Cover Art: Pirate of Your Heart, by Dastid Miluka. Ink on paper, 2016, 42 x 30 cm. Private Collection. For inquiries about this piece, please contact us at art@thebrusselsreview.com.

 

Someone had decided this for her, that Samia would leave. No choice at all was offered, no notification of it given either. Just very loosely, one morning she was summoned and it was announced, you’re going. And days on end thereafter, in transit, she had to pound into her mind that she had another name, the one on the boarding documents. None other. That one. Samia nevermore. She was ordered to answer its call constantly, but to fully ignore the two syllables she had been born into. And again she had been trained to pronounce it over and over, on the long way to the terminal. Josephine, distinctly difficult to pronounce.

This evening her wet eyes were gaping at the rear of the ship, towering over the parking lot, its chimney stacks smoking, and at the trailers, shuffled about by how many yard shifters roaring – she couldn’t follow their convolutions – while under the floodlights, dusk tinged the port in departing purple. Next to her, this man hardly known, his stare fixated ahead, was tapping the wheel with all fingers of both hands, to a rhythm of his own. A broker he was, a new one, her mind whispered. Ultimately her detainer also, she believed.

When her gaze drifted rightward to the expanse of the lorry park – the fact is that, closer, the evenly spaced trailers, but mainly the white one in the foreground, so near to the razored fence, reminded her most closely of the one they had been carried in, to nobody knew where, maybe already five years ago. At this prompt her memory unwound reflexively: how upon arrival they had been sorted, distributed, allocated to employers, masters, proprietors in truth. This she had understood immediately. Alone, first in a colossal stone mansion on a tree-lined avenue, the confined house girl of the owners. Small and thin and tanned and still a child, so unlike them, foreign to their idiom, she had only been taught words essential to her tasks by condescending housekeepers. And orders, they dragooned her to execute on the instant.

He had sung to the lone mother, a man who said he was recruiting, the fateful day come, how good the pay and the life would be for them. Over there, abroad. She could nearly recall all of that speech. It happened to be nothing like it. Never a banknote handed to her. Forbidden to go out, forbidden to appear before guests and visitors. The sole time to rest at last, was when they threw parties and all roamed about and filled the rooms, guffawing and carousing. Then she reclined on the cot, recluse in the attic, to dream, her hands clasped on her belly.

But at this day’s end, she was here, seat belt fastened. The housekeeper had two days ago told her to pack her bag – so little in it – and that man behind the wheel had presented himself at the door and impelled her to follow. A sweep of the hand, a nod of the chin, that was it.

But here, now in the car, the present was abruptly vivified. The vehicles were revved, the passengers butted out cigarettes, slammed doors. An attendant in an orange vest waved them forward. When they had finally been herded into the momentous bowels of the ship, in the clangour of clashing steel ramps and decks, rubber wheels clattering up to the seventh level, and got out, and into the elevator, and stepped out onto the gangway to see, to ascertain the reality of it all, the dark hours had struck this side of the hemisphere and a damp chilling breeze rippled the dead waters, streaked black and silver before the quay. Suddenly she spun with a jitter toward her forbidding chaperone who had loudly cleared his throat and nudged her arm.

“Call me Uncle Damien if you have to talk to me, Josephine,” he commanded. But he probably sensed she was fazed, her eyes blank and dark and stilled. Likely a word too many for her, unpracticed: Damien. He expelled air through his narrow nostrils, an irascible sibilation. “Got it, just Uncle will do!” Then, “Repeat it: Uncle,” without a further glance, without a jot of care. “Again, I didn’t hear you.”

She had integrated words and phrases over those periods in the successive master houses, earwigged in great measure, so often the same phrases. And packets and bottles bore labels, names repeated daily, so she could from the words heard read at least this and that. But speak she refrained from. At night, by herself, she would murmur, but what dribbled from her tongue was far from what her ears remembered. So she tilted her head, nodded or smiled, or vocalised a yes here and a mmhmm there, when one addressed her. It’s what she did now, a stifled mmhmm.

Free of its moorings, the ship’s egress from the harbour was imperceptible, were it not for the glaring incandescence of foglamps and beacons gliding on the black sheen of the waters. In the passageway, a flow of travellers, either straying vague-eyed or trudging in haste, roller suitcases rattling in their wake, floated or jounced along. And she grasped, for the first time with such depth, that truly, irreversibly, she had been uprooted. Sundered out – that’s it – and she had that pain soaring in her feet, as might a tree.

