A Foreign Language

By Catherine Lacey: Part Two

But Tomasa woke up early and found Ismail splayed wildly beside her—hips torqued, arms thrown wide, palms upward. It had always been like this; he fell asleep each night flat on his back, orderly and contained, but entered the next day looking like a toy that had been tossed aside. What happened to him in the night?

In the living room, Nile was tucked on his side on the couch, facing away from the windows. Tomasa stepped softly past him—it felt indecent to look—and after closing the bathroom door she stared at herself in the mirror, barely understanding where or who she was. She’d spent the night treading water between waking and sleeping and her eyes did not hide this fact.

A sense of disquiet crept over her, a sense that she was being watched by some malevolent force, but it was only the cat, Molasses, who was narrowing his eyes at her from the tiled floor. Tomasa turned on the tap to begin her morning ablutions and the cat rushed away, offended, as usual, by the faucet.

It had been a strange night. No, again, not strange. That word kept coming up, but it wasn’t the right word.

In the last few months Tomasa had often been uncertain of which language she was thinking in, an inner unsteadiness that sometimes bled outward. Her thoughts shifted constantly between the words of her everyday life and those of her childhood and subconscious, a vertigo she hoped would be temporary. She had left her native country years ago now, and it was still unclear to her whether it was possible to leave that language behind, too, or whether she would want to dissolve it away, even if she could. But ever since she and Ismail had come across Nile in the park that day with the sunset, she’d felt an even greater insufficiency: all words now seemed to be unable to do what they should do—to be clear, to convey the right thing. She wasn’t sure how to tell Ismail about the late summer she met Nile, about the many nights she slept over in his apartment, while she also failed to form the words to ask Ismail that one simple question—How do you know him?

Yet Tomasa was most frustrated by her inability to simply describe this new sensation between the three of them. There was a slight effervescence to it, but what did that mean? It was a positive feeling, a pleasurable one, though it was also a little exasperating, even tiring at times, and then it would bloom into something easy and bright again. The hours she and Ismail and Nile had spent talking to each other, she felt she had another, hidden body inside her body that was trying to outrun something while also remaining perfectly still. And yet putting it that way implied something imprecisely dramatic.

Tomasa had been washing her face as she was thinking all this over, trying to get under the rock of it, but her thoughts had stalled in fatigue and she came back to herself to find she was just standing there, pressing a towel into her forehead.

In the kitchen, she tried to silently carry out the rites of the espresso pot, hoping not to wake Ismail or Nile, but also half-hoping they’d join her and un-lonely the morning.

For the last week she’d been dreaming constantly of her hometown, dreams that were all spoken in her first language, and with those familiar words and places came people she hadn’t seen in years—the man she’d left, her brother, the ghosts of her parents, former neighbors, classmates from childhood. They told Tomasa everything they’d been doing in the time since she’d vanished, everything she’d missed. They told her who had been murdered, who had gone mad, whose house had burned down, and which girls had matured into profound beauty and married respectably and despite all that good fortune had still given birth to stillborns. The man she’d formerly promised herself to had immediately married someone else, he told her, because it made no difference if it was her or anyone. He had reached this conclusion, he explained, as if his whole life had been an experiment to prove the replaceability of people and the lie of love. He had burned all his poems, he told her plainly.

The other townspeople in her dreams casually asked Tomasa if she was still alive, and her brother wanted to know if she’d return to this place once she was finally dead some day.

The sun was higher now, the kitchen brighter. Tomasa had finished one cup of coffee. How long might Ismail and Nile keep sleeping? Tomasa’s mother had only ever told her one thing about marriage, but Tomasa had been barely eleven at the time, and her mother was dying of cancer and often did not make much sense. And yet her voice had been so clear when she said, Good men sleep the deep and untroubled sleep of good men while a good woman will never truly know rest.

In those last months her mother had regularly announced she was casting vicious spells on certain neighbors she’d never cared for, and one of the only things she could ingest was a bitter tea that aided in her discussions with the spirits. The night she finally died she departed without an apparent struggle or sweat or moaning. She’d seemed pleased, even triumphant, to be released from this place.

But Tomasa typically slept just fine, and sometimes she wondered if that meant she wasn’t a good woman. She didn’t take last night’s sleeplessness as evidence of some sudden goodness but rather as a side effect of an extra body in their apartment overnight. They’d never hosted a guest, and they never brought any part of a party back to their place—half-drunk, half-injured—and now the morning light seemed to have an almost guilty slant. But guilty of what? No. Guilty wasn’t the right word either.

