Love Enough Read Online Free PDF Page B

a living there is my home. Your woman should be in the house or in a grave.
His father told him these things. Now these things ran through his mind.
    His father, Da’uud, was a cab driver. He drove a taxi from four to midnight each day. Then he sat in Bilan café with other insomniac taxi drivers till three or four in the morning. Then he drove home across the Humber River to North Etobicoke and fell asleep as soon as he walked in; dropping his dead body on the couch. The living room had become his father’s bedroom. His father couldn’t sleepin the bedroom upstairs anymore since he couldn’t make it up the stairs. In any case, the bed upstairs, he complained, hurt his back. Heavy brown drapes were always drawn to keep light out of the living room. The family only saw the living room on a Friday when the father didn’t work but observed the Jumu’ah.
    Now his father would be at Bilan drinking Turkish coffee and smoking a cigarette. There would be other men there, his uncle Abdi Fateh, his cousin Ghedi. It’s where Bedri should be too. His father kept insisting that he go into business with them, drive taxis across the city; learning street names in that pharyngeal sound of their language. Bedri couldn’t bear the thought. He’d seen his father once too often sitting at the café, sleep drugged, the smoke of cigarettes crumpling every man’s chest at the counter, the brown smiles as they reminisced about some long ago thing, in some long ago country. His cousin Ghedi was a fucker.
Ilkacase
, they called him, lovingly. Khat-eater. Always showing Bedri up, sitting in those old men’s laps like a dog. They weren’t old men really, his father and his uncle, but they seemed old because of how their life was. It was all in the past tense. And when they told him what he should do, he felt as it they were welcoming him to some petrified life. So he had separated himself from them,separated himself from the grim warmth around the counter at Bilan. He felt left. Even more left now, now that he had told Ghost to leave him here under the light post.
    Bismillaah ar-Rahman ar-Raheem, Qul a’uudhu birabbil falaq, Min sharri ma khalaq, Wa min sharri ghaasiqin idhaa waqab, Wa min sharrin naffaathaati fil ‘uqad, Wa min sharri haasidin idhaa hasad … I seek refuge with the Lord of the Dawn from the mischief of created things …
He whispered this fragmented prayer against his hand.
And from the mischief of the envious one as he practises envy
.
    His father told him these things. Why did they come to him now?

SIX
    T he final decision and the telling had been shitty and abrupt. “No,” Lia had said.
    “I thought you said, like, you want to. To have experiences, right, like …” Jasmeet said, surprised and disappointed. “Life was too small, you said, right?”
    “I don’t …” Lia’s reasons dried up.
    “You agreed, like we said, unlock the beautiful. Think desert! Think Machu Picchu!” And when Lia was silent, “You’ve never even been on a train ride! Come on!”
    “No, no, I really would, you know … I’d like that, I want to …”
    “Let’s go then. Ayahuasca is sacred medicine, like the sacredest, like totally, they say you see galaxies and you see your heart and it’s only the size of an atom.”
    “I can’t. Mercede might …”
    “Mercede! She’s lived her fucking life. Shit, she’s a constant emergency!”
    “You don’t know anything about my mother.” Lia had closed down the conversation with this and therefore there was pure silence after. She had found a way out. At first when Jasmeet had asked her to go with her she could not identify the tug she had felt. Suddenly, there was Mercede in her heart, like a heavy rope. How would Mercede get in touch? What would happen to Mercede? So, the inevitable word out of Lia’s mouth was, “No.” And it had sounded so awful, it had been so involuntary, it was so resolute it pained her.
    You have to survive people. You meet people and