REMEMBRANCE
Virtue’s English Dictionary, Encyclopaedic Edition
Gay: merry. Given to pleasure. Often to vicious pleasure.
Vicious pleasure? In the old Georgian sense, perhaps, but what a definition. Her childhood dictionary had transfixed Rumana for years. It had landed in her parents’ bookcase by accident, left behind by a colleague of her father’s. From the School of Oriental and African Studies, where Riz lectured in political science. The search for definitions, the discovery of unknown words, fuelled Rumana’s love of reading and followed her into adulthood. By which time gay meant something else. Sexual and very specific. The dictionary, published long ago, survived the cull of possessions when the house was sold. Along with her new wave records and her brother’s stash of albums by The Clash. It was still with her when she heard of lesbianism, and looked it up. Lesbian, and homosexual, were nowhere to be found. Did such people, therefore, not actually exist? Were they merely making themselves up?
Rumana placed the dictionary on her shelf, alongside her books on the First World War. She was pretty much an expert now on battles and artillery. She worked in museum education and had endless questions to answer. From fans of Michael Murpurgo. From the great grandchildren of soldiers and evacuees. From children whose parents had fled modern, contemporary wars. She learned about wounded soldiers, and the true effects of shrapnel and gas and grenades. And, to keep herself from falling into weapons talk, she read the War Poets. To try and humanise the horrors.
If only she’d known, in school, that Wilfred Owen was gay. They’d taught the Great War in language that she failed to relate to. She, 16 and Asian. Owen, white and remote. In an age she could make no sense of. Of colonialists and discrimination. Today she showed children how to make poppies. Little children, proud and excited. And she wore her own poppy to commemorate the fall of Japan, with its implications for her family. No fan of empire, for sure, but fully aware of the fallen.
She was not sure if she was gay herself. Discovery of this had come late. She’d loved her ex, Seb. That was certain. But had it been sexual love, or romantic - almost platonic - love for a very sensual and wonderful man? She was greatly aroused by Käthe, her German teacher, and this confused her. Being gay, or bi, had not been an option when she was growing up. Feelings for women were crushes. Men were the real deal, preferably in marriage. Not that her parents were in any way traditional, or even role models. Her mother read all kinds of literature, but failed to tell her daughter about Virginia Woolf. Nusrat was an artist. She painted in bold colours. Scenes of life in Karachi and London. In her private studio, where she also painted Julian.
Until she was fourteen, Rumana had no concept of her parents as sexually active human beings. This dissolved when she found out the truth. That Riz was shagging his colleague Louise at the university and had fathered her child. Rumana’s older brother Sohail said he’d known for a while, and that Nusrat too had been at it for years.
‘I wish they’d just split up,’ he said furiously. ‘They’re staying together for other people.’
He presumably meant family in Pakistan, because Riz and Nusrat had no interest at all in the emotions of their children. Their marriage had been a disaster, despite its early promise. A clinical, sterile home awaited Sohail at his birth. And his sister’s arrival added nothing. The siblings wondered, as adults, why Nusrat had bothered to have them. She told them once, after too much sherry. ‘To shut your Nani up.’
Riz and Nusrat had plenty of sex, but not with each other. Always secret, and alluded to in couched terms. Rumana considered their marriage to be transactional. It was therefore not her parents, but society, that influenced her sexual choices. St Ursula’s School for Girls, in Finchley, where the only talk was of boyfriends and marriage. A girl named Amanda joined her year. She was funny. Good at hockey. Long legs, and fair, plaited hair. Each felt shame at mutual, shocking, attraction. Rumana, hearing sniggers on the sports field. Amanda, scared to respond to unwanted and disgusting desires. Each shunned the other, afraid to explore this new longing. Kissed boys to feel and appear Normal. It was the eighties, after all, and they were fourteen.
One year earlier, before Rumana had periods and a bra, she heard gossip in her parents’ living room. A newly divorced neighbour had been unearthed as a lesbian. Local mothers, whose children played in this woman’s home, were banding together to make her leave the street. To be rid of what Riz brazenly described as perversion. Her father’s hypocrisy grated on her later, when she figured out that he’d already slept with Louise. As for Nusrat, the free-thinking, liberated artist, lesbians were ‘seeking attention.’ They were even giving birth through artificial insemination. To what everyone, in wider society, referred to as Freaks.
When Rumana was eighteen8 her parents made the break, and the house without love was emptied.
Listening now to Käthe talking about verbs and declension, Rumana felt a stirring that she wanted to explore. She’d been in this class for weeks now, and her spoken German was improving. It was the writing that was hard, and practice was needed. She found Käthe vibrant and passionate. Keen to get everyone chatting – in German, of course – and quite open about her sexuality. She had girlfriends, she told them, but no one special. She didn’t have children. Rumana guessed she wasforty, maybe forty-five. She imagined lying with her, making love. The mechanics of it. Thoughts she’d forced herself to suppress, when she’d longed to kiss and touch Amanda.
