The Braid Read online

  “You won’t find a husband in a book!” Alda told Giulia, laughing.

  “Leave her in peace,” grumbled La Nonna.

  Giulia wasn’t looking for a husband. She never went to the cafés or nightclubs where people her age spent their time. Mamma made excuses for her “unsociable” daughter. Giulia preferred the quiet of the biblioteca communale to the racket of the discotheque and spent her lunch break there every day. She was a voracious reader, and loved the stillness of the big, book-lined rooms, disturbed only by the rustle of turning pages. There was something religious about the place, it seemed to her—a mystical, meditative atmosphere that she loved. When she was reading, Giulia never noticed time passing. As a child, sitting in the workshop at the women’s feet, she had devoured the swashbuckling adventures of Emilio Salgari. Later, she discovered poetry. She liked Caproni better than Ungaretti, and Moravia’s prose, and above all Pavese, permanently on her bedside table. She felt she could spend her whole life in his company. Sitting in the library, she would often forget to eat, and she would come back from her lunch break with an empty stomach. That’s how it was: Giulia devoured books like other people devoured cannoli.

  When she returned that afternoon, it was to a strange silence in the main workshop. All eyes turned to her as she entered.

  “Mia cara,” said La Nonna, in an unfamiliar voice. “Your mamma has just called. It’s your father . . .”

  Sarah

  Montreal, Canada

  The alarm sounded and the countdown began. Sarah’s life was relentless, from the moment she woke to the moment she went to bed. The instant she opened her eyes, her brain started to whir like the processor in her computer.

  She got up at five every morning. No time for more sleep, every second counted. Her day was a race against the second hand, calibrated down to the last inch, like the pads of graph paper she bought each year at the end of summer vacation for the children’s math classes. Her carefree, spontaneous days were long gone: the days before the firm, before motherhood and responsibility. The days when a telephone call could change everything. Tonight, how about . . . ? What if we . . . ? Do you feel like going to . . . ? Now, everything was planned, organized, anticipated. No room for making it up as you went along. You learned your role, and you played it over and over, day after day, week in, month out, all year round. Mother, professional, boss, Wonder Woman, all the labels the magazines loved to pin on women like her, as burdensome as the tote bags they slung over their shoulders.

  Sarah got out of bed, showered, and dressed. Her movements were precise, efficient, preprogrammed, like a musician in a military marching band. Down in the kitchen, she laid the breakfast table, always in the same order: milk/bowls/orange juice/chocolate powder. Pancakes for Hannah and Simon, cereal for Ethan, a double espresso for her.

  Then she would go wake up the children: Hannah first, then the twins. Their clothes for the day were laid out the night before by Ron. All they had to do was wash their faces and dress while Hannah did the lunch boxes. Fast and smooth, like Sarah’s sedan gliding through their neighborhood streets on the school run. Simon and Ethan in elementary school; Hannah in high school, now.

  Pecks on the cheek. Have you got everything? You’ll be cold, put on that sweater. Good luck on your math test! That’s enough back there. No, you’re going to gym class today. And last but not least, the traditional reminder: you’re all at your dads’ places next weekend. Then the drive to the office.

  At eight thirty sharp, she would drive into the parking lot and pull up in front of the sign that bore her name.

  “Sarah Cohen, Johnson and Lockwood.” She looked at it every morning with a touch of pride, the plaque that indicated so much more than her own personal parking space. She was a partner, she had a place in the world. Her accomplishment. Her life’s work. Success. Her realm.

  The doorman greeted her in the foyer, followed by the girl at the front desk. Always the same ritual. She was universally liked. Sarah entered the elevator, pressed the button for the eighth floor, walked quickly down the hallways to her office. There were never many others around. She was often the first in and the last to leave. That was the price you paid to build a career, to become Sarah Cohen, equity partner in Johnson & Lockwood, one of the city’s most respected and prestigious firms. Women were in the majority further down the ranks, but Sarah was the only one to have made partner in a firm that had a reputation for machismo.

