Meanwhile elsewhere—just as the light turns green and the cars along a coastline prepare to leave the city towards the half desert and the mountains—more slowly than ever a woman crosses the highway, which, along with the corniche, is all that holds the ocean ever rising at bay.
The woman is alone, searching for her child.
Nothing in her face recalls what once was and if someone shouts her name, she doesn’t turn around and say no or stop it in the language no one here understands or wants anything to do with; if they stop, she doesn’t meet their gaze and if they say wait, she doesn’t come back with a why nor later I have just as much right to walk here as you do, why can’t you understand that?
It’s Friday and soon the city almost dissolved by the heat will fill up with tourists dressed in bright clothes and on a ramble through the food markets with fried fish and oysters. From the large galleria, the tourists as if from out of a hole will make their way to the museum quarter and the souvenir shops and afterwards, once they’ve finished shopping, move on to the rose garden, the university and the bookshops, to the corn vendor on the corner by the drooping palm groves, alone in the sun, and the cats in repose, stretching out, waiting for the heat to break and for the sun to set.
Farther on—farthest on where a hill obscures the view and the road muddies in the tracks of digging machines waiting for work to begin—are also abandoned new builds made of pale concrete and steel girders and a small library where only students go.
Yes, right across the road, invisible to those at the university looking out across the green space and the faculties, stand the new builds half-finished, missing most of the walls to what could have been a living room or bedroom, a bathroom, kitchen or storeroom, and that now gaping mostly keep the students shielded from wind and rain.
At night the students roll out their bedding on the concrete and each pushes their one bag all they have left against the wall, dozes off beside it. Then they wake to the sun and the morning haze and lug their bags across the muddy earth up to their department, cast a look around. At this time of day no one but the cleaners walks the empty corridors and no cafés are open with discounted tea, coffee and yesterday’s sandwiches; none of the guards asks where you’re from or what you’re doing there and no one plants their backpack on the empty chair beside them, saying sorry this seat is taken. The students wash under their arms and between their legs in the large bathroom at one end of the corridor then take a seat in the armchairs by the door to wait for their first seminar, falling asleep and sleeping long.
Later they’ll meet up around the fire and go over how best to make this unfinished building a home—they’ll discuss which walls are essential and from where they’ll get the sheet metal and who among them is best at construction and where they can get hold of screws and drills. The students will talk and laugh and before bedtime open their bag and repack it, take out dry socks and a sweater and walk with their flashlight and books in hand up to their spot by the wall.
It’s Friday a late summer afternoon and soon the beach now vacant will have litter spread across its sun chairs and parasol stands as the ocean draws back from the rocks and reeds; the ice-cream vendors will shove their broken carts up the hill past the palms and grill kiosks, and the taxi drivers will run a rag over the seats and the cracked windshields, will wait for men in suits to wave them down and with someone beside them ask to be driven away from the corniche. Soon, the tourists—just as they for safety’s sake place a hand over their handbags and keep an eye out for the children who while waiting for work on the beach have fallen asleep sack and rake in hand—will climb the wide pavement along the twilight-bright corniche and the ocean view beyond words for those who can afford dinner and a little wine at one of the restaurants there. The tourists will take a seat and ask for sparkling water and maybe a large bottle of house wine, marinated olives with capers and garlic and salted nuts to tide them over, reclining with the late summer sea in minor revolt and the sky pitch dark and dull above the soon over-encumbered corniche.
The woman searching for her child has been there, she knows what the corniche looks like, and tonight as every other Friday night since her child disappeared she will go back there and wait; she will watch the girls, who appear out of nowhere with a mop and rag in hand, and follow them as they approach fresh spills and polish the floor to a shine once again just as The Missing One did.
She will search and look around the corniche.
Slowly endlessly tired she will wander up there—determined and clutching her bag like it’s the most valuable thing she owns, she will sit on one of the benches outside the restaurant where her child was working soon before she went missing and keep the knife warm by passing it between her hands on the corniche.
It’s the corniche she thinks of as the traffic light turns green and the shadows deeper than the day before render her invisible; it’s the corniche and the girl and the children she sees as she steps out and slowly starts making her way across the road—it’s the waiters in their black trousers black shoes and the men with their glasses of beer who stop to shout as the children walk by.
Like any other day she means to continue to the square—to the razed lot they call the alley, and on to the place where the greengrocer is already stacking melons, stone fruit and the coriander The Missing One always wanted to bring home—but she can no longer move, is stock-still in the middle of the road.
Today the world feels different somehow new and if she squeezes her wounds round and open, it doesn’t matter if the pus seeps out yellow thick and if she loses her headscarf at the roadside where she in her tiredness has lain down to sleep, it doesn’t matter if she gets it back—the air is both replete and empty and just as the woman perceives this she also senses The Missing One’s presence and perhaps her smell across the road.
If she stands here long enough—if she stands among the cars, eyes and hands tightly shut in a prayer so intimate nothing but her wish pushes through—maybe the God who proffered but then took back this child will return it to her.
