Fiction from The Literary Review
"What is happening with the maid?" his wife demanded petulantly. "Your eyes are on her all the time. You linger in the kitchen. You visit her shed. You drink too much Pepsi every day, and I think it is just so she can bring you another."
"You are foolish," he said, more irritated than ever by the accusations that had been raining on him for days. His wife would never grasp the treasure of his self-restraint. It had become his greatest joy to keep his hand only on the girl's knee and nowhere else, to prove to that he could be trusted. One day she would speak to him. "She is a helpless child. If you had had your way, she could be dead now, wasted."
"And what a waste!" the wife snapped.
The man threw his hands up in despair. "Haven't you finished?"
"Oh, you would like that!"
"Fire her if you wish," he said impatiently. Perhaps the girl was not worth this daily sniping.
The wife was taken aback. She thought of the girl wandering off through the village and then onto the mountain roads. Soldiers lurked there. She could be shot, or worse.
"Go on, fire her," he said. "I want peace in my house."
The wife snorted. "You think I am so callous?"
She returned to the kitchen and found the girl sitting on the stool in the corner, gazing out the window at the low, brown hills. Goat bells clanked dully from somewhere, and the air was dry and hot.
"What are you thinking?" she asked, though she knew it was futile.
The girl jumped off the stool, startled. She went to the stove and resumed stirring the beans.
The man placed his hand on her knee as had become customary. The girl no longer flinched, but kept a wary eye on him. He lit her cigarette and spoke.
"My boys are still causing trouble and the headmaster was insulted when I offered him more money to keep them. It seems at least one of them will have to return. I have arranged to have him picked up from the port as the airport is closed. Imagine, the headmaster sending a boy back to a country where the airport does not even function."
He sighed. "My wife thinks I have an interest in you," he commented. "She is frightened because you are so beautiful and silent, and she is aging and jabbers on against her will."
The girl chewed the inside of her cheek, smoking.
"Is she kind to you?" he asked suddenly.
The girl nodded, and he was surprised.
"Truly?"
The girl nodded again.
"Please speak to me," he said. "I would like to know what happened to you, why you are here."
She shifted her knee out from under his palm and drew her legs closer to her body so that her knees were beneath her chin. The material of her pants tightened across her behind, which looked like the two rounds of a peach. After a moment, she lowered her legs and obliterated this vision.
"I care for you," he said without thinking.
He was so upset by these words that he left abruptly, and the girl stared at the shed door swing until it stopped at half-open, leaving only a portion of the vine-covered fence visible.
The boy had grown taller and wore torn jeans and an untucked T-shirt. His hair was too long and his ear had a small, almost invisible hole in it.
"How could you do this?" the wife screamed, tugging at his ear. "What are you? You know what people will think?"
The boy shrugged. His face was pale and sour.
The man commanded, "Answer your mother."
"Are you a homosexual?" the wife said shrilly. "Is this why?"
The boy glowered at her and tried to leave the room.
"Stay!" the man barked, but the boy writhed out of his grip and stormed away.
"You see what Paris does!" the wife turned on her husband. "He should have stayed here! Now he has become homosexual!"
"He is not!" the man thundered.
"He might be," she hissed. "How do you know?"
"If he had stayed, he would have joined a militia and been killed. Is that what you want? You want your son to die rather than wear earrings?"
The wife sneered at him but did not answer.
"Leave him alone. He's a boy," the man said, as if this explained everything.
The boy stayed in his room playing loud American music and smoking cigarettes. He sat hunched on the floor and scowled when his parents tried to come in. He did not go outside, nor did he eat with them. He made tapes from records and wrote in the names of songs in tidy, minuscule block letters. He lined up the tapes on his shelf and played them one by one. Sometimes he used headphones, and the house fell silent. The girl brought him Pepsi unbidden, and he drank it.
At dusk the man's hand settled on the girl's knee.
"You see how difficult my life is," he complained. "My son is a mutant and my wife despises me. Only my business is going well. And I thank God for these brief times with you, when I can unburden myself in your tender presence."
The girl was eating a sandwich of honey wrapped in bread. Her sticky lips shone. She pushed her hair behind her ear and took another bite, then licked a finger.
"You like it?" he said, smiling.
She did not answer.
"What do you think about? Your family? Your village? You must be a village girl. Perhaps you were displaced in the war?"
