The Book of Other People Read online

  Yes, Nigora knew about suffering.

  That was the last time she saw him. And, unbeknown to Nigora, she had stayed in Faizullo’s memory accompanied by a pigeon, which had drifted behind her as she turned to say goodbye.

  Three years later, Faizullo had disappeared. It was rumoured that he had been killed; then it was rumoured he had been imprisoned. And Nigora did not know which of these she preferred: for, although her instinct clung to the life of Faizullo, she also could not allow herself the pain of imagining Faizullo with a number stitched on his breast, ragged, like a raffle ticket.

  On her last morning in Uzbekistan, Nigora had seen a pregnant dachshund being driven in the front seat of a hatchback, which Nigora first saw through the car-window beside her and then through the rear window behind her, as she twisted round, entranced.

  Nigora could not worry about the humans; the humans were too much for her. But she could worry about the dogs instead. For the dogs were innocent. The dogs were the genuine bystanders; they had nothing to do with revolutions, or beliefs.

  If Nigora were asked about the suffering in her own marriage, she would not have been able to talk about it. All her suffering was elsewhere - in the realm of remembered facts.

  There was a snobbishness in her suffering, a reserve. It would not countenance comparison.

  And yet, and yet: Laziz would go down underneath the covers, in the nights. And he would say to her, ‘Never leave me, never leave me.’ And how could she? she would reply. Everything she loved was Laziz. And he would say to her, ‘Never leave me, never leave me.’ Or he would say, ‘Tell me I’m not ugly.’ For Laziz believed that he was ugly; he believed that he was the ugliest and weakest child. And Nigora, sadly, continued to reassure him; she kissed the galumph of his nose, the crooked line of his mouth, and she said to him, ‘You’re not ugly. Of course you’re not. I love you, you’re beautiful,’ until Laziz managed to calm down.

  The coverlet had been given to her by her grandmother. And underneath the coverlet she felt safe.

  She did not believe in her own suffering, Nigora. All her ideas of suffering were reserved for the gone, the missing, the dead.

  Somewhere, everywhere, a girl is taking her clothes off. This much was true. Nigora could agree with this. But something else, she thought, was also true. Somewhere, everywhere, a girl was being raped. And the question was: how far away? How far away did something have to happen before it stopped being your responsibility? How far away did a rape need to be? Two streets? A country? A separate universe?

  In this rational hysteria lived Nigora, who loved her husband, Laziz - a taxi driver and former businessman. She loved him, and wanted to leave him.

  Some Day-time Dialogue between Nigora and Laziz

  L When you’re young you can go anywhere but when you’re old you can’t go everywhere. It’s true.

  N It’s true.

  L It’s true? It’s true. Yes. Did I tell you this joke about the rake?

  N The rake, no.

  L Two men are walking down a road.

  N OK.

  L And there’s a rake in between them.

  N That’s it? It isn’t funny.

  L No, it isn’t funny, is it? This guy told me it and he laughed so I thought it must be funny.

  N It isn’t funny.

  On the sofa which they had bought after a year in their new country, Nigora and Laziz watched The Philadelphia Story. Or: Nigora watched, and Laziz slept beside her, his head back, his mouth open. This film was dubbed into Russian, with one male and bass actor doing all the voices. And this made her sad; it created a gap between Nigora and the storyline.

  As Nigora watched this film again, she considered that its plot was all about timing: everything had got out of kilter, and yet somehow things would restore themselves. Timing would be restored. Because the couple who move apart are still the same couple. The beauty (thought Nigora) of The Philadelphia Story is the fact that the film is about Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn, and yet all along it looks like it is about Katherine Hepburn and Jimmy Stewart. But Jimmy Stewart is just there to prove a sad truth of timing: that the affair one is having is never the affair one is having. There is always someone else.

  The cake she had bought lay crumbling on its paper box in front of them.

  She stroked Laziz under his rough chin. She gently extricated his moustache from its precarious angle on his upper lip. Happy anniversary, she said, gently, to herself.

  Laziz would be picturesque, and she would be distressed. That was the image of their marriage.

  She was not sure if the vocabulary for everything really existed. She was not convinced by everyone’s assumption of linguistic comprehensiveness. The feeling she got, for instance, when watching The Philadelphia Story, was not quite sadness; it was not quite melancholy. It was more to do with a sensation of size, of overwhelming size.

