Voices of the Lost

by Hoda Barakat

  I throw you in with all those ordinary women, the whole degraded lot of them. Saying that helps me to put you at a distance, telling you jokes I’ve told you many times before. Or I go and stand at the window and comment on ‘the weather out there’, to remind you of the out-there, to remind you that you have to go, before staying here makes you late. I get dressed to see you out, even if just a very little way, acting like a gentleman. It hurts me, deep inside, that you make no objections to my disgraceful behaviour. You don’t show any anger. You don’t scold me, or swear at me. And then you come back to me as though nothing at all happened, as though you don’t care. Damn you! How can you accept it? Why don’t you love me? Damn you to hell!

  When I hit you that first time, and your immediate response was to put your arms around me, I knew that freeing myself of you was going to be harder than I thought. The next day I said to you – I was trying to find an excuse for myself – that I didn’t know what you expected from me. Crying a little, you replied that you didn’t expect anything at all. At all? Really? Nothing at all? How can it be, then, that you give the appearance of someone clutching an empty pitcher and circling me, coming closer and closer each time, and I have no idea what I could possibly fill your pitcher with?

  Do you believe that I’m hiding stories from you, secrets I’m keeping only for myself? If so, why do you come back? Do you really not pick up on the fact that I’m making no effort to hide my relationships with other women from you? Or do you figure that I’m singling you out as someone special precisely because I do tell you about them? That I’m choosing you above everyone else? I’m letting you into an intimacy that none of the others share? Or is this about your avant-garde views, your rejection of the whole idea that any one body could own another? That is, it doesn’t concern you whether my body is all yours. Fine, so be it. You will not knock on my door, then, nor will you go on knocking until I open it. You won’t chase away the woman you might find in my bed and then work as hard as you can to get me back. You won’t pull my head to your breast and rub it ever so gently. Why are you so hard? And then, if you are this hard, how can you take seriously my regret and the tears I shed after hitting you?

  Despite all your pretences and claims, you give the impression of having just arrived from some ancient century. From some barren and paltry era, where embalmed, pale, consumptive women are made to stand on balconies, pressed together and indistinguishable in the neon of an ice-cold moon, like frozen fish packed in a carton. In a time when other women were sucking out the blood of the long-awaited knight on his steed in order to transform him into someone else, pumping fire-water into his skull, smearing his white horse with kohl and thick, coloured powders, and then bursting into laughter at the sight.

  In fact, you aren’t even particularly conscious of my existence unless I am standing in front of you, and alone. You don’t realize, for instance, that when you laugh out loud at the words of another man, I want to slap you. ‘I’ll do it later,’ I tell myself. ‘When we are alone. And I’ll explain it to her. I’ll tell her it’s only that I have a jealous sense of protection towards her because these men who cluster around her deserve nothing but scorn.’ Not because I have any fear of them or because I dread what they might be able to do. No, not at all. But it’s ridiculous, the way you humour those types.

  Do you really have such an absurd need for diversion? Why? Is it because I’m boring? Irritating? Can’t you see, with those pretty eyes of yours, how I’m burning with desire when I kiss you down there?

  At least that must be some kind of diversion. No? You don’t understand this passion. And every time I’ve made love to you, I’ve regretted it. I ask myself, ‘What business do I have with this woman? My desire gives her a power I can’t stand.’

  When I have dreams about you at night, I wake up in terror, as if I’ve had a truly frightening nightmare. My first thought is that I’ve lost my ability to perform, and immediately I’m certain I’ve lost it for good. I go on a mad search for you and when I find you, I’m desperate to prove that nightmare accusation wrong, and then to show how silly and unimportant this relationship between us is. In the café I don’t have much to say. I yawn, and I just say over and over how much I regret the poor circumstances that don’t allow us to meet more often. And naturally, you will look at your watch, leaving me to flail about in the swamp of my own potency. I entice you to stay a little longer, and you believe I might reveal something important to you. Then I look at my watch. I leave you sitting there in the café as I hurry outside, excusing myself abruptly for having not paid attention to the time. Walking on in the fresh air, I buy bread and some fruit. I try to imagine you returning home in a state of irritation, asking yourself what pushed me to insist so forcefully on seeing you? Then I imagine you going out to meet your friends, and I throw the bread and fruit into the nearest rubbish bin and climb the stairs empty-handed and cold. I might stop off to see one of my girlfriends or bring her home with me, rustling up a quick supper, a good one accompanied by constant banter and some

  Since, after all, I am not really up to your standard, and since I reject the whole idea of standards and propriety, and no one ever taught me how to behave according to its rules.

  Sometimes, alone at night, I’m in torment, haunted by your face, which I can’t rid myself of. I can’t stop imagining the sad expression you wear, which pursues me like a demon. And it’s all because of me. Your face, lonely without me. It agonizes me that I have no place for you – that you don’t have a place here with me, and then that you are so accepting about staying outside.