This improvised uncle – was it Taimen? – for his name, the one, real somewhere, for somebody elsewhere, she would not glean – ordered her back inside, sat her at a table, and strode to the bar, all stiffened steps and rigid gait, to fill a tray with drinks and snacks. Out of the window, through the watery haze of her irises, the twinkling liquid shimmer of the waning harbour coasted away, under the obstinate thrum of the engines, invading her body, all the way up to the roots of her hair.

Another ship, across the channel, was at quay, a blue dazzling vessel like a crystal bowl under refulgent chandeliers, that too would take people away. She cast her look more precisely toward a little group of three, and mostly to the smaller, thinner person there, upon what she wondered if like she who was Josephine now, that boy – for a boy he should be – had been also denied a name, to be why not Albert instead of Arjun, perhaps, or Christian by contrast to Vasilios, could it be.

The man marshalling her prodded her arm with his elbow and handed her two plastic-wrapped sandwiches and a can of orange-flavoured soda, without a word. She chewed the insipid food mindlessly, as everything belonging to the land ebbed away, and the fullness, the entirety of gloom occluded the window. Then came the time to sleep, upon a sign of the makeshift parent, goading her toward the cabin. A cubbyhole in an inner corridor, with the propellers throbbing nearby. He blurted, “You go on top,” so she did, shrinkingly, not even washing her teeth, nor undressing. All that mattered now was how profound the darkness would be once he put the lights out, how fast her heart would race. But after a wad of minutes had slunk past, with the indistinct dandling of the massive hull, the grumble of the pistons doggedly pounding the hull, the obstinate syncopated snores of the stranger beneath her, as utter blackness enshrouded her, as her bloodstream fluttered in her throat, she weened she would rise, slither down the ladder blindly, grope to gather what was hers, and slink out, past the door, barefoot at first, the length of the lifeless corridor.

That she did because she had deciphered on her ticket, a syllable at a time, before her conveyer had taken and pocketed it, that the ship made a stopover in another port, a few hours, now, within the depth of obscurity, before sailing away for the final crossing and the fated destination. People would board, it could be many, others would disembark, maybe much fewer. She would be one of the latter. It could not be elsewise. Underfoot, the carpeting had the coolness of synthetic textiles. At the muster station, opened wide in front of her, she slipped her feet into her sneakers and tied the laces. A woman looked at her doing this, and smiled. Eighteen people were there, staring at the elevator doors, silent. A drowsy child rubbed his face on his mother’s thigh. Then the lift took them down with a slight sway. Her warder wouldn’t know. Even if he opened an eye – the grating of a suitcase or a child giggling in the corridor – he wouldn’t see the berth above him, vacant. But yet, sleep on, she prayed, sleep completely.

At last outside, they were in line, maybe twenty-five of them from all decks, with the ship verging upon its dock. Samia – herself then at once – beheld the blazing floodlights, so white, and the yellow streetlamps, further away, just them, to chart the unknown, unfathomable.

On the walk across the parking lot where the people disseminated in search of their cars, she felt the grip of lonesomeness, woven in its velvet glove of night, constricting her chest. But right after also an elation that billowed so deep in her, and inflated her, because she had severed the hitch, dismissed the bondage, and beyond the still shadows, daybreak, ever pale in its first hues, would trace new courses for her feet to follow, and that thought was exhilarating.

But then, unbiddenly, she listened to light footsteps treading behind, attuned to hers. She didn’t turn around though. She couldn’t turn around, because as long as she didn’t, anybody’s shoes could be pattering in her wake and drawing nearer. It could be those of the woman who had smiled in front of the elevators, and she concentrated to recompose her traits, to recall if her lips were lipsticked or not, and if so were they pink or red, and presume how her shoulder-length hair would swish with her gait. She did not turn around. In such a way she forbade it could ever be him. Of course she wished it wouldn’t be night, the dead of it, so tragically dark, that the other passengers had not dispersed and vanished in their cars, that the lampposts were not spaced so far apart along the street onwards, that this eerie aloneness would not cramp her body in concentric rings from her midriff up, cold coils of a snake that squeeze the breath out of its victim, and yes she was gasping, and so she thought of running, of spinning the yarn of distance between herself and those obdurate footfalls tailing now so close. Yet already the wind left in her hardly could sustain the pace of her stride, and her ribcage and her throat choked evermore and the inkling of a thought that maybe after all she simply could surrender, drop on the asphalt and shrivel and cry, if it was all to end here, that then he would clasp her arm, here above the elbow, and crush and bruise the weakness of her flesh, and yank her up, haul her back, reviling her with hateful curses, each redoubled with a harsher chokehold of his fingers. But he wouldn’t slap or hit her, she could hope, because Josephine mustn’t attract attention, no inquisitive compassion aboard the ship. A sole bruise, purpling slowly under the sleeve, dutifully pulled down, should bear witness to the guard’s anger.