She imagined settling into the armchair in the living room and watching Nile sleep his good-man sleep, but she wouldn’t do that, and anyway how did she know what kind of man he was? She hardly knew him, or whatever knowledge she held must have been outdated by now. Still—she didn’t let herself watch him sleep. She stayed in the kitchen, leaning against the counter, mentally re-tracing the events of the previous night.

The sensation of a whole side of Nile’s body pressed into hers as they helped him home had been startling, and the pressure of her hip bone against his as they made their way up the stairs had been almost entirely too much. She remembered much of Nile’s physicality from the August they’d first met—the tilted way he walked, the long scar on his shoulder, the sudden hand gestures he made when he told a story—but it seemed now that her years with Ismail had erased the memory of what Nile’s body had felt like against her own. By the time they’d reached their apartment door, she sensed her cheeks had flushed a hot red, so she’d rushed to the kitchen to put the kettle on, hoping the color would abate in the meantime.

But she was still blushing when she came back to the living room with the tea. Ismail raised his eyebrows. Is it that obvious? she thought in his direction, but he had already returned his attention to Nile, the two of them talking, animated, about someone they knew in common, and as they laughed, Tomasa felt her face finally cooling down. So it was fine. It was nothing. Nothing’s happening. It was just that they all three had so much to talk about, so much to catch up on, and this indescribable nervousness was simply the sensation of lost time being regained. That was all.

They’d stayed up for another two hours or so after delivering Nile to their sofa. It was already past midnight and both Ismail and Tomasa repeatedly made half-moves toward getting ready for bed, then not following through. Nile had assured them that he didn’t think anything in his leg was actually broken, that it was just a bad muscle strain from landing on it strangely, but when, at one point, he tried to readjust himself and winced, Tomasa and Ismail practically ran to his side, just as they had in the street, she to his shoulders and he to his knees.

When Ismail was a child, his father had taken him on a survival trip into the woods where he taught his son how to make a fire and how to forage and, unexpectedly, how to recognize and set a fractured bone after their dog had stepped on some loose stones, fell into a ravine, and needed to be carried out. This knowledge came back to Ismail as he touched Nile’s leg, tenderly searching for something out of place or swollen. Does this feel ok? And this? Tomasa put a hand on their patient’s shoulder as Ismail moved his hands up Nile’s leg, one hand on each side, first the ankle, then each side of his shin, then there was a delicate discovery of Nile’s knee, the edges, the tendons, the soft underside, and when Ismail pressed a thumb lightly into Nile’s thigh to find the femur, Nile’s breath tensed and vibrated slightly in his throat as he inhaled. But it wasn’t in pain, not at all. Tomasa noticed what seemed to be tears in Nile’s eyes, though he was also faintly smiling.

Does it hurt here?

No, Nile said, softly, as if breaking some kind of spell.

At that, Ismail pronounced the injury a sprain and lowered himself to the floor beside the couch, leaning against the armchair but staying close, as if Nile were a fire and the night was cold.

For the first time since they’d returned to the apartment, a few moments passed without anyone filling the air with words or a story or laughter, and for a moment Nile wondered whether he might have manufactured his bike accident in order to remain near the two of them. The couple must have told each other what had happened between Nile and each of them, years ago—hadn’t they? And that’s why it felt like this? And that’s why he was here in their apartment?

Tomasa had backed away from Nile at the same moment Ismail had, but she’d also felt a strong impulse to touch his hair—longer and wilder than she remembered it. Instead she took a seat on the small red ottoman, pushing it away a little so she could better see both of them, her husband and this man she long ago assumed she would never see again.

Ismail then told the story of the camping trip with his father, how he’d learned how to set his dog’s injured leg and find fresh water and forage. All three were relieved to have this story on which to affix their focus rather than on the sudden uncertainty in the room. Following Ismail, Tomasa recounted how her mother had taught her how to grow and use various herbs for everything from muscle cramps to opening the third eye. She knew this knowledge was something she’d keep forever, that anything you learn early enough tends to remain, hardened, no matter how helpful or useless, in your life.

You lose everything else, don’t you? she asked no one and no one replied.

And don’t you have that tincture for pain, Ismail asked, and Oh yes, how could I forget, Tomasa said, and suddenly she was holding a dropper over Nile’s open mouth, watching the dark jewels of it land on his tongue. Instinctually, Nile reached up as if to help guide her hand, but only the tips of two fingers had grazed the side of her palm and a current passed between the two of them that Ismail also felt as he watched.

