DEAR YASMEEN E-Book

Sophia Khan

• Herausgeber: Garnet Publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Irenie, a young girl coming of age in upstate New York, has a secret at the core of her life. Her mother – the striking, charismatic Yasmeen – disappeared five years earlier. Her father, James, a distant, eccentric academic so bewitched by his late wife, has never spoken of this gaping absence from their lives. Yasmeen is presumed dead, though Irenie has doubts. In a hidden loft space above her father's study, Irenie wafts her mother's perfume across the room, causing James to enter haunted reveries centred on the silent memory of Yasmeen. In that same space, Irenie discovers a box containing old love letters exchanged between her mother and a man named Ahmed, who remained in Yasmeen's native Pakistan as she immigrated to the US. The lovers never reunited; as the story unravels, we discover the details only as Irenie does. Yasmeen's past and ultimate fate are revealed gradually, in part through Irenie's visit to her relatives in Islamabad. As this heartbreaking, unusual and utterly unputdownable novel reaches its dénouement, Irenie and James learn to become the protagonists of their own lives as they uncover the secrets ruling them both.

Leseprobe

Dear Yasmeen

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by

Periscope

An imprint of Garnet Publishing Limited

8 Southern Court, South Street

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Copyright © Sophia Khan, 2016

The right of Sophia Khan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher, except for the quotation of brief passages in reviews.

ISBN 9781902932491

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book has been typeset using Periscope UK, a font created specially for this imprint.

Typeset bySamantha Barden

Jacket design by James Nunn: www.jamesnunn.co.uk

Printed and bound in Lebanon by International Press:

[email protected]

To my family

My heart, my fellow traveller It has been decreed again That you and I be exiled, go calling out in every street, turn to every town. To search for a clue of a messenger from our Beloved.

– Faiz Ahmed Faiz

PART I

1

I wonder now if you receive these, and if you do, whether you still care. Do you see my face in windowpanes? Do I cross your mind on snowy days? I wonder if you think of me, if late at night you jolt awake as I do, grasping desperately at empty air.

I know my mother is dead the day I find the box. It is with a feeling of numbness that this certitude assaults me. Hunched in the darkness of the crawl space, I feel nothing beyond the box’s metal edges digging into my thighs. They say when lightning strikes it can take a while for a person to process what’s happened. Victims have been known to wander yards from the site of the strike before falling unconscious or howling in pain. I imagine they experience something akin to flash blindness: the world stays white and empty until their minds can assign meaning to the shadows again. With the box safely in my lap, I wonder if I’ve spent years inhabiting an echo.

It’s on a Sunday in January that I find it. Heavy snow has stilled our already slow town of Crawford. The lack of anything better to do has found me crouched in the crawl space over my father’s study almost nightly. I have memorized the gradient of his receding hairline, the irregular click-clack of his untutored typing, the particular slump of his shoulders when he’s stuck on a sentence of the book he’s been writing my whole life. Tonight, it seems, he has arrived at something of an impasse. I peer through the peephole and I see him idly forking around rice on the plate of biryani I laboured over all afternoon. He shovels down a mouthful and swallows quickly without tasting. The biryani may as well have been made last week. It may as well be ninety-second supermarket rice.

I straighten up and fumble for the cigarettes, placing the nearly empty bottle of Chanel in my lap so I don’t lose it in the dark. The box begins to put my legs to sleep, but I ignore this, figuring that if I stay just as I am and pretend today is just like any other, I’ll eventually figure out what to do, how to feel.

When I first started coming up here, nothing was more than an arm’s length away. The insulation has now begun to recede along distinctly me-shaped lines. This is how I found the box, a corner of it suddenly protruding from a shoulder-shaped hollow. It is strange to imagine that I was ever scared of being up here by myself in the dark, but I was. When I first noticed the ill-fitting plank above the toilet, I was too frightened to do more than look around. I was eleven and my mother had been gone just over a year. It was with her in mind that I’d quickly shut the trapdoor and leapt from the toilet’s top that first day. She didn’t like me to be invisible, to lurk in dark places she couldn’t see. More than anything, it frightened her to be alone. Back then, of course, I didn’t know she was dead.

Afternoons downstairs were long and empty after school. I kept seeing my mother’s reflection in mirrors, her imprint on the living-room chairs, even though she wasn’t there. In the crawl space, there was just me. One day I bored two holes in the floor: one over the hallway; the other over my room. I would watch the empty house from above for hours, hoping to catch a glimpse of whatever made it seem as though my mother was still there. I never did. Instead, I learnt to live my life without really having to be there. I would imagine other-Irenie going about her life below, watch other-Irenie do her homework and make drawings for her mother. Though I never went so far as to imagine other-Mama, I knew other-Irenie was sure she was in the kitchen, or the bathroom, or halfway up the stairs.

I settle back against the heating vent and pluck absently at the rift in the insulation. My left foot, which is asleep, brushes against the small tape player I keep stashed up here. I stay still, worried that an involuntary twitch might send it flying. Down below, my father shifts in his seat but does not get up. I wish he would at least fart or something, but my father is not much of a farter. A sigher and a stretcher, yes, but nothing more interesting than that.