  Most of her girlfriends from law school had hit the glass ceiling. Some had even given up, changed careers, despite their long, hard years of study. Not her. Not Sarah Cohen. She had shattered the glass ceiling, blow by blow, with her overtime, her weekends at the office, the sleepless nights preparing her pleas. She remembered the first time she had walked into the huge marble foyer, ten years ago. Called in for an interview, she had faced a panel of eight men, including Johnson, the eponymous founder and managing partner. God himself, come down from his office to the conference room especially for the occasion. He hadn’t spoken a word, but had fixed her with his hard stare, poring over her résumé line by line, making no comment. Sarah had felt unsettled but refused to show it.

  She was skilled at composing a mask, practiced in the art for years now. When the interview was over, she had felt vaguely discouraged. Johnson had asked no questions, demonstrated not a glimmer of interest. Like a hardened poker player, he had shown no expression during the interview, and uttered nothing but a terse “Goodbye,” leaving her with little hope of success. Sarah knew there were plenty of other candidates for the job. She had applied from another, smaller, less prestigious firm. Nothing was certain. Others would have more experience, more fighting spirit, a better chance.

  Later, she found out that Johnson had chosen her himself, picked her out from among the other candidates, overridden Gary Curst’s objections. That was something she had been forced to get used to: Curst didn’t like her. Or else he liked her too much. Perhaps he was jealous. Perhaps he was attracted to her. Whatever. He was certainly hostile toward her. Gratuitous hostility, everywhere, all the time, and there was nothing she could do about it.

  Sarah knew plenty of ambitious men like him. Women-haters, men who felt threatened by their female colleagues. She paid them no attention. She trod her own path, left them by the wayside. She had stormed through the ranks at Johnson & Lockwood and established a fine reputation in court. The courtroom was her arena, her territory, her battleground. She would sweep in, ready for combat, intractable, merciless.

  When she addressed the court, she used a subtly different voice, deeper, more solemn than her own. She spoke in short, incisive sentences, delivering knockout blows that left her adversaries reeling, sent them tumbling down the cracks in their arguments. She knew each case by heart. She was never caught off guard and never lost face. Since her earliest years in practice, with the small Winston Street firm that had taken her on straight out of law school, she had almost never lost a case. She was admired and feared. At forty years of age, she was the model of a successful, midcareer litigator.

  In the firm, she was mooted as the next managing partner. Johnson was getting on in years now: a successor would have to be found. The partners were vying for position. They could see themselves already, taking the boss’s place. Managing partner was the apotheosis, the Everest of any lawyer’s career. Sarah ticked all the boxes: a spotless record, unshakable grit, an unrivaled capacity for hard work. Her insatiable appetite for work kept her moving ahead. She was an athlete, a mountaineer, conquering each new peak, never content to rest. Her life was a never-ending climb; sometimes, she wondered if she would ever reach the top. She waited for the day, but she didn’t dare to hope.

  Her career had demanded sacrifices, of course. It had claimed its share of sleepless nights, and both of her marriages. Sarah often said that men liked women who didn’t put them in the shade, but she also admitted that two lawyers in a marriage was one too many. She had read a harsh statistic about lawyers’ relationships in a
women’s magazine one day—not that she ever looked at them much. She had shown it to her then husband, and they had laughed—but separated a year later.

  Work took up virtually all her time. Sarah had missed out on so many shared moments with her kids, passing up on school trips, end-of-year fetes, dance shows, birthday parties, holidays; and it cost her more than she cared to admit. She knew she could never get back all the moments she had missed, and the thought troubled her. She was no stranger to the working mom’s guilt: it had plagued her ever since Hannah was born, since the dreadful day when she had been forced to leave her in the arms of a nanny, at five days old, and headed out to tackle an emergency at work. But she had very quickly understood there was no place, in her world, for the dramas and dilemmas of a heartbroken mother. She hid her tears under a thick coat of foundation and left for work. She felt torn apart, but there was no one in whom she could confide. She had envied her husband’s cheerful, casual attitude. The fascinating insouciance of men, for whom guilt seemed not to exist. They stepped out the front door with appalling ease, taking nothing with them but their caseload, while she shouldered her burden of guilt, like a tortoise laboring under its shell. At first, she had tried to fight it, reject it, deny it, but she had never been able to. In the end, she had made a place for it in her life. Guilt was her longtime companion, the uninvited guest who accompanied her everywhere. The billboard passed in a field, a wart in the middle of a face: ugly and useless, but there it was. She dealt with it because she had to.

