She loved the damp closeness of curves, the rich debris of glaciers and deltas. She loved her gloves and her socks. I, though always cold, hated to cover my extremities. I preferred the raw, violent beauty of the Pacific coast to the secret tides of the protected bays. We said “opposites attract” and we were right. Converging is what divided us.

On her first birthday after we met, the year before we left for Kaghan, in one hand I held a calla lily with a lip pinker than her own, in the other, a bottle of champagne. As I descended the hill to her purple palace, the sun drew the fog from my flesh, and I was salivating as the scent of refried beans followed me all the way to her door. There she met me, dressed in woolens and boots, saying she knew what she wanted instead.

“What?”

“Let me show you.”

I shut my eyes, counted to ten, opened them. “So, where is it?”

“Not here, silly. Let’s go for a walk. To
your
neighborhood, the one you love to photograph, with all the cliffs and cypresses.” She rolled her eyes as though cliffs and cypresses were toys for men. I found her delicious.

It was an especially cold day in May and though I did love the bluffs, I’d been hoping for a more close-fitting day. Call it role reversal. I chilled the champagne and headed for the bay window, to, well, anticipate some tidal advances. The last time we’d made love I’d teased that her needs were growing as strong as the tides rushing up the channels of a salt marsh, and, inshallah, they’d also be twice daily.

Well, it was not to be.

She’d planned the route. First, the ruins of the Sutro Baths, which looked especially green and scummy that day, thick as a Karachi sewer. We watched the pelicans. Dark hunkered shadows, sometimes in gangs of twenty or more, closing in on the fecund orgy at the microbe-gilded pools like evil clouds, like missiles. They launched headlong, scattering the seagulls and the swifts, dropping
one after the other in a heavy, gut-wrenching fall. A rain of bombshells. The invasion mesmerized us.

I moved my camera in search of the prison island of Alcatraz, floating somewhere in the bay, but it was shrouded in fog.
Alcatraz
. The archaic Spanish word for pelican, from the Arabic
al-qatras
. It was the rule of silence that drove the inmates insane, reminding them that their exile was complete. I moved my camera back to the baths, and from there, to the austere silhouette of a cormorant. He seemed to be watching the assault of the pelicans with as little interest as God.

“Nadir, talk to me for a minute, without that.”

I didn’t have to see through the lens to see her point to it. “In a minute.”

The pelicans gone, the seagulls multiplied. I watched a pair land on the boulders along the shore. It was the softest landing, the gulls allowing the wind to pull them down gently, lovingly. And the hummingbirds—how did they survive in this wind, and at this height? And the succulents to her side—those red waxy leaves, juicy as capsicum—and the purple flowers with the bright white hearts! Here it was again: the tenacity of the small. What I’d seen in the Sonoran Desert and the valleys of the Himalayas.

“It’s over a minute.” I put the camera in its case. She cleared her throat. “Nadir, are you as happy here, with me, as you are alone on your nightly walks?”

“I’m much happier.”

She looked away. We were balanced on the farthest wall of the ruins. The water here was less slimy; a thin sun shimmered in its depths. As Farhana’s orange scarf blew across the pale green peat, I took my camera out again. She sometimes let me photograph her now, though still not often enough, and only when dressed. I got a beautiful profile of her gazing at the baths, perhaps imagining them as the rambling maze of salt water swimming pools they’d once been, thumb at lower lip, the mist rolling across the steps in the background.

“Happier than in the mountains of Pakistan?”

Perhaps I hesitated. “Well, yes.”

“So,” she tossed her head back, pulled the scarf tight around her neck, “which is more beautiful. The desert, or the mountains?”

“Hard to say.” I paused, wanting to play along with this birthday guessing game. “Both. Equally. Differently.” How to compare a horizontal wilderness with a perpendicular one? Especially the most impenetrable perpendicular wilderness in the world? What I couldn’t even begin to explain was how both energized me by removing me from myself. Like seeing the world from behind a camera. She wouldn’t understand. She’d call it hiding. She’d call it cowardly. But it was none of these things. It was disappearing. I could see better this way.

She watched me hesitate. “Okay, which makes you happiest, the desert, the mountains, or these scummy baths with me.”

This time I am sure I did not hesitate. “I’m happy anywhere with you.”

She laughed. “You don’t have to say that. But since you did, why?”

I was still photographing her. From behind the lens, I replied, “Because you don’t remind me of my past.” And as I stepped onto a lower wall to get more of the ruins behind her, I realized that this was exactly so. She wasn’t like any of the women I knew in Karachi. Her energy was—different. It wasn’t sultry, wasn’t eastern. She was walking away from me now, walking away from my lens, and I noticed that her walk was determined and—how can I put it?—unstudied. As if no aunt had ever told her that women walk with one foot before the other. It wasn’t graceful but it was vigorous. There are men on the Pakistan–Afghanistan border who can spot a foreign journalist hiding in a burqa by the way she moves. Farhana would never pass. She could, however, keep up with them on the mountains. Not many women from Karachi could. And yet—of course I didn’t tell her this—they had more patience in bed. Farhana didn’t like to linger, not over food, shopping, or sex. The only thing I’d ever seen her linger over was her hair, and that was not with pleasure. All the languor was in her spine,
the part of her she never let me put behind my lens. Everything else about her had the slightly lunatic energy of Nor Cal, uncomplicated and nervy. I mean, for heaven’s sake, she was passionate about
glaciers
. How many Pakistani women know two things about them? It was Farhana who told me that Pakistan has more glaciers than anywhere outside the poles. And I’ve
seen
them! I’ve even seen them
fuck
!