The girl paused in her eating. Her large green eyes shone moistly.
"Tell me?" His hand tightened on her knee.
She did not.
He sighed, wondering at her resilience. "I don't know why I ask, when I am fond of this silence," he mused.
Dusk gave way to night and the cicadas began buzzing. The man sat with the back of his head leaning against the wall, eyes closed, her knee warm and moist beneath his palm. His fingers slid slowly a few inches up the soft fuzz of her thigh and stopped there. His stomach hurt with the strain of this delicate control. Her breaths became shorter, but when he opened his eyes he found her face taut with fear.
"I'm sorry," he said brusquely. He got up to leave. "I'm not perfect, you know."
She did not move. Her teeth bit at her thumb.
"Don't do that," he chastised, and left.
"Now we have two children who refuse to speak," the wife muttered. She slammed pots and pans into the cupboard beneath the counter. The girl hovered about, unused to the wife's activity in the kitchen. "Now I go from here to escape you, and I find him instead with his homosexual ear and torn clothes. I leave the house for a cocktail, thank god, and all I think about is him in his room, or you in your shed, and I don't know what you want or think or feel and it makes me so angry!" she shrieked, dashing a whiskey glass onto the floor.
Quiet fell. Rays of shards surrounded the opaque chunk that had formed the base of the glass.
"Sweep this!" the wife commanded.
The girl retrieved the soft, short-handled broom from the narrow closet and began sweeping, her bent form following the movement of her arm back and forth in waves. Her short, curly hair was pinned tightly back from her forehead. She had found a child's plastic pink barrette in the shape of a flower for this purpose.
"I'm sorry," the wife said. "I am so tense, that's all. My husband is behaving strangely and my son is a monster. I hardly ever get to the city anymore because of the blocked roads and I miss my social times."
The girl swept the glass into the metal dustpan.
"Uf, what a noise," the wife commented, smiling, and the girl nodded in agreement, then went outside to empty the dustpan into the garbage.
The man found the boy on the patio with his Walkman, the tinny sound of music like a nail screeching on metal.
"Take that off," he shouted.
The boy complied with a swift, irritated movement.
"What are you going to do with yourself now? You can't enter a school here. The closest one does not teach in French and you barely know Arabic anymore. I won't have you going into the city every day with all the danger."
The boy shrugged and smiled with one corner of his mouth.
"You think this is funny?"
The shed door creaked open and the girl emerged. She walked past them with hurried bare feet, not looking at them. The man saw his son's eyes travel over her.
"But the danger is not so bad that we should not try. I will call tomorrow." The man sat back, satisfied by his son's disappointment.
At night the man went to the shed to speak with the girl but he heard a noise that gave him pause. He crept closer and pushed open the door to see his son moving on top of the girl, and then he heard her giggling softly. It shocked him to hear sound coming from her. Her slender arms were wrapped about the boy's shoulders and her curly hair was dark on the pillow. The boy grunted and the man stepped back, his body trembling with shame.
He stood in the darkness of the patio, listening. Time passed. Then the door opened and his son emerged into the moonlight, tiptoed past the vines and crossed the patio. The man remained in the shadows until the boy had gone inside.
He opened the door to the shed. The girl was already asleep, her naked body sprawled on top of the sheets. He saw the sheen of sweat on her skin. Her hip bones jutted above the dark spread between her legs. One arm was bent behind her head, the other hung off the edge of the pallet, fingers pointed to the floor.
He sat down and she woke. Her four limbs scrambled to cover herself, but his weight pinned the sheet and what was left reached only her belly. Her breasts were small but full, with dark, wide nipples.
He touched one and she made a whimper.
"You have disappointed me," he said. His restrained, poignant adoration voided itself of meaning with the force of grain suddenly breaking through a flimsy sack and pouring out in a heap. The notion that she might have spoken to his son upset him further.
"Did you tell him?" he asked, his hand still on her breast, which shrank beneath his hand as she hollowed her chest, trying to ease away.
She shook her head.
He was bitterly pleased with her anguish.
"Tell me, now."
She stared at him, uncertainty flitting across her features.
"Tell me or I will do what he was doing," he said awkwardly, as if she would not know the name for it.
She lowered her head, obscuring her face.
He gripped her breast harder. "Speak."
