Voices of the Lost

by Hoda Barakat

  That’s what did it. All of this anxiety inside me exploded into pure rage against the Lord and Master who had placed her in my path that day. I began cursing and shouting in Arabic, while she went on smiling, her expression ever sympathetic but tinged with reproach. And then, sometime during the night, I had an idea. I must make her fall in love with me so that she would not think about throwing me out. So that she would become attached to my presence in her home. Love is stronger than sympathy, after all. And so she would also stop waiting for that fraud who’d been her lover. So that even if that crook tried to return in order to steal from her again, she’d have put the thought of him out of her head already, and she would keep me instead, you see.

  I woke her up. I told her that, first of all, I must apologize to her, and second, that I wanted to reveal and confess the true motive behind my anger. I began acting as though I were very embarrassed, and I started explaining to her that, in spite of myself, I had fallen in love with her. And that when she told me that she was still taken with the man whose clothes she kept in the wardrobe waiting for his return, I realized how strongly I was attached to her, and how jealous I was. Me, whom she had rescued, picked up from the street, whom she had been so kind to, saving me from dying of hunger and the cold; my feelings, desperately hopeless, had made me very ashamed. If I revealed them to her, I’d thought, it would look too much like I was exploiting her big heart, and this was morally unacceptable. ‘Especially for us,’ I said. ‘We Arabs,’ I added, nearly in tears by now.

  It was a terrible night. She raped me, that woman, openly and ferociously. As I tried to fend her off, detaching myself even a little from her in hopes that she would return to her senses, she just clutched me more fiercely and attacked me again, like a wild animal. She had fallen for my play-acting. She wanted to rid me of the embarrassment and shame she’d heard me express. That’s what she said. She threw herself on me, and began saying how insanely she wanted me, and how long she had felt it, and that I had made her forget the man whose clothes she was going to put out in the street the very next morning. That she was very happy I’d been so frank with her because she had been waiting anxiously for this but hadn’t seen any signs of attraction or desire, let alone passion, from me. She said all this, on and on, as she undid the buttons on my shirt and yanked off my underclothes to take my member in her mouth and cup it in her hands.

  Oh God. Oh God, what have I got myself into? That’s all I could think. What daily hell have I cast myself into, walking into the flames on my own two legs?! The more I tried to refuse, the more it aroused her and excited her passions, and then the more I felt an overpowering disgust. I loathed her body, everything about her body, that pale, wrinkled, saggy old body. Her benevolent smile, her moustache-smile, her seductive little gestures that a girl of twenty would be mortified to try, the bright-coloured underwear she bought specially because of me, her springy step as she tried to sway like ‘an Easterner’ to Egyptian dance music, her girly coquettishness and affected coyness, her gifts, her cooking, her candles… This woman who had become another woman made me think about killing myself. Almost, yes, killing myself.

  I told her one day that what we were doing was forbidden where I came from. She said she would marry me as soon as I got my papers. So then she kept harping on about the papers. Why don’t we get the procedures going to obtain the documents you have to have, and then

  The nightmares were coming back.

  I’m in a very pleasant, even splendid, place, well lit and spacious. It’s a party or an occasion of some sort. I need to pee badly, or to empty my bowels. I start looking for the facilities, but when I open the door to the toilet, it’s another vast space with many doors, like the white, door-lined corridors of hospitals. I find a cubicle where I can do my business, except that the door to it is suddenly hanging off its hinges and the toilet bowl is overflowing with someone else’s excrement. I try another cubicle but it’s even filthier. Little by little, everything my hand touches, from the light switch to the wall I lean against, or anything I get tangled up in or bump into, or whatever brushes against my clothes, is dirty and stained with shit, and meanwhile I’m still searching; there are so many cubicles, one after the next, and so many narrow, cramped corridors I have to pass through, and they are also soiled with excrement, and I am still trying to find a little nook away from the gaze of the men and women who are caught in there like me. I am only trying to find a spot where I can relieve myself from the pressure of my bowels.

  I’d wake up, pull off the covers and turn on the bedside-table lamp. I’d search among the bedclothes for those wet, sticky spots. I’d pull off my nightclothes and inspect them closely. I’d soap my hands over and over and call on the angels for help. I’d make a glass of tea and stand behind the window, staring out at the night. I would stand there a long time, gazing hard into the blackness, which was like the waters of a vast river, and I’d watch the running, gushing ink-waters until my breathing grew quiet. I wouldn’t get to sleep again unless I cried away my torment, cried to the point of utter exhaustion and anger. If the woman woke up (she usually slept heavily), I’d shove her away, and she’d mumble, ‘You’re remembering the war, I will make you forget all your pain.’ She would go back to her snoring, her conscience at rest, the conscience of innocent people, of the good and the well meaning.

  Every morning, I began to feign sleep until she had left the flat. In the evening, she would find me bent over my writing, my pen scratching out any old thing in Arabic as I forbade her to touch me because I was working on a book about the war. The book became my great excuse. For here I was, completely preoccupied with thoughts and memories and all of the horrific secrets I knew. They paralysed me, those violent scenes that I could not keep out of my mind. They made it impossible for me to have sex, indeed they took me far away from the world of desire. Any desire. That’s what I said, over and over, to keep her away from me.