Since joining the museum, with her Masters in Holocaust Education, Rumana had expanded her reading. Her job made her brain swim with facts, conveyed to school parties on a never-ending loop. It was why she wanted to learn German. The history of that nation. The Holy Roman Empire. The Weimar Republic. The Nazis. The Holocaust team was full, and they started her on War and Empire. She searched the museum bookshop and picked out a novel. ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’, by Erich Maria Remarque. A curious name. Intriguing. She may as well try it, and aim to read it in German in a couple of years’ time. She’d only just joined the class and her crush made her feel stupid. What if Käthe noticed how she felt, and asked her to pull herself together? She began to make an effort, focusing entirely on the lesson and fantasising after. She told Sohail and he laughed out loud.
‘Don’t tell me you’re gay now. After all that stuff with Seb.’
Seb, her Romanian ex-lover. Sohail had loved the joke. Rumana. Romania. He’d liked Seb and was sorry when the relationship came to an end. At the time, Rumana was in love. She still loved Seb, unconditionally, but what she felt for Käthe was voracious. She had certainly loved Seb with her body, and this left her confused. Maybe we’re all a little bit ‘bi’? We’ve just been conditioned not to be. The young had no hang-ups. They found it all totally normal. She watched them scrolling all day, affirming all kinds of love and offering their pronouns whole-heartedly. It was beautiful, she thought. A freeing of the body and soul. Friends of her age were not so liberated, and she was lucky to have her brother. An open-hearted guy with no complications. They’d had each other’s back since childhood. Negotiated stepparents together. The departure to Australia of their father, from whom they’d become estranged. Frequent altercations with their mother, who had split from Julian long ago and lived with a sculptor.
The book by Remarque plunged Rumana into grief and led her to Wilfred Owen. This was when she discovered that Owen was gay. Frustrating, she thought, that they didn’t tell us this incredible fact. I would have wanted to read his poems. To consider what we had in common, as victims of prejudice and assumption. It was normal and rational, when Rumana was growing up, to use offensive words. To yell out racial abuse. To spit at women in sarees and push dark children off their bikes. Streets where you wouldn’t walk. Wilfred Owen would have understood that. Gay-bashing. Can’t have been much different. Remarque had survived the Great War, but Owen died in battle. She told children that all the time. That the Armistice had been one week away.
It turned out that Blighty came from an Indian word. Bilayati. Foreigner. Rumana was shocked to read this, to discover the role of Indians in the war. She now had a link to that time, and to Remembrance Day itself. A day of no significance in her family home, but maybe that was an error. She lay on her sofa with one book after another. Books from many genres and cultures, which taught her to travel. She wondered what Käthe thought about the British Legion, and the poppies on sale at Charing Cross station. They’d walked there together after class one evening, and both had felt a spark. What were Käthe’s feelings about the Great War, and of course about the Nazis? It never came up in class but didn’t everyone share the revulsion? Class was no place for politics, but they often joked about Brexit and the Indian-heritage PM. He and his mixed Cabinet, and their Stop The Boats obsession.
Term ended for a break at the end of October. A few drinks in the nearby bar, and a definite frisson. Rumana felt Käthe’s hand stroking hers and flushed.
‘Which way are you walking?’
‘Whichever way you are,’ Rumana whispered.
Corny. Absurd. Have a little sophistication.
‘Okay.’ Käthe smiled. ‘Do you want to come back, for a – coffee?’
Reply slowly this time, with decorum. Don’t rush ahead.
‘Maybe. Where do you live?’
‘Holland Park. Central Line.’
‘I don’t know it but I’m in Stratford. On the same line.’
‘Useful.’
Käthe felt for her fingers under the table.
‘I’m not your teacher tonight. And we are full adults.’
Doubt, mixed with anticipation. Is Käthe the one? Was Rumana reading too much into Käthe’s warm and open smile. Her desire to chat as class came to an end. Waiting to walk together. Now, on the tube, hands touching. Too late for poppy sellers to be out at this time. Books, on every shelf. What a paradise, Rumana thought, as she entered the Holland Park flat.
‘I don’t know if you really want coffee right now,’ Käthe said.
‘I don’t think so –’
Overwhelmed, both, with desire. They fell onto the sofa and began to kiss, feeling for one another. The first sight of the female body, after all this time without knowing. Thumping heart and trepidation. For weeks the fantasy. The auburn hair. The chance to stroke it, and to feel the skin of this woman. Käthe laughing, afterwards, at the way it had unfurled.
‘I wanted to make a move,’ she whispered, ‘but I didn’t want to be unprofessional.’
Coffee and sliced bread for breakfast, and a traditional honey spoon. A very German affair. The familiar food of many trips to Berlin. To Munich, and to the Black Forest.
‘Have you had boyfriends?’ Käthe asked.
Rumana thought of Seb, of his generous words when they split:
‘It didn’t work out, but it was incredible.’
He was a space scientist, a man of unparalleled intelligence. They’d met at another museum and she’d told him she didn’t get physics.
‘I can tell you about rocket science,’ he laughed. She wondered how he’d feel if he saw her now, with Käthe. But he’d always been open minded.