  More and more, she was beginning to believe that feelings were not complicated. They were not split into infinite constituent elements. Instead, often, the words were not all there. For Nigora was pragmatic. She had no time for souls with soul. No, Nigora did not believe in the indefinable. She believed that everything had a definition, if only the words could be found.

  She remembered her father coming into the empty kitchen, letting his keys splay on the table. She remembered him biting the cap off a biro, as he made notes on a pile of manuscript. She remembered the first boy she ever slept with, Shuhrat, who used to swim while she lay and read on the grass by the river. He got out and lay beside her. She remembered his arms, the hair springing awry as it dried. But now she could not quite remember his face. She remembered his eyes were brown, but she could not remember his eyes. She only remembered that she knew they were brown.

  And she missed her mother. In this new city, where Laziz was her one companion, she wanted to be home again. She wanted to be there in the kitchen, with her mother talking. And her father, as she talked, would pluck a stray hair from the base of her neck. There was a bowl of sweets on the kitchen table, underneath a tablecloth.

  Nigora was a minor character.

  She remembered writing her initials on the condensation in the car window, as her father drove her to piano lessons. She remembered the letters leaking downwards, obeying the line of gravity.

  In the Gardens of Sunderland Café - renamed from its original Gardens of Allah, after Sunderland had been victorious in the 1973 FA Cup Final - Yaha made notes. For Yaha was not just a footballer. He had also received a university education. According to Yaha, in this world there were three ordinary systems of government: and he had invented a fourth, in which ‘virtue was always rewarded’. This was his ideal republic; its constitution formed his constant study, his refuge, his repose.

  Nigora considered Yaha, and gave up. She stroked the hairs on the back of Laziz’s hands. Where could she go? Everywhere she went, there was her marriage.

  The thing about you, her mother used to say, is that you never act out of character. You have no originality.

  But Nigora knew this was not true. Because she was going to act out of character. She was going (thought Nigora) to be herself. And yet: how could she? How could she?

  Judge Gladys Parks-Schultz

  Heidi Julavits

  On the final dusk of her life, Judge Gladys Parks-Schultz sits in a green velvet armchair reading - or rather not reading - a dull nautical mystery called Trouble Astern. Her chair faces a large window overlooking a long driveway lined with oaks. Beyond the furthest oak she can see the ocean and, riding the horizon, a house-lit island.

  Behind her is a closed door.

  From this vantage point, we cannot see Glad Parks-Schultz. She is blocked from view by her throne-like chair. Glad Parks-Schultz’s name suggests she is as dull as her mystery, an insincerely cheery woman compactly assembled, her bland orb face stacked directly atop her middle like a snowman’s. Her name suggests a curt and stilted manner. We see her barking monotone pleasantries, scaring children unintentional
ly. There is no sense arguing with this perception, even if there is only a little truth to it. We cannot see Glad Parks-Schultz, we can only hear her name in our heads, and her name has carved a lumpen shape for her there.

  Glad Parks-Schultz tries repeatedly to lose herself in her mystery - a love affair, a sailing trip, a cabin, a knife - but cannot. Following the spat over the Christmas ham (‘How can you serve ham?’ her daughter had asked, a fair question; Sylvia was a vegetarian, something her mother had willfully forgotten), Glad Parks-Schultz finds herself in a familiarly pinched humor, her Holidays Gone Wrong mood. To go with this mood she plays in her head images from another Christmas, images from Fanny and Alexander, the only Bergman movie Glad has ever seen, and then only because Sylvia, a film major minoring in psychology and thus a self-appointed Bergman connoisseur, gave it to her as a Christmas present last year (‘This is more your speed,’ Sylvia had said, not uncritically). Fine if it was. Glad preferred her cultural enrichment free of anguish.

  Outside her window (in which only she can see her faint reflection), the tree-lined drive extends to a distant point. It is the trick of perspective, thinks Glad Parks-Schultz, whose face, in the half-reflection in this dying-light time of day, appears longer and thinner than it might to anyone actually seeing her. Glad Parks-Schultz splays her book over her lap (only twenty more pages to go), giving up on the cowardly pair of lovers who have sailed and anchored in a cove, who have rowed their dinghy to the secluded beach, who are sneaking through the woods to a cabin to kill the woman’s husband with a knife. Why the husband is alone in the cabin is itself a bunch of self-reflexive foolery - he is a writer putting the final touches on a mystery book. She wants to ask the husband about this book - not the book he’s writing, but the book he’s in. What kind of mystery, she would ask him, makes you wait until the very end for a dead person? She is a district judge. She is not interested in crimes before they happen. She detests the why of most novels, which is the reason she sticks to mysteries. There is no emotional worrying of the why in mysteries - she cheated on him; he wanted her money - there is only the outcome, and the intricately explained how.

