David and Ameena Read online

  David started a little. ‘You know those people?’

  ‘Of course not. I told you, I just make this stuff up.’

  ‘He’s not a writer?’

  ‘No, he’s not. I mean, he might be. He looks like he might be. But I don’t know.’

  ‘How did you know about the woman?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve just been watching her… them, you know, while we’ve been sitting here, how she goes away and then comes back every few minutes to kiss him. It didn’t seem very wife-like to me – too intense, too erotic-chemistry, though that could well be wife-like of course, and she could well be his wife. I just liked the idea that she wasn’t.’

  ‘And the building? You don’t live there?’

  ‘I do. That’s my building, I live there yes. But the rest I made up.’

  David felt a tinge of admiration and something else that felt distinctly like wonder, but also a kind of anxiety that he couldn’t explain, but that had something, certainly, to do with how casually she lied, for after all, stories are but fiction, as are lies, with a thin line between the two that makes the one art, the other deceit.

  ‘Do you know,’ Ameena continued nonchalantly, ‘on my first day of uni… first day, first class, my professor – he was this really “proper” chap, you know… very old-school, very English, lots of silver hair and tweeds and scarves, theory-head, a famous one, written lots of respectable books, that kind. Well, so he wanted to see where we stood as a class, what level of ability we were at, so he could set the standard, tailor his lectures accordingly etcetera. So, he asked us all to go away and write something, a short piece of fiction on this topic he gave us – I still remember it, it was about doors, we had to write about doors, literally or metaphorically, that bit was never specified, just go write five hundred or a thousand words about doors, and he asked us not to write our names on it.’

  She took the last sip of her wine and held out the glass for him to refill. She had delicate arms, he noticed, smooth and shapely, small hands, long fingers, prominent veins on the underside of her narrow wrists, like tiny green rivers.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said when he had done that, and then continued, ‘So then three or four days later he comes back and he starts off by saying how impressed he was with everyone’s work and how we should all be proud of ourselves and blah di blah blah and then he goes on to talk about how hard it was for him to do this, but that he had picked one that stood out particularly to him, that he had enjoyed the most – and he wanted to read the beginning of it.’

  She paused and inclined her head slightly. ‘So, he did and then he said could the writer please identify themselves to the class. He read my story, David, and then when I raised my hand to claim it, there was this kind of shocked silence. Those faces. The look on them. I’ll never forget that look. I mean, it was everybody in the class, but mostly – most strikingly – it was him.’

  ‘But why,’ David asked, ‘why would that be so unbelievable?’

  Ameena sighed and then took his hand and guided it, very gently, inside the V of her V-neck t-shirt, and he was astonished by the forwardness of the gesture, both astonished and touched, for it was indicative of a kind of great trust on her part that he wasn’t sure what he’d done to earn.

  ‘I don’t know. It just was. It was very clear that he didn’t imagine, not for one second, that anyone who looked like me or had a name that sounded like mine – some Paki girl – could have written the best story.’

  ‘Ameena…’

  But her eyes had started to flash, and he let her speak.

  ‘David, do you know something? I’m not stupid, it’s not like I’ve never had an awareness of my ethnicity or my religion or the way I look, but that moment was such a moment of clarity for me. It was like I learned, in that moment, for the first time in my life, that things are connected to it, to this’ – she touched her skin – ‘ability and authority and access, all of it, are connected to this.’

  ‘Ameena?’ David said with sudden, unexpected vitality.

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘I want you to hear me play.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘We-ell... I’d be happy if anyone did honestly, but yeah, you would be especially nice.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Okay, you will?’

  ‘Okay, I will.’

  And with that, because never before in his life had he asked a girl to listen to him play, David felt the first stirrings of passion in his heart for this person he had only just met, who he felt like he wanted to keep meeting, whose body he was at that moment touching with the kind of intimacy that comes, even to lucky people, very rarely.

  1.13

  I am a Jew, son of immigrants.

  As a child, David wanted to tell people this.

  Also, his full name. He wanted to tell people his full name. David Greenberg. GREENBERG.

  He wanted to say it aloud – to reveal this – to everyone he met, on the narrow, winding coastal New England streets, in the classroom, at the playground, in the corner shop where he went to buy milk, just so once it had been said, it would have been said, it would be out there, loud and clear and unambiguous; it wouldn’t need to be whispered or presumed upon or thought-but-not-articulated in that part of people’s brains that is reserved for things that can be thought-but-not-articulated. If he just told them, David reasoned, then they would know. And he would know they knew. And that would bring a kind of relief, a kind of opposite thing to the wariness he now constantly felt.

  For David, it began with language.