The coffee was strong and they left for work with reluctance. They parted on the tube and Rumana made her way to the museum. A museum of war, which she wished could be re-named. To National Museum of War and Remembrance. She’d been here now for two years, fielding the children’s obsession with weapons. Occasionally she filled in at workshops on Holocaust education, and today she watched some Year 9’s in the permanent Holocaust exhibition. She’d been here with Seb, thinking of their hero Elie Wiesel. Today there were quite a few older children heading that way, persuaded by their teachers to take a look inside. All of them were of South Asian appearance, just like her. As a group they pretended to titter. They were scared of showing emotion. They gazed at the Nazi uniforms, mesmerised and embarrassed. You weren’t supposed to admire things in here. It was spelt out in the subsequent rooms what those uniforms had done. They left the gallery feeling sick. Like the feeling you got after a funeral.
They behaved quite well compared to some school parties. They exited quite fast and Rumana made her way to the poppy workshop to meet the under-10s. They grilled her about the Blitz, and compared it to life in Gaza and Ukraine. Their school was in Mile End, not far from where she lived. Not one of them could have had a relative in the Blitz but they understood about war and child evacuation.
‘My friend’s Ukrainian, Miss,’ a boy said. ‘His dad had to stay to fight the Russians.’
She’d chosen not to have a child, though Seb had been persuasive on the subject of adoption. She still considered it sometimes. She thought of Käthe and pictured her as a mother. Teaching their adopted child, of mixed or unknown origin, to speak and write German. If they adopted together she’d be a mother too. A better, more loving, one than Nusrat had ever been.
She wondered if Käthe would want to meet again. She’d been afraid to ask, and dared not look at her phone. If only she could be more spontaneous. Seb was always jumping into love, and he’d finally cracked it. He had a partner now whom Rumana saw on his various social media profiles. A space psychologist named Mariella.
Her phone pinged as she went to lunch.
‘Dinner tonight – and more?’
They lay in bed together, she and Käthe, at her flat in Stratford. They giggled a lot as they drank.
‘Your books are – eclectic,’ Käthe smiled. ‘Space exploration, the Vietnam War - and the Nazis. And you have a lot of different novels.’
‘So do you. But forget the books,’ Rumana declared. ‘I love you.’
Shocking herself. This had to be the gin. Käthe kissed her, a little tenderly.
‘I’m falling in love with you too.’
‘Have you – ever slept with a man?’
Käthe, so free and upfront about her sexuality. Even she had denied her first instincts.
‘I slept with a guy at university. I thought I was a freak, when I didn’t – perform. You understand? And he wasn’t that gracious about it.’
‘So how – when did you realise?’
‘I fell for a beautiful woman, a musician, at a party. She guided me. That’s when I found out.’
‘But I – I’m mixed up. This, with you, is fantastic. But I’ve enjoyed sex with guys.’
‘Don’t put a label on yourself. Just have fun.’
And this was how it flowed. Rumana moved classes, to another night and another excellent tutor. Love, unlabelled and beautiful. They reached the late autumn of 2024, with a new government that didn’t seem so full of hate, and the poppy sellers were out again. It was their first year anniversary and they were on their way to meet Sohail, and his new partner Natalie, for a drink.
Walking to the station. Holding hands. Past a tiny cabal of people with Jesus Loves You placards. Gospel music on a phone. A glare from a woman with a poppy on her coat, following them with a young girl.
‘Don’t you ever end up like that,’ she instructed her daughter.
Her voice clear and bitter.
‘Excuse me,’ Rumana exploded.
‘Jesus died for you,’ the woman said boldly. The child fixed Rumana and Käthe with a curious stare.
‘Jesus would have held our hands,’ Käthe laughed. ‘He would have celebrated our passion.’
‘Are they lesbians, Mum?’ the girl said out loud.
‘They’re two very sick people. We’ll pray for you,’ the woman replied.
‘A gay man called Wilfred Owen died for you,’ Rumana said.
The woman scoffed and moved away but Rumana held back. The child. The child could not hear this and be left without the truth. And the child didn’t want to move away. Back to the staring Jesus lovers. Her brain was seeking an answer. An explanation. Rumana looked into her eyes. Year 7, she guessed. An age to rebel. She could be at the museum one day, reading Wilfred Owen’s poetry. Learning about humans, shot into pits by degenerate, blind-drunk hooligans. She could turn now into the future, or shuffle along with the poison. With the senders of hate texts. The transphobes.
‘We’re just two people in love,’ Rumana replied. ‘It’s a lot better than hate, isn’t it?’
For a moment the child kept looking. At the women holding hands. At their obvious joy and unison. Then she smiled and nodded her head. Watched the women in love moving on, towards the Central Line. Into the crazy mix of London.
about the author
Nargis Lal is a new writer. Her achievements include: Short-listed for Cranked Anvil Flash Fiction Prize with ‘VIRGINITY’ Long-listed for Fiction Factory Short Story Competition with ‘MATRICIDE’ and ‘WALTHAMSTOW VILLAGE’ She is British Indian. Her stories deal with sex, race, politics, and relationships
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