She was sobbing. I saw it first through the lens. I saw it too late, after I’d taken the photograph of her wiping her nose with the back of her hand. She said it was the worst thing I could have said.

The seagulls hovered, teetering in the breeze. Before they touched the rock it was beginning to sink in, yet each time I approached a landing, the wind pulled me away again. We loved each other, Farhana and I, for precisely opposite reasons. If I loved her because she did not remind me of my past, Farhana loved me because she believed I was her past. That day I came close to understanding; by the time I fully understood, we were already immersed in separate rituals of silence.

I expected to keep to the coast to Point Lobos, but, veering inland, she began following the signs for Fort Miley. I said nothing. I didn’t know what to say. How could I apologize for all that drew me to her? Perhaps I’d been crude in trying to sum it up in the first place. (Or she’d been crude in asking.) That’s the line I eventually took, as we clambered uphill. “There’s too much about you that makes me happy to say why.”

“Too late. You already said it.”

Silence, then.

There were picnickers in the grass. Behind them rose a plaque commemorating what had once been gun emplacements, from before World War I. The plaque read,

Although they never fired on an enemy, coastal batteries here and throughout the Bay Area stood ready—a strong deterrent to attack.

“You had enemies back then, too?” I muttered, before catching myself. “I didn’t mean
you
you.”

She cut me a furious look. I bounced foolishly on my toes. She climbed further up to where enormous guns had once pointed out to the Pacific, guarding all three approaches to Golden Gate. There was a sublime view of Ocean Beach, but I knew it wasn’t for the view that she’d brought me here.

Without looking at me, she said, “Take me back.”

I assumed she meant to her warm purple house in the Mission. “Let’s go.”

“Take me back to the places in Pakistan that you love.”

I was stunned. If she’d never been to them, why did she say
back
? And why now? And why ever?

When she said it a third time I understood that she presented her idea as a condition: take me back and I will keep loving you.

For always? I wanted to ask. No matter where?

I looked at her boldly now, and she returned my stare. I was hoping she’d understand that this is what my eyes said.

It was here that a man loved her, a man with whom she could spend an unknowable quantity of time doing just about anything: walking, going to the movies, eating sushi and Guatemalan tamales on the same day, gossiping about a father in Berkeley, a father I’d still not met because, as I was growing tired of hearing, he was unpredictable—I didn’t know whom she was protecting more, him or me—but who’d brought her to this country when she was three and stayed. I didn’t understand why a thirty-year-old woman—yes, she turned thirty today, it was meant to be a happy day!—with a great job and a great house in a pretty neighborhood in a pretty city didn’t feel this was home. All I understood was that she didn’t. She was at a time in her life when other women long for a child. Farhana longed for a country.

“You’re going home next summer. I’m coming with you. That’s what I want you to give me for my birthday. I want this promise.”

I didn’t want to return. With her, that is. Nor did I want to explain that for me it was a return, but I didn’t think it was for her. Nor that, just as she took joy in showing me this corner of the world
because I was new to it, I could only take joy in showing her mine if she acknowledged it as new to her. Not if she claimed it as her own. I’d spent the past year lingering over northern California and could freely admit there was much I’d yet to learn. How many months was she prepared to linger over Pakistan? How many years? Would she have the patience to wait and yield till the geography really did begin to construct the person, the way the breakers beneath us constructed the shore? Did she
want
to yield? Of course not. It was a country practically under siege.
We might be interested in you but not in your landscapes
. What images did she want to see and to which land did she want to return?

We’d been happy. I wanted to stay happy. I said, “I’m going for work.”

It wasn’t a lie. The plan was to spend next summer in the Northern Areas with a friend from school, Irfan, to take pictures. Though loath to admit it to Farhana, this past year I’d sought Irfan’s help in paying my share of the rent. Irfan always wired the money without complaining, though of course it was meant to be the other way around. I should be wiring money home, not receiving it. Till I could pay him back, I’d keep working long hours at a brew pub a few blocks from my apartment and take whatever other work I could find, usually as a wedding photographer. I anticipated doing the same even after next summer, no matter how many images I shot of vertical or horizontal wildernesses. Yet her reply stunned me.

“Work? What’s the point? You’ll never sell any. At least I know glaciers.”

I stopped rolling on my toes.

“Perhaps you’re going back for the wrong reason,” she kept on.

“And being your tour guide is the right reason?”

She bestowed upon me an ice-black stare, the kind I was to receive the following year from a very different creature, in a very different place. Behind Farhana, I could see the guns that once pointed to the minefields outside Golden Gate. How easy it is to envision enemies lurking in the tide. As I looked over her shoulder,
imagining what shapes those phantoms had once taken, I couldn’t have guessed that within fourteen months, she and I would be posted at our own separate lookouts, not on a headland overlooking the Pacific, but near a glacier overlooking Kashmir.

“What’s the most beautiful thing you ever witnessed?” she’d ask, as we lay together by her five-sided bay window, playing opposites. “I mean, a moment.”

I always said it was the mating of glaciers. I’d seen the ritual once, with Irfan and his wife Zulekha, on that previous trip to Pakistan’s north. I tried to communicate the wonder of it to Farhana, while she stretched on her stomach, swinging her legs.

First, I’d say, the village elders discussed at length which glaciers to mate. The female ice was picked from a village where women were especially beautiful and, because this wasn’t enough, talented. Talent meant knowledge of yak milk, butter, fertilizer, and, of course, wool. From caps to sweaters all the way down to socks, the questions were always the same. How delicately was the sheep’s wool spun? And what about the kubri embroidery on the caps—was it colorful and fine? Most importantly, did all the women cooperate?