If she prays loudly enough dear God as the shouts from the cars resound and the great sun keeps burning unbounded I pray to you with all I have maybe something will happen that couldn’t have happened before.
If she puts words to the unthinkable of all my children as she falls to her knees on the asphalt she was the one I loved most maybe something beyond comprehension can come to pass and the child will appear as if in a dream.
She waits, why doesn’t the dream manifest?
In the heat her knees stick to the ground and go numb; alongside her the traffic slows to a crawl, then moves on.
In the cars children sit up and watch the woman—across her chest the shirt is gossamer and along her back a tear running down from one shoulder, her body already fading in the late summer heat and across her pant leg dried blood in black stains from thigh to ankle and out to her toes blue and swollen. She seems unfazed by the people who want her to move along, and when she turns around and fixes her gaze somewhere, it is as though she still sees nothing of this world.
Is she going to get run over, their children ask, is she going to die here on the road, they ask, and their parents say, I don’t know, maybe she will, and turn away.
In the bag are the same flyers as always, and across her slippers worn ragged by the streets, the same broken straps that rub the back of her foot red then fall off—around her neck one of the girl’s shawls darker with each passing day and in her pocket the knife she carries with her wherever she goes in the city.
Later when the slippers no longer hold, she’ll walk barefoot to the corniche and the restaurants and up to the railing; later, when no one is looking, she will climb up and over to the sea- and sky-darkened cliffs.
Today something is different somehow stillborn and the woman feels it as she pounds her fists on the hood of the car that comes closest to her and presses a flyer to its windshield:
Has anyone seen my daughter? 17 years old, missing since dawn on 1 May. Help me find her, help me get justice.
She wedges the flyer under the windshield wipers and doesn’t turn around when the driver calls her back, doesn’t care if he spits and doesn’t go back to hit him when he shouts that she is a slum rat, dirt.
She just keeps moving on and when later that same night she stops searching, hands and forehead bloody, you are standing nearby, looking out over the ocean. You don’t see the blood, you only see the woman, and soon thereafter the woman throwing herself off.
Late summer one Friday night in a city half obscured by skyscrapers, and half left to the desert and the near-saturated yellow that rolls in and lays itself upon the streets and lawns like a hand, the cigarette vendors dust off their carts though nothing helps but rain, and in the bushes that frame the parks from north to south, something pale green unfurls where once were flowers and red berries to be sucked on and spat out.
This is a place you haven’t been before even though you’ve often wanted to visit, and when you finally walk these streets it’s as a tourist, no matter how many times you speak the language that you’ve known since childhood or ask the hotel staff how it’s going, picking up a newspaper where you slowly get up to speed and then relay what you’ve read to your co-workers within earshot.
On the corniche rises the buzz of men in suits with a woman at their side and along the main road rose vendors wait all in a row; you have strayed from your co-workers to get a little air—baby needs a walk you said with your hand on your belly—and when you pass the entrance to the restaurant, the children draw near and greet you; they ask if you’d like to buy the bracelet they’re holding out or would you prefer a pot holder crocheted with yarn and bottle caps? You crouch down to get a better look at the children, answering yes and thank you and putting the bracelet on and the pot holder in your bag. You give them the banknotes you’ve taken out, then continue across the corniche.
As you turn to face the sky and the sea a single unbounded darkness you spot her.
The woman is standing on the other side of the railing body bent forward almost one with the cliffs and the sea, looking out to where no horizon and no moon makes itself known; when she turns around and looks at or past you, you follow her gaze along the large road over to the grill kiosks and jewellery vendors and see, as she does, the streetlamps white and yellow down by the harbour and the beach.
It’s cooling down—you can feel it and so does the woman standing there with her shirt wide open, letting the ocean breeze beat against her bare chest and the bleeding cuts across her stomach; she wants to kick off her pants but doesn’t know how, to pull the girl’s shawl tighter around her neck even though she can’t.
From this night on the children she has left behind in her search for The Missing One, the children to whom she has never quite returned, will sleep closer together and curled up more tightly and above them in the day the sun will by turns be blinding or cold and white—she knows this.
She knows that the water from the bathroom taps will wane and stay cold the whole winter through and their paraffin lamp will more frequently be blown out by the wind in the alley; she knows that the blankets with their tears small and large will no longer keep them warm and the palm fronds the children fill their arms with across the road won’t have a chance to dry in the damp and fog that arrive in autumn like a steady rain.
Not before the morning, when the sun again hits the walls and the roofs and sweeps across the children’s feet numbed and blue, will the children let go of each other and once again begin to make their way out of and away from the alley; only after the light as white and unbearable as before bears down on the earth and on the children’s bodies—awaiting that which will never return—will the children strike out and slowly wander off, leaving that alley.
I hope the woman thinks as her hands clutch the railing more tightly and she sees the sky and sea, a single vast home to which she longs to return—I hope the children will one day take the other children’s hands and go elsewhere she says and starts listing the names of her remaining children so the sky and sea won’t forget them like they forgot and abandoned The Missing One.
Take care of my Pearl and teach her to ride a bike properly she says as her foot skids on the rocks—let Minna learn everything about the stars and galaxies—she likes that—and give Mo a hard ball that no one else has yet had the chance to kick the woman says and falls silent.