  Meanwhile, Glad waits impatiently for Sylvia and her college boyfriend, her son Rod and his college girlfriend, all of whom she has banished from her house in a fit of ham pique, to return from the beach.

  But once these people (her children and their temporary beloveds) are out of her sight she feels unseen, and not terribly easy as a result of it. Better to be loathed on a major holiday. Better to feel hated and alive. She is a stern district judge despised for her imperviousness to human context, to bad-luck stories. (‘No Glad-Handing Parks-Schultz’.)

  The first snowflake of the season tumbles past the window. Glad huffs. She brushes the spine of Trouble Astern and prays for an escape from her tedious self. She’ll take any old diversion from this green velvet armchair - her mother’s favorite armchair, the upholstery warted with burn marks during her mother’s final days smoking in this very chair, dying in this very chair. She wants to be free of this Holiday Gone Wrong mood, this overheated pair of woolly mukluks.

  This is where, Glad thinks, if I were, say, a less cooperative character in the relentlessly trouble-free Trouble Astern, I would set the writer-husband’s peg-leg afire (were he to possess a peg-leg), I would crush the whiny lover’s head with a winch handle. If impulsive violence isn’t part of my character, I could instead (as is the annoying tendency of the characters in Trouble Astern) flash backward to some baldly moral exemplar from my childhood. I could allow myself to be sucked backward and molecularly reassembled as a younger, sweeter person, available to be efficiently known by others via some traumatic event involving - preferably - my mother. This is the way of the world, Glad knows. She hears it from the lawyers every week. Mothers are, in some soupy way, to blame for every act of criminality.

  Glad rubs at the spine as if it were some tinny magic lamp, promising instantaneous transport to an enthralling past. For the purposes of heightening the intrigue at this particular moment she thinks of this enthralling past as Her Secret Life. Everything has a secret life these days - birds, bees, alphabets, armoires, the characters in Trouble Astern - and Glad feels quite comfortable in claiming one for herself as well, even if she’s not entirely clear on what constitutes a secret exactly. If she’s never spoken of it, is it a secret, even if the content isn’t particularly combustible? After all, it’s not that she failed to tell this ‘secret’ on purpose (to deceive, protect, gain financial or emotional advantage, whatever); really it existed as a part of her past person that was inextricable from her current person, and so to know her was to know this about her.

  Or so she’d assumed. During the ham incident, when Sylvia had unfairly accused Glad of not knowing her (didn’t Sylvia know that Glad’s way of knowing was what looked like not knowing?), she had then gone on to say something that was, perhaps, true. She had claimed that Glad refused to be known. I don’t know anything about you, Sylvia said, and I’ve known you for twenty years. I don’t know why you are the way you are.

  A person needs a reason to be herself ? thought Glad. But instead she said - fair enough. This is her measured, judicially minded parry to every little trauma Sylvia kicks her way. Fair enough.

  Glad looks at the falling snowflakes, thicker now, ghosting the branches of the oaks. The green velvet prickles the backs of her arms. She squirms uncomfortably, then settles down to concentrate, closing her eyes and straining her face muscles. Pushing her brain backward is like trying to nag a boulder uphill with a feather. She begins with something easy. Where was she when she heard the explosion? She was hiding from her mother behind one of the oaks lining the drive, fingering the bark as she is now fingering her book. The scientist’s house next door, unseen behind a wall of arbor vitae, emitted a cloud of white smoke. The slate tiles from the garage roof scattered through the air like shot from a rifle, growing larger and larger as they spun towards her. A late-blooming sense of self-preservation drove her behind a tree trunk, into the front of which, a second later, two tiles thunked themselves with the sickening sound of axe-heads. Her mother emerged from the house. She noted her sunflowers, decapitated by a low-flying tile. She spied a speck of Glad’s dress, protruding from behind the impaled oak.