  This more-or-less tolerable situation did not last long. She began saying (again and again) that while it was all very well and good to write, talking was the true cure, the only real cure, prescribed by trauma psychologists as the treatment for victims of shock and the aftermaths of disaster. I must speak, I must expose the secrets, I must talk and talk to rid myself of the torments I had suffered. I must reveal what was in my deepest self, I must name the pain and the anxiety if I was to find relief and inner peace. That’s what the woman with the moustache said, over and over, and then she proclaimed that it was love – only love and nothing else – that cured all illnesses, in more or less the same way that saints’ miracles always worked. And she would love me without bounds. Love. Oh God.

  I slipped out of the flat and went to find the Albanian. I gave him a brief version of what had happened to me, living with this woman, this old, ugly, horrible woman. He just laughed and accused me of being ungrateful, of forgetting those nights of chill and hunger and homelessness and the bruises from beatings. My body had been eaten away by lice and scabies, he said, so who was I to refuse anything? ‘Close your eyes and fuck her,’ he said. ‘Just work your imagination a little, your wet dreams, scenes from porn films. You’re rejecting the blessings you’ve been given. Weigh it all up in your head, man. And then do what you want to do. Right, there’s my advice.’

  I went to see him a second time. ‘Come back with me,’ I said. ‘Let’s rob her. I know the place, I know where everything is, where stuff is hidden. She never locks any drawers. Money, jewellery, gold.’ ‘Why?’ he asked me. ‘You’ve got everything you need, as far as I can tell. Or do you just want her to suffer, as a kind of revenge? Anyway, revenge for what? You’re mad, how would this help you? And of course she’ll know it was you who robbed her, or at least that you had to be an accomplice since you’re in the flat all the time. And then, why would I put myself in such a risky situation when I’m waiting for my asylum papers? You’re mad. Leave me alone. Don’t come back. I don’t want to see you here ever again.’

  I bought a bottle
of whiskey and I went back to the flat. I began gulping it down as if I were a parched wayfarer who’d suddenly found a spring. In the evening she yelled at me like you’d yell at a little boy, because I had gone out of the house and because I was getting drunk. She snatched the bottle of whiskey from me and poured what was left down the sink. ‘What will you do next?’ she whined. ‘Look at your gut, getting fatter and fatter. Instead of exercising you’re just falling back on alcohol. I’m not putting up with this!’ I was afraid she would throw me out, so I tried to humour her with a little dancing, to show her I could still move gracefully, and to make her laugh.

  ‘This woman just doesn’t know who I am,’ I began repeating to myself. ‘She doesn’t have a clue, and she doesn’t understand me.’ Seeing that she had no fear of me, I became convinced that I was diminished. I no longer had the power to frighten others. At least I still had control over my anger; I could swallow it when I wanted to. But when my own fear came back to me, I couldn’t control that. It came on suddenly, like a heart attack or an epileptic seizure. It made my eyes fog over and my whole body go numb. Suddenly I was back inside my old nightmares, but this time that fear was locked arm in arm with the dread I’d injected into the eyes of all the people I had tortured. As if I was collecting this enormous double portion of fear inside my own head and body: the fear I’d had of those who tortured me, and the fear of those I tortured. All of that terror accumulating in one enormous ball that went on picking up everything in its path, one mass growing bigger in its fear, swelling to a giant size in its pain.

  And the woman, this foreigner with the moustache, poured her tender care and her passion over me. She embraced my worries about the book. She called me in to watch the news because I needed to know the latest developments, she said. If I didn’t watch, she summarized what was important in the news, significant to the revelations I would offer in this book I was writing. Once I had a book with my name on it as the author, the authorities would take a different view of me. In any number of ways, it would ease the way to getting the papers I needed.

  My darling mother, evening is settling on the city. The glass walls of this outer hall in the terminal are like mirrors reflecting the lights, and no one has come anywhere near me. I see wet coats, so it has begun to rain. There are not as many people coming in and out, now that night is falling. I’m still thinking about buying a ticket to come back. I’ll tell them I wasn’t successful at getting a resident visa, and that I don’t have any documents on me to prove who I am. They’ll interrogate me for an hour or two, or maybe a bit longer, and then they’ll chuck me onto the aeroplane.

  Or I could tell them I’m an undercover detective. That I’m following the woman who tore up her letter and then got away before I was able to pick up her trail here and stop her. And I have this letter, here in my hand, here it is, and because I’ve studied whatever there is in her file, I know that she did not return to her own country, because… Well, I will say, because she killed her husband in order to meet up with this man she loved, or this man she was having an affair with, and then he would take her to Canada, and there she would disappear. But the lover didn’t actually come, and so she changed her plans and has gone looking for refuge elsewhere, with another man. It’s all there, the letter gives all the details; it’s documented, and so they’ve got to allow me to follow her.

  But since I don’t have any papers, they won’t believe me.

  Or I could go back to the woman’s house, have a look around at the way I left things, and see, for instance, whether her former lover might have turned up, using his own key. I need to go back there to change the lock. I forgot about doing that.

