After the Carnage Read online

  The next day Selma stayed home from school – she had gone to the doctor’s and got a certificate for stress. Amina had the day off also; she had to take her children to get some new documents at the council. I had lunch with Sev, another student from our class, at the Turkish cafe nearby school; we both ordered chorba soup. Sev had come with his young family; he was trying to find a bigger apartment so they didn’t have to all sleep in the same bed, the five of them. We sat under the paper curtains and he began telling me about a rumour at school, that someone had won the lottery, but then he stopped mid-sentence and gasped. Something distracted him from behind me. He lowered his voice and spoke in English instead. ‘Oh my goodness, that woman behind you, who is she, she’s not from school?’ I looked back. ‘No, she’s not,’ I said. ‘What?’ ‘Look at the young girl with her – the woman just grabbed her ponytail, her braid, just yanked it like five times, look at the girl’s face!’ he said. I turned and looked, it was all red, her ears flushed red too, and she held her small hands over her ears, her fingers at her hairline. Beneath her spectacles we could see she was silently crying, while the woman’s body jutted out on her chair from the restaurant table, playing with her telephone as if none of it had happened. ‘Oh my goodness, how can someone do that?’ Sev said. ‘I can’t eat anymore.’ ‘I don’t blame you,’ I said. We both were so upset that we left the restaurant, our meals unfinished, and walked back to school. ‘Do you think it’s strange?’ I began evenly. ‘We’ve seen war, people who stop breathing, buildings gone to rubble, and here we cry over a girl’s hair being yanked?’ ‘I don’t know if it’s strange or not, I feel like we’re really close to something here though, always on the edge of being hurt – maybe because we can’t speak the language yet, because we couldn’t just go over to the woman and say in French that that was not a kind thing to do. Maybe because it’s all inside us?’ ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘you think if we could speak French we’d say something anyway?’ He didn’t know the answer and when we returned to school we changed the subject.

  The afternoon classes were taught by Martine. At first I wasn’t sure I liked her. She’d always start conversations that often turned into arguments among the students. She brought up polygamy, racism, brought up politics and homosexual parenting – I was open-minded, I thought, but many of the other students weren’t and often someone’s homophobia, rightly perhaps, lost them friends. One girl, Alia, seemed nice enough when I first met her, but after she started to say in class how disgusting homosexuals were, how horrible, I never could look at her again. I’ve always thought if you haven’t got something worthwhile to fight about, don’t fight at all. Another student, Sufjan, had got angry one day too; he’d stood up and yelled, ‘We don’t fucking fit in here, yes we are here, yes there is no war in the street, but it isn’t our home, we aren’t really welcome. My wife can’t find a job, after school I can’t find a job. What will we do? Watch television? Our children will hate this country of France because they’ll see we never become nothing here. We stay as nobody here.’

  ‘You wish you were home?’ Martine had asked then.

  ‘Sometimes, even if I would die there,’ he’d said, striding toward the classroom door to leave, but then he sat back down when Martine told him she understood completely and we all started to talk about the future, about some of our hopes and about the things we missed the most from home: pickled lemons, the feel of familiar seasons, understanding all the people in the streets – them understanding us.

  It was maybe a few classes later, in the grip of winter, when Martine explained a few things. It was the day Sultan admitted he had won the lottery and had brought two large cakes and bottles of juice, along with serviettes and plastic cups, to share with the class. Martine was floored; we all were shocked. ‘How much?’ ‘Five hundred thousand euros.’ ‘Will you buy a house?’ we all screamed; even Martine was saying to buy a house and take the rent as income. But Sultan said he’d keep all the money for his children, his grandchildren, that it wasn’t a big deal. He was very modest about it, or careful perhaps. I wasn’t sure what to think because he told the story so composed: how he always bought one scratch card with a packet of Marlboro Reds, five euros for the scratch card. ‘So you handed over the money?’ someone in the class narrated. ‘You took your cigarettes, you scratched outside?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And then you just were shocked?’ ‘Yes,’ Sultan said again. I was watching him tell his story, so calm. He had a brand-new umbrella resting across the table, I remember looking at it, its green fabric, the gold handle, the spikes dipped in gold enamel. I wondered if anyone else noticed that nice umbrella too.

