Winter falls early in Aatifa Wahabzadah's Tower Hamlets kitchen. The clock has fallen back, in the early Sunday hours, and it is now, suddenly, black as night, as Nouche, a diminutive Parisian, lights a Gaulloise Blonde at Aatifa's kitchen table. Her flame lights up the walls, the Arab scrawl framed over the furnace, the portraits of Aatifa's children, Omar's siblings. Omar, Aatifa's second son. Nouche's boyfriend. He sits across from her, in the dark, his black face briefly glowing in the flare.
Aatifa herself left the kitchen in the middle of preparations for dinner, in what now seems hours away, when it was afternoon still, which is, in fact, just minutes ago. Aatifa left to pick up the phone in the next room. They can hear her talking, through the kitchen door.
Aatifa's voice, from the sealed lounge, is both wildly exotic, and utterly familiar, depending on the point of observation. It's like Schrödinger's cat. In this quantum physicist's thought-experiment, a cat is locked in a sealed room, where the state of a particular subatomic particle determines whether it will live or die.
The catch is that the state of the particle, theoretically, is subjective, depending on whether or not we are looking. Until we open the door, the cat is thus famously, and absurdly, both alive and dead.
The cat may stand, tonight, for our glaring incapacity to grasp even the most basic facts of our own lives--let alone the world at large.
Back to Aatifa, still in the other room, still speaking Eritrean, on the phone. The couple here, sitting in the dark.
Nouche, the Parisian, in a little powder blue dress and maroon heels, hears a high-pitched chatter she associates with markets, with auctions, with, for some reason, red and white: with the cream of lacy, silk garments; and scarlet--with raw slabs of meat.
Omar hears his mother. He hears the easy conversation, the luminous flow, of kin, of blood. He hears his mother, talking to his sister, on the phone, her voice muted by the door. His baby sister, Abebeche, who got married at twenty-two this summer, and who will be three months pregnant this week.
Nouche's Gaulloise is a star between them in the dark. She would not have lit it in front of his mother, who neither smokes, or drinks, or wears, for that matter, the silk skirts and shiny, ultra-sheer stockings Nouche herself will favor. Nouche, who is thirty-eight, divorced, and childless. Not to mention slightly drunk, which, fortunately, is not something Aatifa would notice, as she has so rarely in her fifty-two years encountered a real-life bottle, its effects would take some actual pointing out.
Neither Nouche, nor Omar, is in fact, really, listening to Aatifa. The phone, the cat, the other room, the thin sheen of light peering from under the kitchen door, are all a bit beside the point. Here, dusk has fallen, an hour early, before dinner; night has descended over the kitchen counter, over a pale blue tea towel, over the open bowls and chopping boards strewn with peels and diced bits, a cleaver gleaming softly as Nouche, again, inhales.
Nouche is listening not to Aatifa but, instead, to Omar, whose lips glow in the dark. He, in turn, is miming words, words which, just minutes ago, lay scribbled between them, neatly lined in the open notebook on the table, and which now, like the terry towel, the food, the counter, the framed pictures, have disappeared into the wintertime night, so suddenly upon them. They float between them, now, those lines, as rumors only, tremors, on Omar's tongue. Words.
He whispers, That is how speech does
Silk on one side
Cheap, striped canvas on the other
Omar is, in fact, quoting Rumi, the Sufi master. He is quoting ancient Persian, muslim poetry.
He is, however, also talking about writing itself, drawing attention to the poems he himself has been writing, which is what the notebook, now near invisible on the table, contains. Drawing attention to the fact that these poems, silken as they may sound, were drafted, sketched out, fabricated. Voiced.
Nouche is listening to this as she smokes. She hears Omar's low, glowering notes emitted in the dark, spun between them, like silk. Inhaling, she sees both the sheen of speech, its finish, its glow--and, as she exhales, the Gaulloise going dim, she sees the matt canvas, the cheap linen, the drawing board, of Omar himself: his lips moving in the night, tongue and throat, to be guessed at only in the dark, the baritone of his chest, his heart. The other side of speech, the canvas, where this, his voice, is not yet art: it's craft. A man, laboring away.
Nouche knows about canvas. She is a painter. She knows about labor. She knows about coat upon coat of oils, layer after layer. She knows a silk gloss varnish from cheap, coarse linen, knows the front of her canvas, from the back.
They have been working together. Nouche paints tunnels, passages, things marked WAY OUT.
Omar talks.
His voice is a tunnel of its own, channeling Rumi, the Sufis, his childhood faith.
The faith of his mother, still talking, in the other room.