And so as at the end of a hunt a vanquished prey will do, Samia stopped and stared ahead at the bulb of a lamppost concealing beyond its glare any vision of a future, into that depthless blackness that annuls space and stifles time. The steps stomped on, and she counted them, and when she’d reached five she closed her eyes in which the electric effulgence abided. She did not record a sixth footfall, and in this interrupted course of seconds – stalled in a wedge of the universe’s clock – would linger a truce, she believed, as long as she stood like that, motionless, as long as she kept her eyelids tight on the dimming glow of the bulb, she dreamed that nothing more would occur, and she esteemed any aspiration of hers would hover within it, evanescing, but to be worshipped intensely for that glimpse into the stillness of eternity.

“Well, that makes two of us, I guess,” a voice in her back sighed out, but it was not the modulation she anticipated, not the raucousness of her captor’s gruff tone, rather a disconcerted exhalation flowing out of a sleek throat. Keys tinkled, surely tossed up and snatched in the air by a quick hand. “Excuse me, but do you know where we are? I’m pretty sure I parked in section C… aisle eleven. Didn’t see any signs anywhere.” Samia still didn’t turn, and tried to envision the face tempering this voice, which now attempted an overture, “And you, do you remember?” At this she was perplexed, for how would she recall where this person had left his car, this man, and young, she imagined from the mellow timbre?

So Samia did shift her feet, to the left, just enough to encompass his figure. And they stared at each other, at their faces rendered grey and bleak by the white halos of light wreathing from the buzzing lampposts, their faces garlanded by the mist of their breaths. They stared for longer than convention prescribes. Both still and silent, their steamy puffs of respiration obeyed to an even cadence. Then Samia knew, and so did he.

She was twelve years old, admittedly, the last time they had shared their lives. In the house with the garden at the back that wafted wet lilac and roses in the springtime and where she had been stung by a wasp on a summer day and cried and writhed and he panicked and yelled for someone to come; the house where the kitchen that smelled of casseroles baking in the oven was on the north side and darker to keep the foodstuffs cool; where always a father was absent and they were not told why and a mother surly and tired griped and whinged and kept them at bay because silence alone in her room was her reprieve from what they were neither of them meant to know; the house in which they were the true light for one another, had been the only brightness for as long as their memory flickered; in which through their play this world was revoked and others were spun from their mouths and their flying hands striped by the rays of the afternoon’s sun, words and gestures of enthralling tales on seas and on lands; but also the house to be expelled from brutally for an unpayable debt, with a war somewhere nearby, they were bitterly told; the house vacated the next week, that they looked back at through the car’s rear window with the light of day ebbing from the garden and the yellow front wall; the house that had been so much in them from birth on.

Childhood had been over, so early in adolescence. They could no longer be supported, taken care of, their mother said one morning, that they had to go their own different ways, wherever and however a livelihood beckoned. Emoluments devolved to their incomeless mum as a gaffer arranged Samia’s and Alvan’s expatriation to countries hankering for help in so many fields, he flaunted, that they would choose as they fancied. Some distant relative it was, who drove them in his car to a loading bay on the outskirts of the town. And then Alvan was escorted to one lorry and Samia retained near another. It was unworldly for them to imagine a separation, so both squirmed and wriggled to free themselves, but the men’s hands were rugged, and they screamed and called to no avail. To no purpose they wailed like subjugated children, and Alvan, far away, was entombed in a green truck, she just was able to see as someone hoisted her in the white trailer, where she was ordered to sit, behind huge crates, plastic-mummified. Maybe ten other people squatted there, and a man, in an innominate tongue, stiffly silenced her. There had begun her life as an anonymised menial, the invisible skivvy, and so the occasional toy of this or that proprietor, and why not, in the third house, his party guests’ too.

But today she had escaped, before she would be spirited away, by way of sea, still farther out of herself, of what was left of her deep inside, that is. And with all this flotsam of the past whirling in her head, she stared at Alvan, for it could only be him, and he gaped at Samia, for it could only be her. As they held their breaths, until their mouths, their quivering lips were unfogged for a final validation of their integrity. They each took a step toward the other, then the remaining three dissociating their bodies. They stretched out their hands, tentatively at first, before clasping one another with the might of their arms, and their faces embedded in the crook of the other’s neck, they took to crying and sobbing softly, like if children once more, what they would have done at the loading dock, years back, had the abductors felt sorry, and let them, before tearing them apart.

