Idly, waiting for Ava to put the photograph together, he typed in another command, asking for a follow-up narrative on the card's chain of provenances. Ava took an instant longer than usual, but it was still no more than a couple of seconds before she produced the name of the city where the card had been found.
It was Calcutta.
Chapter 3
WAITING FOR AVA to get on with the card, Antar pushed his chair back, on its castors, until he could look into his kitchen, through the door of his living room. There was a window above the sink, and by craning his neck he could just about see the back of Tara 's apartment, on the far side of the building's air-shaft. He was relieved to see that she wasn't home yet; the apartment was still dark.
He slumped back in his chair, yawning. His eyes began to glaze over at the thought of the steaming cup of sweet, dark tea that was waiting for him at the neon-lit doughnut shop in Penn Station; of the other regulars who occasionally dropped by to sit around the plastic-topped table – the Sudanese bank-teller, the well-dressed Guyanese woman who worked in a Chelsea used-clothes store, the young Bangladeshi man from the subway news-stand. Often they just sat in companionable silence around a circular plastic-topped table at the back of the shop, sipping tea or coffee out of paper cups while watching tapes of Arabic and Hindi films on a small portable monitor. But every once in a while, there would be a discussion, or they would exchange tips – about a gadget that was on sale somewhere, or some new scam for saving on subway tokens.
Antar had started going to the doughnut place because the owner of the franchise was an Egyptian, like himself. Not that he missed speaking Arabic: far from it. He got plenty of that all day long, from Ava. Ever since she was programmed to simulate 'localization' Ava had been speaking to him in the appropriate rural dialect of the Nile Delta. Her voice-reproduction capabilities had been upgraded so that she could even switch intonations depending on what was being said – from young to old, male to female. Antar had grown rusty in the dialect; he was just fourteen when he left his village for Cairo and had never been back. At times he had trouble following Ava. And then there were times when he would recognize the authorship of a long-forgotten relative in an unusual expression or characteristic turn of phrase.
It was a relief to escape from those voices in the evenings; to step out of that bleak, cold building, encaged in its scaffolding of rusty steel fire escapes; to get away from the metallic echo of its stairways and corridors. There was something enlivening, magical almost, about walking from that wind-blown street into the brilliantly lit passageways of Penn Station, about the surging crowds around the ticket counters, the rumble of trains under one's feet, the deep, bass hum of a busker's didgeridoo throbbing in the concrete like an amplified heartbeat.
And of course there was the tea. The owner brewed it specially, for himself and Antar, in a chipped enamel pot, thick and syrupy, with a touch of mint – just like Antar remembered from his boyhood.
He ran a finger around his damp collar. It was clammy inside today: too hot if he shut the window and too damp if he left it open. Downstairs, the building's front door was opening and closing in a steady rhythm: he could feel the impact through the floor, every time it slammed shut. The people who worked in the warehouses and storage spaces on the first three floors were on their way home now, a little early because of the long weekend ahead. He could hear them on the street, shouting to each other as they walked towards the subway station on 7th Avenue. He was always relieved when the banging stopped and the building fell silent again.
There was a time when there were nothing but apartments in the building, all rented to families: large, noisy Middle Eastern and Central Asian families – Kurds, Afghans, Tajiks and even a few Egyptians. He had often had to knock on his neighbours' doors, asking them to keep it down. Tayseer, his wife, had become very sensitive to noise after she was confined to bed in the last trimester of her pregnancy. In the past she had never noticed when the neighbours made a racket shouting across the air-shaft, or when their kids skateboarded in the corridors. She had grown up within earshot of the canopied souks around the Bab Zuwayla in Cairo: she liked the bazaarish feel of the building, with everyone dropping in on each other and sitting out on the stoop on summer evenings, while children played around the fire hydrant. She liked the building, even though the neighbourhood scared her, especially the heavy traffic on either side of it – the West Side Highway at one end and the approaches to the Lincoln Tunnel at the other. But she'd wanted to move there anyway: she thought it would be easier having a baby there, with so many women and children around.
In the end it didn't matter: an amniotic embolism killed her and the baby in the thirty-fifth week of her pregnancy.
They were all gone now, all those noisy, festive families that had so attracted Tayseer. They had been syphoned slowly away into small towns and suburbs by the demands of their expanding businesses and their ever-growing famillies. Antar had sometimes thought of moving too, but never with much conviction.
At first he had expected that the building would fill up around him after his old neighbours left – just as it had in earlier generations, with one wave of migrants moving out and another moving in. But somewhere down the line the pattern had changed: an alteration in the zoning regulations had prompted the building's owners to start converting empty apartments into commercial properties.
Soon the only residents left were ageing holdovers like himself: people who couldn't afford to move out of their rent-controlled apartments. Every year the building grew emptier of people, while the storage spaces expanded.
The man in the next apartment had been there since before Antar moved in. He was a keen chess player and claimed to be related to Tigran Petrossian. Antar played with him occasionally, losing badly every time.
Then one summer – was it fifteen or twenty years ago? – the chess player began to waste away. He couldn't play chess any more; he barely had the strength to move the pieces. His nephews drove up from North Carolina, where the rest of his family had settled. They cleared out his apartment and loaded everything into a yellow moving truck. Before they left they gave Antar a gunmetal chess set, as a memento; he still had it somewhere. Antar had watched from his living room window as they carried the chess player away in the truck.
Next it was the woman in the apartment below. She had been in the building since the sixties, when she first came to America from Azerbaijan. She had grown old in that apartment, brought up two children there; she had nowhere to go, especially after her eyesight began to fail. In that familiar space she could still manage on her own; she would have been at a loss anywhere else. Her children had let her stay, giving in to her entreaties against their better judgement. They'd fly in to visit, every other month, from the small Midwestern town where they lived. They arranged to have food delivered to her twice a week, from an uptown grocery.
And one day the delivery boy killed her, battering her head in with a cast-iron skillet. It was Antar who found the body. He had grown accustomed to the rhythm of her movements, and when he didn't hear the familiar tapping of her cane for a whole day, he knew something was wrong.
He'd lived alone on the fourth floor for four years. Then, a few months ago Maria, the Guyanese woman from the doughnut shop, brought Tara to Penn Station and introoduced her to the other regulars. Tara was small and birdlike, with a fine-boned beak of a nose. She was youngish – in her thirties, Antar reckoned – a good deal younger than Maria. He guessed at once that she was from India: the connnection was obvious really, because Maria was a Guyanese of Indian origin and he knew she still had relatives there.