Time to Talk About Bread
The Return
By Faraaz Mahomed
I hadn’t seen my friend Adam for about three years, during which time we’d inhabited very separate worlds. Mine was a quiet place, populated by Friday night dinners at my sister-in-law’s, Sara’s, apartment in Boerum Hill, where we’d discuss, over roasted new potatoes and panna cotta with fig compote, the death of moderation and the accumulating, heightening waters around Prince Edward Island.
His world was more alluring, painted with a veneer of hardship and a gloss of heroism. When he left for the Sudan, it was on the verge of splitting into two, the south and the north coming apart like halves of a very bitter orange. We spoke about two or three times a month at first, at the beginning of what would be an ongoing food crisis precipitated in large part by the rebels’ and the newly formed government’s raids on civilian livestock and farmlands.
He would tell me about the flittering light that threatened to go out all the time because of oil shortages and about the monumental loaves of bread at the new French bakery in Juba. Somehow, even though our conversations were finite, with what seemed like the whispered ticks of a timer in the background, there was always time to talk about bread.
Adam’s thin face, peppered with stubble and wrinkled in some corners, would bounce onscreen as he walked around in his garden of dead leaves.
‘It’s like 110 degrees. The dogs just lie around. Even when you try to shoo them. They don’t give a fuck.’
I got the sense that we envied each other. I would picture myself with a bearded face and ragged t-shirt imprinted with a blue and green planet or a few words of social justice-type language. For sure, they made those in Brooklyn too, but the t-shirts here, much like the activists, despite their torn threads and plain colours, were too comfortable, not asperous enough.
He, on the other hand, seemed to want my life of banality, contoured by trips to farmers’ markets and half marathons. I think he heard something I didn’t in the retellings about Sundays at Prospect Park with my wife, Lyla, or about our weekend in the Catskills, kayaking until the water was almost turned silver by the slow descent of the sun.
The calls became less frequent after a while. They stopped having patterns or routines, occurring randomly and awkwardly. They became shorter too, not because we didn’t want to talk, but because of the bad reception, or because there was a shipment of food aid that needed dispatching or a client fidgeting as they sat in the waiting room next to my office before a session. We usually managed to get in a joke or two about his ‘fuckfriends’ or his increasingly unkempt facial hair before the call ended.
*
In between sessions one day, after having spoken for an hour to a young woman about her fear of vaginal penetration – her VPP – he called me. It had been about three and a half months since we’d last spoken, and there wasn’t the usual grainy stiltedness, just the sound of a fairly crowded place punctuated by electronic bellish noises.
He was at Schiphol airport, and seemed a slight bit delirious, like a carpet that was soft and comfortable at its centre but whose edges were fraying.
‘I’m getting married!’
‘What?’
‘Yeah, this weekend. In the Hague.’
His intonations suggested that he was almost happy, like there might have been some measure of truth to his expressions of delight, but there was also an attempt at making up a deficit through sheer will.
The next time we heard from him, he’d sent us pictures of their honeymoon in Crete, surrounded by azure waters and handfuls of craggy-skinned old people who seemed untroubled. His wife, whose name was Habiba, was a thin and sprightly-seeming woman with a wide smile that ended in sharp edges. In their picture, their bodies were tightly wrapped together.
‘Does he still live in Juba?’ Lyla asked that day, as we walked to the subway, her left palm in my right and ristrettos in our free hands.
‘I don’t know. I think he wants to leave.’
It was a fall afternoon, just before the evening would be issuing chilled winds. We were going to see Pacific Rim, part of a Del Toro retrospective at the Angelika that she’d been invited to.
The movie was powerful and moody, but it felt very long, arduous even, because of the myriad allegories and warnings. I think Lyla could sense my exasperation. She curled into me and we distracted ourselves by running our fingers over each other, poking and caressing. I liked the sensation of her long hair rushing around as she moved.
We stayed for a while after to talk to her media friends. There were a few of them, some I liked very much, like ginger-haired Caroline from Ireland, with her breathy words and soft admonitions.
‘We’re so fucked.’
‘So fucking fucked,’ their friend Gill interjected. He was less charming, clearly urbane and thoughtful but lacking in the gentility that most of Lyla’s friends exhibited. In succession, they each had some meaningful reaction to the film, some axiom to share about the curse of modernity.