Aatifa has no way of knowing that with the Parisian at her kitchen table, she has not so much gained a daughter, as recovered a son. Omar could no more have told his mother what crack has done to his life over the past seventeen years, than he could have spoken to her from the grave. His mother has less conception, even, of drugs than she has of drink. The crack-house floors Omar used to wake on, five inches deep in waste, in discarded hypodermics, in strangers, stretched out on beds of splintered needles, sometimes dead for days.
Today, clean less than a year, Omar sits at his mother's table at dusk: a large, black outline against the kitchen tiles. The holy month of Ramadan has come and gone. Eid has come, with its tide of magnanimity and forgiveness, but nothing could have bridged the sheer abyss between life as he has known it until eleven months ago, and this, his mother's kitchen, except this single, miraculous fact, of sitting here clean.
This is one tunnel Omar has crossed, one passage he's traversed, one exit he's found.
Here he sits at the table, in the dark, with a beautiful woman, a woman from France.
She paints, he whispers.
Nouche listens. Omar has moved on to new lines, a new poem, one of his own, one from the sheets lying between them.
She spells
WAY OUT
Eyes closed
Ankles open
Like anything.. he continues, reciting from memory--the lines, the table, the kitchen, the notebook lost in the dark--..Like faith, like sin
WAY OUT
Is spelled
Backwards
Blind.
Blindly, he whispers. Baby.
Spelled
WAY IN
That's what it's called, the poem. IN. Unlike the painting it refers to, her painting, one she did awhile before. A painting she lugged all over the East End, one wet, windy day two months ago. A red canvas, a tunnel, glossed in a rock-hard coat of scarlet nail enamel. A red passage, ending, in the middle, in a single square, the fairest, faintest blue. Called OUT.
In the kitchen, today, they are tying her exit to his entrance, his ins to her outs: putting Omar's words to her image: a collaboration of sorts. He has been invited to read at the Whitechapel Day Center, the place where, not a year ago, they burned the clothes he came in in, while he lay hallucinating, crawling out of his own skin in the detox ward. Now, his peers, the small group left of those he came in with--Terri, Marquis, Anwar, have offered to host an evening of drugs-free street culture, with him, Omar, headlining. Nouche's tunnel paintings will be part of Omar's spoken word performance, with the borough of Tower Hamlets funding a video recording, to go onto the council website, and, of course, on YouTube.
Cameras. Lights.
Listening to Omar in the dark, in the Tower Hamlets kitchen, Nouche is closer than she has been in eighteen months, to the Paris world she left behind. The world of Soiree, of Alain Mouille, her TV host ex-husband. The Paris of rock starlets, of goblets and books, of authors and conceptual artists gathered around Mouille's table, of politics and couture and desire discussed under the cascading, pitch perfect crystal of studio armatures.
Aatifa, just now, bursts through the door, a tall, pitch dark woman in white robes, long fingers catching the switch on the wall.
Both Omar and Nouche sit blinking under the sudden floodlight, the neon strip crackling overhead.
What, Aatifa bellows, Are you two children sitting here for, in the dark?
She picks up the cleaver, and slashes an onion. Allah, she says, looking up at the wintertime clock. 'It's midnight,' she says, 'Before it's afternoon.'
It is Aatifa, that evening, who returns Nouche to the City of Lights. Aatifa, who was born not here, in Tower Hamlets, who, in fact, has relatively recently settled in the large, ground floor council flat. Aatifa has lived half her life in Hampstead, in the leafy North London ambassador's residency Omar grew up in.
To Aatifa, there has been no crackhead Omar. There is the baby she drove around with, in Addis Ababa, in the back of a white Peugeot 504, the driver in front sweating as he swerved the main potholes on the broad boulevards leading to her young diplomat husband's offices.
There's the toddler asleep in her lap, in Khartoum or Djibouti or Asmara, as a porter would appear from some terminal with her family's luggage; the stack of cases topping his head, the porter's short, bow legs, all mirrored across a marble airport floor.
There's the Omar ignoring the Dubai Zoo apes as he spent a blistering noon getting in and and out of a signal red push car, getting behind the wheel of his first ever automobile.
There is, to Aatifa, the Omar reading under the trees in the Hampstead garden, the tall youth running in place in the driveway, weightlessly moving on the concrete, suspended among the roses, as she would watch from the kitchen window; the long-limbed youth almost levitated over her lawn, until, in one split moment, she would look up and he would be gone, her lawn deserted, dust visibly whirling the air.
There is the man, tonight, at the council kitchen table.
