But Iman did not want the flickering images of the past to be part of the garden. War should stay out of here. Shaking windows, wailing women, burnt skin, the terrifying gleam in the whites of a young man’s eyes. Blood that was not menstrual, softness that was damaged flesh, stillness that was not sleep but death. She wished she could wash her mind of all these things. She breathed in the smell of the garden, touched the flowers. This was the present, and she was here inside it.
Salma felt light-hearted, confident that the holiday would be a success. When she was young, holidays had meant days on the beach, sticky sand and the roar of the Mediterranean. They also meant increased parental interference and telling off, tantrums caused by exhaustion and too much sun. Then, in university, there were trips with the Beloved club. Sometimes she would be so involved in the organisation that the trip itself would pass her by. Afterwards, she could not remember what they had seen or experienced exactly; she had been too busy, caught up with assessing whether her authority had been challenged or whether she had taken the correct decisions. It was meeting David that changed her. He took away most, if not all, of her anxieties, her sporadic harshness towards others and towards herself. With him she softened and learnt to enjoy those things that were essentially meant to be pleasurable but had descended into sources of stress.
When the signal on her phone improved, she sent a message to David. She did not phone the children. Instead she kept walking and the more she walked, the healthier and stronger she felt. Too warm now for a jacket, she took it off and tied it around her waist. She walked towards the sound of running water and when she reached the stream, she washed her face and then, on the spur of the moment, decided to take off her shoes and socks, make wudu and pray. The grass was her prayer mat, the wind a protector, her knees felt grounded to this particular piece of earth. She spoke to it and said, ‘Bear witness for me on the day I will need you to. On the day you will be able to speak and I will not. Say that I prayed here in this very spot and nowhere else.’ The sound of her voice, urgent and pleading, made her smile. She was acting out of character. Usually when it came to matters of faith, she was pragmatic and mild. But this place was something else.
She took out her phone. Amir, this is the last time I will write to you. This might sound lame, but I have come to my senses. It is not healthy to poke into decisions taken twenty years ago.
She was interrupted by the sounds of people talking as they walked through the forest behind her. She stopped and turned. There was the blur of red from a rucksack or a T-shirt, accompanied by a man’s short laugh. She waited for them to appear, prepared herself to smile and say a friendly hello. Instead the group passed along and when she picked up her phone again, she could not find a trace of what she had written. All the words had been swallowed up and disappeared.
She lay back on the grass. The sun shone directly above her and she covered her eyes with her arm. The sweat on her T-shirt started to cool, her skin permeated by the breeze. She pulled her jacket over her and that simple action, of drawing a cover over her arms, reminded her of bed sheets, the lightest of materials on a sultry night that was too hot for duvet or quilt. She closed her eyes and the darkness was not black. It had moving colours like running water. Her weight was on the ground, she wanted to roll over onto her side but felt she couldn’t. When she asked her clients to lie on their sides, she slipped a small pillow under their heads. But she was not at work; she was free to rest, to squander time, to let her mind run loose. If she opened her eyes now, she would see the sky through the trees, but she did not want to open her eyes. Later she would, but now she could not open her eyes. She dreamt that he found her lying down, that he left the group he had been walking with in the forest and found her ready, waiting for him. In the dream she is impatient, hardly needing encouragement or preamble, and pulls him to her in a hurry, desperate because there is only a short time, only a small chance, before the feeling is lost and everything else with it. Better this rush, better this grabbing, assertive and direct, linear without games, triumphant without strategy. There is more of her in this shadowy world, with more skin and stronger depths; she is not held back by mind or matter. Everything is permitted, there are no boundaries. It is one and the same between her and him, between who he is, familiar and unfamiliar, knowing her, but the end is up to her. Opening her eyes before it was completely over, she was wide awake to the last motion of her body, the surprise that was not a surprise but still out of her control.
Slowly, she sat up and looked around. Her phone made a sound. She picked it up. It was a message from Amir. I can smell you. She smelt of sweat and of wanting a shower. She started
