Story for performance #857
webcast from Sydney at 06:16PM, 25 Oct 07

continued to rumble
Source: Richard Oppel, ‘Turkish jets bomb Kurdish rebels’, New York Times, AFP in Sydney Morning Herald online, 25/10/07.
Writer/s: Loubna Haikal

She integrated pretty quickly. She found work, she found girlfriends and a language to talk to them with. A language like theirs, a melange of mother tongue and new words, names of shops, of products to acquire, and universal jokes about husbands and men in general.

She soon had an income and became busy, more so on weekends.

She left her two children with her husband and ran away, down the driveway, to a revving car full of women eager to attack shops and shop owners.

She went shopping, not for the now, for there was little she needed now. She went shopping for the future. War, famine and disease, were situations she had barely survived before transporting herself here with her husband and kids.

But now, away from the spectre of war and death, divorce and joblessness were real possibilities. For now there’s going to be a future. And futures have needs that need looking after.

That very possibility of a future gave her stamina, to go from shop to shop, harass shop-owners for bargains, for her right to a better deal, for her right not to be exploited for profit.

The need to look after her future and that of her family’s gave her permission to acquire an endless amount of goods, to duplicate items without any sense of guilt. Her feeling of insecurity could’ve been easily interpreted as indulgence or even decadence.

She came home, like a soldier expecting to be showered with flowers. Like a soldier she arrived home triumphant, announcing the retail price and the discount. She opened bags, exhibited goods like the spoils of war: dresses she’d never wear, a size or two too small or too big, but at bargain price, a steal; glasses for all occasions, dinner sets and nighties. She’d spread them all over the floor for her family to see. She’d put them back in their plastic bags stack them in cupboards on shelves too high to ever be reached again.

The cupboards were full and so was her life.


Her husband, she knew, he did not integrate well.

He had a job, he had an income and he had cigarettes. He had memories of a language, a mother tongue that was kind to him, that looked after him and understood his need for understanding.

He spent Saturday and Sunday at home, nowhere to go, the phone never ringing, not once when she was not home. He tried sleeping the weekend away, on the couch in the TV room. He ate the lunch she prepared for him. He ate it late in the afternoon alone, while the kids did their homework or went out with friends.

He stayed up all night walking from the kitchen to the TV room, back to the kitchen, going outside to the front porch, coughing and spitting coffee-coloured phlegm, lighting a new cigarette from a burning one. He inhaled smoke and exhaled hopelessness.

Eight years. Eight years and not once did she get out of bed to check up on him, ask him what’s wrong, ask him ‘Do you still love me? Are we still married?’

There were half arguments he’d start in the evening, when he sensed she was about to retire. He became anxious: another day, the end of a possibility, the possibility for change. But his attempts made her exit to her bedroom even more quickly. She was never short of pretexts and how could you be when life was so full?

He continued to rumble through the night, alone, coughing and splattering, banging doors, turning lights on, occasionally breaking things in the hope she would come and ask him to stop the noise, start an argument, a full one, a fight. He imagined shouting at her, something he’d never do in reality. He roamed the TV channels, and with each new cigarette he lit, he inhaled a vision of her, in her latest nightdress, the one bought and unpacked that day.


But why, she thought, appear in the night? Nights are for healing and repair. Why ask what’s wrong when she knew. She knew there was nothing she could do, nothing she could change, nothing she wanted to change, not in her own life. She didn’t want to ask and she didn’t want to witness his pain. She loved this country and he didn’t. She loved her friends. She loved the style of everything, the life, the peace, the freedom, everything around her. Even all those products that she didn’t need but was free to acquire, gave her freedom.

He lived in the ‘back there’ space, where she never ever wanted to go again. His attachments imprisoned him in a language that was inappropriate that did not fit anywhere, except back there. That useless sentimentality she had no time for.

Eight years he waited for her to pop the question. A look, a gesture in his mother tongue would have sufficed. But this new tongue of hers had tied him up and he could no longer speak to her, his own wife.

There were old photographs he’d look at from time to time, to try and remember how he was able to converse, communicate, with other men, sitting together, contemplating the view. He remembered those moments well, when he said nothing, but never felt silent.

One very hot night, he coughed a hundred cigarettes, he coughed more than two thousand nights of waiting, with neither moon nor stars, he coughed away the deafening emptiness of his life. He left her with the warm cigarette butts, the children and a chipped coffee cup. He knew their lives would continue. He left that night to join the men in that old photograph, where once again he could meet with the man he once was.

In the morning, she woke up to her future, well secured, her cupboards full, ready for any possibility. She got ready to meet the day, to join her new self, her new life at work.

Adapted for performance by Barbara Campbell from a story by Loubna Haikal.