*
Adam arrived unannounced at our Park Slope apartment one day. By then, we’d had inklings that his marriage had soured but we weren’t sure how much. He was, to our knowledge, living with Habiba in Sardinia, where she tended to migrants who’d washed up like detritus after long journeys across the Mediterranean.
But as we sat at the Grey Dog and sipped on coffee, he munching on biscotti and me observing the dirt on his fingernails as though it would signal some revelation, he told me that they weren’t altogether compatible.
‘She’s not…she’s not…I can’t relate to her anymore.’
It felt so blindingly truthful when he said that. The chasmal sound of the instrumental Brooklyn cafe music seemed to fade, leaving just a residue of his admission.
‘So you’re back?’
‘I don’t know… I mean, I thought about going back to Juba, or maybe trying to get into grad school in Germany.’
‘What kind of grad school?’
‘Like Literature or Fine Art or something.’
He was so wantonly directionless that I felt envious. Even though I could sense a hint of despair, even that felt exotic.
As the subject changed, I listened to him talk about the famine, at times with a raw and passionate tenor and, at other times, with a philosophical acceptance that was underlined by crunches into chunks of almond.
‘I know there’s more we can do to feed people… but the politics is what’s killing people.’
‘I can see why you’d want to go back.’
He paused to think about what to say next. The whites of his eyes glinted and his face bobbed the way it used to when we were talking over WhatsApp.
‘Maybe.’
At our apartment, as he showered, Lyla and I cooked dinner for the three of us that evening and we wondered between ourselves what to do with him. She seemed, initially, to be burdened by the thought of letting Adam sleep in her study.
‘Why can’t he go to California?’
‘He’s not going to stay with his parents… he can’t stand them.’
She was chopping tomatoes for a salad that would accompany our dinner of cock-a-leekie soup, and stopped dead still for a second, before raising the knife like a wand.
‘They’re family. He’s not supposed to like them.’
‘I can tell him we’re not comfortable with him staying.’
She carried on chopping, in ardent strokes that made hollow, echoing sounds when they hit the board. The sap dribbled down to the counter, collecting into a small and murky puddle. When she finished, she tossed the tomatoes onto the spinach and arugula leaves and sprinkled some vinegar that congealed into inky blots. She tossed the knife in the sink and let the water run for a few seconds before putting her hands under it.
‘No, it’s fine. He can stay.’
*
We were a threesome for a while after that, and it was enjoyable. Some mornings, we’d wake to the wafting smell of Sudanese pancakes, gorraasa, being pan-fried for breakfast. He liked wading in the kitchen, feeding us, making us feel like guests.
‘No, no, like this,’ he said one day, holding a clumped piece of flatbread, doused generously with a mixture of yoghurt and spices, up to his mouth. We would imitate his movements and his expressions, two Aristotles learning from Plato. It always felt so satisfying to have him say we were doing it right.
Lyla, too, began to enjoy having him around. They shared the same taste in movies, preferring atmospheric, complex films to the kind of cerebral but facile ones that I liked. So, in a kind of perpetually rigged voting system, I’d end up watching The Conformist when I really wanted to watch Spotlight. Sometimes I’d end up liking it.
After a while, it became natural to have this rhythm, where she’d go with him to an event in Midtown and then they’d stop at the farmers’ market in Union Square or in Greenpoint to collect ingredients for a three-course dinner. Some days, if I had a free afternoon, he’d meet me in Clinton Hill with a packed lunch for the both of us and we’d sit on the wrought-iron benches in Fort Greene Park for an hour or two. I’d ask questions about his life in Juba, and he’d cede a few details before asking me about the regeneration of Red Hook. I knew that there was a slight film of unease that coated his estimation of his own life, and so it made him reticent, but still, I couldn’t help asking.
At work, my mind would drift regularly. A couple, for example, was telling me about their inability to conceive and the strain it was placing on their marriage. The wife shed a few apologetic tears on behalf of her uterus, and the husband laid his hand on her shoulder as a gesture of shared culpability. He said something to her, a word of comfort or two, but I couldn’t pay attention. Instead, I was thinking about the famine, imagining crowds of people clamouring for something, a piece of bread or a bag of rice, their chapped hands reaching out and in between the heads in front of them.
When my thoughts returned to the couple, the tears had dried, and they were talking about IVF.