  At home his parents spoke to the boys in Yiddish. They talked to each other in Lithuanian in private, and in English when the boys insisted they should (‘But how can you learn a language if you won’t speak it?’). He and Abe spoke to each other solely in English – the kind of passionate Americanised English of boys – they talked baseball and basketball and boxing but also, because of their mother, they talked Chopin and Bach and Glenn Gould and the Gershwin brothers. At school David spoke English, but also learned French and Latin with everyone else. Every Sunday morning, David and Abe were sent to Hebrew school at the synagogue where they were taught to read and write Hebrew. Their mother spoke no Hebrew apart from a few words, but their father was conversant in Ivrit, having gone to Israel on what was intended to be a ‘heritage trip’ but resulted, as these things do, in something else, and he returned three years later, enriched by the gift of Taglit, to marry David’s mother, quit his job in the garment factory in which his own father and Ruth’s would work until they died, and declare himself ‘an independent luxury watchmaker’ – in that order.

  And so, every Saturday at lunchtime, their father would spend forty-five minutes separately with each of his sons – never a minute less, never a minute more – teaching them how to speak Ivrit. They would read the Israeli newspapers together and engage in often passionate discussion about what was going on in the world: literature, politics, philosophy… and then the time would end, with a warning chime of a clock, too soon. For David, this was the best part of his week, but whether it was the subject matter that delighted him or the alone-time with his father, he couldn’t be sure. And in this way, the boys learned to converse in Hebrew, with each other and with their father – a profound connection that came primarily from language, and this they realised and cherished dearly. But in other ways, all these tongues made David weary. How unburdensome, he would think, looking at some of the other little kids in the school playground, to only speak one language, to only speak English to everybody. How simple. How freeing.

  There was a period in his early childhood when David remembers not knowing what language he was speaking even as he was speaking it – often he would start off a sentence in one language and end it in another. ‘What?’ his school friends would say, looking blankly at him. ‘What did you just say?’ And David would blink and stare back. What had he just said?
He didn’t remember. He remembered what he was trying to say, the semantics, but not how he’d said it, what language he had used to express his meaning. And this, his own inability to differentiate between the languages, to understand the appropriateness of what got spoken where, troubled him, it made him both weary and wary.

  Sometimes he felt this was why he had turned so readily to music – a kind of expression of himself outside of language. He believed earnestly that music had been given to him for a reason, that words could not possibly be the only means of man’s expression, and if he wished to be understood fully, he would have to speak in this other kind of voice. Music had the same rules for everybody, African-American or European, Gentile or Jew. And he found that he succeeded in that, in understanding that even those rules were a kind of freedom, and in seeking to perfect those rules, he felt truly free. He was expressing emotion through this voice from within. He was singing through the piano! He had music; music was his.

  And yet, greedily, he wanted language too, he wanted language to be his, just like music was his, and he deeply felt the limitations of ‘proper’ English as a means of his private expression. At school, he found that the teachers tried especially hard with the children of immigrants, to Americanise them – to ‘civilize’ them, his father would sometimes say when he was in one of his moods. ‘Oh, stop it, Benjamin,’ his mother would cry, ‘they’re only trying to get the kids to assimilate, to make them American.’

  ‘Yes, yes, Ruthie, I know. To civilize is to Americanize and to Americanize is to civilize,’ his father would retort calmly without looking up from his magnifying glass where he would be scrutinising some minor imperfection, undetectable to the human eye, in a priceless watch. And his mother would make an impatient sound and leave.

  Sometimes, David’s father would look up from his desk, his watches and clocks and his staking set, and proclaim loudly, ‘Both of you are my favourite sons,’ and you could tell he said it not only because it made their mother happy to hear it, but because he meant it with all sincerity. He loved them both equally in a way that some parents do successfully manage to love their children equally.

  Children, on the other hand, are more discriminating – or perhaps more honest – than the grown-up versions of themselves, so while Abe seemed to align naturally with his father’s strong ethnic identification, David saw the world through his mother’s more conciliatory eyes.

  To him, it was a thing of honour and a thing of dignity that at school, there were people dedicated to trying to help children from all backgrounds move forward, fit in, dream ‘the dream’. It was at school that he was introduced to the pride of American literature, to novelists like Faulkner and Hemingway and Fitzgerald and – to David’s great admiration – to Jewish writers like Bellow and Roth who had, over the course of their writing lives, become ‘American writers’; they had earned this distinction for themselves solely by their own genius. He loved this about school, he loved that there was a core program of literary patriotism, he loved that he had teachers who took the effort to make them spell correctly and write grammatically and read good books, he loved that there was ‘an American way’, and that there was someone who cared enough to show it to him. Understanding what made one an ‘American’ – the duties and obligations that governed this identity – made David’s chest swell with pride.

  Abe was less interested in linguistic matters, or more broadly in any matters of the classroom. He was far more involved in the language of the street – prizefighting, craps games, graft, pop-culture slang. And, sports. Abe shone at sports. He was tall and big-built and with that came a natural athleticism. But somehow his excellence on the court or in the field or on the gridiron didn’t shield him in the way David’s excellence in music did, for children are as unpredictable and as fickle as they are honest. In truth, perhaps because kids like Abe were not ‘expected’ to be good at sports, the fact that he was so good – better than most of his non-Jewish classmates – was what seemed to engender, in itself, a very specific kind of hostility.

