Unaccustomed Earth - Jhumpa Lahiri [94]
Farouk spat at Paul’s face, a cold spray that made Paul recoil. Farouk pushed him off, went into his apartment, and slammed the door. Other doors along the hallway began to open. Paul could hear Farouk fastening the chain. He found his glasses and stood up, pressed his ear to the varnished wood. He heard crying, then a series of objects falling. At one point he could hear Farouk saying, “Stop it, please, please, it’s not as bad as you think.” And then Sang saying, “How many times? How many times did you do it? Did you do it here on the bed?”
A minute later, the elevator opened and a man walked toward Farouk’s apartment. He was a lean man with gray hair and a big bunch of keys in his hand. “I’m the super in this building. Who are you?” he asked Paul.
“I live with the woman inside,” he said, pointing at Farouk’s door.
“You her husband?”
“No.”
The super knocked on the door, saying neighbors had complained. He continued to knock, rapping the wood with his knuckles until the door opened.
Inside was a hallway illuminated by track lights. Paul glimpsed a bright white kitchen without windows, a stack of cookbooks on the counter. To the right was a dining room, painted the same sage-green as Sang’s room. Paul followed the super into the living room. There was an off-white sofa, a coffee table, a sliding glass door that led to a balcony. In the distance was a view of the Citgo sign, draining and filling with color. There was a bookcase along one wall which had fallen to the floor, its books in a heap. The receiver of a telephone on a side table hung from a cord, beeping faintly, repeatedly. In spite of these things, the room had a barren quality, as if someone were in the process of moving out of it.
Sang was kneeling on an Oriental carpet, picking up the pieces of what appeared to have been a clear glass vase. She was shivering. Her hair was undone, hanging toward the floor, partly shielding her face. There was water everywhere, and the ruins of a bouquet of flowers, irises and tiger lilies and daffodils. She worked carefully with the glass, creating a pile of shards on the coffee table. There were petals in her hair and stuck to her face and neck, and plastered to the skin exposed above her black scoop-necked top, as if she had smeared them on herself like a cream. There were welts emerging above her neckline, fresh and bright.
The men stood there, looking at her, none of them saying anything. A policeman arrived, his black boots and his gun and his radio filling up the room, static from his radio replacing the silence. Someone in the building had called the station to complain, he said. He asked Sang, who was still on the floor, if Farouk had struck her. Sang shook her head.
“Do you live here?” he asked.
“I painted the walls,” Sang said, as if that would explain everything. Paul remembered her painting her own room, barefoot, listening to Billie Holiday.
The policeman leaned over, inspecting the broken glass and flower debris on the carpet, noticing the welts on her skin. “What happened?”
“I bought them,” she said, tears streaming quickly down her cheeks. Her voice was thick, ashamed. “I did this to myself.”
After that, everything proceeded in an orderly way, with people moving in separate directions, not reacting to anyone else. The policeman filled out a form, then lent an arm and took Sang to the bathroom. The super left, saying something to Farouk about a fine. Farouk went to the kitchen, returning with a roll of paper towels and a garbage bag, and knelt by the carpet, cleaning up the mess Sang had made. The policeman looked at Paul, as if assessing him for the first time. He asked if Paul was an involved party.
“I’m her housemate,” Paul replied. “I just gave her a ride.”
The next morning, Paul was awakened by the