The years between, in ways fundamentally inexplicable, not least to Aatifa herself, have, like Schrödinger's poor cat, been both dead and alive; have both happened and not happened, depending on the point of observation. Yes, of course, there has been the morning when Omar, instead of appearing around the Hampstead corner, pearly drops streaming into the soft terry cotton neck of his sweat suit, remained the dust in the air, the empty imprint on her lawn, an absence, suspended somehow in her driveway: something only waiting to happen. Does that mean it happened?
Of course there have been years in between. There were light-years, between the North London home, and the Tower Hamlets estate. The homeland coup, her husband's fall from grace, may have been the least of it. There has been murder. There's been death matching that of Omar's absence--his life, or what passed for it, carefully dissected from his mother, removed at the root. The root, which was his heart, in which the two, his mother and his need for a buzz, were both the same thing, and mutually exclusive.
Neither of them, Omar or his mother, will talk of the Omar hiding under his mother's white gown in the Addis car, as the young driver would speed them through the dark, through the night, where blood ran black, potholes filling up with bumps it bore no thinking about, a night too bewildering to even start organizing it in terms of kin or clan, coming or going, ins or outs.
When human ties, blood ties, become, just simply, blood..
When blood, instead of flowing, slow and luminous--the stream of life--starts simply pouring out into the street.. What does that mean in terms of Schrödinger's cat: what, then, is it, you're observing? What is it, even, that may or may not be happening?
Omar, like his mother, has things to remember and things to, more pressingly, forget. Questions, things to ask--and things better left unsaid. Questions, thoughts, to pose, and thoughts left alone, left to fester or die, in your head.
To Omar, up till the age of twenty-one, the impulse to forget may have been identical, to the one to hide in his mother's gowns. Up till the age of twenty-one, he and his mother would forget together, side by side, her slicing onions in the kitchen, him running in place in the driveway.
Then one day off he sprinted.
He must have run, at some point, into kids he didn't know, got offered a can of something he'd not seen before. Beer, a spliff, the usual perhaps on most Hampstead lawns, excluding, of course, his own. In any case. Forgetting, once tried among peers, separate from his own clan, proved a habit there was no turning back from. It became a need of its own, and then an absence, a negation in its own right, the way out--the empty imprint left in Aatifa's life, a massive black-out in his own. Did any of that ever happen?
Here he is in the kitchen, watching Nouche stretch her sheer, slender legs and click across the kitchen floor. Her back, in powder blue cashmere, is tiny, beside his mother's great white robe at the counter. Nouche runs the tap, her half-smoked Gaulloise hissing out. Nouche's back is soft as a kitten next to Aatifa's imposing taft, but just as straight; the women like negatives, somehow, of some same, basic principle. Aatifa was built to traverse the marble floors of one or the other North African terminal, a child asleep on her hip, a porter teetering under her cases, her robes and gowns. Nouche was made to be lit with perfection, crystal reflecting every small curve, every angle; to cross a Paris studio floor in her heels. Watching both women, side by side at the Tower Hamlets council kitchen counter, Omar is not sure wether to get on his knees, and kiss the ground they stand on--or to cry.
Aatifa shakes the onions from the board, into a pot, and hands the knife to Nouche, who sticks it under the tap, and slips it onto the drying rack. Both may be naturals when it comes to wielding big, razor knifes, to cutting away at the past--both have the shoulders, the posture to proof it.
Nouche did not grow up in Paris. She is from Marly-Gomont, a Northern hamlet of scrawny, home milked cows lost in flat fields stretching all round, like a massive, green crater; a place of inbred women gossiping under the church clock, its blunt little steeple Marly-Gomont's single aspiration, the one thing, lamely, reaching for the sky.
She married Mouille, the Paris TV host, at twenty-three, still in art school. A large, gregarious man, with a lust for getting to the bottom, a man who turned her inside out. She hates him, still, with a vengeance, his penetrating mind, his endless probings, his showy, moneyed appetites, all leading nowhere, dead-ending in a shallow, sordid divorce.
She now lives in a single room in the East End, opposite the local mosque. This is where she met Omar, three weeks clean. Eleven months ago. On the street, thrown out of the building, where he had gone to pray.
Crackhead Omar. The one who, like the cat, is, and isn't, here, today, in Aatifa's kitchen. Crackhead Omar had lived in the street, on whatever he could pilfer from the pavement, from the stones. He was banned from hospitals and hostels, had been barred from every shop or store in Tower Hamlets, was routinely thrown out at church fetes and charity bazars, was stopped at the door at the NHS; was turned away, that morning, at the Brick Lane Mosque.