‘Poking into other people’s business will get you nowhere,’ my mother always used to warn when she found me lurking behind closed doors. But I am not doing that now, not really. I am not up here simply hoping for a fart. It’s true that I drilled the hole over my father’s study with the intent to spy. What was it that made him rush straight up there each day after work? What did he have in there that was so compelling he’d be halfway up the stairs before I could respond to his perfunctory hello-how-was-school? Perhaps I thought he’d pore over secret files pertaining to my mother, make whispered phone calls, slip out the window and slide down the drainpipe. Perhaps I just hoped to see him relishing the dinners I had been making for him since my mother disappeared. But he did none of these things. He just sat at his desk and typed, or stared blankly at the screen, or slid his chair over to the window to sit and read. Then, as now, he’d let his dinner grow stone cold before devouring it in large and mindless bites. It isn’t spying if there is nothing on which to spy.

My foot has woken to stinging pins and needles and my back is growing stiff. The box is leaving deep grooves in both my thighs, but I’m not ready to address that yet. I estimate that I’ve been up here for almost an hour. Usually, I pop up, do my thing and climb back down, but with my winter project finished and Celeste in Florida, there’s not much else to do. I wipe off my glasses and take another look through the peephole. It seems my father is similarly listless. I light the cigarette. It’s time to shake him up.

The first time was an accident. I was rifling through my mother’s bureau, looking for a safety pin, when I spied the top of the bottle poking out of the tissue box. My mother was always absently sticking things in strange places, where no one, herself included, would ever think to look: shoes in the crisper, keys in my backpack, perfume in a tissue box. After she vanished, I spent weeks looking for the perfume. When I was sad, she’d let me take a whiff – sometimes she’d even dab a bit behind my ears.

In my eagerness to get it open, I somehow tipped perfume all down my front. Suddenly my mother was all around me, holding me in her arms, stroking my hair, putting me to bed with a story and a goodnight kiss. Then I opened my eyes. The room was empty.

Hours later, I awoke in the crawl space, the perfume still in my hand. Even now, I cannot remember having climbed up here. When I heard my father come in, I edged closer to the peephole. I remember wondering if he’d call my name, look for me when there was no response. The house was dark and he must have assumed I was next door at Celeste’s. He came up to his study with a jar of peanuts and quickly lost himself in a book. When he was a quarter of the way through the peanuts, I felt the beginnings of a sneeze. I whipped my shirt up over my mouth to stifle it, inadvertently dragging the perfume-saturated cloth over the peephole. My father slowly put down his book and extricated himself from his chair.

‘Yasmeen?’ he’d whispered softly, sniffing at the air.

It was the first time I had heard him say her name since she’d gone. I wanted to hear him say it again and again. I wanted to be sure that he wouldn’t forget her, even if he’d forgotten me. I was suddenly furious at him for letting my mother go away, for never talking about her, for acting as though she’d never existed. I wanted him to miss her as I did, to visibly grieve over her absence.

And so it all started.

In the beginning, it was just the perfume. As I got older, I grew more creative. I played the Nusrat qawwalis she’d listened to, smoked Turkish Golds, and whisperingly recited poems from the earmarked anthologies she kept stacked along the front room’s walls, sticking mostly to Faiz and Dickinson because they were most heavily underlined. By the time I was thirteen, I’d learned volumes by heart, and even now I find myself silently reciting them as I climb stairs.

My father has never said anything to me about these spectral happenings. I am convinced he wants to keep this wisp of my mother for himself. So I continue to leave traces for him, all the while thinking that it’s really me who has her. It was always me who did.

I blow a mouthful of smoke through the hole and drop the cigarette into the syrupy dregs of the chocolate milk I brought up earlier. This is a mistake. My father hears the hiss and straightens in his chair. I jerk back into the darkness.

‘Irenie?’ he murmurs. I don’t answer. Years or moments later, when it feels safe to move, I peer down at my father. He pecks away at his keyboard, oblivious. The box weighs painfully on my ankle. For the first time, I look at it closely. It is made of metal, maybe tin, and is about the size of two shoeboxes put together. In the dark, it appears to be heavily decorated with some sort of fluorescence. One latch is broken, the other secured with an ornate lock. It’s just as I remember it.

I knew what it was from the moment I first felt its contours in the dark: my mother’s secret. The one she never told me. It entered into my memory so long ago that it seems always to have been there. I remember it on my mother’s lap in the bedroom when the art room at school caught fire and Mrs Ronson drove me home. I remember it on the pantry floor with my mother hunched over its contents on those rare afternoons when I defied her and refused to sleep. I remember it that one time on the kitchen table when I had a sleepover at Celeste’s but came home scared. Each time, my mother would smile and close the box, ignoring my questions and merging back into life as though the faraway look so recently on her face had never been.

‘What’s hidden in there?’ I’d ask, but she’d tousle my hair and put the box someplace unreachable. Whenever she was busy, I’d search the house hoping to find it. My mother was an expert at hiding things and she knew where I’d look. After she disappeared, I looked for it obsessively. When I couldn’t find it, I was sure she’d taken it with her, perhaps to someplace happier.

I see the tiny speck of light coming through from the study go out as I lower myself from the ceiling. I’m holding the glass between my teeth and the box in my left hand. Catching sight of myself in the mirror, I feel positively James Bondian and all at once the realization hits: I have found my mother’s greatest secret. Will whatever’s in the box tell me why she left or where she went? I want to know her every particle, every thought she ever had. In the urgency of this longing, I lose my footing and clutch at the shower curtain for balance. The glass falls from between my teeth and shatters in the tub, but I do not drop the box.

