Voices of the Lost

by Hoda Barakat

  Did he get his passport back? I’m not certain. He told me a lot of lies. Yes, he lied to me so often. I moved through his sets of lies as though I were moving through a rainstorm and trying to dodge every raindrop. There were so many lies that I couldn’t even remember to ask myself, between one lie and another, whether there was any speck of truth in what he was saying. The next lie would be upon me before I had taken in the last one. It got to the point where I was convincing myself that all the energy he poured into constructing these huge edifices of falsehood, with such careful engineering, was proof of how much he loved me. The love of weak, empty, failed people.

  I go back to my ghosts. I think about how he tamed me the way animal trainers at the circus tame bears. And about how I accepted it. I took it all, without even demanding or expecting a single cube of sugar. Then he trained me up with obstacle races. Every time I jumped over a barrier he piled on ten more. And I went along with it. I took it all, even though I had nothing to show for it, not even a tin-plate medal! Maybe in his sick mind he truly believed it gave me pleasure. A kind of delectable masochism. Maybe he was right. Maybe he saw in me something I couldn’t see in myself. If it weren’t so, then why did I take it?

  It was as if I opened my thighs and my heart to the wind, to a ghost, to the shadow of a man. The longer he looked at me, the more transparent I seemed to become, the more absent to his eyes. When he slept with me, it was like he was consuming me, a ripe and tasty piece of fruit, and then he tossed me away like the pit that was left behind, like the fruit’s rotting remains, already poisonous. What did I have that he loved, and what did he hate? Was he afraid of me? Did he have secrets, dangerous ones?

  Did he go to another woman, one who loved him more than I did? Then why would he hide her when he knew that I would not have put any obstacles in his way? What right would I have had? Because he had long let me know that I had no rights over him, and I accepted that. And I consented to humiliations much more painful than this. I wanted him to feel reassured. For his sake I turned into a different woman. I put up uncomplainingly with things no woman from his country would endure. Maybe I should have done the opposite of that. Or maybe the important thing was that I not resemble them. I don’t know. I no longer know anything.

  I no longer know anything but this consuming hate. Nothing but the violence of my desire for revenge. To the point of murder. To kill him with my own hands.

  I must go back and search for that man with the moustache. Although, even if I were to stumble across him, I wouldn’t believe a single word of whatever it was he’d tell me.

  How could he let go of me like that? How could he leave me?

  I was here. Finally I was in the airport, but only after a long delay. Over there, we’d waited for more than ten hours before taking off, and then six hours in the aeroplane, and then we landed.

  I was unbelievably exhausted. The hotel was about a hundred kilometres away. That would mean an hour’s taxi ride, assuming we hit no traffic on the way. And it was raining, so we would make slow progress no matter what.

  My suitcase still wasn’t on the conveyor belt. Probably lost; that wouldn’t surprise me. And then it would be days before they came across it; likely they wouldn’t locate it before I was back in Canada. The bag’s delay added another layer of nuisance when I was already fatigued beyond belief, tipping my exhaustion into anger and bitterness.

  Why hadn’t I packed a smaller case, one that could go into the overhead locker, as I normally did? Was I perhaps imagining that I would stay a week, or more? It’s strange how the logic shuts off in our heads sometimes.

  What to do now? I wondered, with this airline employee hovering, asking me to fill out a form in the lost luggage office or else to stay here and wait. To wait until someone finds my bag here inside the sorting and distribution area. He goes on and on, explaining the state of chaos across all airports today due to the storms. Completely dazed, I’m utterly worn out, my mind refusing to work.

  I had sat down in the waiting area, having returned my luggage cart. The electric belt on the carousel stopped moving. Then passengers coming from somewhere else began collecting around it.

  I remembered that my medications were in the outer pocket of my bag. I had taken out only what I would need to get me through the flight, leaving the rest in that zipper pocket. Why did I do that? The medications didn’t weigh much, and I could have put them in my little shoulder bag along with my tickets.

  Why…why?