‘I know it’s a really difficult process, but I want to try,’ the wife was saying, her body suddenly taut and upright on the sofa.
‘Then we’ll try.’
*
I came home one night and he’d made a feast of lamb and purslane stew with peanut salad and a jelly-like starch called aseeda. I didn’t know why, until Lyla told me with a jovial dint.
‘Sara’s coming. She just sold her book.’
It was a collection of short stories that she’d been working on for about a year. They usually involved a youngish female protagonist living in New York, often queer, inhabiting spaces that were traditionally the preserve of men, like a lesbian rabbi or a half-Trinidadian mayoress in a conservative town upstate.
‘Sounds interesting.’
By then, he’d been with us for about two months. In fact, the study wasn’t really much of a study anymore. Lyla had moved her computer into the living room, and she’d take long meetings in our bedroom, comically dressed in a blouse and a tie accompanied by pyjama bottoms. In what had become his room, the bookshelf that had been crying out for occupants was now strewn with his novels and, when walking down the hallway, the room gave off a distinctly woody scent.
The floorboards of our apartment creaked a little, and the pipes rattled, so there were these mundane sounds that signified his presence in the middle of the night. But there was also just the sensation, the consciousness, that there was someone else there. It felt like we had a shadowy, arcane pet.
He’d started teaching yoga at the co-op, and was putting together a few grad school applications. He would say, with purpose, that he wanted to write an entire dissertation on Gemütlichkeit, and what the New York equivalent, in parts of Prospect Heights or even some of the less puerile stretches of Williamsburg, might be.
‘Everything here is cozy,’ he said to Sara that evening as he collected the remaining broth on his plate with a pinched sponge of aseeda. I think he was speaking admiringly, judging by how prosaic he seemed to find Manhattan as a comparator. The unease that I’d witnessed before was dissipating. He didn’t have the same weight in his voice as he’d had that day when he called me from Schiphol. So as Lyla and I watched, we were congratulating of ourselves.
‘I think that might be true, but there’s an underbelly,’ Sara told him, ‘if you open those cracks and see the reality of Brooklyn, it’s not so charming.’
We left them alone for a while so that they could find out for themselves whether they were flirting or just enjoying a sort of mutual intellectual masturbation. In the kitchen, we washed a few dishes and scooped out almond milk ice cream into a series of unmatched bowls. Lyla had made a batch of kadaif to accompany the ice cream, and drizzled each portion with a gloopy honey syrup.
When we returned into our small dining area, really a corner of the living room in which a small table and a few chairs stood awkwardly next to French doors that led down the hallway, they’d already left.
Lyla and I sat on the sofa, each with a bowl in hand, and watched the end of a documentary about the building of the Parthenon. In front of us, on the rickety coffee table, two bowls of ice cream melted into sugary rivulets of liquid, some of which coagulated and swelled the bottom of the pastry.
*
I began struggling with severe insomnia. Often, it made me fret around in our bed for a few hours before shuffling to the kitchen. I was learning how to make gorraasa myself. At first, my pancakes would come out uneven or misshapen, but with some practice, I started to become quite good. I would make about a dozen and leave them for him and Lyla and Sara before going out to ride my bike.
It was getting cold out, and specks of sleet were becoming common late at night or early in the morning. In the dark, I would ride down to the promenade and the wind from the river would ripple across my face like a branch of iced hemlock leaves. Most mornings, I’d encounter a few people who were sleeping rough, covered in mangled blankets or trying to stay warm inside cardboard dwellings. One of them, a short stub of a man with wildling hair and several missing teeth, used to smile at me as I swept past.
On a morning during that week of excess between Christmas and New Year, I brought him a cup of coffee. He told me that his name was Henry, and that he was once a parking valet in Las Vegas. I asked if he wanted to go back, and he told me that he thought about it, but he didn’t like the people.
‘Everyone there is so stupid.’
‘But they’re warm.’
His bare gums, the colour of fresh salmon, emerged into a half-smile.
When I returned, there was a vaguely familiar woman in a turban headwrap standing in front of our building, huddling into herself underneath her coat. I scanned my mind to try to recollect who she might be. The arrowhead edges of her lips reminded me that she was Habiba.
Having heard about Lyla and I from Adam’s parents, she came to look for him and, from what we could gather, possibly take him back to Sardinia or, otherwise, ask for a divorce.
