I put my glass on the ledge, where a row of her potted geraniums were dripping water. “I think I agree with General Sahib.”
Reassured, the general nodded and went back to the grill.
We all had our reasons for not adopting. Soraya had hers, the general his, and I had this: that perhaps something, someone, somewhere, had decided to deny me fatherhood for the things I had done. Maybe this was my punishment, and perhaps justly so. It wasn’t meant to be, Khala Jamila had said. Or, maybe, it was meant not to be.
A FEW MONTHS LATER, we used the advance for my second novel and placed a down payment on a pretty, two-bedroom Victorian house in San Francisco’s Bernal Heights. It had a peaked roof, hardwood floors, and a tiny backyard which ended in a sun deck and a fire pit. The general helped me refinish the deck and paint the walls. Khala Jamila bemoaned us moving almost an hour away, especially since she thought Soraya needed all the love and support she could get--oblivious to the fact that her well-intended but overbearing sympathy was precisely what was driving Soraya to move.
SOMETIMES, SORAYA SLEEPING NEXT TO ME, I lay in bed and listened to the screen door swinging open and shut with the breeze, to the crickets chirping in the yard. And I could almost feel the emptiness in Soraya’s womb, like it was a living, breathing thing. It had seeped into our marriage, that emptiness, into our laughs, and our lovemaking. And late at night, in the darkness of our room, I’d feel it rising from Soraya and settling between us. Sleeping between us. Like a newborn child.
FOURTEEN
_June 2001_
I lowered the phone into the cradle and stared at it for a long time. It wasn’t until Aflatoon startled me with a bark that I realized how quiet the room had become. Soraya had muted the television.
“You look pale, Amir,” she said from the couch, the same one her parents had given us as a housewarming gift for our first apartment. She’d been tying on it with Aflatoon’s head nestled on her chest, her legs buried under the worn pillows. She was halfwatching a PBS special on the plight of wolves in Minnesota, half-correcting essays from her summer-school class--she’d been teaching at the same school now for six years. She sat up, and Aflatoon leapt down from the couch. It was the general who had given our cocker spaniel his name, Farsi for “Plato,” because, he said, if you looked hard enough and long enough into the dog’s filmy black eyes, you’d swear he was thinking wise thoughts.
There was a sliver of fat, just a hint of it, beneath Soraya’s chin now The past ten years had padded the curves of her hips some, and combed into her coal black hair a few streaks of cinder gray. But she still had the face of a Grand Ball princess, with her bird-in-flight eyebrows and nose, elegantly curved like a letter from ancient Arabic writings.
“You took pale,” Soraya repeated, placing the stack of papers on the table.
“I have to go to Pakistan.”