  ‘Woah, Aby-baby you’re running fast!’ a boy in the playground would yell. ‘But you don’t need to run so fast anymore, the fire’s out!’ ‘You’re so strong, Abe,’ another boy would shout. ‘Did you run away from Belsen and hide in a gym?’ And then they would make hissing noises and snigger and laugh.

  Miraculously, none of this seemed to touch Abe emotionally. He was completely comfortable with his Jewishness; often David thought it was his Jewishness that gave him comfort. And so, no barb seemed sharp enough to penetrate him. On the contrary, Abraham Greenberg, naturally confident, rivalrous and often combative, seemed to gain some sort of strength of will from it, a kind of fearlessness, and the more he got taunted, the stronger and angrier he became.

  But it affected David deeply.

  I am a Jew, son of immigrants, he wanted to say. And my name is David Greenberg.

  1.14

  To Ameena’s memory, her father had never been a violent man. Zoya on the other hand, when in a fit of rage, had held no qualms about smacking her or Kareem for even minor transgressions.

  One time, Ameena, six years old, had been smacked for complaining that the food her mother had cooked for dinner was too ‘greasy’, a word she had learned from an incident at school not that long before when at lunchtime, the grease from the chips had dribbled on to their school uniforms and a classmate’s mother had raved and ranted and accused the school of making her obese child obese. And so, when presented that evening with a bowl of aubergine curry swimming in some kind of mysterious orange oil, Ameena felt it would be clever to transpose the analogy from potatoes to aubergine. But no, Ameena had misjudged, and she realised very quickly after the fact that potatoes and aubergine must never be confused, and neither should her mother’s cooking with that of the school cook. Also, as she had suspected before and had confirmed yet again, in her family, undue displays of cleverness were rewarded with an entirely different kind of plaudit. This time it was a single slap, quick and hard across the cheek, followed by a protracted glare of utter disbelief at the audacity of it all. ‘Go up, UP, you ungrateful girl! Praise be to Allah, you get any food at all! When there are children, small, small children…’ At this, Zoya raised her right hand up in the air, thumb and index finger inches apart to demonstrate exactly how small. ‘…starving on the streets of Africa! Greasy, she says, greasy. Miss Muffet sitting on tuffet. Next time you open your mouth, you cheeky girl, you will get spiders put into it. Then you will begin to appreciate real food. Greasy!’

  Her father had chosen to remain silent on the subject. Kareem had sat there, smiling smugly at her misfortune. Ameena had winced at the force of the slap but not cried, resisted saying something instructive about Africa, and run up the stairs, albeit out of defiance more than obedience. But when Kareem, upon finishing his dinner, had come upstairs and opened the door of her room just to say, ‘Goodnight Miss Muffet,’ with a snigger, she had gone back out and crouched at the top of the stairs unnoticed, for she was sure that now that they were alone there would be a conversation between her parents, and Ameena wanted to hear it, for she was endlessly amazed by how differently they lived compared to normal people.

  ‘You really need to stop hitting them. It’s not legal in this country,’ Yusuf cautioned.

  Zoya smirked. ‘Legal shegal. What will they do? Report me? We were spanked as kids and we turned out alright, didn’t we? The whole nation of Pakistan and that big fat country next to it, they are doing okay, aren’t they, all one billion of them! Better than these people here, always in the loony sessions.’

  Yusuf couldn’t help but smile. ‘I think you mean therapy.’

  ’You can call it what you like, fancy names, they are still loony sessions. Saw the news today? Some couple threw the nanny into garden bonfire and the man is standing there, grilling chicken to hide the smell.’ Zoya stuck her hand out and rotated her wrist in front of an imaginary barbeque
. ‘Throwing the nanny into the bonfire! Imagine! Like she is Tandoori Chicken.’

  She stopped grilling then and brought the same hand up to her forehead, making little circles with her index finger. ‘Mad, all mad.’

  Ameena standing at the top of the stairs felt her eyes grow wide and before the gasp of horror escaped her, she ran into her room feeling a sense of such gladness that she had a mother who slapped her when she was naughty rather than throw her into bonfires. And gladness also that they were not like normal people, for they had neither nanny nor barbeque, nor garden for that matter, in which one could grill anything, chicken or nannies, alike.

  1.15

  He walked her home that night, the night they met on the rooftop, a hot, still night, the air sticky with humidity and the secret intimacy of new lovers.

  ‘Ameena,’ he said as they walked past the primary school playground, its brightly painted swings and slides lying unnaturally still and silent under the honey glow of the streetlights.

  ‘Hmm…?’

  ‘What kind of stuff do you paint?’

  ‘Can’t tell you!’

  ‘Oh?’ he said, and held it like that, his mouth, in the shape of the ‘o’, and it hung suspended between them like an invisible object.

  They walked some more in silence, side by side but not touching, past the little dog park with its gate padlocked several hours earlier, past the 24-hour pharmacy, past the elegant brownstones with their chandeliers on, past the pizza place, which was bustling, and the salad place, which was not.