Loom: A Novel

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84 It isn’t as i f she hasn’t pondered this before and turned it over in her brain so often and so carefully, it has taken shape and emerged before her like a frieze she unfurls and pauses to point at this or that scene. This is where it all started, she would say. And this, right here, is where I wouldn’t allow it to go on. It isn’t as if this is the first time Emilie has tried to loosen the gnarls of her past. But today she does it with a new urgency. The sky brooding and heavy, and Eva coming, and the necessity she feels of pulling up her sleeves and getting on with it, wherever it might lead her. Right from the start, she was on to him. In her memory, their first night wasn’t lovely and amorous but an initiation into suspicion. What she remembers is her husband revealing his plans for them to move to Beirut while she is sitting on the bed, straight as a board, wondering how he might deceive her next. Farid didn’t tell her about Yussef right away, as though she wouldn’t notice his coming home late every Tuesday and Thursday. It immediately raised the alarm in her head, even before she decided to investigate and found out that, with the exception of a few nuns and the cleaning staff, no one lingered after hours at the school on those days, least of all her own husband. But it was only after Josephine was born that she decided to speak up. Money had been disappearing for years, but now every lira lost meant another opportunity missed for her baby daughter. One night she waited up. They would have it out, come what may. But she would have to wait until the next day. That was all he would say that night. A teacher through and through, he believed in showing 85 before telling. He was stalling. She shut her eyes and thought of throwing something heavy at his head. She braced herself for the worst. Another woman? She didn’t believe this for a second yet couldn’t come up with something more original. Sleep was long in coming that night. Shortly before daybreak, she finally managed to doze off for what felt like seconds before his hand on her shoulder startled her awake. She stumbled half-asleep into the kitchen to prepare the coffee and got dressed while he ate a quick breakfast of labneh and olives. They walked together into the pale morning light, Josephine clasped to her bosom, their destination, it turned out, a neighborhood she crossed regularly on her weekly visits to the butcher’s. A noisy place, with shoe shiners and fresh juice bars at every corner, and narrow, congested streets. They entered a gray building with laundry hanging on the lines and a cluster of dirty children in the courtyard. The elevator smelled of urine and hiccupped its way to the third floor where they got out. Farid knocked three times on one of the doors then produced a key, which he used to let them in. She took one step following her husband, then another into a small hallway that led to a badly lit room. A tall man was standing in the living room, dressed in an undershirt and pajama pants and surrounded by litter: a pile of newspaper on the only sofa, full ashtrays, thick dust on the floor, grime on the only window. The man was in as sorry a state as his apartment. He obviously needed a bath, and when he opened his mouth to give them what might have been a broad smile but could have just as well been a grimace, Emilie saw that he was missing several teeth. “This is my brother, Yussef,” her husband said, looking at her from the corner of his eye, pausing to allow the words to sink in. Emilie looked at him without understanding, searching her brain for clues to what exactly he might have meant by “brother.” “My wife, Emilie,” he added without bothering to look at Yussef (the tall man, as she called him in her head). If he said anything else, she doesn’t remember. Her mind was in a thick fog. She vaguely recalls him clicking his heels like a toy soldier (did she invent this silly detail to get back at him, to make him look ridiculous and out...