Bottle of Smoke
YOU ENTER YOUR AUNT MARIS’ garden through a hole in the wall, so draped as to be half-hidden by a fallow choke of dead trumpet vine. The grass is sere on the frozen ground, dry and uncut, still high enough to have to wade through. Your own breath, white and visible, blows back over your face like a veil in the wind, a gumbo of rotting herbs—coaxed forth from that half-moon-shaped flowerbed under the small back window—mingling with it. You smell basil, taste thyme. Dead marigolds. Desiccated rosemary. You smell and taste something that died here not too long ago, when the weather had already turned too cold to let it rot away quickly.
Inside your jacket, your breasts press painfully against the ribbing of your T-shirt. Because your maternity bra was not among those few things you grabbed as you made your escape from the hospital earlier today, they ride unrestrained, full and leaking; you cup one cartoonishly, mittened hand and arm beneath them, propping them up protectively, and use your other to dig with, scrabbling at the rigid dirt. You start to kneel, but something seeps down one thigh, quick and hot—blood? Fluid? So you rise again, bend carefully over. Try to ignore it.
Your stomach still bulges slightly—a pale swell, an empty gourd. If you only pressed hard enough, you think, you might be able to feel something rattling around inside it.
Perfectly fit to leave, according to hospital staff—despite the strenuous objections of Diehl, your (hopefully) soon-to-be ex-husband. A clean bill of health; no complications. Hale and hearty.
And hollow.
Eventually, you find the key to the kitchen door buried under a broken stone cupid’s head rakishly set (ever so slightly askew) in a nodding circle of withered things that probably used to be pansies, right where your Aunt Maris’ unexpected last note said it would be. The lawyer who read you her will passed it on to you, discreetly sealed inside a rough-woven, off-white envelope with an unfamiliar watermark, the pulp of its paper thick with cotton fibres. The note itself written in strong black ink, bordered with a faint, printed pattern of Arabic writing—a poem maybe, or a curse, or an advertisement for some hotel, but completely indecipherable to you, no matter its actual content—framing Aunt Maris’ few choice words, a looping flow of script, as terse and stylish as herself:
They gave you my name. I give you my house, and everything in it, with this sole proviso: Use it as you see fit, but tell no one of your intentions. If you need it, find it. And use it.
And since you do, you have. And will.
You breathe on the lock, scrub at it clumsily, showering the mat with frost. Faint icy flowers flourish at every corner of the door’s glass insert, a pale frenzy. At first, the key sticks; but as it turns at last, with a distressingly loud wrench, the first flurry of that snow they’ve all been telling you to expect—these three days running—finally blows over your shoulder, sending a few flakes up over the collar of your coat, across that feverish line of flesh which occasionally comes and goes between the otherwise impervious meeting of hat, sweater and bundled-up hair. They melt on contact, as though consumed by some inner infection.
Your nipples hurt. The mess between your thighs is cooling now, insistent. You want bed, bath, music, sleep. Dreams, even—preferably borne on a tide of Drambuie fumes, rendering them incoherent and easy to forget.
You step inside, into dusty silence, and let the blooming, colourless riot of the door’s glass forest swing shut behind you, ice marbled like veins over the trunks of numberless suggested trees—hidden eyes, gleaming here and there, amongst the frail and subtle leaves.
* * *
1949.North Africa. Somewhere outside of Ain Korfa.
The woman’s name, Maris has been assured, is Sufiya. She makes bottles, Madame. Excuse me, Mademoiselle. The ceilings of her hut are too low for Maris to stand upright; she enters sideways, slipping on sand. Curtains are everywhere, veils fine as smoke. Outside, two musicians perform—some kind of flute and a small drum bound with hide on either end, and a girl dancing with a cane held between her hands. One thought you might take an interest, seeing as you collect them.
So hot, and dry, and breathless, in the dimming light; everything turns flat and pulsing, as when you walk into a dark shop on a bright afternoon. The girl is reduced to a series of undulations, a bored mouth, the liquid sideways flash of an eye.
Wouldn’t Maris rather stay outside, and ask her whether—for a modest fee (but then, all fees are modest, here)—she might be persuaded to do more than dance?
But here is Sufiya now, between the curtain
s, barely visible against a bank of convex and reflected light, her collection—her wrapped limbs gilded by a warped, bluish halo of glass. Smoking. Watching. Combing the tobacco’s sweet exhalation back over her head in handfuls, like gaseous perfume. It lingers, heavy and enticing, more than possibly laced with something stronger.
Ya Ummi, foreigner. One hears you seek me.
There are faint blue tattoo marks between her brows, shards of mirror hanging from her long, dark hair, braided into it. More tattoos, stretched triangular by time and gravity, on her long, full, bare brown breasts. Maris feels a fresh clutch of interest, and lets the dancing girl slip away, forgotten. She takes her hat off, loosing her own pale braid like a sudden flood; Sufiya smiles at the sight, revealing flat, slightly discoloured teeth. Also bluish.
Again, the barest suggestion of addiction; there is a definite nervous edge to her Oriental languor. The inside of her bottom lip is tattooed as well, rimmed in faded purple.
Is her tongue? Will she show her?
You have money, one doesn’t doubt, Sufiya says, putting her cigarette out in the sand at her feet. Foreign lady.
Maris smiles herself. Much, she replies.
Sufiya shrugs, fluid.
Then you may ask . . . what you will.
* * *
Your Aunt Maris, on your mother’s side, for whom you were indeed named (much as your father might sometimes like to imply otherwise)—Aunt Maris, the family myth. Literally unmentionable. Few of her pictures survived the internal purge, but here is one: A snapshot, small and brown-tinted, taken in Tunis, the year that you were born. There, under the lone palm, one bright slice of darkness in a collective mass of shadow, straight-backed for her age, linen-suited. Her hair—pile on pile of it, gone quite colourless as bleached silk—is hidden, like yours, under her hat. But not against the weather.
Her eyes are black stones under incongruous ink-black brows, crinkled at the edges, long washed clean of anything but curiosity.