Voices of the Lost

by Hoda Barakat

  It’s an embarrassing proposition. Maybe you felt it before I did. That is, you confronted it before you boarded the plane, or even immediately after you made the reservation and bought the ticket and wrote to me with the details of your arrival time and airline and so forth. Speaking about reservations, I’m thinking now about changing my reservation and postponing my departure by two or three days, but not in order to give you more time, for I know you aren’t coming, since you haven’t sent me an email and you didn’t try to reach me via the hotel phone number. I’ll stay on a few days because I like this room so much, and because the rain hasn’t stopped, and I don’t want to go out in this torrent of water. I’ll wait, so that I can walk around a bit and see this city. And because I have the time. And because this little sparrow has my attention, as he hops incessantly around the same little space. And now, whenever I’m standing at the window to follow his movements, he has begun looking in the direction of the hotel.

  No. I won’t stay here in order to watch a bird. I’ll stay here because something tells me that the writer of the letter I found here is coming back. I asked the very nice man in reception to tell him I’m here. True, the letter looks a bit old, because the paper it is written on looks old. It doesn’t offer any hints or clues that would help locate its writer. In spite of this, I am going to try. I might stumble across him here or somewhere in Paris. In one of the cafés where young Arab men gather when they don’t have anywhere else to go. The young men who are fleeing from something. Surely that will not be very difficult. Anyway, whatever the case, I am not going home. It would be impossible to go home now! And then I have nothing to do anyway, no one to meet anywhere. And since you aren’t going to come I will erase Canada from the list of places I was jotting down, the places with possibilities for

  I will find him, or at least I’ll find some trace of him in Paris. Then I’ll know whether he returned to his country after the revolution they had there, once he got his passport back. People don’t just disappear like grains of salt dissolving in warm water. And when I do meet up with him, I will

  My Dearest Mother,

  I’m writing to you from the airport before they take me away, and before trying to go through security. They are watching everyone. Every move. Because they’re afraid of terrorists, they have everything under surveillance, starting with the main terminal entrance. They’re all over the place, patrolling every corner, these plain-clothes officers.

  But I was ready for this. To them I’ll look like I’m just waiting for an arriving passenger. I’m not carrying a bag and I’ve opened my jacket so they can see I’m not wearing an explosives belt.

  My beloved mother, I don’t know if this letter of mine will reach you. What I really don’t know is how long I can stay here. How much time I have, I don’t know. I bought a newspaper so it would look like I’m reading, and I glance at my watch every couple of minutes, and then I go over to the big electric boards where arrivals are announced, and then I come back to my seat. This way, anyone who is watching me will believe that the aeroplane carrying the traveller I’m waiting for is delayed, and they’ll go away and leave me alone.

  There aren’t many things I can occupy myself with in this place between places, amid all the people hurrying in and hurrying out. No one stays long, not the people saying goodbye with a wave and then wheeling round quickly to leave, nor those here to meet someone from arrivals, who compare their watches with the times up on the board and turn their faces to the outside doors the moment they recognize their passenger coming towards them from the gates. I can amuse myself a bit by looking at the variety of people here, their features and their distinct racial types, and the different ways they have of saying goodbye to their relatives or loved ones, each according to their colour and place of origin and religion. From their appearances, I can guess how they will behave. I say to myself, ‘This woman is Sudanese, and she will cry as soon as that teenager standing next to her – he looks a little sad and worried, it must be her son – as soon as he leaves her to head inside.’ ‘This plump young woman with the blonde hair and jerky movements who can’t stay still, she will positively start jumping for joy when she’s finally hugging the person she’s waiting for.’

  This doesn’t mean I’m writing to you just so I look busy. No. I want to tell you what’s been going on before you learn it from someone else. You’ll believe me, Mother, as you always have. Well, no, not always. You haven’t always believed me, but I don’t have anyone else to confess to. You won’t be able to defend me, I know that. No one can defend me. But if I write to you, then at least you’ll know how dear you are to me, and that in these very difficult circumstances, I am thinking of you. That’s the least I can do. Maybe it’s the only way I have of trying to seek a pardon. Even if you won’t pardon me, just as you never do. You have never shown me any mercy, ever since they came to get me, at the house, that first time. Before I went with them, as they were already beating me, I told you it was just a trivial hashish case, nothing big, and there was no reason for you to be scared. You didn’t believe me. You didn’t believe me and you spat in my face. Maybe you wanted to convince them that I was really a boy from good stock, someone who should have turned out a polite and well-trained young man because his family had raised him well, and if his family was spitting on him now, it was because they were good, upright citizens who believed and trusted the soldiers. That’s why I’m telling you now that I didn’t feel angry about your spitting at me. In fact, it’s become my fondest memory, your spitting into my face, because what happened to me after that was

  You will not believe what happened to me.

