Sandpiper

I used to sit where the water rolled in, rolled in, its frilled white edge nibbling at the sand, withdrawing to leave great damp half-moons of a darker, more brownish beige. I would sit inside one of those curves, at the very midpoint, fitting my body to its contour, and wait. The sea unceasingly shifts and stirs and sends out fingers, paws, tongues to probe the shore. Each wave coming in is different.

For eight summers we have been coming here; to the beach house west of Alexandria. The first summer had not been a time of reflection; my occupation then had been to love my husband in this—to me—new and different place. […] To love this new him, who had been hinted at but never revealed when we lived in my northern land, and who after a long absence had found his way back into the heart of his country, taking me along with him. We walked in the sunset along the waters edge, […] my hand, pale bronze in his burnt brown, my face no doubt mirroring his, aglow with health and love—a young couple in a glitzy commercial for a two-week break in the sun.

I looked out to sea and, now I realize, I was trying to work out my coordinates. I thought a lot about the water and the sand as I sat there watching them meet and flirt and touch. I tried to understand that I was on the edge, the very edge of Africa; that the vastness ahead was nothing compared to what lay behind me. But even though I’d been there and seen for myself its never-ending dusty green interior, its mountains, the big sky, my mind could not grasp a world that was not present to my senses.

I should have gone. No longer a serrating thought but familiar and dull. I should have gone. In that swirl of amazed and wounded anger, knowing him as I did, I first sensed that he was pulling away from me, I should have gone. I should have turned, picked up my child, and gone.

Um Sabir, my husband’s old nanny, does everything around the house, both here and in the city. I tried at first to help, but she would rush up and ease the duster or the vacuum cleaner from my hands. “Shame, shame. What am I here for? […] What have you to do with these things?” My husband translated all this for me and said things to her which I came to understand meant that tomorrow I would get used to their ways.

She fits herself into my body and I put my arm over her until she shakes it off. In her sleep she makes used of me; my breast is sometimes her pillow, my hip her footstool. I lie content, glad to be used. I hold her foot in my hand and dread the time—so soon to come—when it will no longer be seemly to kiss the dimpled ankle.

Um Sabir washes all the fruit and vegetables in red permanganate. This is for my benefit, since Lucy crunches cucumbers and carrots straight out of the greengrocer’s baskets. But then she was born here. And now she belongs. If I had taken her away then, when she was eight months old, she would have belonged with me.

Yes, I am sick, but not just for home. I am sick for a time, a time that was and that I can never have again. A lover I had and can never have again.

I watched him vanish—well, not vanish, slip away, recede. He did not want to go. He did not go quietly. He asked me to hold him, but he couldn’t tell me how.

A fairy godmother, robbed for an instant of our belief in her magic, turns into a sad old woman, her wand into a useless stick. I suppose I should have seen it coming. My foreignness, which had been so charming, began to irritate him. My inability to remember names, to follow the minutiae of politics; my struggles with his language; my need to be protected from the sun, the mosquitoes, the salads, the drinking water. He was back home, and he needed someone he could be at home with, at home.

That narrow stretch of sand knows nothing in the world better than it does the white waves that whip it, caress it, collapse onto it, vanish into it. The white foam knows nothing better than those sands that wait for it, rise to it, and suck it in. But what do the waves know of the massed hot, still sands of the desert just twenty—no, ten feet beyond the scalloped edge? And what does the beach know of the depths, the cold, the currents just there, there—do you see it? —where the water turns a deeper blue.