  Why am I here? What made me leave my house on a night when there were storms raging everywhere? Was it just to have some fun? A little flirtation, a bit of a joke? To see a woman I knew when she was a teenage girl? Was it some kind of fatal curiosity? Or a test of the old masculine magic? Of the charm I had when I was still young and vigorous and something to look at? Then: Why not? I had said to myself. Why not go and see? I’m not ready to surrender completely to the daily routine of my life. This is the sort of thing we read in novels with feel-good happy endings. This is what seduces us in the films we watch, no matter how scientifically minded we think we are. Film images deposit something in our blood, a poison that settles there, where no medical test can find it.

  ‘Why not?’ What a terrible expression. It can lead you to self-destruction precisely because it sounds so playful. Just a game! But when you play a game, you can lose. It isn’t appropriate for me to be doing this. It’s no longer appropriate. I’ve been acting as if it’s possible to retrieve that illusion of adventure after its time is long gone. When I was young, I circled half the globe. At twenty, I gave up my studies for an entire year and travelled the world. That’s how I met this extremely pretty girl. I remember enjoying her, but likely it was just me enjoying myself, being a young man. Probably I did rather fall in love with her, as so often happens at that age. Anyway, life has not been unkind to me. I’ve had my fair share. I married the woman of my dreams, I came out with an excellent degree and I’ve had a fine career. So, what is it that I want now, when my joints can’t even manage a stroll further than the next bend in the road, as my daughter always says when she wants to get a reaction out of me? Is what I’m feeling simply distress about my advancing age? Can such an unsettled, disturbing feeling as this come over one suddenly, as if from nowhere? Or is it that my enthusiasm has suddenly collapsed, just because my bag is delayed, or maybe even lost?

  Or perhaps it’s that this idiotic romanticism of mine, which has made me go soft in the head, is no longer up to the fatigue of travelling now that it’s no longer fuelled by the old books and films we once obsessed over. It has been decades since I read a romance novel or watched a sentimental film. Where has she returned me to, this woman, this long-ago girl? What trap has she led me into? We are jolted back into our sensible reality when we have to pick ourselves up off the sofa and open the door. The familiar sofa where our worn-out bodies quickly, happily, recognize the barely perceptible depressions they’ve made there over the years, and the door we close and lock behind us, coming home, as if that locked door will fend off all the horrors of the outside world, its nightmares and its dangers.

  It’s age. We waited too long, she and I. We were too late.

  I am certain now that she has not come. It’s out of the question that she would really have travelled all the way here from her home country, once she had given it some thought. And I’m certain she did give it some thought, and then she thought better of it. She wouldn’t have let the fantasies tear through her head as they have done through mine.

  On the other hand, she did say – that is, she wrote – that if she left her home and travelled to meet me here, in this city, then most likely she would not go back, because she had more travelling to do. Why would she have said that? What travelling did she mean? Or was she trying to tell me that this would just be a passing encounter, that she was not going to attach herself to me or try to hold on to me, that she wasn’t looking for anything from me?

  But now I’m thinking that these reassuring words
could simply be a deception. A trap. After all, what do I know about this woman? For instance, why not consider the possibility that she is on the run after committing some awful crime? Or, what if this brief tryst with her turns out to be like a grain of sand that, regardless of its tiny size, could get inside of me and bring the whole machinery of my life to a halt? In her head, of course, I am still that romantic youth, the adventurous one who travelled without any luggage. She cannot possibly gauge how much I have changed, and how remote I am now from that boy she met.

  It’s not me, really, who has changed. It’s the world and everything about it. That region I criss-crossed far and wide without ever finding anything to fear, where I met people who fed me and gave me shelter, or else slept out in the open, peacefully and without any worries…would I travel to those places now? Certainly not! It would be impossible even to try.

  Where was it crouching, all the resentment and hatred? The terrible violence? Back then, I didn’t feel the tremors. The peak may have crowned a volcano, but all I saw was a summit covered in snow. Like all the tourists, probably.

  Now, whenever I see the apocalyptic images coming from there, on the news or in documentaries, it feels as if I never actually went to those countries. Of course, these images aren’t just stories or legends. But to understand what is going on over there, you’d have to devote the kind of effort and time that normal people don’t have. Those who do take the time are people driven by feelings of guilt, which are pointless. Nothing ever comes of it, apart from yet another drummed-up cause for romantic young people who don’t have a cause. If any of them did decide to get to know that obscure world ‘close up’, they would return to their family as a few random body parts in a little wooden chest – if they came back at all, that is.