‘Irenie?’ comes my father’s voice. He knocks gently at the door.

I hurriedly shove the panel back into place and look for somewhere to stow the box. Under the sink, perhaps. My father never opens the cupboard under the sink, not even if the toothpaste has run out. He cuts the tube in half with his nail scissors and uses whatever he can get. Before my mother left, the toothpaste was either fat and new or a neat caterpillar with a curled up tail.

‘What?’ I ask, rather loudly. I cut my finger on a shard of glass as I hurry to clean it up. Washing blood and ash and chocolate dregs down the drain, it occurs to me to wet my hair. ‘I’m washing up.’

I do not hear him move. Hasn’t anyone told him that women need their time? I strip off my filthy dress and quickly don a towel.

‘Well, when you’re through I’d like to brush my teeth,’ he says, still there.

I throw open the door and he stumbles slightly. To my extreme irritation, I see he has been leaning his forehead against it. ‘Done,’ I tell him.

He looks at me oddly, but says nothing. As I brush by him in the doorway, he shrinks away more than usual and stares at the floor. When I get back to my room, I see my hand has left streaks of blood up and down the towel.

That night, I keep waking up thinking of the box. I want to go get it, but what if my father finds me in the hall? It has been five years since I’ve seen my mother, a third of my life, and I can’t quite remember how her face looked not frozen in a photograph. My father had her three years longer. He is the one who let her go, maybe made her go, when I was in Florida with Celeste and unable to protect her. I will not let him take this from me.

I dream my mother is in the kitchen, slicing banana over my cereal even though she knows I hate it. I dream that she’s ironing my father’s shirts, letting me spray starch. I dream I’m wandering through the house in the dark looking for her, but I’m not scared because I know she’ll be there. I finally give up trying to sleep at around five and go downstairs to make myself a cup of tea. It’s only then that it finally occurs to me just what finding the box means: if my mother were alive, the box would be with her.

My father chooses this morning to go late to work. He lingers at breakfast, even though I’m too distracted to manage anything more than buttered toast. On Mondays, he usually gets an omelette. He reads the Journal of Late Antiquity and struggles through that single piece of toast.

‘Won’t you be late for school, Irenie?’ he asks. My father and I rarely eat together and I sense he’d prefer to be alone.

‘Won’t you?’

‘Add/Drop week,’ he mutters. ‘Office hours in the afternoon.’

I sit playing with the honey pot until I’m sure I will be late even if I sprint the entire way.

2

To think there was once a time when I imagined I could never be without you. To think I imagined I would simply disappear. It’s been years now and somehow I’m still here.

The first day of school passes in a blur. All through my classes, I worry the box will vanish into thin air like a dream of a thing that never was. When the final bell rings, I rush home to check on it, not even waiting for Celeste.

Bringing it out into the light, I see it’s elaborately decorated, if rather battered. My mother must have painted it before I was born, maybe even before she met my father. Painting, she used to say, is something that requires passion. During my lifetime, evidently, she never felt any. I never saw her lift a brush, not even during the lessons she gave.

I rattle the lid and tug at the latch, but it holds fast. I notice then that it is an antique Ottoman lock, whose filigree perfectly matches the pendant that has hung from my bedroom mirror since my mother left it for me five years ago. She never took it off until she took it off forever. When I sat in her lap I would play with it, mesmerized by the interlocking spirals. Even then it seemed to me it must hold secrets, though I’d never guessed it was a key.

The box, once unlocked, opens smoothly, despite having been shut for so long. I hold my breath as I open it, almost expecting a climactic soundtrack to play in my mind. But the room stays silent. Inside it lies a parcel wrapped in what appears to be an embroidered sheet. It is full of letters.

‘Dear Ahmed,’ I read across the one stuck to the lid, the only one that’s out of place. It’s my mother’s handwriting, though bigger than I remember it and casually untidy in a way her penmanship never was. It’s on the old-fashioned airmail paper that occasionally used to arrive from Islamabad. She was always delighted when it came and would open it slowly, worried she’d rip a word of the letter that had been its own envelope.

‘Be still, Irenie,’ she would scold as I climbed all over her, trying to peep at words I couldn’t yet read.

I flip over the letter and look at the address. Ahmed Kakkezai. London, England. It was sent in 1992, so how did it get back into this box? ‘Love, Yasi’, she’s scrawled along the bottom. I don’t remember my mother ever mentioning an Ahmed or having any particular affection for London. When we passed through on our way to Islamabad, she was always eager to go on. If my father suggested a stopover in Ireland to visit his mother, she’d say, ‘I just want to get there.’ We’d only been once and I don’t think any of us had enjoyed it. Like my father, Granny seemed at a loss for what to do with us. As far as I remember, my mother’s only visits to London were spent pacing around Heathrow during layovers. She was never a good traveller, despite having been back to Islamabad almost every summer since she left. And she never wanted to travel anywhere else, despite all the travel pamphlets she collected describing this place and that.

‘Everyone I love is either here or there,’ she would say. ‘Why would I want to go anywhere else?’

But she’d loved Ahmed in England and we’d never gone there.