Adam was surprised to see her. We realised that he might not have actually shared his intentions with his wife.
Sara rushed away angrily that day. In a kind of game of musical beds, Lyla went to stay in Boerum Hill that night to comfort her and Habiba shared the bedroom that had once been the study with Adam. I slept alone in the main bedroom.
Habiba and I encountered each other in the kitchen in the middle of the night.
‘Sorry, jet lag.’
‘Must be rough.’
‘You couldn’t sleep?’
I told her about my battle with sleeplessness and she told me about a leaf I could buy, a decoction of which would help if I took it each night. Her accent had flecks of Arabic and Italian, interspersed with a hint of American too. I’d later come to know that she had grown up between Sardinia and New Jersey, but spent a large proportion of her adult life in Juba.
For about three or four days, things remained in that pattern. Lyla stayed at Sara’s and came over to scold or to pry, while Adam and Habiba toyed with reconciliation. I would go for a short bike ride, sometimes waving a quick hello to Henry, and then I’d have breakfast with them. As I watched their uneasy play unfold, I’d wonder if they were going to go back together to Sardinia or to Juba. And I’d wonder what life would be like after that.
*
There was an incident in Juba in early January, a rebel attack on a government compound that killed several civilians because a car bomb had detonated too early. Habiba was telling me about it as we sipped jasmine tea in the middle of the night. A few sallow tears lingered on her face, coating a sheen on her cheeks. Her head was uncovered, and the bright brown locks of her hair were tied together untidily behind her head.
She told me about the last incident in Juba, and the day that they’d met at the hospital. Adam had been in a convoy of food trucks travelling westward when they were attacked by rebels. It wasn’t really clear what happened from his retelling, but she thought that they were punishing some of the tribes in the Mundri area for their recent cooperation with the army. Several people were shot, and a few others were arrested. Adam was neither. Instead, his body convulsed and he frothed at the mouth. As Habiba told it, he dissociated for hours and bit his own tongue until it bled.
‘I’m not sure I should be here.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I knew Adam was having a hard time. I just needed to see for myself if this was the end.’
She didn’t say if she’d arrived at an answer, but it seemed, from the meagreness of affection in her voice, that she had.
I arrived back from my bike ride as the sun was rising. When I opened the door, there was an envelope filled with leaves, and some instructions on how to prepare them. The greasy, overwhelming aroma of fresh cooked eggs and soy bacon travelled from the kitchen like a hysterical scream.
It was just Adam and I for breakfast. Habiba had left for Sardinia while I was out. As we sat at the table, he started to tell me in parabolic sentences that curved upwards and down again rapidly about his call with a professor in Bochum, and about his thesis. He told me he’d be leaving soon.
As I listened, it became apparent that there was just a minor lisp in his speech that I hadn’t noticed before. It was an airy sound, a tiny opening in the flesh of his tongue that had been torn and then patched together improperly. While he chewed his food, I watched intently, looking for a mark across the pinkish flesh. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I could make out a ravine of small stitches.
*
When he left, we packed away some of the things he’d left behind: a blue yoga mat, a pair of sunglasses, a worn copy of Light In August with a message from a friend in Juba. In small writing that curled as though it was being pushed downward by a heavy bluster, it told him to be well.
The study went back to being a study after that. Lyla bought a used office chair to replace the uncomfortable stool she’d been using. She bought a few candles too, telling me with an acrid expression that she wanted the smell of Adam out of our apartment.
Habiba was right. With the güshta leaves, I started sleeping again. Sometimes I’d wake up and there was a spray of blue and yellow-white outside, crowning into the horizon, anticipating birth into daylight. When I’d get out of bed to go biking, I’d stop in the study and sit on the pull-out couch, back in its original position. I’d stare vacantly out the window, thinking about the famine, about the couple with the IVF, about the queer policewoman.
Some mornings, I’d still panfry gorraasa for Lyla, but it became infrequent. We were starting to tire of the taste of it, of how mealy and bland it was. Lyla especially didn’t enjoy the salty aftertaste.
I found myself better able to concentrate at work too. The constellation of experiences that played themselves out in the therapy room; the abusive parents, the stalled careers, the existential angst, they became engaging again. If my mind drifted, it drifted to thoughts of a weekend in Amenia, surrounded by bucolic groves and shy woodland creatures that scurried in between the cracks of wood and earth.
