Free I Think of You: Stories by Ahdaf Soueif Page A

have stayed with me,” she says.
    “With you, Tante, yes. But with you and Hussein and Mira and her mother? There’s only one bedroom here. I can’t think how you’re managing.”
    “Look, my dear”—Adila Hanim sighs as she starts chopping an onion into a bowl—“I didn’t want them to come. I’ve been hearing for a while that there are problems between you two, so I thought I’d come over to try and mend things. Then Hussein, God preserve him, says ‘Mama, I won’t let you go alone; I’m coming with you.’ The next thing I know his wife is coming too, because she might as well shop for the baby, and then Souma Hanim decides to come and help her daughter with the shopping. So here we are. And the place istight; I mean, the rooms are nice and big, but there’s only two of them, so we’re all in each other’s throats all the time. I know it’s only for a few days, but I’m not used to this, child, I’m not used to this.” She shakes her head sadly and bangs her knife against the edge of the bowl to shake off the last of the diced onion.
    Asya presses back against the wall. She has not seen Tante Adila for five years, and although the brown hair still bravely holds its color, the face is more troubled and lined than she remembers. She must feel her daughter-in-law’s newfound hardness. She must be hurt by it. But Asya isn’t hard, not really. She longs to go over and put her arms around those solid shoulders and … and then what? Then they’d sit down and cry together. And in the end Asya still would not be able to give her mother-in-law the thing she wants most, the thing she’s come all the way to London for. She watches as Adila Hanim turns on the tap.
    On a corner of the ornately tiled floor, a small black kitten is chasing his tail. He is obviously having a lot of fun. Autotelic fun, thinks Asya; all he needs is his own tail—which is fortunate, since his own tail is all he’s got. She’s seen him before: he’d been around when she came here eleven days ago to give Saif some of the mail that kept arriving for him at her address. For a few minutes of her visit the kitten had been a small black ball of fur on her husband’s immaculate white shoulder. Clara, he told her, his latest friend, had found this kitten and adopted him. She had named him Satan and spent hours looking after him. He’d also said that Clara would have loved to meet her buthad gone out. She was Scots, he said, and spoke with och and wee. Her photo on the desk showed a dreamy, creamy oval face and a tumbling mass of auburn hair.
    “What was I saying? Yes, I did not speak to her at all,” Adila Hanim repeats. “I had to offer her tea, of course, because after all, this counts as my home while I’m here and she was in it. But apart from that I pretended not to even see her.”
    “It’s not her fault, Tante,” Asya begins weakly.
    “Why are you defending her?” Adila Hanim shakes the water from her hands, wipes them on the front of her apron, and puts them on her waist as she turns around to face her daughter-in-law. Asya looks down at her shoes, a plain deep green, away from the sadness and puzzlement on the careworn face.
    “Explain it to me,” Adila Hanim says. “I tell you, I just don’t understand anymore.”
    “Well, what I mean is”—Asya shifts against the wall—“she isn’t the first. There were others before her, and there are going to be others after her. She’s just not terribly important—and anyhow, we had already left each other.”
    “Left each other! Spit from your mouth, child. It’s just a little quarrel and it will pass. He’ll get rid of the redheaded tart.”
    “She’s not a tart.” Asya realizes how odd she must sound. Either mad or phony. “What I mean is,” she goes on, “it’s sort of normal here. I mean, she met him and he was a single man—separated. I think she’s in love with him. She probably thinks he’s going to marry her.”
    “Marry her! He’ll have to