Nouche had just stepped from her door, to unlock her bike, her third in two months, chained to the grill fence across the street, right before the entrance, where, she hoped, the constant coming and going of slippered men, all through the night, would somehow safeguard it. Their murmurings, escaping from the soft-lit hallway, the stained glass windows, would, like a mantra, a spell, keep the bike safe, she'd pray, from the thieving Brick Lane night, each night, till dawn.
Omar had sat by the doors, that morning, on the ground, in a new white shirt and too-wide pants, as she clicked into the street. A dark face, like any other, perhaps a bit more anguished, more determined, more raw. There was something about him, she'd found, halfway across the road, herself thinking, for no reason at all in the world. Just that. There is something about him.
The bike was gone.
What Aatifa doesn't know is that, instead of gaining a daughter, with Nouche, she has recovered her son. To Aatifa, there is no Crackhead Omar. There is no crack. There is little Omar, and there's the man she knows, without having to check, to be sitting behind her, at the table, as she stirs the pot.
Of course, there have been light-years, between the North London driveway, her fitted Hampstead kitchen, her Aga--and this, the cramped counter, the chipped little council furnace. There has been murder. There's been another coup, a revolution. There's been blood. She has lost uncles, cousins.
Salam, her daughter.
There has been death, matching that of Omar's absence, of whatever was left of his life--the Tree of Death, built from broken needles, like a skeleton Christmas tree, that he hulked under, on a crack house floor; the people sleeping beside him, to never wake again.
Aatifah lost another child.
There's been death, matching Omar's--bone by bone.
Has any of it happened? She empties a bowl of mushrooms in the pot. The ijeras are prepared, her wat is bubbling away. Aatifah hands the bowl and the cutting board to Nouche, who leaves them dripping beside the cleaver in the rack. Behind them, Omar's chair scrapes on the lino. He appears beside the women at the counter, his tall, broad back sandwiching Nouche's blue sweater to his mothers gown, his large hands holding nothing, not a clue, to any of it. Wielding nothing but a towel, the powder blue square; his mother's dish cloth.
Nouche had left the painting, the one with the square at the end of the red tunnel, the one called OUT, at Omar's house, that night, months ago now, the wet and windy day she had taken it to her dealer, in Shoreditch, only to find the window dark, the walls empty, the gallery closed. She had stood on the pavement that day, in the rain, with the painting, thirty-eight years old, childless, divorced, and now, also, officially, careerless. Moneyless. Poor.
She had, still carrying the canvas, passed a different gallery then, around the corner. Billie Jean's.
Billie Jean, who tonight, at Aatifah's wintertime counter, is further away than Marly-Gomont or even Addis, but who, then, that rainy August day, being a recovering addict herself, had both held an inspirational talk at Omar's Whitechapel Day Center, and had a succesful show of her paintings in the thriving Shoreditch gallery around the corner from Nouche's, which was dead.
Tonight, Billie Jean is remote, a shadow, distantly involved in the project Omar and Nouche are working on, the spoken word performance at the Whitechapel Day Center. The poem, IN, the painting, OUT.
The notebook is still on the table. Omar's lines now lie out in the open, exposed under the neon fixture. It doesn't matter, one way or the other: he knows them by heart. He dries the dishes, as Nouche washes, and his mother stirs. He's not sure Nouche gets the poem. He doesn't know. The piece itself reflects a tunnel, the one he does know, the one he traversed, his own WAY OUT. Out of one life, which was dead, the one spent under the needle tree, the Tree of Death--and into the next, which is here, tonight, in the Tower Hamlets kitchen: his feet on the ground, the very same ground, holding up these two women. The way in.
Does she get that? Does she get this, that he is loving her, he is half mad with desire and gratitude, just to be happening beside her?
And that this is the way in?
And if not, if she doesn't get it--is this, what he feels for her, still happening?
He doesn't know. He has no answers, just the dish cloth, which he uses, serving the women--that, and the sense, in his chest, that this is his life, this is the way in; this is faith. The faith of his childhood. That this is it, it's what Rumi was on about. The God thing.
Billie Jean, tonight, is remote, a distant chink in the IN/OUT project, involved with the council, with funding the video, the cameras, lights, Nouche had been conjuring up as Omar recited his poem at the kitchen table in the dark. Now, at the counter, it is Aatifa who transports Nouche back to the City of Lights.
To Aatifah, in ways unfathomable even to her, there is no in-between. There's the concourses she carried Omar across on her hip, the chilled, shiny floors. There's the North African palaces her family were invited into, the packed mud walls reaching straight for the sky, a setting sun slanting in through a port hole high up in a crest, the air descending warm and gold like honey in the cool sanctity below.