The top letter of the pile is almost twenty-three years old. The one beneath it is a week older: from Ahmed to Yasi. His is typewritten and the ink has begun to fade. There are two stacks of letters in the box, each as thick as a phone book, and I wonder how far they go back, whether they’re all Ahmed and Yasi or if she had other correspondents. So many letters, my mind screams. So many secrets. I must not panic, I tell myself. I must proceed systematically. It’s better to ease into it. Before I begin, I will establish a context. If the letters are just between the two of them, I must be prepared for the fact that my mother exchanged ten pounds of letters with a man I don’t know. I must begin at the beginning and end at the end. I will peruse the stacks before I read them, looking just at the date and the addressee. I’ll establish a count and order them chronologically.

Before I’m even a quarter of the way through, it’s apparent my mother was one step ahead of me. The letters are arranged from oldest to newest, first hers and then his. There isn’t a single letter from anyone else.

My mother must have ironed the letters before she put them in order. The creases look pencilled in on pages so perfectly flat they seem never to have held a fold. There are hundreds of pages in the box. How long did it take her to leave them all so perfectly? Did she lie in bed at night waiting for morning, when she knew she would be free for this arduous task? I would like to believe she left them so well ordered for me to find someday, but the dearest of delusions are often the most fragile. This box and its secrets were hers alone: when it came to its contents, I suspect she didn’t think of me at all.

The sheets accordion across my floor by the time I finish counting. There are two thousand four hundred and fifty-six pages in front of me. The earliest ones are brief notes they sent to one another during their university years. It must have been there that they met. The later ones are much longer, going on for pages. But I want to start from the beginning. At the bottom of the box is a newer-looking manila envelope stuffed with something and taped shut. Why would my mother attempt to seal up something in her box of secrets? The sense of dread that’s been creeping up on me all afternoon intensifies. For a second, I’m unsure if I really want to know about all the skeletons my mother hid so carefully in her closet.

It’s too late to back out, though, and I find myself lifting up the envelope as though in a dream. My fingers mechanically pull back the Scotch tape, leaching yellow from the paper and leaving fuzz along the strip. Now she’ll know I’ve been into this, I think, as I flick away the tape. She’s never coming back, I remind myself. She has left you this time for good.

The envelope contains an awkward bundle wrapped in an old handkerchief of my father’s. I unwrap it to find a stack of cash. There’s a little over seven hundred dollars there, plus a cheque from a Mrs Randolph for another two hundred and forty: the forgotten dividends of her painting classes. She started them around the time I first began school and continued until about a year before she left. Her students were elderly local women and the unemployed wives of other professors. Occasionally, a university student enlivened the generally subdued group with wild stories of failed love affairs and late nights. While these lessons were in session, I was prohibited from entering the front room – or the ‘studio’, as it was called during those times. I lurked in the kitchen, eavesdropping as I stuffed myself with varying iterations of the chocolate-chip cookie. The crackle of the fireplace and the syrupy afternoon sunlight that streamed through the wall of windows seemed to put the women at ease. They often paused, paintbrushes suspended mid-air, to confide indubitably important but unendingly mysterious things such as how, since they’d turned forty, white cotton panties were all they could be bothered with.

After the last of her students left in their clouds of perfume and patchouli, my mother would lead me to the rapidly cooling front room to assess their work.

‘What do you think of Meredith’s use of yellow here?’ she’d ask, cocking her head and resting a hand on her hip as she stepped back from a painting. ‘It strikes me as slightly garish, but I can’t decide if that’s her point.’

I’d consider the canvas in question with what I hoped was a thoughtful look and reply, ‘Yes, I think so. To me, it looks like she meant it.’ I loved it when my mother asked my opinions on things. Her students painted a lot of abstracts, which seemed to me far inferior to the intricate little girls with poufy dresses and elaborately bowed hair I painted in art class at school. I knew my mother hated my little girls, but a streak of unusual stubbornness made me persist with them anyway.

‘They look like little wedding cakes,’ my mother would say. ‘Children don’t look like that in real life. Where are the scabs on their knees and the dirt in their hair?’

At times like this, I came close to hating my mother. How could she not see that the children I was drawing were perfect, just like I wanted to be for her? Maybe if my hair was always neat and my skirts stood out in starched penumbras, my mother wouldn’t cry at the breakfast table and sneak whisky into her coffee cup. Although I never told her, I couldn’t stand the crazy, chaotic messes of colour her students produced. They seemed dangerous to me, too difficult to understand. I forgave them, though, for the crisp parcels of cash their creators brought in, and for the chance they gave me to be an adult with my mother.

‘Let’s go for ice cream,’ my mother would sometimes say on the coldest of winter days. ‘We need to remember that summer exists.’ She seemed to me to use her earnings primarily to finance unplanned adventures. Once, she picked me up from school in the middle of the day and took me to the city for a multiple-fork lunch. Sitting across from her, over the sparkling white tablecloth, I felt like the luckiest girl in the world. Every man and woman in the restaurant sensed my mother’s presence and couldn’t help but watch her from the corners of their eyes. The busboy was at our side to refill her glass every time she took a sip, and the hot rolls in our basket were continually refurbished. My mother was the centre of my world, and it pleased me to see how she could so easily become the centre of everybody else’s while still being all mine.