  We were gathered around the table with the cake when Martine told us the news. She took the whiteboard marker out and drew numbers on the board as she explained. She said, ‘Now you were all able to get 350 hours in total, okay.’ She drew a big 350 on the board, put a slash through it, that universal code again. After this class, she explained, there was no more funding, no more money for the program, and she said, ‘Fifty hours maximum,’ and she drew a bigger 50 on the board, circled it with the marker. She explained that after this class, we couldn’t come back and ask for more help with French. She was disappointed about it, and explained her disappointment then: ‘After this, there’ll be students but they will be Americans, Canadians, Australians and British, and others; students will have to pay a lot of money for the classes.’ We were feeling deflated after the story of Sultan and the cake and asked questions to which she answered a lot of impossibles with. She explained that maybe it was good because after this course, because the course was ending, we could find work faster; we could earn a wage more quickly, have more money. But I think she could tell that we didn’t think there was much outside the school to look forward to, not being too capable in French just yet.

  I looked at my friends, at Selma and Amina, and made a sad face with them.

  That’s when Ahmedov had the knife, he screamed then, a deep ‘raaaah’ noise from his stomach, it was aggressive and wild, but not frightening, almost like he was speaking up for a feeling we had all been suppressing, some wordless, formless thing. ‘No school,’ he yelled and held the knife up to his throat, the blade indenting the skin. His eyes were uncertain, as if he hadn’t thought beyond this moment. Then he lunged at Sultan for a tiny second, before laughing and flipping the knife’s blade back in its case, spraying Chantilly cream down Kamla’s dress. No-one said anything – just widened their eyes at each other, but Martine didn’t like it, ‘I don’t like that,’ she’d said and took the knife from his hand, put her palms on his shoulders and told him to calm down, calm down.

  I thought about that strange day while I stood there in the unemployment line. In the whip of cold air, I pulled my coat in tight against my body, and wondered where my friends were right then. I thought about the previous night, and how bad the news had been on the television, how it seemed like the whole world was full of hating, and when my children and husband went to bed I had Googled How to prove love in the world; I was tired and so I clicked on the video results. I watched this strange black-and-white movie about some monkeys in an experiment. The monkeys were released into a divided cage. One side of the cage had a wire monkey with a bottle of milk; the other held a soft cloth toy monkey with no food. The monkeys all went to the cloth monkey. Some monkeys leant across, clutching the cloth monkey and drinking from the wire monkey, but still they all went to the cloth monkey and stayed with it for hours and hours.

  After the Carnage, More

  I look up and I remember a veer of redstarts and house crows, the birds leaving the slip of clear sky, sky rapidly remodelling itself in ash. I’d wondered if it was the first time I’d seen the birds of Lahore from that angle.

  I’m conscious, alert enough to know I’m in a hospital corridor, lying on my back still, which means either I am relatively unharmed according to the order of triage, or worse – and more likely – the hospital is understaffed and too many
were hurt. A medic’s blues flap past the side of my trolley and I manage to shout my wife in a way that tacks a question mark on the end.

  Sir?

  My wife?

  What is her name?

  Zaidi, Mariam Zaidi.

  Certainly, sir.