To hear Aatifa speak, tonight, there has never been anything in the world, but elegance, and grace. Anything else is, like Schrödinger's cat, in the eye of the beholder, a mere question of perspective--a lack of observation.
Omar has not seen his taut, intense girlfriend this loose, this happy, in weeks. She has returned to the table, her legs pulled up under her, her small feet, her pearly toes, bare in their stockings.
She listens, as Aatifa is describing the Dubai Zoo, little Omar climbing in and out of the seat of the red toy car, Aatifa watching from an airconditioned shelter; Nouche listens as Aatifa moves on to a banquet in the Dubai hotel, skipping gaily to dances back in Addis, the women in their robes moving across the floor like pieces on a chess board under the white, modernist trellis, the concrete palisades, out under the stars.
Music and lights, he thinks, folding both women into the warmth, the light, the happy rhythm of his chest.
Nouche had been happy, and loose, that rainy, windy August night. She'd been drunk. She'd stretched out on her black sheets. She'd been feeling Omar, in the hard-bodied arms reaching under her, with exhilarating power, lifting her ass from the bed. Her feet were slung over the straight shoulders before her.
Omar, right then, was seeing her. He saw her red passage, glossy like the tunnel, the painting, left by Nouche earlier that evening against his own kitchen counter. He was burning up, his desire for her, his own girlfriend, making him insane. He was having visions, all of her, and of her legs slung over his shoulders, his hands under her, pulling her in: the only way out. He came, shamefully, not even imagining his own dickmanship; his own triumph--but hers, her long, lithe-limbed, languid contractions.
Music and lights.
The next morning had been equally rainy. Omar had stood in his kitchen at nine, sliding away from the fridge door the painting, wrapped in plastic, still wet from its trip all over Shoreditch, from one gallery to the next, the day before. This was an abysmal August, a BBC weather voice announced, as Omar stood on the tiles, staring at the open fridge. It was the holy month of Ramadan, still, and he had slept soundly, of course, again, all the way through the pre dawn meal.
Verily, Omar thought, staring at a tray of raw steak, left by Nouche the night before, There is a blessing in Suhar.
The night before. Nouche had lain on her black sheets, looking down the mounds of her breasts, down her own creamy belly, to the smooth, silvery crest of her vulva. At the shoulders before her, the strong, toned arms. Billie Jean was holding her up with one arm, the other inside her.
Billie Jean is clean, and, unlike Nouche, stone cold sober. She has no excuse. Doesn't need one. This is her thing, the one place where she cannot, and will not, hold back. She suffers the disgrace of being here, at all, not just in the room, but on the planet. Being here, with all her brain cells intact, all her nerve ends zinging. She bears it and grins.
Billie Jean takes each fresh day on the jaw, minute by goddamn minute, breath after fucking breath. She will not go back to anaesthetics, not to heroin, not to crack: she chooses to be here, if it kills her.
It is this determination, this lion-heartedness, that Nouche, looking down her own legs, is giving in to, this fearlessness, this choice. Nouche wants it, all of it, yielding in radiant waves to the great cat before her. Billie Jean, she thinks, is meat, bloody and raw. Just like Omar.
If Omar is clasping himself in both hands, seeing Nouche, her open legs, her lazy, luminous glow, at this particular moment, and Nouche, under Billie Jean, is mouthing, Omar--what, of all this, in Schrödinger's terms, is actually happening?
Aatifa would insist on grace. On elegance. She, tonight, this dark, October evening, insists on the City of Lights. It is global, Aatifa's city, boundless, stretching from Addis to Dubai, from Mecca to Asmara. It includes Marly-Gomont, and lights up even the Tower Hamlets estate. It is radiant, like the stockinged, languid woman at her table, not quite a daughter, perhaps, but here, tonight, happening, to her son.
Both, Omar and Nouche, that August night, had looked down their own bodies, had stared down, shuddering, at their own crotches, thinking, fucking hell. Both had been happy, shattered, grateful, appalled. Alive.
It is the next morning, that the rest kicks in, all this, the weather, the rain, the wind, the painting, still bubble wrapped in Omar's arms, as he carries it up the stairs, the dark, dusty Brick Lane staircase opposite the mosque. She left it in his kitchen, the night before, drunk, dismal. He's promised to take it round.
Here he is, key in hand, grateful to be of use. He fiddles with the door, which is open, unlocked. He picks up the canvas, nine months clean and sober, prepared to take life on life's terms if it kills him. His determination matches Billie Jean's, still sleeping, bone by bone, by bone. Omar walks in the room, carrying the painting, the red passage, the WAY OUT, before him--determined to be alive, to be here now, to be in.
