Loom: A Novel

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167 Sh e must t ell h im. Before they leave and maybe never see each other again, for being neighbors is no guarantee that they will. How kind his gifts. How she could tell the figurines apart with her eyes closed, her finger her guide. How she saw him in her mind’s eye, brows knotted, bent over, his eyes intently watching the shape as it sprung to life between his hands. Even now, when she knows it was his wife who had carved them, she holds on to the thought. The eggs she kept in her pocket, sometimes a few at a time, reminding her every time she touched them that there was something beyond this, this house in the middle of nowhere with children who had stopped talking; something salvageable still. She had been right all along: human connection held them sanely together, like the string that had once held Shirin’s rosary together. For each movement of the finger, a bead stands briefly alone, heaved by prayer. Break the rosary, as Eva once did, and we are lost, scattered to the winds. As she herself had done, when she accused Yussef and sent him to the asylum to die among strangers. Each statue a story. The boy with the untucked shirt perhaps David himself as a child, impatient and unkempt, racing out to play. The girl squatting with her right hand extended to pluck a flower or caress a stray dog must have haunted his dreams with her beseeching eyes. Cupid with his round belly and dimpled knees. Shepherds with tattered clothes that David must have seen in children’s books, because she has yet to see a shepherd in Scarabee. Children with the placid faces of beings who keep too much to themselves. And there were the eggs. Holding them in her hand she could almost sense a beat, feel them almost opening. Of all the 168 creations he gave her they are the most difficult to understand, the most hidden and closed. She casts a last look around her. Salma, the kitchen scoured clean and the dishes washed and dried, is all smiles and jolly busyness. Emilie would have never managed this on her own. Would have left the kitchen a sorry mess, dirty pots and pans strewn like the dead in the wake of a battle. “The kitchen looks great,” she says. Salma smiles in return. Emilie must remember to be more mindful. Kindness is harder to carry out than most people think. Another half an hour and the meat will be falling off the bones. In the living room, her son and her granddaughter are watching TV. She strokes Marie’s lovely red hair and stops to laugh at the juggler performing for a cheering audience. She folds the blanket she used earlier and leaves it on the arm of the sofa. George looks up and asks where she is heading. She puts a finger on her lips and he doesn’t insist, happy to return to the juggler. He laughs, his belly shaking. She grabs the figurines from her bag, all seventeen of them, and puts them with the eggs in her pockets. Josephine is staring out the window. She stands next to her. “Tomorrow it will be over,” she tells her. How she has neglected her daughter. “When Eva comes, we will show her a good time.” Her daughter ’s shoulders stoop. How will she help her? She walks up to his room and lays the content of her pockets on the desk. When she begins to talk, he stares at her. She prefers to look away because she is afraid he might become bored with the words she is saying, the Arabic he doesn’t understand. She tries to explain why she came to him in the middle of a blizzard, why he had been leaving her his wife’s art. She thinks the two of them were waiting to be found. She is returning his gifts, she says, because they are what remain of his wife. She doesn’t think it was an accident, his leaving them to her by the clearing. She thinks his wife is looking after him. After her, too, perhaps , she says more quietly, afraid she has gone too far. “But,” she raises her head and looks frankly at him, “when you leave your home you break a trail. Do you understand? Boundaries become less . . .” she waves her hand in the air, “solid.” There...