A shuddering went through her body and then, to his amazement, she spoke. "I was taken from my village when they attacked," she said.
Her voice, so small and weak, shocked him. It did not approach any of the voices he had imagined for her. She had a faint lisp.
"Who attacked?"
She squirmed under his hand and he released her, for that had been his bargain. But his hand felt bare and cold now. She tugged uselessly at the sheet, which was still pinned beneath him.
"Go on."
"The soldiers," she said in her little voice. "That's all I remember. Then I was here. I think a lot of time went by before I was here," she added.
"Did they do to you what my son did?" he asked, for now this was the thing he wanted to know.
She did not answer. He heard her breathing, in and out.
"You can't remember?" he said.
She shook her head.
"Do you like it?" he asked. The question gnashed about inside his stomach. The wraith of his past obsession with her story flitted away.
She tried again to pull the sheet but he weighted himself down on it stubbornly. Her arms crossed her chest and she started to pull up her knees, but the sheet threatened to slide off completely and she lowered them again.
"I think you spoke to my son," he said.
The girl shook her head.
"I took care of you," he said. "I was kind to you and told you my feelings and thoughts. I was patient with your silence, understanding. You repay me like this?" he tugged at the sheet but she gripped it against her belly with her elbows. "You think you can play this game and get away with it?"
She shook her head fiercely.
"And then you finally tell me your story and it's so bare you might not have spoken at all," he said. "You were there, now you are here. What kind of thing is this to wait for as I did?"
The girl's lips shivered. She bit them. Moonlight filled the shed as the door creaked wider in the breeze.
"You will leave tomorrow," he decided, and the pronouncement restored him. Sometimes kindness was ignored: this was the way of things, and he had to accept it as he did other facets of existence. He could not understand how for so many weeks he had endowed this creature with almost mystical properties, only to see her engaged in the most basic of acts, and to hear this bland little tale.
He wanted to stay. He wanted to remove the sheet from her trembling body and insert himself into her, biting her cheeks and nose and lips. He breathed deeply and rose. He patted her leg.
"You see how you were mistaken?" he said. "You could have had a good life here."
"How can you drive her off like this?" his wife shouted. "She has nowhere to go and does not even know where she comes from. She is our responsibility!"
The man was astounded by her defense of the girl. "I thought you despised her," he spluttered.
"Perhaps, but I am not evil! She cannot even recall her own name. She does good work here, and I am used to her. And she talks now."
"She has to go," the man said, feeling the order of his house crumble about him. "She is a whore."
"No thanks to you," his wife retorted.
"I never touched her!" he said at once, for this was paramount in his thoughts and he had been seeking the opportunity to admit it.
"You think I care?"
She was adjusting her gold earrings before the mirror. He noticed that her hair had been done at a salon and her nails were manicured. She wore a tight skirt and silk blouse, and her calf muscles were taut as she stood on her high heels. Suspicion touched him with its fiery little fingers.
"Where are you going?" he asked.
"To the city. I have a cocktail," she said bluntly, and left the room.
Evenings, the man sat alone on the patio and smoked a water-pipe, listening to the distant rat-tat of gunfire, although sometimes the war paused and he heard only the cicadas in the trees. The girl's irritating laughter would float from the kitchen as she clattered dishes in the sink and regaled his wife with some village gossip. His son had left again, for America this time, a boarding school that accepted problem boys. The man's business was faring well despite the political situation, his wife had stopped the brief affair he knew she had had but which remained unspoken between them, and his satellite turned this way and that, picking up the rest of the world. Occasionally, he invited some men from the village to sit in his television room, for he enjoyed their rapture at the large screen and at the array of broadcasts in foreign languages. At these times, they drank arak, served by the girl on a wide silver tray, the jug's mouth covered with an upside down glass and the rest of them in a circle around it. He still called her No-name, out of habit, though others had invented a name for her.
Her merry little voice in the kitchen irked him, so he was relieved when one day she married a boy from another village and disappeared from their lives. But he would go to her shed sometimes and lie on the pallet, remembering the story he had waited for and which had been so bland, and he wondered also how she must have felt beneath his son's gangly, teen-age body. He was glad, however, that he had held his desire in check, for it proved that he was fundamentally a good man, and that it was not his fault that his kindness had been so disregarded.
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