BRENDA SEROTTE

"A POISON TREE"

…In the morning glad I see,
my foe outstretched beneath the tree…
William Blake

When Ahmet died Leonora painted their bedroom black. She mourned there for four days and nights, eating only the remains of rotted fruit in a crystal bowl that stood on the chiffonier. She neither brushed her teeth nor combed her hair. Her grief was like the deepest water; she had been sucked into it, and could not climb out. His absence lay so heavy upon her chest that she was sure she would stop breathing.

On the fifth day of mourning, Ahmet’s brother, Nahoum, put an end to the widow’s grief. He burst into the black room with workers from the dead husband’s factory, and moved out the couple’s safe. Inside was Leonora’s gold and diamond jewelry, thousands of dollars in cash, their passports, and quite a few stock certificates. Next, he lifted the Vermeer painting of the sweet-faced Dutch girl, and the painting of three reclining fat women, by Rubens, off the wall. From her bed, the widow watched, all the time saying nothing. Nahoum wrapped the paintings carefully in white sheets, and his men took them out.

Satisfied that he had everything he wanted, her brother-in-law surveyed the room in one sweep, lingering one moment longer on his deceased brother’s face in a photo. He sneered at the prostrated woman in the black burkha, sprawled across the bed. Then he put the final blade to her heart:

"I will return in the morning to get my nephew." Their son! "Make sure he is ready."

Leonora turned a shade paler.

On his way out, he knocked over the wedding photo of Ahmet and Leonora, and shards of glass sprayed in all directions. One such jagged piece landed straight up on the carpet, like an icicle or knife.

That night, bereft, Leonora paced the black room. She asked the spirit of her dead husband what to do. She was penniless—-not that she cared for material things. What she and Ahmet shared had no price. But her son!

"I cannot let Nahoum take our boy!" she told the black walls.

Alas, they lived in a country where all this was entirely possible.

She called her personal maid and asked for a mirror. What she saw was as bad as she had thought: her face was the map of sadness, streaked with tears, and had a sickly pallor. This wouldn’t do, to look like a ghost. She went to her closet, and realized that she had no feminine clothing; there was nothing to wear but the shapeless black or blue burkhas. Then, she remembered a gift Ahmet had bought her, something beautiful, from Bangkok, only a few months before: a lavender peignoir. She had been saving the sheer nightgown, with its long matching coat, to wear on their anniversary night.

The next day, when Nahoum arrived, she waited for him in the driveway dressed in this revealing costume; she was barefoot, and wore only the lavender gown, with nothing underneath. Nahoum gasped; his driver looked away. I will have to have her arrested, he thought. Following that, he could not help but admit how beautiful she was.

Leonora had applied kohl to her eyelids and blush to her cheeks; her nails, toenails, and lips were painted red.

Nahoum had never married. He had always coveted his brother’s wife; it was no secret. But on that day the widow convinced him that she, too, felt the same way about him, and had for a long time, but knew how forbidden it was to even think such thoughts. She could get stoned in the village square, should anyone suspect. Thinking was a form of adultery.

Keeping the dark "secret” from others would be easy; now, her task would be to convince Ahmet of her love for him, or he would surely kill her. Her brother-in-law was a clever man, a businessman, a dealer in import-export textiles who had built a thriving businessing of his own. He was far from stupid. She took a chance:

"I'm so ashamed of the love that flames in my heart for you--" she lowered her head--"that I could not tell you in Ahmet's house."

Before he could stop himself, he sent his driver away, and there, in the driveway, he kissed Leonora and touched her the way he had dreamed.

"Let's go inside, to your bedroom. There, you can convince me you are not lying."

She did a fine job of it; after a dubious beginning, she did just that in the next few hours, and he felt sure that this woman was in love with him. He knew that such affection and abandon could not be faked. Leonora was not lying, for who knew a liar better than he?

So deep was the widow’s fear, and so wide her grief, that the newly declared feelings for her treacherous brother-in-law even felt true. They made love all night long in the black room.

Thus, the couple became embedded in a romance that shocked everyone in their village, including the servants, who are seldom fooled. She could not stand to be apart from Nahoum for long, and he, the colder of the two brothers, was constantly surprised at his own ardor. Their mating became so intense it exhausted them; it was deeper than anything Nahoum had ever known. Within a week they were living together in his dead brother's house, but hardly leaving their bed, even for food. Meanwhile, the black room, at her insistence, had finally been padlocked.

With six weeks, maybe two month's time, Nahoum began feeling poorly. At first it was a small pain, like a pebble got stuck in the pit of his stomach, which he attributed to their sporadic meal-taking. But soon, his little pain grew into a sharp stabbing one, frequently enough to make him gasp. Then it became constant, and then unbearable.

The doctor was baffled. He chided Nahoum for behaving like a lovesick groom, instead of the middle-aged, sharp businessman he was. And with his brother’s widow yet!

"Go back to your own house!" the doctor advised. "You need to get rest!"

But Nahoum could no longer be away from Leonora, not even for a few minutes. She had a strange, compelling hold over him.

They took blood tests, and all were negative. Another month passed. Soon, he was totally uninterested in food, as if he had never in his life eaten meals, and his physicians suspected it was because he could not swallow. As a precaution, his bodyguards were instructed to taste his every meal before serving it, and the contents of the widow’s pantry were analyzed twice. They found nothing amiss: no hint of poison, no spoiled foods, nothing that would cause a man to waste away like Nahoum. When his physician suggested, again, that he move to a hospital, just to be safe, he slowly shook his head. Behind the doctor, Leonora smiled at Nahoum, that angelic, inviting smile that he was smitten with. She was wearing a low-cut sheer blouse that day, which she had hastily covered with layers of black cloth, when the doctor came, but Nahoum had seen the outline of her body already, and even in his pain, he wanted her.

Her new lover got sicker and sicker, and eventually became too ill to travel. Doctors brought in specialist after specialist, but Nahoum forbid them to carry him out for another MRI. No one could find an earthly reason for his malaise.

The day came, at last, when the man slipped into a coma. Leonora sat by his side, holding his hand firmly in her own, crying softly. It was apparent to her and to everyone that Ahmet's brother, Nahoum, was dying.

As he drifted in and out, he gripped the widow’s hand as hard as he could, terrified, and begged her not to leave him. She promised all that he asked, kissing him and caressing him as if she had never cared for any man but him. Afterward, the nurses and servants claimed that she hadn't even attended to Ahmet with such devoted diligence. And then, after suffering weeks of torment and agonizing pain, Nahoum passed away.

When the room had cleared, and all the weeping sisters of the deceased, his mother, his aides, bodyguards, and nurse had finally gone, Leonora opened the sash on the leaded windows, as was their custom, and let Nahoum’s soul depart. She then went straight to the black room and unlocked it. She flung open the French doors, and stepped out onto the balcony.

In her pocket was a letter, a few weeks old, from her sister in America, pleading with Leonora to come and stay with her. The sister, who had run away long ago, sent her condolences in advance, and commented on Leonora's bravery: "Nobody could have survived what you have survived, Sister, to have buried not one, but two loves."

At last, Leonora, twice a widow, felt peace. Night had just fallen, and at the moment she looked up, a star appeared overhead. The great sycamore in the garden, that she had watched day after day, from Nahoum's room, seemed to be in mourning with her. It swayed to the left and to the right.

The End