I put the money back in the envelope and pencil the grand total across the top. My father will be home soon and I want to clear all this before he gets back. I don’t think he’s been in my room since my mother left, but I don’t want her secrets lying around when he’s in the house. Maybe he’ll sniff them out and I’ll be forced to share.

I put the letters back in the box, careful not to mess up the order, and push it under my bed. Celeste will never understand why I haven’t read them yet, but it’s my mother’s life in this box, and though I’m determined to invade it, I won’t launch my offensive in a way that would displease her. Right now, it’s time to start dinner. My mother was never late with dinner, not even when she’d spent all afternoon weeping quietly over the latest addition to the box.

3

My love for you is a firefly on a starless night. It is a mother’s first look at her newborn; it is the aurora borealis pouring in through an ancient’s trepanned skull, a rainbow in wintertime. It is the Mariana Trench, the Lacandon Jungle, the snow-covered peak of K2, the Pacific Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, all the oceans that come together so really are just one. It is simultaneous supernovae, your face in each pulsation. It is the universe and in my universe there is only you.

James got home just as his dinner was beginning to congeal. He nodded at a pair of architecture students photographing the trellis out front, but did not invite them in for a cup of tea as Yasmeen might have done. Inside was hardly warmer. The kitchen was comfortable enough as long as the stove was on, but a draught from the laundry room that he’d long meant to fix rendered it icy moments after the cooking was through. Irenie had left him a breast. She knew he would have rather had a thigh. He had told her on multiple occasions, but she’d say, ‘People your age should not be eating thighs.’ James couldn’t help but wonder if she cared.

There was no sign of his daughter now. There was no sign that the meal had not been cooked elsewhere and spirited in by ghosts. The thought of this struck James’s fancy for half a second but he was not a fanciful man and his mind quickly moved on. It had been a tiring day. Every day was tiring during the first week of the semester. There were students to meet, schedules to be made, special exceptions to be considered. James disliked complications that necessitated violations of his routine. That afternoon, two students had come in to complain about having been wait-listed for his intro class. The first was a pretty girl who gave off the distinct reek of profound stupidity; the second was a young man with brambles on his collar. All things considered, they seemed neither more promising nor less than the students already in his class. He would not have given them a second thought had Doris not told him on his way out that their admission was entirely up to him this year. He just taught the classes; he did not wish to decide who got to take them. But if the two stragglers were not admitted, he might get a reputation for being too unbending. People might feel the need to speak to him about it. It was James’s way to choose the course which would require the least interaction.

He considered the chicken breast again. It lay in a pool of reddish sauce from which a thin rim of orange grease was beginning to emerge. It had tinted a small section of his rice already and now threatened to infringe upon the eggplant’s space. He wondered how long it had been sitting there, how long ago it had been made. Irenie’s school had just begun; perhaps she hadn’t had the time to cook dinner. Perhaps the chicken breast had been recovered from a tin-foiled dish at the back of the fridge, set out for his consumption just as it was on the verge of going bad. But the kitchen smelled of frying onions and spices that had never ceased to strike him as foreign. The chicken had been cooked that night. He had been allotted a breast either for health reasons or out of contempt, and his tardiness was the sole cause of it looking old. James sighed and began the lengthy process of disentangling himself from his winter clothes. He was surprised to see the snow on the shoulders of his coat; he hadn’t noticed it was snowing. He shed his layers onto the hatrack and took his plate upstairs.

Passing Irenie’s room, he noted that all her lights were on. So she was home. He briefly considered knocking to tell her he was back but she would have heard him on the stairs. If she’d wanted to say hello, she would have come out by now.

He continued to his study and gently shut the door. He retrieved his dressing gown from the peg and set his dinner on the desk. In the warm light of his desk lamp, it looked somewhat less grotesque. It wasn’t that Irenie wasn’t a good cook – she was – but that the plates she left for him when he was late always seemed to glare at him in accusation. She cooked the same complicated curries her mother once had; only hers were seldom passed around the kitchen table in serving dishes, never salted with family conversation. They were left instead in single servings to grow cold and quiet on the counter. James would have been happier with sandwiches, though it was something he knew better than to profess.

James, as always, forgot to bring his cutlery. Some days he would brave the trip back to the kitchen for it, but tonight he was too tired. The kitchen was his least favourite part of the house. When Yasmeen had been with them, it had always been full of clamour and laughter and tempting smells. Even when she wasn’t cooking, she could often be found reading by the stove. He had once caught her with her stocking feet propped inside the oven. ‘I was cold,’ she’d smiled and shrugged. That was when he’d fixed the fireplace. When she couldn’t sleep, she’d go downstairs with the excuse of tea. Waking up alone had never alarmed James then. He always knew where he would find her. Now her absence was in everything: the silence of the kitchen, the empty gloves beside the kitchen sink, the cup beneath the bathroom mirror that still held her last toothbrush. Once, James had suggested to Irenie that they leave the little yellow house.

‘How will Mama find us when she comes back?’ his daughter wanted to know. She glared at him as though it was he who’d chased away Yasmeen.

‘How indeed,’ was all he could say.

He nudged his dinner listlessly with a fingertip. It was now completely cold. Oh, stop being such a baby, Yasmeen seemed to be saying bemusedly from the photo on his desk. Her eyes said different things each night. Though eighteen years his junior, Yasmeen had always delighted in calling him a child.