As it became warmer, we spent most of our weekends in the park, occasionally with Sara and her new partner, Molly, a simple woman with a hostile expression and a penurious vocabulary.
‘Isn’t ridden the past tense of ride?’
We were sitting on a blanket, tearing pieces off of a baguette, dipping it generously into the mix of yoghurt and spice that Adam had taught us to make. Close to us, a group of people were tossing a ball and chasing it fervently. Further away, some were walking their dogs.
‘It also means like having a lot of something. Like being guilt-ridden.’
Lyla had a theory about Sara and Molly’s relationship. She thought she could tell, in the smoothness of Sara’s statements and the temperate lilt in her voice, that she thought Molly to be trite. Lyla theorised, though, that Molly, with the patent shortfalls in her manner, in the way she appraised the value of things – good hair being the same as an adequate grasp of the problematic nature of the electoral college – made Sara feel like a better person.
*
About six weeks after he left, I received a call from Adam. His beard, which had grown slightly in his time in New York, had been shaven off altogether, leaving a boyish patina. He was enjoying Bochum, he said, and had found an apartment just diagonally opposite the Rathaus. We were talking as he walked through the town, so his face was encased by the outlines of rowhouses and steeples.
‘It’s a small town, but I’m not bored. Not yet anyway.’
‘How’s the bread?’
‘Ah-mazing! I can see why they came up with Gemütlichkeit!’
In Germany, he told me, he wouldn’t be paying for grad school. And he had a job as a research assistant, so he was doing pretty well. I listened for the shards of doubt or sadness that I’d thought I heard that day when he called me from Schiphol, that I later confirmed were real, but there wasn’t an undertone or a pretence. There was just the sound of his happiness, accompanied by the beat of his footsteps through a pebbled street over an unsteady connection.
I only heard from him sporadically after that. There was no sequence or order to our conversations. They’d happen randomly, and then there would be long silences. However long it had been, when we did speak, the rhythm felt the same. He’d ask about Park Slope, about the repetitious threat of the co-op’s closure, about my life. And I would ask about his. I’d want to know who he was having sex with, if he felt authentic feelings for them, if the gloss was still there.
One weekend, he sent me pictures of his trip into the Black Forest. In between pictures of thickets and shrubs, there were a few thin-necked ravens with eyes like pellets of stone that presided over treetops and streams of water that led nowhere.
Occasionally, as I browsed on the Internet through stories about the election or the theater listings, I’d search for news about the famine. I’d feel remorseful for fetishizing, but I’d glare at wide-eyed children with distended bellies or loosely strung words of urgency, thinking of ways that I could help without moving from the patch of sunlight that landed on the desk in the study.
*
Mid-May, Sara’s book was being launched in Soho. The air was stolid and Lyla and I were walking slowly to the subway, my left hand on the slim protrusion of her naked spine. We stopped a few times on the way to admire shop windows and to nuzzle while we waited for the light to change.
We lingered in front of the bakery close to the entrance of the Bergen Street stop, and admired a few flaky pastries and spongy cakes. In the reflection, I could see an arm waving at us. When I turned around, Henry was standing under a sprawling London Plane tree, its branches stretching outward like they were reaching for the corners of the world.
Lyla and I bought him a strudel and a coffee from the bakery. His thin lips thanked us and his pool-like eyes brightened.
‘I haven’t seen you in a while.’
‘I’ve been sleeping up in Greenpoint, at the BRC. Some days, I just lie around in the Calvary.’
‘The cemetery?’
‘Yeah, it’s lush and peaceful out there,’ he said as he brushed crumbs from his beaten windbreaker.
We spoke briefly about the silence in the graveyard, and about the patient breeze that Henry was enjoying so much. Finally, we said our goodbyes and Lyla and I carried on to the subway, palm in silky palm.
Faraaz Mahomed is a clinical psychologist and human rights researcher. Originally from South Africa, he is now based in New York. His short stories and travel pieces have appeared in Granta, the Georgia Review, the Sunday Times, Superlative, and elsewhere. In 2016, he won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize for the African region, and in 2020, he was longlisted for the Bristol Prize and was a finalist for the inaugural Toyin Falola Prize. He is currently working on his first novel.
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