They kept talking after that, telling stories of home, those faraway and long-abandoned places. Tomasa knew so many of Ismail’s anecdotes, but she also noticed how he always told them slightly differently—new details came up or old ones fell away. And as he spoke now there was a new vibrancy in his face; it was almost as if his eyes had changed color. Or was it just that they never stayed up so late? It was nearly two in the morning and the conversation kept finding new turns, and they all felt both at ease and uneasy as their bodies subconsciously and constantly calculated the volume of air between this body and that body, the negative space, the distance between them.

At two, Tomasa had been the one to wave the white flag of exhaustion, and soon they began retreating toward sleep. Once he’d shut the bedroom door, Ismail had wondered if he and Tomasa might finally confess how they each knew Nile, if he might finally hear himself detailing their encounter to his wife—or was that too large a confession so late at night? They hadn’t done so. They’d kissed each other goodnight and held each other a while before rolling apart to pass the night untouched. Soon everyone had fallen asleep except for Tomasa, who stared at the ceiling for a while, slept shallowly, and woke thrice before getting up to face the day.

The way the morning light was hitting that pale blue bowl on the kitchen countertop—creating such luster in the ceramic’s glaze—it made Tomasa wish (yet again) that she had learned to paint. She studied the edge of the bowl as if she knew how to render it in oils, or as if she were examining a painting that she’d already made. Was it fine enough? Was it real enough?

The bowl had been an engagement gift from the locally famous potter in her hometown. The potter was much older than Tomasa, but close in age to her never-was husband; the two had grown up in neighboring houses and had come to see each other as brothers. Tomasa knew it hadn’t really been fair of her to take the bowl for herself when she ended that relationship by leaving town—and so abruptly, and without telling anyone—but it was the choice that she had made and it was too late to unmake it. Now, when she used the bowl or even just looked at it, she never regretted smuggling it away from him, though she wasn’t entirely without shame. It was just that she’d had so few possessions back then, and the bowl had seemed like a crucial talisman that she would need to arrive wherever it was that she was going. The bowl seemed to promise her an eventual home, a real home, in this new country. She had packed it carefully for her long journey, and looked after it the whole way through—wrapping and rewrapping it in a wool sweater, holding it on her lap during a rickety bus journey on a mountainous road—and now it had finally arrived here, with her, somewhere she both lived and felt alive.

But just a month prior, Tomasa had received a letter from Luci—the only friend from back home she trusted with her new address—and Luci had written to say that the famous potter had fallen on hard times. His wife had been bed-ridden for a year now, their young child had died of a fever, and recently the potter had developed mysterious pains in his hands that often prevented him from carrying out his work. There were fewer and fewer pots, fewer bowls, and with every passing day this light blue bowl—oval shaped and perfectly irregular—seemed like evidence of Tomasa’s culpability in his fate, as if by taking this beautiful object that didn’t entirely belong to her, she was secretly the one to blame for his suffering.

Tomasa had always been, from a very young age, fluent in every kind of guilt, a willing sponge for the guilt of others, a magnet that pulled ambient guilt from any group and transformed it into her debt to settle. This is the problem she will live with, to lesser and greater degrees, all her life, right up until her final weeks alive, when, finally, in her last decrepit days of breathing, the self-inflicted burden of being the world’s guilt-eater will depart from Tomasa, leaving her with the freedom to die a clean death. But she doesn’t know this now. She cherishes the sky-blue bowl. She even cherishes the blame it points in her direction.

Then Ismail appeared at the threshold of the kitchen, interrupting her dwelling, rubbing at one eye and stretching the other arm. He went to her and held her and after they’d traded yawns they began to whisper, as if conspiring, about how the other slept or didn’t sleep, and about the images in their dreams—a train Ismail was unable to catch, a vineyard where Tomasa was working. Neither of them yet knew that Nile had just woken as well. He had turned onto his back and opened his eyes slowly, waking up in an unknown room, faintly confused but somehow delighted in his confusion, and as he sat up and looked to his left, he saw his hosts down the hall in the kitchen, embracing in the morning light.

The clearest memory Nile had kept of Ismail was from the weekend they’d met, some six years ago in the forest. Nile had been watching Ismail break down his campsite on their last morning together, collapsing the tent frame while Nile had sipped from his tin cup of coffee, feeling at once unburdened and serious, as if he knew he must have been approaching a difficult era, personally, but did not yet know what difficulties it would entail. Of Tomasa, whom he’d known a little longer but less profoundly, he remembered the moment they met more than anything that came after; her then-naive grip on this language had endeared her to him as she asked for directions in the street. All their mistranslations and misapprehensions had created a light, comical dynamic between the two, one that had carried them into a few weeks’ courtship. Like a well-made but nevertheless burnable paper airplane, this way of being together could not survive for long.

