All That's Left to Tell(32)
She sat entirely still, the room silent, and then he heard her move forward on her chair.
“Let me see your hand.” He extended it toward her. She bent it at the wrist and said, “Spread your fingers.” After he did, she set the base of her palm against his, and then pressed against it with her entire hand. He could feel her fingers extend well above his own, and the tiny spaces the creases in them made, and her palm was cool and dry. He felt the intimacy of his effort to see her through the pressure of her hand on his. And then she tightened her fingers around his, squeezing, and he could feel the strength in them.
“That shouldn’t necessarily be a complicated question, should it? But for me, it is. I’ve kept others from hurting me when I could.”
She pulled her hand away.
The evening deepened as they continued to sit for a time without speaking. Outside, he occasionally heard voices, then a door closing and someone laughing. He remembered the table he’d seen days ago with the three place settings, and he had wanted to sit down there with that small family. And then the call went out for the evening prayer—he wasn’t sure how far away the mosque was, but it was surely equipped with loudspeakers for the muezzin’s voice to carry this far. Odd that a man’s singing, with no instruments to support him, calling people to gather, could sometimes sound like a mournful plea for company.
“When I was seventeen,” Josephine said, “a girl in my high school took an interest in my mortal soul. I think of her every time I hear that particular muezzin. He sounds like a woman, don’t you think?”
“Before I came here, if I’d heard him, I would have been sure of it.” He was feeling a sympathy for Josephine that he couldn’t have explained.
“Years ago, I used to wonder if they tried to. Sound like women, I mean. I’m not sure why I wanted to think that. Jibril laughed at me when I asked him about it.”
“Jibril was the man you traveled with?”
He imagined she nodded, sensed that she did, which meant that she had forgotten his blindfold because of the memory.
“The girl in my school,” she said. “She was tiny, really. One of those young women who somehow managed to be short and thin at the same time. I towered over her. She wasn’t particularly popular with the other kids, but she had that kind of sunflower face, round and always turning toward the light, and her brightness was appealing, so most of the kids forgave the Bible she hauled around with her schoolbooks. She didn’t push it most of the time, but once she invited me to a concert in a small, open-air stadium in a park. I didn’t believe in God then, but because she was sweet, and I considered her a friend, I spent the evening there with her. It was Christian rock, which I didn’t have much patience for, but it was played well enough, and the lead singer would occasionally tell stories in between songs. In the middle of one of those stories, an ambulance went by with its siren blaring, louder and louder as it neared the venue, and the singer broke off his story and asked everyone to bow their heads, and as he was saying a prayer for whoever it was who was hurt or dying, my girlfriend took my hand. It was the only thing that reached me in the entire show.”
Beneath the blindfold, he could see the two of them sitting at the concert with their heads lowered, but he still couldn’t imagine Josephine’s face, and for a moment he saw it as a featureless oval from which a voice emerged, and he tightened his eyes against its opacity.
“I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I guess it’s because of the one time I heard her sing, and how she reminded me of that muezzin. She had a boyfriend who went to a different school. The same church, apparently. They were serious about it in the way only seventeen-year-olds can get. He’d given her a ring. Anyway, our last year of school together, we took a trip with the other kids from our class to an amusement park that was a few hours’ drive away, and we came back after nightfall. She was sitting with a boy who’d always liked her. I didn’t make anything of it. I slept most of the way back. But when we got off that bus, she asked if I could give her a ride home, and when I looked over at her after she pulled the car door shut, she was crying, and was pulling her knees up to her chest. She said, ‘I don’t think he’ll forgive me,’ and, given the way she sometimes talked, I thought she might have been talking about Jesus. Maybe she was. I asked her what had happened, but she only shook her head. I was surprised to see that sunny face so dark, and it’s possible part of me enjoyed that. She started rocking back and forth in the seat. I told her that whatever it was, she was taking it way too seriously. But she shook her head, and started humming. I didn’t recognize the tune, but assumed it was a hymn. And when she started singing the words, her voice changed. Since she was so small, when she spoke people compared it to a Munchkin’s. And her singing voice still had something of that quality. But it was overlaid with something mournful, something deeper, and resonant. She sang it all the way through, and when I pulled into her drive, I looked at her and said, ‘My God, that was beautiful.’ But she only nodded and wiped her eyes with her palm and said, ‘Thanks for the ride.’ She looked like an old woman when she walked hunched over into the porch light and pushed open the door to her house.”
After Josephine finished speaking, she let out a long sigh.
“Anyway, when I hear that muezzin, I think of that girl. He’s probably fifty years old, but his voice has the same quality. Of someone singing beautifully in the hope they’ll be forgiven.”