Read Online I Think of You: Stories by Ahdaf Soueif - Free Book Online Page B

is
muggers only
after dark?
A woman with a toddler walks past
if you can call it
walking:
that motherbaby dance.
Right and left he staggers
leading
distracted
only going forward diagonally
by chance.
Soon I’ll pack my camera
my notebook
my ballpoint pen
and come home to
where
she still combs her hair
for you.
You dig, you say, my fishnet tights
my jaunty ass
my cigarette
but now I sit and wonder
do wives wear fishnet tights—in Russia?
    I’ve cheated a bit here because I’ve worked on the poem before copying it out. I only had the first twosections and the ending was different. But I think it’s a lot better like this.
    It really is strange how poems work. On an Amsterdam boat train I remember Central Park and I start a poem. A month later, I add in something from today and—wow! It’s there.
    I think I have something good here. When we go back to London I’ll type it up and start a folder so I can show it to him. This journal stays locked. I don’t do poem number two now. I go to bed.

    Sunday, 12 March 1979
    Dearest Mummy,
    Thank you thank you thank you for your letter and for everything in it. Can I be independent and have—at the same time—a guardian angel? You’ll be glad to know—will you be glad to know?—that everything is moving pretty fast. I’ve actually started at Citadel Publishing, although we haven’t really agreed on a salary yet (Vivien tells me I should hold out for more than they’re offering) and I’ve used your money—as you said—to make a down payment on a little flat in Kensington. It’s terribly sweet—or will be when it’s ready. I’m supposed to move into it next month.Meanwhile—you’ll never guess—I’m borrowing Saif’s flat while he’s away. It feels really odd being in his atmosphere again like this. He’s in the States. I don’t really know what he’s doing there—except he’s taken Mandy (I told you about her visit up north) with him.He could be meeting her folks or he could be getting rid of her. I don’t know—he gave me a portfolio of her oeuvre a while back—
    Asya pauses and looks up from her typewriter. Maybe that’s not fair. After all, Mandy was—presumably—doing her best. And she probably didn’t ask Saif to give it to her. Maybe she was horrified at the idea. No, if she’d been horrified, it wouldn’t have happened. Saif would hardly have pressed her. Asya can just see them: Mandy going on about it—about the possibility of getting it published, Saif finally saying, “I can give it to Asya if you like; she’s in publishing.”
    “But what am I supposed to do with this?” Asya had asked.
    “I haven’t the foggiest,” Saif said.
    “I mean, I’m not—well, you know Citadel isn’t that kind of publisher. They do schoolbooks.”
    “Send her a nice rejection slip,” he said. “That’d be something.”
    Asya picks up Mandy’s portfolio—again. Had he particularly wanted her to see this? Wa s there a message in here somewhere?
    A set of photographs of buildings with mirrored windows, and on the facing page:
We see what
we want
to see.
You
see
your own
reflection.
    A set of photographs of trees—autumnal—and a blurred figure, Saif surely, vanishing into the distance, and on the facing page:
Next year
once again they
will flower.
You
will not
return.
    Asya sits back in her chair. Is this meant for her? But it was Mandy who wrote it, not Saif. Does this mean that whatever had been written she still would have turned it into a personal message? She gazes out the dark window. Last month she had stood out there, under that tree she can now make out as only a dark shadow on the other side of the road, and she had watched him. She had watched him and known that she could not go back, sit companionably in the other armchair, and reach for a magazine. She leans sideways trying to see the sky, to see if there are any stars. Imagine the world out there, full of signals. You pick one up and it seems to