All That's Left to Tell(52)

“How are you tonight, Marc?” she said. He again felt her voice as soothing, and he knew that he would have trouble resisting it.

“Not much different from how I was last night,” he said.

“Really? After everything we told each other?”

“I’m not always sure of the purpose of what you’re telling me.”

“I’m not, either, if you can believe that.”

“Well, you rarely hesitate. You rarely stumble on a word.”

He heard her shift on her chair, uncross and recross her legs.

“Has Azhar been killed?” he asked, and was struck by his tone of resignation.

She didn’t respond immediately, and then said a few words in Urdu. Saabir was still in the room, after all.

“If I told you no, would you believe me?”

“To take away a father from his children, I don’t care the cause—”

“Don’t. Listen to me. I’m telling you no.”

“What did you say to Saabir?”

“I told him that soon I would be asking him to leave.”

“Can I see Azhar?”

“No. You won’t see him again.”

He opened his mouth to say something, but remained silent. She said a single word to Saabir, who responded with a word of his own that sounded half-spit, but he opened the door to walk into the evening. When he closed it, the call went out for the sunset prayer.

Marc asked, “When he leaves like that, and he hears the muezzin, where does he go to pray?”

“You’re assuming Saabir is necessarily devout,” she said.

“I asked him about his wife and child.”

She was quiet for a moment, and then said, “The time is coming where we may have to move you. It may be far away, and I may not be the one speaking to you anymore.”

“Why?” He heard the note of desperation in his voice.

“Because, as I’ve told you, I don’t coordinate things here.”

He felt hollow inside.

“Have you remembered another story you can tell me about Claire?”

Before an image could invade his mind, he said, “Josephine. Joline’s story is your story, isn’t it?”

“Shhhhh,” she said. “Tell me a story you remember about Claire.”

Something rose in him without the effort of recollection.

“The last—” He had to clear his throat against a tide. “It’s strange, you know.” Because he had to think past the story of the time of Claire’s healing, and her leaving the note, and her running away, but this he didn’t say. “The last time I saw her. It was like something out of a movie, if you can believe that. It was maybe a month before the phone call I told you about.”

“When she said, ‘You shouldn’t have kissed me’?”

“Yes.” He was quiet for a moment, thinking about that.

“Tell me about it.”

“I told you already that the time of that phone call was just after I’d moved into an apartment. A month and a half. And when I saw Claire, I’d been in it maybe a week. It was early December, out in the street in the city, and it was late afternoon, but seemed closer to nightfall because of the shorter days. There were a lot of people out on the sidewalks, but it was colder than hell, and they were walking fast to get to their bus stops or into the stores. The light posts were already wound with those tiny white lights, and the display windows framed with ribbon. I don’t know how it is for you to feel heartbroken, but for me, it—” He stopped for a half minute, and Josephine didn’t speak. “For me, it made the world more alive. Closer. Raw. I remember feeling this cynicism. At the orgy of buying going on in those streets. And the next second, I remember almost weeping at one of the shop displays where a gold ribbon was strung above a child mannequin’s head like it was a halo. I thought it was so beautiful. Before I saw Claire, I was standing near a bell ringer. Someone working for the Salvation Army, an old woman. She did not seem right all the way, you know? There was something fixed in the smile on her face, and her eyes seemed vacant. She was probably half-frozen. But a few people were dropping in coins. And I remember standing there, imagining how cold those coins must feel in people’s hands, and how much colder they were sitting in that kettle, and I was fingering a dime and a quarter in my own pocket, and not feeling particularly charitable, and then suddenly wanting to empty my wallet for the strange woman. The coins in my hand were cold, too, and I said to myself, ‘Well, I think I’ll give my coldness away,’ and I remember thinking—like it was an epiphany, and it wasn’t—that the source of all charity was not a human warmth but instead a need to distance yourself from the cold, and then my eyes glazed with it, and despite myself, I saw a beautiful woman coming around the corner across the street.”

He could feel himself sweating, and he could hear himself breathing in the odor of it. Each time Josephine came to see him, he was increasingly aware of the smell of his body, which had grown worse even though he washed up in the mornings with the basin half-full of stale water.

“I wonder if you’d wipe my face,” he said to her.

He heard her stand up. He thought he heard her lift a corner of her garment, and she started with his forehead, and, with a light touch, worked around the circumference of his face, then under his eyes, and down his neck before she sat back down.