  Certainly my wife is fine, I appease myself as the medic woman strides away, certainly. With almost certainty, I’d have never expected to see violence, yet no-one expects the disorder of a day – we have the expectation of items on lists to eventually be ticked. I’d never thought I’d be lying out on a restaurant deck with my legs at neat right angles in the toppled chair, the chair I’d intended to dine in, my new kurta shirt pressed against the floor where people had trodden, where drinks had spilt. Nonetheless, it had happened, worthy of the adverb suddenly – Mariam had brought up the subject of Ava Gardner and was goading me, in her way,1 to tell her of the time when, as a child, I’d seen Miss Gardner at the Lahore Railway Station, when suddenly a jeep smashed through the rust-bit hotel fencing and careered into the pool. A volleyball game was being played in there at the time if I remember right. Then only the force of air around us, throwing glass, tile, limb, life back from whatever burden the driver had. Of course, I knew something about what was going on in their mind.

  I couldn’t move my head, couldn’t turn to find my wife, to see all the likely shoes left behind by feet. I imagine feet and legs and bodies whoosh away from sandals in such events. I saw a boy run past my head, leaping over it. A boy like my boys used to be when they were children, careless. Then I only saw the birds for however long I was on my back; had I seen them before, I thought, years earlier, just like that, running from the sky.

  Perhaps it was as a child flung into the dust and wickets and players’ arms of a cricket game, and overcome with joy had I arched my face skyward and seen, from a line of mulberry and kikar, birds startled by the uproar of a home-team win? Or on a rooftop, in spring, as a teenage boy, clinking glasses of cold sweet tea and smoking cigarettes, lying out in our shorts? The same season I’d met Suleman. My dear friend Suleman, with whom I waited tables at the journalists’ hotel. Suleman ended up working for them in the end – the enemy, I thought in my childish way. Later I had children too young, before I knew the world right and before I could teach them the right things. Instead I taught them they could never be anything but engineers; I didn’t teach them that actually, I forced it. Their childhood home, cement-poured block with flattened ceilings and locked windows. There was a bedroom my wife and I shared with the boys. I remember my first-born lying on the floor of the communal bedroom, looking at a book, holding it above his head, his homework book. I’d snatched it, as I used to do, and read what he’d freshly written: when I grow up I want to be a truck driver. I grabbed the back of his neck, rubbed his nose into the ink then, like people do with dogs when they piss in the house. In my limited opinion he’d pissed in my house. It wasn’t until they were studying science at university that we left all the birds and all the dust behind, and that I finally understood all the things I shouldn’t have done.

  Boston, then New York, was where my wife and I had gone when the children went to university. We settled in Richmond Hill, Queens, and—

  Mr Zaidi, your wife is … she’s just having an X-ray now.

  What for, why the X-ray?

  It’s very common procedure for primary blast injuries; it’s rudimentary, really.

  And I don’t need it?

  Mr Zaidi, have you spoken to someone? Mr Zaidi, do you understand what is happening here? Sir, you’ve had a back injury, that’s why you can’t move, you’re in a brace. But you’re going to be completely fine.

  She reaches for the manila folder at the foot of the trolley, inspecting it to finish her sentence.

  We just need your patience – and the pain? How’s the pain?

  And my wife? I’m in no pain.

  I will come to tell you as soon as we know something. Then she yells at the top of her voice, motions her arm as if hailing a taxi above the bed, placing the folder down as she rushes away, as if startled, and another blue-clothed person shakes an IV bag that I hadn’t noticed was already attached to my arm.

  My wife. Richmond Hill, Queens, almost twenty years ago it was. On Saturdays we’d walk down to Smokey Oval and watch the songbird competitions2 from a little distance. With a picnic blanket and then, later in the decades, with portable folding chairs, always a flask of coffee and brandy, apples, rolled-up thin cherry cigars.

