All That's Left to Tell(12)

He had taken a trip to Arizona once where he saw similar drawings, though they weren’t in caves. Images of animals, some quite beautiful, and human handprints.

“It’s funny,” he said. “You don’t think of the ancient history of a place like Pakistan when you’re thinking about coming here.”

“No,” she said. “Most people don’t. It’s a beautiful landscape conquered by many. The Aryans, the Greeks, the Mughals. The British. Now Americans think of it as foaming at the mouth.”

“Which it is, sometimes.”

“Like everywhere else, and never only that. Because the truth is, here we have this butcher who drew a perfect image of a smiling cow. And someone taught him this. You can think of the country that way, too.”

She sat down in the chair where Azhar had been sitting without moving it closer because she didn’t want to destroy the drawing.

“We’ll have to sweep this away before Saabir comes in.”

“Not an art lover?”

“Ha. No, it’s not that.” She was silent for a few seconds. “Do you know, if you were to be killed, it would probably be Azhar, and not Saabir, who would do it?”

The thought had occurred to him, especially given Azhar’s profession.

“Does that mean you have some news for me?” he asked.

“No. As I told you before, things can change quickly here.”

For the first time, he recognized her vulnerability in her work. If he were to be discovered, she was unlikely to live much longer herself.

“And if someone decided you should be killed?” he asked.

“There would be many who would volunteer.” She sat quietly for a while. “So have you been thinking about Claire?” she asked.

He shifted his feet, and somewhat absently strained at the rope around his wrist, which loosened slightly.

“I don’t want to think about her.”

“You seemed transported this morning.”

“I wouldn’t say transported. It feels good in the way a dose of morphine does, in that it makes the pain go away for a while.”

“Was she an affectionate little girl?”

“I—” he started to protest. “All little girls are affectionate.”

“That’s not true, you know.”

“Well, were you?”

“I could be. I liked exploring. Finding things. Presenting them to my mother.”

“I assume you loved her?”

But she ignored this question. “She kept many of them. We lived near a school with a playground, and some nights, when the other children had been called in or had gone home, I’d go out and sit in one of the swings, kick myself high, and survey the playground for anything they had left. It was about what you’d expect. A Popsicle stick. The missing limb of a doll. Kite string. If it interested me, I’d jump off the swing and pick it up and bring it back to my mother, who would arrange them into some kind of display that she’d place for the evening on the windowsill. So if I was lucky enough to find the cracked eggshell of a killdeer, and, say, a gum wrapper and a ribbon, she’d wind the ribbon into a kind of crude nest, place the broken shell in it, and cut out of the wrapper a small chick that she’d place in the shell. Next morning, when I got up, it would always be gone.”

“This was in upstate New York?” But it was another question she ignored.

“One time I was looking through the attic of her house, and opened a small box that had my name on it. And there they were, a tangle of these things I’d brought to her from that time. An assortment of junk, really. A dirty flip-flop. A mitten. Two or three toy cars. But what was strange was how few there actually were, and it seemed she’d saved them all, without storing them carefully, or anything like that. The eggshell was in bits. But I thought I’d done this a hundred times, and there were maybe two dozen items in that box. Not much larger than a shoebox, to tell you the truth.”

“Did you hold on to it?”

“No. Hardly. All those things were so plain or broken or torn. You can’t reinfuse them with how you marveled at them as a child. If I marveled at them at all. I picked them up because they seemed to please my mother.”

Behind the blindfold, he saw a fleeting image of a girl hanging from her knees on a bar, reaching for a coin she saw on the ground.

“So would you describe that as affectionate?” she asked, but he didn’t answer her. “Anyway, so you see how this works, Marc? Do you think that the baby we dreamed up for Claire this morning—”

“You dreamed up.”

“No, we dreamed up. Do you think that the baby we dreamed up for Claire today is a girl, and that there’s a school in that highway town out west where her mother and father live, and that she’ll wander around the dirty playground and pick up bits and pieces of refuse left by other children and bring them home to her mother and present them as a prize?”

“I can’t imagine you as a little girl. I’m sorry. I’ve never even seen your face.”

“You don’t have to imagine me as a little girl. You have to imagine Claire as having one. And you have to stop trying not to remember her. Why did you refuse to fly back home when you heard she was killed?”

In the blindfold, he felt the question was as confining as the walls of the room, and as ever present.