  Get in here and finish your chowder, she said angrily. Or did she? Glad honestly couldn’t remember. She was only sure that her mother treated her as if she were to blame for the accident, as if Glad’s availability to be freakishly killed had caused the neighbor’s house to explode.

  (She can imagine Sylvia asking at this point: why really did the house explode? And was anybody killed? But this is not the secret. Or rather these questions, the inevitability of Sylvia’s literal-minded questions, discourage her from sharing this secret past of hers. Not to blame Sylvia and her pointless redirects. But to moderately blame Sylvia. Yes, indeed. If Sylvia’s searching for the why, the why Glad is the way she is, why Sylvia has never been permitted to know her in a way that feels satisfactory to her, Sylvia must in part take responsibility.)

  But returning to the flashback. Her own mother, Glad remembers, steered her into the house. Glad felt invigorated by proximity to annihilation, her head lighter for having nearly been detached, airborne - and then her mother’s total inability to accurately read Glad’s emotional state made her remember (she actually remembered remembering) an incident with her piano teacher who had quit the previous year.

  (Your piano teacher, Sylvia would say skeptically, implying that, after a near-death experience and an explosion, some actual lesson might be extracted.) But soon she was remembering inside of a reminiscence (this was another reason why she’d never revealed her secret life to anyone, such an aimless tributary it was), feeling quite viscerally beneath the hands of her mother the touch of her old piano teacher, Mr Phillips. Something about Mr Phillips’s sleazy availability, especially as he hovered over the keyboard with his chin practically brushing her sort-of breasts as she clunked her way th
rough ‘Greensleeves’, appealed to her. Or not his availability - his stupidity. He was so certain that she was a hapless, naive girl of what - twelve? eleven? - that he could nearly brush her breasts and she wouldn’t notice. That he could caress her elbow as she mutilated ‘Good King Wenceslas’ and she would read his attentions as teacherly.

  It was a sweetly vile arrangement, everyone more or less content to behave dishonestly, until Mr Phillips came late one day, so late that Glad convinced herself that he was not coming. And thus she allowed Harold Blunt to kiss her by her back door, the door Mr Phillips used because he was a back-door sort of man. She often kissed Harold Blunt because Harold Blunt was such a far-flung outcast that no one would ever believe him if he claimed to be kissing Glad Parks practically daily. On this day that she was kissing Harold Blunt, Harold Blunt had been chasing her with a water balloon. He cornered her by her back door and, balloon held threateningly over her head, clamped his lips over hers. When Mr Phillips found her kissing Harold Blunt, he stared at her as an adulterer might stare at his cuckolding mistress. She averted her eyes, but even so it was as if every belittling, superior thought she’d ever had about the man was broadcast over the neighborhood loudspeaker. He knew he’d been had. Harold Blunt responded by smashing the water balloon on Glad’s head and running away. Glad stared at Mr Phillips through her raining-down bangs. He hardened to her in a matter of mere seconds; she was no innocent, she was just another ‘Greensleeves’-mangling trollop who’d made a fool of him.

  As the balloon water dripped into her eyes, she was reminded (a reminiscence inside a reminiscence inside a reminiscence) of another moment in her life, although in fact this moment was in her then-future, so how could she have ‘remembered’ forward from the past? Confusing, and yet this was how it happened, or rather this was how this past of hers existed. As an ever-shifting matrix of falsely interconnected selves. Somehow as a twelve- or eleven-year-old she remembered being sixteen, she remembered riding in the back of a rental car driven by her parents, rain sheeting down the windshield, too much for the the hairpin wipers. Their Bermuda vacation had ‘turned’, as her father phrased it - a hurricane loomed, the three of them had colds, her mother, an incessant liar who lied about things that shouldn’t be lied about, was ‘in her element’, i.e. raucously miserable. When miserable she told stories that Glad herself knew to be untrue because they had happened, or rather hadn’t happened, to her. At this moment she was telling Glad about the time she and Glad had taken the ferry to the Vineyard and Glad had tried to jump overboard. ‘You loved to self-destruct in a crowd,’ her mother said, forgetting that Glad had climbed atop the railing in an attempt to rescue an old lady’s escaped parakeet, clinging to a porthole bolt. She’d lost her footing and slipped safely back to the deck, but not before knocking the parakeet from its perch and sending it hurtling to its death in the wake below. When the old lady approached them worriedly for a report, her mother patted the old lady’s forearm and said, ‘He flew away, dear.’