Fine, he thought. Fine, I won’t be. He triumphantly brandished the teaspoon that he’d just recovered from a mug beneath his desk. Even cold, his dinner was delicious. It always was.

He remembered the first time Yasmeen had made him dinner. It was a chicken dish very much like this one but it wasn’t delicious. He had pulled her into the coat closet for a kiss and it was left simmering overlong. They attempted to skim the unburnt sauce off the top and had then resigned themselves to rice. It was one of the best meals he could remember. Oh, stop feeling sorry for yourself, Yasmeen’s eyes seemed to be saying now. He tried but failed and found he was no longer hungry. Pushing his plate away, James picked up the photo frame that held his wife. It was one of the few photographs he had of her. Irenie wanted it desperately, he knew, but he couldn’t bear to let it go. He couldn’t even bring himself to place it in the living room. Irenie had Yasmeen every time she looked into a mirror: her small and straight nose, her delicate chin, her smooth and slightly burnished skin. James wanted to keep this one thing for himself.

The photograph was taken not long after they first met. A drunken art student had intercepted them and had begged Yasmeen to pose. It was early enough in their courtship that he still counted every hour he got to spend in her company, so he resented the intrusion. But Yasmeen, as always, had been obliging. The student dragged them all over campus. In the end, all he took was that one photo: Yasmeen beside a snow-covered pine tree, brushing away a bough with the familiarity one generally reserves for one’s own hair. A print turned up in her postbox a few weeks later with neither a signature nor any note of thanks. Yasmeen didn’t like it. She had asked him to remind her never to wear that cap again. But James found the photo charming. She told him he could keep it as long as he promised no one else would ever see. To his knowledge, only Irenie ever had. It was hard to believe that seventeen years had passed. To James, falling in love with Yasmeen never seemed like something that had happened long ago.

The first thing he had noticed was the sound of her step, a sharp tic-tic across the slippery, polished marble. He would be trying to concentrate, grading a paper or preparing a lesson plan, when the click-click of her sharp heels would drive mercilessly into his mind, distracting him from whatever he was doing. Finally, halfway through the semester, he leapt from his desk at the sound of those shoes, intent on admonishing her about the need for silence in academic buildings, and caught his first glimpse of her.

He was not prepared to be impressed. Women in high heels had grown passé for him over a decade ago. A woman he dated for a few months – Agnes, he thought her name was – was so self-conscious about her stature that she insisted on wearing high heels even when she knew their plans for the day would entail a great deal of walking. She’d insist they go out on the town, walk rather than take grimy cabs (and God forbid he even mention the subway), but then she would whine ceaselessly about her shoes biting. She invariably invited herself back to his apartment after these outings for a nightcap, and her shoes would be off before they were through the door. He’d attended to her various injuries without complaint, and afterwards, much later, she’d rest her head on his chest and draw her long manicured nails across his ribcage, sighing that no one had ever looked after her as well as he. When, finally, he suggested more practical footwear, she regarded him with the long-suffering air of some patron saint of ailing extremities, left out of every catechism he’d ever read, and sighed, ‘It’s not my fault you’re so tall. If I wore shoes any lower, my nose would be level with your navel.’

They broke up a week later. He didn’t understand her needs, she said. He had been wary of high heels ever since. (He once thought, absently recollecting the relationship some years after his marriage, that Yasmeen would have been twelve then, or maybe thirteen, probably longing for her first pair of heels as she scuffed her way through a dusty schoolyard in her shiny black Mary Janes. He had tried to ask her about her first heels once, but she was short with him, reluctant as ever to discuss her past. The next evening, she’d met him at the door in stilettos and little else, but really all he’d wanted was her memory.) So when he burst from the chaos of his office into the tomb-like foyer he had been flustered, faintly annoyed, and not at all prepared to meet Yasmeen.

‘Pardon me, Miss,’ he’d said sharply, in a voice somewhat too loud for the space. ‘Would you mind …’

She turned around, startled by the decibel of his voice in the otherwise silent room, and his irritation left him all at once. She didn’t look as though she belonged in her sombre suit, in his mundane life, in this mouldering university building at 9 am on a Wednesday morning. Even in the dimly flickering fluorescence, she seemed to glow. Somehow her outline was more vibrant than everything else in the room. She was clearer, sharper and more real than anything he’d ever seen. It was as though he’d been living in two dimensions and all at once something had inflated, grown round.

‘Yes?’ she said, looking at him askance.

‘Nothing,’ he’d managed to stammer, ‘nothing at all.’

Over the next few weeks, he’d made a number of what he’d thought were discreet inquiries into her identity. Charles Faber, a swarthy and rather garrulous Latin professor who had, to his irritation, recently moved into the office next to his, was more than happy to oblige. In the cramped coffee room down the hall, where Faber spent most of his non-teaching hours smoking French cigarettes, flirting with secretaries and gossiping, James learned that the woman’s name was Yasmeen. Though she had attended a small liberal arts college in New England, she had grown up somewhere in Asia, perhaps India or Pakistan, but she did not speak of it. She was working somewhat half-heartedly towards a master’s degree in literature. The tutorial she taught was related to Professor Chafen’s notoriously tedious academic writing course. Her students adored her, and often came to her outside class to discuss the various trivialities which college freshmen are wont to suffer. She was frequently seen sitting patiently at the campus coffee bar with a toasted onion bagel and a teary co-ed. There were rumours that she was wildly promiscuous on weekends, that she drank heavily and perhaps even used drugs, and was occasionally to be found in the society section of the local paper draped over the arm of some languid young heir, disinterestedly surveying the intrusive photographer. On Monday mornings, though, she was perfect, never a hair out of place, and there was no one who could claim to have personally seen any of her supposed lovers or substance-fuelled frolics.