  But you’re right to be that way. What life could I invite you into? I’m broke, totally broke, face in the mud. To others, I look like someone who refuses to accept what the fates have dealt me, since a person in my condition doesn’t turn down work no matter how low the pay. Any wage, for someone like me, would be respectable, that’s true enough. But the work? I did work, after all. I worked for that insurrectionist military man who started a newspaper because he wanted to instruct all of God’s creatures on the principles of democracy. Every time a team of inspectors from the Ministry of Labour marched in, he ordered all of our offices to be emptied. We had to clump our way down the steps of his splendid palace like a flock of bewildered sheep staggering onto the boulevard. We waited, huddling in nearby cafés until the guard came to sound the all-clear whistle. The guard – the heavy, the big man’s qabaday who handled security. It was all because we were working without papers, under the table. Black-market workers.

  This lover of democracy who had fled his native land – or who had probably worked out a deal with his ‘historic’ zaeem, his old militia chief, that meant staying away for a bit in the hope people would forget the massacres he’d instigated – this lover of democracy gave us lectures. He made us come to the palace he had bought and renovated as a headquarters, so that he could lecture us as if we were his students. He allowed himself to congratulate us on living in exile, just as he was, because we were freedom-seekers. Like him, we had refused to accept the oppression and the backwardness of our Arab nations.

  Because we were seekers of freedom and democracy, and foreigners here, if anyone attempted to apply for residency, the qabaday accompanied them to the ground floor where the quasi-secret office of investigations was. It was an investigations bureau in every sense of the word, with the authority to throw people out. All it took was a gesture to the qabaday: Take this petty clerk to gather up his things in silence and see him out through the metal gates (which, as a rule, were locked).

  We did ask ourselves, we asked each other, how the ministry inspectors could explain to themselves all these unoccupied desks, bare except for scattered cups of coffee that were still hot. Money seals mouths, we concluded. Money creates delays. Money even overcomes the law. We said these things to each other, over and over, offering bitter condolences. That these were the necessary conditions of living in exile. That we were our countries’ orphaned children. That our families were
poor. We always promised each other that we would meet up and look for other work together.

  It’s strange that I never even once blew up at the qabaday. Somehow, and I don’t know exactly why, I found this security fellow to be a good guy. We shared a lot of laughs, especially about the huge difference between his massive powerful physique and my body. He loved playing his strongman game – his muscle against men who wrote for a living. He must have asked himself how this writing business could possibly help any one of us to confront the kind of nerve someone like him lived by, with his strong heart and powerful brawn. He was like a child-giant, a baby-doll face over an inhumanly thick neck. He reminded us of certain relatives we had back in our villages, young men who boasted of their ability to lift heavy weights and fight bulls, who even pulled heavily laden wagons on their own as if they themselves were the animals. I found him entertaining and we talked a lot, but I never asked about his duties at the newspaper. To my good fortune, he never ushered me through those gates.

  And me – a man broke to the point of humiliation – did I ever object or complain? Did I leave the work? No, I just trudged along like a donkey who tugs his own halter forward. Until we arrived one morning and began waiting, like migrant workers who show up hoping for day contracts. We pressed on the bell repeatedly and stared into the camera above it, hoping against hope that if we had been counted as tardy it would not be deducted from our wages. The gates remained closed. No one responded. We waited a long time. What was usually a quiet street was choked with people, because we were all out there. A voice came over the loudspeaker system. ‘Go home, there is no work today.’ The same thing happened several days in a row, until we gave up. None of us felt angry. Nobody tried for revenge against the zaeem who had stolen his country’s wealth and smuggled drugs, the lover of democracy who had taken such obvious pleasure lecturing us and then having the sweets he had ordered passed around. We were all preoccupied with looking for other work, something similar to the work we had been expelled from, of course, something to tide us over for at least a few months. That’s why we had to keep quiet, to appear obedient and compliant. Anyway, without any work contract, there was no way you could make a complaint.

  The labour market we knew had dried up, after a few ventures of this sort failed. Or let us say that the money shifted to other markets. Little by little, the only choices were cocaine or the Islamists. And because I am a coward – a gutless coward, really – I was more comfortable with the first option. Many times, I went to the so-called ‘Café National’, and I offered my services, to carry suitcases and so forth. No one employed me. I stopped making the rounds of the cafés, but I didn’t go anywhere near the Islamists, either. Signing up with them was out of the question. And anyway, if I’d failed with the traffickers, how then could I ever

  Then it occurred to me to try renewing my passport. But that’s when I got a shock: I was persona non grata. They held on to the passport. ‘Fine, keep it!’ I said. I wasn’t trying to renew it in order to go back. I just wanted to extend my visa here, or perhaps move to some Arab city – Beirut or Amman, maybe. Then I began mulling over the question of how I could live here without a residence permit. An illegal immigrant who could not get any real work. It didn’t seem possible.

  That’s how I found myself among ‘the opposition’. I got labelled opposition after a French newspaper published an article I had translated from the Arabic. I didn’t write it, I just translated it, and for a pitiful sum of money. Then I told myself that as long as this was how it was, I might as well really join the opposition. Maybe I would find people there who were in similar circumstances, and they might help me somehow. They had their networks, their connections, their ways.