  Or maybe it’s better if I sleep here tonight. I won’t find anywhere open now where I can buy a new lock and key, and I won’t find anyone who would fit it after taking the old one out, not now. It’s late.

  I killed that woman. The work of an instant. In a moment of terror and panic that seized me and completely overpowered me, I killed her.

  I was sleeping next to her. All of a sudden, she pressed herself against me, hard. I was half asleep but I had the sensation that worms were crawling over my skin. I even saw the worms. I pushed her hand off me, pushed and rubbed it off me as if I were scraping worms off a corpse. But she started touching me again and pressing herself against me, against my limbs, my organs, everywhere. My head erupted. Alarm, anger, a combination of the two. Poisoned blood shot blue-black through my body and clouded my eyes.

  Now, because I’m recording what happened, I’m trying very hard to remember all the details in their order. This is not because I’m trying to find excuses for myself. After all, it so happens that I killed a lot of people long before I killed her. None of it affected me much: not their screams, not their blubbering and pleading, not the gurgling sounds as they died – hanged or strangled or buried alive in coffins and then shot at. Inside, they struggled and pounded and scratched as though they meant to wrestle the bullets from where they’d lodged in the wood, before they went quiet, giving in to their fate. Even the smell didn’t bother me. It was just an outcome, as I saw it, of what was more or less a natural process, human flesh decomposing. I slept soundly, undisturbed by any regrets, feeling no alarm, no anger. Torture followed by death was going to be either my lot or theirs, a final decree that there was no escaping.

  As for getting any pleasure out of those things I did, deeds God might well make me answer for? Well, what I did was simply the most natural path to follow: a person wakes up at dawn and goes back to doing whatever he was doing yesterday. It isn’t a matter of choice or pleasure. Feeling pumped up by your own strength and audacity and the absolute power you have over people isn’t just a nice little luxury you can take or leave. Seeing men who were once army officers, or university professors, or judges, kissing your feet and bawling is more than a mere treat you come to expect, to top off your day. It grows into something you have to have, without even being aware of it. Because when these things happen, the blood rises and boils in your heart, thickened and heated by natural intoxicants which mimic the drugs that create the addict’s pleasure and bind him forever to those substances. When you can overturn people’s lives and make them into different people, when you can recast their fates completely with your own two hands, you become Fate itself. Fate, to which you used to supplicate on hands and knees, desperate for it to be merciful to you. But this time around, that’s not where I was! My interests lay in keeping her alive, that woman. She was my only refuge. It did me no good at all to kill her.

  I wasn’t really aware of what had happened until the next morning. She was lying there as stiff as a board, her arms outstretched and her legs splayed. Her hair looked like a bushy, tangled ball of thorns and her eyes were wide open and bulging. Her tongue was bluish and it hung from her slack jaws. So I must have strangled her. There were blue rings on her neck and beneath her buttocks a pool of cold urine. The fuzz from my nightclothes clung to her fingers and nails, and I had some trouble picking it out. I covered her face and then her whole body with the bedclothes. I went into the kitchen, made coffee and sat down on the stool. God, she’s ugly, I was thinking. She really is hideous now. What’s happened has happened; maybe it all happened because she’s so disgusting, and now this disaster has landed on my head. I mean, she’s dead now, so she won’t be conscious of any of it. But I’m alive and I have to find a way out of this mess I’ve got myself into. Getting rid of the dead bodies was never part of my job. There were always others assigned to that and I didn’t know anything about what they did.

  My next thought was that I could just leave her as she was and run away. Immediately, and fast. But where to? Her Algerian neighbour who lived in the flat below was back from holiday. And the woman had always told me that she was the only person who ever visited this downstairs neighbour and chatted with her. That was because now and then, she – that is, the Algerian – came round with a platter of couscous or some other dish she had made. So, what if the Algerian woman
came up here and knocked on the door one of these days, and then the next and the next, and it began to dawn on her that her neighbour was missing, and she got worried? I wrote out, on a slip of paper: My dear neighbour, I’m away for a few days, and I’ll see you when I am back. I stuck the slip of paper on the door of the flat, closed it and returned to the kitchen. What if the Algerian woman noticed that the handwriting wasn’t her neighbour’s? But what evidence did I have anyway that the two women ever exchanged messages, and knew each other’s handwriting?

  I was in a real fix. I needed some time. That was all I needed now, I thought. This woman who enslaved me and poisoned my days was not going to be the end of me – this woman who had made me into one of her pet dogs, because she cared so much about strays.

  I turned on the radio. It was her favourite singer, screeching out lyrics in a raspy, terrible voice. I’d heard that she began life as a whore in the streets of Paris. I turned the radio off. Forgiveness – it’s a divine secret, who gets forgiveness. They forgave the whore. They made her into a big star instead. Who would forgive me? Where would that come from? Your heart? My mother’s heart? Hahaha!

  Do you remember that poem, ‘A Mother’s Heart’? Do you remember how you made me memorize it? How you kept saying this poet was a genius?

  A man once met a simple youth,