James learned all this with little prodding. Yasmeen, it seemed, was one of Faber’s favourite topics. He would expound at length on the particularities of her face in a certain sort of light that only ever filtered through the smoke-stained windows on those rare days which are rainy and bright at once. James could sometimes hear him scuttling to his office door when the telltaleclick-clickgave Yasmeen away, hoping to catch a glimpse of her through the frosted glass. Though James himself might have liked to peer at her clandestinely in this manner, his general disdain for Faber prevented him from doing so, and he took to going down the hall for coffee every morning when Yasmeen’s tutorial was scheduled to end, hoping she might come in and fetch a cup for herself. He would offer her the sugar bowl, perhaps mention the weather in passing, and tell her silently how much he loved her. But her tutorials often ran late, her students clamouring for more of her, far beyond their allotted time, and there was only so long he could spend in the dark coffee room without wanting to strangle Faber.

One day, quite without warning, Faber interrupted himself in the middle of a melodramatic monologue detailing the relations between a certain sociology professor notorious for predilections closely approaching pederasty, the teenage son of a member of the religion department, and a highly controversial artist-in-residence, whose paintings of mutilated children engaging in unspeakable sexual acts had been featured briefly in the Guggenheim before they were promptly removed to serve as evidence in an obscenity case being waged against him, and asked, ‘Have you ever even spoken to her?’

James, who had been paying only cursory attention to him as he mentally reviewed the texts he’d selected for the Fundamentals of Homeric Poetics course he was slated to teach the next semester, was so alarmed that he dropped his mug. Relieved to have a reason to not look Faber in the eye, he bent to gather up the iridescent blue remains glittering in the dull murk of rapidly cooling coffee.

‘What?’ he asked nervously. ‘Whom do you mean? Which her is this?’

Faber gave him a look but remained eerily quiet, tapping his foot impatiently and not offering to help with the mess. James gathered up the last of the pieces, quite without an idea of what to say, and went over to the sink for a dishtowel to wipe up the spilt coffee. The two men stayed silent in this strange tableau for a few minutes: James kneeling by Faber’s left foot, scrubbing at nothing in particular, Faber leaning against the fridge, mug clamped tightly in a surprisingly dainty fist and resting on his large belly. Finally he gave in, cleared his throat conspicuously and muttered, ‘To Yasmeen, of course.’

‘No, not really,’ James admitted, standing up in relief and adjusting his spectacles. Yasmeen was beautiful. Everyone in the building must have noticed her by now, spoken to her, or wanted to. Faber himself often accosted her in the hall to offer up inanities about the university, the weather, the particularly becoming colour of her dress that morning, though James couldn’t imagine where Yasmeen would find a colour that was unbecoming. Even after they had been married for five years, he would insist that she looked lovely in a particularly abhorrent puce blouse that he had bought her one Christmas because he knew she liked the designer. He considered feigning surprise at Faber’s line of inquiry, brushing it off as he would any of his lewd speculations or sly insinuations, but it was too late for that now. He’d already shattered his mug, spent far too long crouched on the floor, mute as a phrenology dummy.

‘Well, perhaps you should,’ Faber responded, with the practiced pseudo-sagacity that so impressed the dim-witted posse of undergraduates who regularly followed him around campus, spouting obscure Latin epigrams and epigraphs no one but they and Faber cared to know. ‘The year’s almost over and she won’t be teaching that tutorial next semester.’ James was impressed and faintly unnerved that Faber had registered his existence, let alone his secret longings, during the months of his seemingly oblivious ranting. Sitting down at the small and slightly crooked table that held the sugar bowl, Faber rather smugly informed him that he was easier to read than a gossip magazine. Having never been tempted to peruse such a periodical, James was unsure of just how transparent he had been. It wasn’t that he asked that many questions about Yasmeen, Faber said, but that he’d never asked about anyone else. Perhaps no one else had noticed, but Faber was astute. He had a nose for this kind of thing. Yes indeed. He was truly intuitive. James was obviously smitten with the girl and he should do something before it was too late.

Faber lectured at length. James couldn’t stand his confidential tone, the warm brush of his breath as he murmured fatherly advice, an old man to a younger one, as he described with surprising emotion how he’d met his wife, the irreplaceable Irma, who had tragically succumbed to gout after a long battle with various illnesses, both imagined and real. Since then he’d been on his own, with only his work to sustain him. His grown children called only on high holidays and his grandchildren lost interest the moment the shiny presents he came bearing each Christmas had been unwrapped, exchanged, abandoned for more delectable delights. Excusing himself hurriedly to get to his afternoon seminar on time, James resolved that the man was less obnoxious than he had thought.