  Sarah never let anything show to her colleagues and fellow partners. She made it a rule never to talk about her children. She didn’t mention them, kept no pictures of them framed on her desk. If she had to leave work for a doctor’s visit, or an unmissable appointment at school, she would say she had an “outside meeting.” Better to say you were leaving early for “a quick drink” than because your nanny couldn’t stay late. It was better to lie, to make things up and embroider the truth than to admit you had children. Children were synonymous with chains, ties, constraints. They compromised your availability, blocked your career path. Sarah remembered a woman at her old firm who had made partner, then announced she was pregnant, and found herself demoted, relegated to the lower ranks.

  It was a kind of abuse. Mute, invisible abuse, a kind of everyday violence that no one dared to challenge. Sarah had learned her lesson: she had said nothing to her superiors about her two pregnancies. Amazingly, her bump was barely visible up until the seventh month, even for the twins, as if, deep inside her, the children sensed they had better keep out of sight. It was their little secret, a silent pact. Sarah had taken the shortest maternity leave possible, and returned to work two weeks after her caesarean, with a perfect figure and smile, flawlessly made up; underneath it all, though, her face was tired. Each morning, before pulling into her dedicated parking space at the foot of her office tower, she would stop at the parking lot of the nearby supermarket to take the two child seats from out of the back and put them in the trunk. Her colleagues knew she had children, of course, but she was careful not to remind them of the fact. The secretaries could chat about teething and the best baby food brands, but not a partner.

  Sarah had built a wall between her professional and family lives. They ran on parallel tracks, never intersecting or overlapping. The wall was precarious and cracked in places; it threatened to topple over one day. But that didn’t matter. She liked to think her children would be proud of what she had made, of what she was. She tried to make up for their lack of time together: quality, not quantity. In private, Sarah was a tender, attentive mother.

  And for all the rest, there was Ron. “Magic Ron,” to use the children’s nickname. Which made him laugh. The name that had become almost an official title over time.

  Sarah had hired Ron a few months before the twins’ first birthday. She’d had trouble with Linda, the previous nanny, who was always late, and slack in her work, and who had eventually committed a gross error that prompted her immediate firing. One day, Sarah had hurried back home to fetch a file she had forgotten and found nine-month-old Ethan alone in his crib in a deserted house. An hour later, Linda had come back from the market with Simon, totally unconcerned. Caught red-handed, she had explained that she took the twins out separately, on alternate days, because taking them both out together was too difficult. Sarah had fired her on the spot. Pleading crippling sciatica at work, she had spent the next few days interviewing a succession of helps, including Ron. Surprised to find a male candidate, she had discounted him at first—too many stories in the papers. And her two husbands hadn’t exactly distinguished themselves in the art of diaper-changing and bottle-feeding. She doubted another man would fare any better.

  Then she remembered her own interview at Johnson & Lockwood, and all that she had had to accomplish, as a woman, in order to make a name for herself there. And so she reconsidered. Ron deserved a chance, like the others. Besides which, he had a great résumé and sound references. He had two children of his own. He lived in a nearby neighborhood. He had all the qualities required for the post. Sarah had given him a two-week trial, during which Ron had proved perfect for the job. He spent hours playing with the kids, his cooking was divine, he did the shopping, the cleaning, the washing, relieved her of every dull and exacting chore. The kids—Hannah, who was five at the time, and the twins—had all taken to him straightaway. Sarah had just left her second husband, the boys’ father, and she felt a man around the house would be a good thing in a single-mom family like hers.