  I ought to have listened to you. I should have bowed my head and been an obedient child no matter what. I don’t know now whether all those beatings my father gave me (the leather belt, the cane) were of any use, or whether on the contrary all they did was add more rage to the anger building inside me. Not just anger plain and simple. It was a sense of continuous blind humiliation, and to this day I can’t see any justification for it. Even now my body aches from his beatings, and that is because I was small and innocent. I never, not ever, did anything to deserve that kind of beating. He always beat me in front of other people. He would drag me outside the house so that people would see that he was beating me. That he was teaching his son to obey. He might be a poor man but he was respectable and he took care of his family.

  I know it is far too late for any words of reproof, even to you. Because I do blame you for never once protecting me from him. Why didn’t you? Yes, he would have beaten you too, I know that. And it would have made him twice as angry as he already was, I know that too. But many mothers have stood up to a father, bending protectively over their boys and taking the blows that were meant for them. Many, but not you. All you did was to run water through my hair and over my face and say, over and over, ‘He’s right, he’s got a point, he wants you to be a man. A man of good character – he wants to be proud of you.’

  My father beat me because he felt like it and because he was convinced it was the right thing to do. It was as though he was preparing me for all the varieties of blows to come. God be praised! And with time, he did actually strengthen the resistance of my skin and bones, and reduce my sensitivity to pain. I got used to tightening my nerves against the pain I knew the beating would cause. And so, when I began going to the club, I already knew how important it was to prepare oneself in advance for pain. The club! We used to call it ‘the club’, even though there was nothing club-like about it except the dirt-filled sack that we competed with each other to punch with our half-bare knuckles. We wrapped them in bands of inner-tube rubber that the lieutenant fetched and cut for us. And this boxing was supposed to build on the upbringing we got at home, improve our moral fibre, push destructive thoughts out of our heads. It was meant to chase the images of women’s bodies from our minds: those obscene pictures that led us to practise the secret act. Because if that ugly habit did not ruin our eyesight, it would drain the stre
ngth from our muscles, weaken our ability to fight and kill, and destroy our faith in the shining examples that we must all have before us.

  Why am I returning to those days? Because I think I have a long time to spend here, I don’t have any idea what is going to happen to me, and it’s important to me to talk to you. Because you haven’t seen me in years, and you don’t know anything about my life since I left home, or since they made me leave home, that first time, and then the second time, when I dropped by quickly and didn’t stay long, because

  But I have to tell you that I got the whole idea to write this letter from a woman who was here.

  She was a middle-aged woman, or maybe a bit past middle age. She was standing just over there, near the big sack of rubbish. She looked confused. I was just eyeing people, amusing myself, when I noticed her. She was looking around, and then she sat down and took some folded papers from her handbag. She opened them and began reading. After that, she sat there for about half an hour, just staring at nothing. Then suddenly she tore up the pages, dumped them into the rubbish bin and walked quickly inside towards the departure gates.

  I waited a few moments before tossing my newspaper into the rubbish bin. And then it was easy to fish out the torn pieces of paper the woman had thrown in there, along with my newspaper – as if I had changed my mind. I mean, in case anyone was watching me. I only went back to my seat after I’d stood for a good while in front of the arrivals board. I’ve learned these little tactics through the kind of life I’ve had. Every scrap of knowledge we pick up turns out to be useful one way or another. But then I was startled to see that same woman returning to the rubbish bin and searching inside for the papers she had thrown away. I became more curious to find out what was in them when I saw how unhappy she looked about losing them. Unhappy, but even more than that, bewildered. Because the cleaners – she was looking everywhere, trying to spot them – hadn’t come round emptying the bins. They were as full as they had been before.

  Anyway. The thing is, there was nothing much in those pages. She had only torn them in half and so it wasn’t hard to rematch them. There was nothing really important. Basically, she was just a woman who had been waiting for a loved one, or a former lover, but her hopes were disappointed because he didn’t show. That’s all, but somehow a light bulb flashed in my head and I decided it would be smart to hold on to the letter. In it she said she was going to follow another man to Paris, hoping to pick up his tracks there. But she’s come to the wrong terminal, since none of the airlines in this part of the airport fly to Paris. It’s a bit odd! And then, if there’s nothing secret about what she is doing, why did she come back to look for those pieces of paper?

  This woman said – or rather, she wrote – that it’s impossible for her to return to her own country. These confessions of hers leave me suspecting that her home country is Lebanon. But there’s also a big mystery about that. In this departures hall, there are no gates for airlines with flights to Beirut. I am very sure of that because I’ve read and reread the departure and arrival boards so many times. There’s something going on, and that’s why I decided that I might be able to make use of this letter in case they’ve been following me and they manage to find me here.

  Never mind that. What I want to tell you now is that I have missed you, Mother, in spite of everything. It has been a very long time since we saw each other, so long that I doubt you would know me if you saw me. I have changed so much. I look very different now. I’m extremely thin, my teeth have fallen out, and I’m going bald. You would say that I deserve all this. You might even disown me, calling me the Devil’s offspring. And if I think of my father, I’d have to admit that you have a point. Still, after all that I’ve been through, is there any point in believing that if I asked you to pardon me, you might do it?