James took to getting his coffee earlier in the morning after his talk with Faber, not wanting to have to endure his winks and giggles. Fortunately, he never arrived till after ten, so James felt safe spreading out his newspaper on the sticky little table and leisurely sipping his second cup of coffee while scanning the books section one damp day in November. It was one of those hushed winter days when it feels too early to be awake, even in the middle of the afternoon, and he wasn’t quite ready to go to his office and begin work. He was reading a special feature on an author whose historical fiction he occasionally enjoyed on long plane rides when Yasmeen swept into the room, spraying raindrops and stray leaves. She was wearing galoshes today and he hadn’t heard her coming.

‘God,’ she exclaimed. ‘It’s absolutely miserable out there. I had to get the bus a full hour earlier so I’d have time to dry off before my tutorial.’ She paused for a moment to take off her raincoat and put it down on the chair across from him, really looking at him for the first time. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m Yasmeen. I have a tutorial in the room next to yours.’ She went over to the dish drainer and began to inspect the motley collection of stained and chipped mugs: Happy 85th Birthday Great Aunt Gertrude; George Washington High School Sailing Team, 1974; cartoon kittens in a ribboned basket.

‘I know,’ he replied softly. ‘Careful about the red one. Charles Faber put it in there. When it’s filled, the bottom snaps open.’ She smiled and selected a plain green one. Gold rim. ‘I’m James,’ he said, after a pause he hoped was not too long.

‘I know.’ She smiled charmingly. ‘The mystery member of Orchard Hall. I hear the rest of them scurrying about, nattering about this, that or the other without stopping, but you’re always in your office with the door shut. I was beginning to wonder if you weren’t a genuine recluse.’

She had poured her coffee now and was rummaging around in the fridge for milk. Would she sit down with him once she found it? He prayed she would. He prayed she wouldn’t. She didn’t. Instead, she put her coffee down on the table and leaned her elbows on the back of the chair, peering at him like an inquisitive child.

‘So you teach classics?’

‘Yes. Greek. To a disinterested audience mostly.’

Had she really been curious about him or was she just being nice to the poor ageing academic stammering through this everyday interaction? He wanted to look at her, as if to drink her all in, but he was sure that a hundred men had stared at her just like that and he didn’t want to be one of them. What is it like to be a beautiful woman? Your face like a badge you can never remove, a red flag attracting attention at every turn, whether you want it or not. Even now, wet and dishevelled with damp wisps curling darkly from the dignified knot at the back of her head, she was perfect.

‘Would you like my handkerchief?’ he offered gallantly, perhaps a little desperately, as he pulled it from his breast pocket. ‘It probably won’t be much help, but you can dry your face at least.’

She smiled. ‘Thank you.’

Were handkerchiefs antiquated concepts? he wondered. She might think him a geriatric. At least this one was quite nice: monogrammed cream cambric with his initials embroidered in simple navy script across the top. His mother ordered them from a special clothier near Cork and each Christmas they would arrive in neat packets of five with no note or greeting. Other than the occasional illegible letter detailing the latest developments in her garden or his scholarship, it had long been their only manner of correspondence. With her second husband, she seemed happier than he remembered her being since his twin, Irene, died when she was just nine. America didn’t quite agree with Grace Eccles, especially once her husband died. She stuck it out for five years after that. A few months following James’s departure for Yale, she announced she was selling the house and moving back to Ireland. It wasn’t really a surprise. He was all she had here, and they had never been close. Less than a year later, a letter arrived informing him that she was engaged to William McKenna, a retired jockey, whom she met at the butcher’s when he attempted to lay claim to what she had determined was to be her kidney, so could he come that July for a small ceremony, just family? William was amicable at the wedding, and James liked him, although they had met only a handful of times in the twenty-five years since. Both he and his mother detested travel and had little to say to each other beyond what could be conveyed in their brief biannual epistles. He was glad she was happy though, and blessed her now for her annual gift.

Yasmeen had finished wiping her face with the handkerchief and made to hand it back to him, but it seemed somehow unchivalrous to reclaim a lent hankie. ‘Keep it,’ he told her. ‘Maybe you’ll need to dry your face again on the way back to the bus stop.’

‘How sweet,’ she said, and meticulously folded it into a tiny square before tucking it neatly into her jacket pocket. ‘My mother was forever pressing them upon me when I was a child, but I’d lose them or rip them or stain them faster than she could keep up with. When I left home it just seemed too much of a bother to procure them on my own.’

He suspected she was lying, just a little fib to assure him of his worth in some small way. Yasmeen did not seem like the type of woman who would grow up to abandon habits ingrained early. Even now, her nails were short and her hair was neat. Surely she thought him grey and dull, tiny unreadable print on a smudged newspaper from some other time, some other place, that had nothing to do with her.

‘Going home for the break?’ he asked rather abruptly, uncertain of how this interview could gracefully end.

‘No, unfortunately not. It’s much too far,’ she replied, spooning three teaspoons of sugar into the temporarily forgotten coffee and stirring choppily.

He had thought she would be graceful in everything.

‘India?’ he asked.

‘No,’ she said, ‘we aren’t all the same breed of brown.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he stuttered, but she was already gone, the slim shadow of her back disappearing in the corridor. She hadn’t bothered to take her coffee with her, so he brought it back to his office and drank it, gagging on the sweetness of each sip.