Over coffee Nile and Ismail and Tomasa decided it was only right to go out for breakfast, a reward for having stayed up late, praising Dionysus with all that wine. It was a cooler morning than this winter had yet brought; the chill enlivened them as much as the café’s warmth.

After they’d found a table in the corner and settled into it, Ismail spotted the previous night’s scandal in the opposite corner, by the windows, pawing at each other. The analyst wore a bright-yellow scarf around her neck and shoulders while the redhead, whose hair was disheveled and eyes raccooned with mascara, kept laying her head on the older woman’s shoulder and raising one corner of the scarf to her mouth, chewing on it like a puppy or a feral child.

Don’t all look at once, Ismail cautioned, but over there, by the windows—

So Nile quickly sent his eyes leftward, then Tomasa had to turn almost all the way around, ostensibly to readjust the peacoat she’d flung over her chair. Right away they noticed how the previous night’s illicit glisten had drained away from the adulterous couple, yet something solid did seem to remain. The analyst and the redhead held some of that worn triumph that a decades-enduring couple sometimes has. But how? It was obvious the affair couldn’t have been going for so long. And, what—was the girl even twenty-four, twenty-five?

As subtle as they’d tried to be, the analyst had noticed being noticed, and while holding eye contact with Ismail she raised her coffee cup, toasting the apparent tryst. Because that’s what it looked like, they all realized now. The three of them had been locked in conversation for hours at Rin’s house, had left at the same time, and now here they were, bleary at the café the morning after. It wasn’t untrue, it just wasn’t true in the way it would be naturally assumed. Or was it? Tomasa turned back to smile at the analyst, feeling analyzed, and almost a little too seen.

Having been spotted, that now familiar agitation grew between the three of them, a nervous energy they tried to dispel, yet again, by telling stories of home, old stories, origin stories, backstories. Nile considered but chose not to tell the couple about the afternoon when he and his best friend, at fourteen, had stolen two horses from the neighbor’s barn, and while Nile had been trotting his horse gingerly across the field, his friend’s mare had suddenly bucked and the boy had gone flying in a huge arc, the boy’s laughter sounding wild and clear until he landed on his head and was dead on impact.

But Nile did not tell this story, only thought of it briefly before recounting the time he went missing as a toddler but was found hours later in the sheep’s pen, napping amid the lambs. Ismail followed this with his favorite piece of self-mythology—the afternoon he’d wandered free from his mother at the market and made the logical choice to take apples from the vendors’ massive piles and hand them out to the beggars who sat on the ground. The vendors had watched him, frozen, unable to intervene, and once his mother found little Ismail again all she could do was pay for the pilfered fruit and carry him home, without a punishment, without a word.

Tomasa felt she didn’t have any stories like theirs, no charming evidence of her innocence. So few of her tales from childhood ended happily, or at least she couldn’t think of any of them now. What came to mind instead, for some reason, was what happened a week before she left her homeland, a detail she often omitted when people asked why she’d left everything she knew for a country she’d never even visited.

Tomasa had, she thought, loved the man she was engaged to marry—despite his inconstant rage, despite his having thrown her into a wall. Didn’t you have to love someone so intelligent who wrote so many love poems about you? Yet it was also true that Tomasa felt then, at twenty-two, that there was something about her impending nuptials that she did not understand, so she went to see the witch who lived in the hut on the edge of town. The witch knew immediately why Tomasa had come.

He’s sleeping with another woman, someone you know.

The witch’s psychic powers were not at play; in small towns, the betrayed is often the last to know of the betrayal, yet Tomasa only reacted with a blink.

But you do not care, do you?

I care, Tomasa said.

You do not care because you are in love with someone else.

Tomasa did not say anything to this. Perhaps she heard an owl’s call or perhaps she just imagined it.

It’s your friend.

Symptoms of being told a fact you have almost successfully denied include silence, nausea, and blushing.

And the reason you’re in love with her, the witch continued, is because she can—in a glance or by ignoring you or with a single word—cause you pain. This is what you must unlearn. You must teach yourself to stop meeting pain, or the threat of pain, with love.

Dominica. Beautiful Dominica with all her knife tricks and strange ways of dragging the backs of her hands across Tomasa’s body. Dominica, freakishly fair-haired and dark-eyed, who described her life as a perpetual game against God.

For this, you must leave this place and travel very far.