That’s all—that’s all she hopes for before you see her throw herself off and then nothing more—then only the dark of night and the sea breeze and the bars and the food, then you and the child in your belly and the woman’s bag left on one of the benches white-painted and worn, placed where the ocean view is hidden by the restaurants enormous along the corniche.
Later you take it—you take the bag with you and give the waiters one of the flyers you find, but keep the soap a stump at most from the depths of her bag; you show them the picture of the girl wearing shorts and a sweater and turn around, you don’t wave goodbye and don’t say okay when your co-workers call out, Good night, see you tomorrow, take care now.
In the hospital bed you will try to remember if on that night you were tired or happy and if you were wearing the green or black velvet dress you’d packed; you’ll try to remember if you felt the child kicking as you stood for what felt like an eternity on the corniche and if the woman was tall or short, if her hair was the same colour as yours and if it was on you that she fixed her gaze when she turned around and saw the many tourists, made up of people like you, ever flowing back and forth, as if the lot of you were one with the strip of bars bright and the streetlamps ornate along the corniche.
When the woman lets go and slams against the rocks once then twice, it is neither quieter nor more solemn than usual—this at least you remember and this you tell the people who later wonder why you’re always circling back to the woman and the corniche. The light from the restaurants didn’t get any less harsh and the music didn’t die down—the waiters didn’t stop serving aperitifs and small plates of cheese and olives, and along the lookout point the tourists didn’t back away, did not leave the corniche; you remember that the rocks were shiny, almost mirrored, and a scream rang out that you later hoped was yours even though you’ve never been able to scream like that and neither did you understand the point—I don’t have it in me you say later in the hospital bed and clench your fists two hard rocks, beating your face and chest with all your might.
You’ll only remember calling for help, saying you saw a woman fling herself off—I saw her over there you’ll shout so the whole corniche comes running and when you’re surrounded by the diners, you’ll point to the place where the black water its softness untold washes over the rocks and once again you’ll say there—see?
The child was healthy at the check-up only a few days ago, what do you mean there’s no heartbeat? you ask one of the two doctors who have followed the nurse in and are now standing in silence in front of the ultrasound image of your dead child. Your stomach is sticky and hard and in the examination room you only have the doctors and the back of the screen to fix your eyes on; outside nothing is as it was and when the doctors search for the words you interrupt them, saying no or what.
You know the irreversible has already taken place, but your refusal to let two white women with a life that never was nor will be yours rewrite what has happened to your child makes you pull yourself together, makes you stern. What do you mean there’s no heartbeat? What do you mean there’s no heartbeat? What do you mean there’s no heartbeat? you ask again and again and are finally drowned out by the one who is saying, I mean that the child has died, it is no longer alive—this is what no heartbeat means, she says and turns to her co-worker.
On the corniche the diners ask if you can remember what the woman looked like and if you’re sure she jumped off here, there’s no trace? Was she short or tall and was she wearing a dress or pants? Was she white or black, they ask, and were you standing here a long time before it happened?
The tourists in baseball caps and shorts, who like you have been dining and drinking on the corniche, ask if you’re sure it was a person you saw, and you will later think that at that moment it was already clear you would soon have a hard time distinguishing a person from the cliffs and the cliffs from the corniche, the railing and yourself.
It was a person—I’m sure of it you say as you pace the hospital corridor waiting for your mother, brother and sister to arrive.
Perhaps in a moment of stillness when no one was speaking to you or shouting that the police were on their way, you saw the body float up to the surface once only to vanish again as if in a dream—could that be?
Perhaps when your gaze was fixed on the space between the cliffs and the sky and you saw the sea foam whipping up in an eternal dance across the rocks the woman floated up as though transparent or only half-born into the world, do you remember if that happened?
Yes, perhaps—when your gaze was fixed for a moment on the place where she in falling made impact, not the first time but the second, and saw the water wash over the rocks—did you think she could have had a few breaths left in her, you weren’t sure, what were you to do?
Later you are no longer sure of anything, but it’s the woman you think of as you lift your child out of the refrigerated drawer cold and press it to your milk-swollen breasts.
Later you will think that your child also died on the corniche even if it continued to grow and kick for months thereafter.
Yes, there you’ll think. In a rift between ocean and sky—the moment you got up in an attempt to avoid your co-workers and find a more peaceful spot on the corniche—you suddenly remembered Rozia and how one afternoon she didn’t want to play with you.
It was in the days before you all left, you’d asked her if you could go to the playhouse to draw and sing and she replied that she didn’t want to be your friend anymore because you’d taken her hand puppet and anyway you were moving away soon. I’ll give the hand puppet back, Rozia you said and then who said we’re moving away?
Later that evening your mother told you that people in military uniforms had stopped by and so it was time to pack.
You did as she said and stuffed your favourite dress and the drawings Rozia had given you into a large bag, and then the woman was standing there as the memory ended and your gaze was again fixed somewhere. She was standing on the other side of the railing and then turned around, looked past you on the corniche.