  But none of them would put up with me. As much as they fought among themselves, they were united on one thing: that I was ‘suspicious’. I was just an opportunist out for my own gain, and they would have to keep a close eye on me until I came up with something they could all agree proved I was worthy and fit for service.

  What more can I say?

  Apart from all of that, I’m a backward soul. I’m aggressive, I’m violent, and then to top it off, I’m an addict. And also, my best sex fantasies begin with me pushing you into the arms of some other man, or men. You’re naked, and sometimes you’re underneath, sometimes on top. Most likely it is all a way of dealing with my jealousy. I like seeing you looking just like any other woman, your body alive with animal health and desire, moving from one set of hands to another, one mouth to another, all of them making your flesh glow and burn and open. To see you as just another woman, like my neighbour, the baker’s wife, who laughs and writhes and squirms when I do something that hurts her, like when I slap her, and then she scampers off to stuff herself with food, when, just a few minutes before, she was squealing with pleasure. There’s nothing more exquisite, nothing more primal, than those common, functional spaces where people can just get on with the shared acts they’ve been engaging in down through many ages, without singling anyone out, without any

  Besides all that, I miss you.

  Here I am again, spouting nonsense. All the cocaine in the market is contaminated. Except for the really expensive stuff, it’s all tainted, diluted with paracetamol. Instead of puffing me up like a rooster, a long sniff of it sucks out whatever oxygen might still be in my head.

  Why am I telling you all this?

  Yes – to tell you how I got to this point, broke, with nothing, not even papers. This doesn’t change anything about my relationship with you. I’m not writing to you now in order to bring you back. No, in fact it could be – this letter I’m writing, I mean – it could be the last thing I have to say. I’m not holding on to any illusions. I need to find a woman who’s getting on a little in age, a widow, something like that, who wouldn’t be unhappy to have me as a husband. First I could get residence papers, and then maybe even citizenship.

  God, it’s all so ridiculous. Most of my days are just one absurdity after another.

  Forget what I’ve written in this letter. I just wanted to talk to you, to keep you in my head a little longer, because I miss you. My head is so confused, I get things so wrong and I don’t know where I am, that I almost suspect some of what I’ve written was meant for another woman. Or maybe another man, someone I was imagining as a sort of twin, maybe. Something like that, anyway. Forget what I’ve written, because now I’ve forgotten it myself. It’s the cocaine.

  If only you were to come in the door right now.

  If you were to come in the door right now, then we would forget everything, together. I would say to you, ‘Come and stand over here, close to me, by the window, and let’s look together through the glass.’ Come and look at this beautiful night, the city flung wide beneath its lights, sprawling in a drowsy mass. Come closer and let your shoulder touch mine, as if we are children, little girls, sisters peeping out at the night in secret, concealed from their family. Tell me what you see. Don’t let the misgivings whispering in your head get to you. You won’t see anything but this night; there’s nothing behind or above or beneath it. This is all there is.

  Take off your shoes, let those pretty feet of yours get some rest. Don’t worry about the time. Take as much time as you want. I’ll go on standing here. I won’t get tired, and I won’t make any sudden move that might wake you up if you happen to lean on me and doze a little. I will remain here, standing here, even if I dissolve in place and my bones fall to pieces.

  Wait. Wait just a little. I’ll be back, I’m coming right back to you.

  This man across from my window is watching me. He’s been watching me for a while now.

  He’s not just someone who looks like the man with the heavy moustache. It’s the man himself! He’s from the secret police. This has nothing to do with using cocaine or selling it. I am not a dealer. I’m not a user either, or rather, I’m not enough of one that they’d be watching me from a rented hotel room, for days now, maybe weeks. A type from the Mukhabarat alerted by the people
who refused my passport renewal at the consulate. This is so funny. Such a laugh, and so terrifying, all at the same time. Maybe it’s an opportunity. I can just explain the whole situation to him and we can come to an understanding, face to face.

  I’ll be back. I will come back to you.

  It’s because drowsiness is always hovering, ready to pounce… Or let’s just say it’s sleep’s tyranny. I’ve never been much good at waiting for anything without nodding off, but here, for some reason, I haven’t had to work at resisting sleep. The doziness I can never normally shake from my head and limbs hasn’t come over me here, even though in this room I can’t find anything stimulating to keep me pleasantly occupied. All I can do is to go on taking stock of the room’s contents, sizing up the furnishings one by one as if they have some significance, as if every object will yield a grand meaning. When a person has nothing to do, when you’re just floating in a void, you can’t help trying to attach meanings to the objects around you, to find some connection with them. As if I can retrieve some memory of them, as if I’m already familiar with them, like they have some sort of place in my life or tell a story I already know. I’ve told myself, for instance, that the knob on the wardrobe door looks like the one I remember seeing in my aunt’s home, in the old flat, the one she left during the war.

  I stare at the wardrobe’s double doors, following the patterns of the wood grain until my eyes are watering. Then I shift my attention to the drawer in the little bedside table, indecisive about whether to open it or not. I already know what is inside: a Bible, its pages thin and delicate, like you find in every hotel room in Europe, and an old telephone directory that no one uses any longer, and hasn’t for a long time. The hotel cleaners must have forgotten about it.