“Let’s find the car,” Alvan whispered, and she marked how the warm puffs of the air he exhaled fluttered against her skin with each syllable. Arm slung over shoulder or around waist, they wandered in the frigid black parking lot and among the colourless autos, unable yet to really speak, until he exclaimed, “There it is, that’s the one,” and they sat inside, waiting for the shiver to abide, before Samia asked, “And you?” as if she had already unbraided her story.

“Like you I guess, Samia. Probably like you…” and he upheld her chin in the cup of his left hand, and scrutinised the depth of her eyes in which a sparkle of the nearest streetlight glimmered. “Construction site work to begin. Bitter hard. Got hurt more than once, but you couldn’t stop. Needed the pay too bad.” Alvan looked down and away and sighed. “Then I met this other guy, he had an idea, a bright one he swore. He said if you don’t try things you’ll be like we are until it kills you.” Alvan, with that same hand, drew Samia toward him, rested her head on his chest and stroked her cheek.

In the quiet interval that followed she was attentive to Alvan’s slow, metronomic heartbeats pounding through her ear. Then his voice swelled back, resounding through the cavern of his ribs. “We filched stuff when we unloaded the trucks, stuff easy to carry and stash away, then sold it half-price at night, to guys waiting in their vans outside.” He snickered, “Of course, he got more than me, I was just a kid, he said. But all in all, after two years, I had enough to raise my head and see what’s out there beyond.” Alvan twisted his hips to seat himself better, and with that sway she lifted her face to see his, and snuggled closer to him. “Then one guy proposed something else. Counterfeits, electrical equipment and electronic gizmos. You know what that is, Saminou?” No, she shook her head. “Well, cameras, intercoms, breakers, panels… all that sort of stuff, but fakes. Like if I stuck a Chanel sticker on your coat, and sold it ten times, a hundred times the price, see?” Samia pretended and nodded. “Bought them dirt cheap, sold them half-price to blokes who charged the end dudes in full, with a little rebate to make them happy.”  Alvan tossed again and scraped his throat. Joggled by his squiggling, with a stream of colder air slithering between them, Samia realised she understood so little of what he was expounding, when he continued. “By then I had quit the grubber work, just didn’t show up one day. Made quite a pile, you know. Easy. But not legal. Sandro – the guy who got me into it – he got questioned tight, so we had to fly the coop, each on his own. Had to buy papers. An ID, I mean. I’m Paul Barme now.” Alvan chuckled, “You hear that, Paul Barme, me? and he really laughed. So Samia recalled the set of his bared teeth, the curve of his chin, the flexure of his eyelids when, in the house, he got so merry. “Because of that I’m sort of on the run, my Saminette. Smuggling fugazzi is one thing, faking ID is another. The two added up probably could run for ten years. But couldn’t go on illegal, anyway…” He turned fully to face her, to clutch her cheeks in his palms, feel how after all they still had the fulness of a child’s, and uphold the persisting tininess of her lips and nose. His very darling Saminou. “And what about you? I’m so happy now, to be with you! Tell me, I’ve blathered too much.”

So Samia lowered her brow, with tangles of black hair veiling her dinky features, sputtered out how she had lived, how she had resigned herself often, how encased and how thwarted and how choked and how dead her mind had rung that she had believed she should make her body follow, until tonight, like if a voice had blown in her ear, and exhorted her to grab the jailer’s key, to unlock the prison’s bars, to unbolt the cell of her own person, and run forth until she dropped in her tracks, if that should be her fate.

“But that wasn’t your fate,” Alvan says, “maybe you felt, way inside you, I was there, on the ship, that I would step off at this port.” This time he looked out the window, and sniffled, and swiped his nose with the back of his hand. “You know, I’ve always called you, I’ve always asked whoever up there somewhere can do that, to guide me, that I could find you. And today it’s happened, and it’s you who listened.”

They again embosomed each other, clung to themselves and cried just the same, but also interspersing their tears with jingles of laughter, and that childhood blossomed back, and that ineffable love of theirs, and yes they could swear to it that it would never be once more ripped away from them, for as long as time would last. They didn’t have to say it.

They settled their breaths and wiped their eyes. They gazed fixedly through the windshield. Alvan started the engine.

 

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  • Giles Kelber, writing as Giles Kelvage, has studied Anglo-American literature in the United States and in France. He has worked for a variety of educational systems in France, Finland, Belgium and Luxembourg. He has written all his life, including essays, articles and disquisitions for artists’ publications and the international Subjective Atlas series. “Call to Whooshicree” is his debut novel.

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