  That was the sound, at the restaurant, the sound of the car going into the pool – it was just like the sound of propane bombs on the cherry farm to scare the birds, birds hungry for ripe May cherries. Was it in Quetta, where Mariam and I taught; yes, I remember them going off in booming intervals, I knew I’d heard that sort of boom before. It was surely the last time I’d heard a sound like that, and yet my friends in America never could believe something like that. They had often wrongly assumed that because I was from Lahore I would have seen terrible, macabre things my entire life. It would take a bit of convincing to make someone believe I’d never seen anything violent really in my life: I’d never witnessed a war, I’d never attended Muharram, nor so much as had a television to see the news of elsewhere. There are other sorts of violence though. I know those types of violence only in retrospect. I can’t quite comprehend what happened today, my mind is awash in everything from before, I can’t rationalise this corridor and the murmur of a large crowd that I can’t see. One wonders what trouble these drivers have, but I fear it’s simple hatred. One can rationalise most things in life, except this – one cannot rationalise hate; hate is irrational. But then I think, do they think what they believe is correct, is truth, one truth irrelevant of hate – and then I think the world is too big a place for one single truth. It’s taken me time to realise that.

  I think I’ll sleep.

  No, I’ll open my eyes.

  When I open my eyes I’m in a different room, the ceiling has changed, and it’s quiet and all this has begun my thinking about our bedroom ceiling in Richmond Hill and the hotel-room ceiling there in Lahore and if we’ve missed the family lunch and if I missed telling my grown children that they were good, and kind, and that I was proud and that I was sorry for being so ambitious for them. But ambitious wouldn’t be the right word.

  Before I can regret all those years, my old friend Suleman’s face is peering over the top of mine, and with his left hand he pops a pair of spectacles on.

  So, you are awake? You can hear me?

  I can hear you, Suleman.3

  Don’t do that, old friend, I’m not that old or ugly.

  Who was it?

  The usual, he says, scrolling through his phone now, glasses propped on his nose, his torso above me so I can see.

  It’s only a byline on the BBC – not enough casualties, it would seem. He snaps the phone down and takes his glasses off, staring across the room at presumably someone motioning for him.

  My wife. I manage to shout for another time.

  Suleman’s head pops back in my view.

  Of course, I’m just going to speak to the doctor. More soon.

  I mouth the word, looking up and listening to the slow, gentle pull on the door closing behind their terrible, hushed conversation.

  More.

  1 Mariam Zaidi had her way; she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen along with Ava Gardner at the station in 1955. Before Mariam would ever speak, laugh, cry to me, her way was always to curl her smile at the edges, reveal only a hint of her gums and half the length of her teeth; squinting like this she could have me do anything for her. That small smile was the introduction to everything, for me to comfort, to listen, to desire her, to leave her alone, to tell her old stories.

  2 We stopped attending the songbird competitions when we heard the finches were smuggled in live from South America and w
ere stowed away in plastic hair curlers. We did enjoy the spectacle and the intricate wooden cages, and the sound of hundreds of birds at once, before we knew how cruel it was.

  3 I begin to cry, it is a lot of tears because I can feel wetness gather at the edges of what must be a brace against my head.

  Happy

  Jules and Tomas weren’t a particularly happy couple. They’d traded in their fuller, busier lives in the city a few years prior and had settled in a quiet village on the banks of a picturesque river. During their marriage application Jules and Tomas hadn’t flinched when the town council insisted they were booked out all that year, and were subsequently the first same-sex couple to marry in the adjacent village. They’d purchased a split-acreage a few hundred yards from the river’s edge during the fall and had been looking forward to cookouts when the weather turned; they’d even talked about building a jetty. It wasn’t until after the contracts were signed, and they’d both secured average-earning jobs in IT, that the man at the municipal offices informed them that the river was too polluted for jumping off a jetty. An affable chap, he also pointed out that the opulent and pretty mansions dotting the river were built from slave-era money.

  Jules and Tomas’s neighbours were Elizabeth and Eugene. Elizabeth and Eugene had three generations of family on either side living in the region and they would often entertain with their lifelong friends and relatives. It was not uncommon to hear cars at all hours of the days and nights idling the gravel driveway during lengthy farewells. In the spring, Jules and Tomas would trade cherries and tomatoes with Elizabeth and Eugene and lament the weather and current affairs in equal measure. It rained around eight months of every year and often the tomatoes would not last the entire season from rot. The cherries were edible only every second year.