  I know you won’t, I know there’s really no hope.

  At least you’ll know that I am still alive if this letter reaches you. Alive, amid all the news of death that the sky rains down on us like pellets of hard-baked clay. I hope you’re still alive too. I hope you got away in time, whatever route you took, by land or by sea. In the end, that’s why I’m writing this letter, even though I don’t even have an address to send it to! If only my luck would hold out, I would carry it with me and I would search for you. If I thought I could find you, I would put it in your hands myself. Because it is so hard to speak. To find the right words. It would be especially hard if I felt compelled to spill my whole story from beginning to end (as they say). If Fate rules that I have to pay the price for what I’ve done with my own hands, then you’ll be the one who decides finally whether I am pardoned or punished. It’s you who will be either my guardian angel or my executioner. Giving a pardon doesn’t mean forgetting or erasing what’s been done. Granting a pardon just means having some pity for a lost son who never understood how he could have been so battered by storm winds that he came to be what he is.

  My beloved mother, I have changed a lot. I’m no longer the son you knew. I’m sick now, sick in my body and sick in my soul. And there’s no hope that I’ll get any better. All I can dream of is an escape that keeps me from dying in prison. That’s what I dream of: an escape that lets me die in the open air, flickering like a candle before my flame goes out in some empty stretch of space, somewhere in God’s vast desert. The Devil will receive my soul, my sick soul, and the Devil can do as he likes with it.

  No one told me why the soldiers came and took me from the house. The first thing they did was to beat me: no questions asked, no investigation, no formal charges. They beat me and left me on the ground, then dragged me to a little room, returning to drag me out and begin beating me again. After that they put me in a van and moved me to a cell. ‘Your friends confessed,’ they said. ‘We’ve got lots of evidence from the boys at the club who know you.’ ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘As talking seems to be allowed now, can I ask what I’m accused of? What did my friends tell you about me?’ They just thought I was being cheeky with them.

  Weeks passed, and then months. Their methods varied. I don’t have the time or the space to tell you the details, but I can say that they broke me. They pissed on me and relieved their bowels over me too. When I was already swimming in my own piss and shit, they came lugging buckets from the toilets to pour over me. The pain didn’t affect me any more, but the fear inside me made the ‘rest’ periods when they left me alone pure torture. It wasn’t a fear of death. Hell couldn’t have been any more brutal than this. It was a fear coming from somewhere I didn’t know, and it always came over me when I was alone. Eventually, I came to prefer being with them. Listening to one of them telling jokes, for instance, I could tell myself, ‘He’s still a human being, he has a family, maybe he has children…’ and I would start repeating that I was innocent.

  But that fear, that terrible horror, devoured me, pulling me down into a pitch-black abyss and leading me to the brink of madness when they began to rape me. It only became unbearably painful once they started using glass bottles and clubs. It was a fear that grew by leaps and bounds when these rapes seemed to be happening in my dreams too. And then maybe only in my dreams, like my recurring nightmares about shit and all the useless attempts I made to get rid of it. To escape the stinking filth. I mean, I didn’t have to be in prison to have these dreams. I could be anywhere, and before long I couldn’t tell the difference between night and day, between what was really happening in my life and my nightmares.

  Terror.

  ‘I want to confess,’ I said to them. ‘I did lie to you, and I did all the things you’ve accused me of doing.’ ‘You have to prove you’re telling the truth,’ they said. ‘How do we know that you’ve really repented?’ ‘I’ll prove it,’ I said. ‘Work with us,’ they said. ‘Do whatever we order you to do. We’ll be watching you, and so we’ll know.’

  I took it further than they expected. It wasn’t easy to convince them that I had really and truly become their servant. They were wary, and they were constantly setting traps for me. But I
succeeded, I passed all the tests. I wasn’t lying to them, after all, and I had nothing to hide from them. The only thing I cared about was not being sent back there.

  Little by little, I began to enjoy my new strength and power. I relished the deliciousness of my strange and startling transformation, the knowledge that now I had become the man who could strike terror into people – me! They grovelled at my feet like rats singed by lightning and called me ‘sir’. You saw me then, in that blessed period, when I was back at home, having become a man – a man in every sense of the word, one whose father could take pride in him. A man whose father no longer needed to discipline him or teach him anything, since it was obvious that the state had taken that task over from him and had seen it through. So much so that… I’m sure you remember when he threw me out of the house. People had complained to him about me. ‘Your son, may God protect him, is the one who tortures our sons after they’re kidnapped. We just want them back. None of us is asking for anything more than that. We understand that they must have deserved what he did to them. All we want is to know where they are, and whether they are still alive. Could he please have them returned to us, now that he has seen to their rightful punishment?’