  Subconsciously, perhaps, she was ensuring no woman would take her place. And so Ron had become Magic Ron, indispensable in their lives.

  When she looked at herself in the mirror, Sarah saw a woman of forty who had it all: three beautiful children, a well-kept house in a smart neighborhood, a career that was the envy of many. She was the epitome of the women you read about in magazines: smiling, warm, accomplished. Her wound was invisible, almost undetectable. But look beyond her perfect makeup, her designer heels, and there it was.

  Like thousands of women across the land, Sarah Cohen was split down the middle.

  She was a bomb waiting to explode.

  Smita

  Badlapur, Uttar Pradesh, India

  Come here.

  Wash yourself.

  Don’t hang about.

  Today is the day. You cannot be late.

  In the tiny yard behind the hut, Smita helps Lalita to wash. The little girl stands submissively, not even protesting when the water gets in her eyes. Smita untangles her daughter’s waist-length hair. She has never cut it; here women keep their hair from birth, sometimes their whole lives. She divides the hair into three skeins, then braids them with expert hands. Then she holds out the sari she has stitched for Lalita, night after night. A neighbor gave her the fabric. She doesn’t have the money for the school uniform, but that doesn’t matter. Her daughter will look pretty on her first day, she tells herself.

  She has been up since dawn, preparing her food—there are no meals in the little school. Each child brings their own. Smita has prepared rice and added a little of the curry powder she keeps for special occasions. She hopes Lalita will have some appetite on her first day. She will need energy to learn to read and write. In place of a dabba, she has put her daughter’s rice in a carefully cleaned can, and she has even taken the trouble to decorate it. She doesn’t want Lalita to be ashamed in front of the others. She will learn to read, just like them. Like the Jatt children.

  Put on some powder. See to the altar. Hurry.

  In the hut’s only room—kitchen, bedroom, and temple—Lalita is in charge of the little altar to the gods. She lights a candle and places it beside the sacred images. It’s her job to ring the bell when prayers are finished. Together, Smita and her daughter recite a prayer to Vishnu, the god of life and creation, protector of all humanity. When the order of the world is disrupted, he is made incarnate and comes down to Earth to set things straight, taking in turn the form of a fish, a tu
rtle, a boar, a lion-man, even a man. Lalita likes to sit beside the small altar in the evening, after supper, and listen to her mother’s stories of the ten avatars of Vishnu. During his first human incarnation, he defended the Brahmins against the Kshatriyas, and filled five lakes with their blood. Lalita shudders every time she hears the story. In her games, she is careful never to crush even the tiniest ant, the tiniest spider; you never know, Vishnu may be there, right beside you, incarnate as the lowest of creatures. A god at the tip of your finger. The idea delights her and terrifies her at the same time. Nagarajan enjoys listening to Smita, too, beside the altar in the evenings. His wife is a wonderful storyteller, though she has never learned how to read.

  No time for stories this morning. Nagarajan has left early as usual, at first light. He is a rat catcher, like his father before him. He works in the Jatts’ fields. It’s an age-old tradition, a skill that is handed down, an inheritance of sorts: the art of catching rats with your bare hands. The rodents eat the crops and damage the soil with their tunnels. Nagarajan has learned to recognize the tiny, distinctive holes in the ground. You must be attentive, his father told him. And patient. Don’t be afraid. You’ll get bitten at first. You’ll learn. He remembers his first catch, when he was eight years old, when he put his hand down the hole. A sharp pain tore through his flesh, like lightning: the rat had bitten the tender space between the thumb and forefinger, where the skin is soft and sensitive. Nagarajan had cried out and pulled his bloodstained hand free. His father had laughed. You’re going about it the wrong way. You have to be quicker than that, take him by surprise. Try again. Nagarajan was frightened. He fought back his tears. Try again! He had tried again, six times, six bites, before pulling the huge rat from its hiding place. His father had grasped the animal by its tail and smashed its head against a stone, before handing it back to his son. There, he said, simply. Nagarajan had taken hold of the dead rat and carried it back home, like a trophy.