“What good would it do for you to know Claire’s story?”
“Good? It would do no good for anyone. Maybe for you. It might open some kind of window for you. I don’t know what might fly through it with you trapped in this unhappy place. But as for me. As for me and you, together, waiting here, I wonder about her past so that we can learn to tell the story of her life if she had lived.”
The thought of this under the blindfold made him feel more helpless.
“Don’t—there’s nothing—that’s the whole point. I don’t want to—I can’t believe you’d want to do this. I’d rather you torture me, if I had a choice.”
“No, you wouldn’t. Believe me.”
“You just said murder is commonplace in Pakistan. Suicide bombs. Drone attacks. Yesterday you spoke about how openly people grieve here. Well, would you ever ask those people to tell you about what they’re grieving? Are they grieving over the ones they’ve lost, or for the stories their loved ones won’t get the chance to live and no one will ever tell? You can’t know those stories. Claire was nineteen. If she were ninety, maybe you could know them then.”
He was grinding his teeth between sentences, wanting to tear away the blindfold and run out the door.
“When you were nineteen,” he said, “would you have imagined a time when you’d be sitting in this fucking building across from a bound and blindfolded man while trying to drum up a ransom for some kind of failed cause? I can’t fucking believe this. Just leave me alone.”
He heard how much he’d raised his voice, and he waited while the sound of it echoed off the bare walls, but Saabir didn’t come through the door.
“When I was nineteen,” she said calmly, “I was a theater major at a small college in upstate New York. One summer, we did a performance of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming. Do you know that play?”
“No, I don’t know that play,” he said, shaken and exasperated.
“There’s only one character that’s a woman. The other five are men. I was too young for that part, all of us were, but the director wanted to do Pinter. So I was Ruth. I was in love with the boy who played Teddy. That was my husband in the play. We would rehearse for hours, you know, in this theater with no air-conditioning. It was one of those summers where the world outside the theater seemed flattened by the heat. The grass dried to the point that it looked like someone had set it on fire, and in the afternoon, when the wind blew, which it always did, the trees under that sun seemed gray rather than green. You couldn’t be outside for long through this string of ninety-degree days, so after a while, it seemed like our rehearsals, and then our performances, were the lives we were living. And afterward, that boy—because he was a boy then—that boy and I would go up to his apartment, and we would make love almost till dawn on that bed, with the window fan blowing the barely cool air over our bodies. I don’t mean constantly make love. I mean the kind of lovemaking where you would finish, you know, both of you calling out in the way that it seems rare when it’s still new to you, and you’d both be almost slippery with the sweat on your skin, and the sounds of passing cars and insects out your window would lull you to sleep so that you didn’t know you were asleep, or you were simultaneously sleeping and listening to the world outside, then one of you would lay a finger on the still-damp place on the other’s neck, or in the small of his back if he’d turned away from you, and then you would be probing other places, and his breath and the sound of your own blood would rise and recede into the streets again. It was like that then. It was like waves. And after you woke up in the morning, you felt shy, a bit, at what your body revealed about who you were, so maybe the first thing you’d say were lines from the play. The last thing I want is a breath of air. Why do you want a breath of air? I just do. But it’s late. I won’t go far. I’ll come back.”
Her words hung in the air, and forgetting how he was bound, he tried to lift his hand to reach for them. As she was speaking, he had forgotten his anger, and for the first time, really, he’d almost forgotten where he was, and the heat of the late-spring Karachi morning had become the heat of Midwestern July. Only she’d said upstate New York, hadn’t she? He sat still, waiting for her to continue.
“So that’s where I was when I was nineteen, and I don’t know that I aspired to be anywhere else. Well, no, of course I did. But when you remember, I mean when I think back—I can’t recall any particular performance, any particular rehearsal. It’s as if they all happened at the same time. I remember the nights afterward. If Claire had lived, I wonder how she would remember age nineteen, years from now.”
“She was not like you.”