  That’s what I say to my daughter, who accuses me of the white man’s indifference. She says it teasingly but she’s half serious. ‘But you were there,’ she says, over and over again. ‘How could you not know anything about those people?’

  I didn’t know anything before, back then. And I don’t know any more now. And here I am in a faraway city with the aim of meeting a woman from that world.

  How well can we ever know people who have lived through civil wars? How much can we ever really know about the violence and destruction, the losses, the devastation? The overpowering fear they must feel every day? Can we ever really understand how they are transformed, which things change inside them, and which things harden? In the last quarter of one’s life, when death becomes something intensely near and possible, the heart is no longer anything more than a useful pump. Warm blood rushes into our organs only in order to flee once again. There’s no other reason, just flight. Coming and going. No feelings, no memories, no… What does she want to escape, that woman I used to know?

  The employee is here again, telling me to come and identify my bag. Suddenly I feel more in control of myself. I’ll go to the nearest hotel, one of the airport hotels, and tomorrow I’ll get on the first flight home.

  I am certain I will sleep soundly, and I wish her a good night too, wherever she is.

  I hope I can sleep soundly.

  I miss the smell of my wife’s neck.

  They picked me up off the street and dragged me away by force. I carried on kicking and screaming. ‘Holy Virgin Mary!’ I began calling out. ‘Jesus of Nazareth!’ I shouted, and shouted that I was an innocent man, swearing by every saint of theirs whose name I could remember. I didn’t let up, from the room in the airport police HQ all the way to the door of the aeroplane. I cried and screamed, ‘God! What do I have to do with any of this?’

  ‘Where have you hidden your papers?’ they were asking me. ‘If, that is, you even have residence documents, or papers certifying your refugee status, as you claim?’

  I told them, and I swore to it, that I was still waiting for my documents.

  ‘So then, where is the receipt confirming they received your application, the notice you got allowing you free movement?’

  I gave them my word that it had been destroyed along with the rest of my belongings when the reception camp burned to the ground. They talked about it in the news. The whole world saw dozens of images of the camp in flames. ‘I swear to God, I’m not lying! I was about to submit a request for replacing lost documents. By God, by God, I swear it!’

  They laughed at me; they were mocking and sarcastic. They had heard this story many times, they said. Then they announced that my friend had confessed everything after they’d arrested him following that appalling crime. ‘He gave us all the details. What he did, and then what you did. It’s big, your part in it, very big. The two of you – killing a citizen, a woman who took you in as refugees. You robbed her and cut up her body. There are still some body parts we haven’t found. Like the heart. Did you eat that woman’s flesh? And you all wonder why people are so afraid of you and why they hate all of you? C’mon – everyone back to their own country!’

  ‘God, I had nothing to do with it. I swear to God!’

  ‘We have many witnesses who can identify you. Plenty who saw the two of you together. Lots of them. Stop fooling around! Either you confess or you go back to Albania, where they’re even better at getting answers out of people like you than we are.’

  I try to lie. I’m lying because I have no choice. Maybe they’ll believe some of it, some bit of it. I’m in quicksand and I’m sinking, and soon I will suffocate.

  And when I cry out again, sobbing and blubbering that they will kill me there, they ask me, ‘Who?’ ‘Members of a gang I worked for,’ I say. ‘I was petrified of what they’d do to me if I said anything, but I also kept quiet because I had hopes and plans of my own. So I escaped the gang and then…’

  ‘We’re handing you over to the Albanian police. You can tell them all about it when they question you. When they investigate you.’

  How could that raging lunatic Arab do this to me? Just because I happened to meet him one rainy day in front of a supermarket, he can now sentence me to death without any chance of appeal? For years I’ve been on the run, all because I was born in a cursed land, and now here I am going to my execution. There’s no point dwelling on how different things would be if I were English, for instance, or Australian or Swedish. Would they investigate me this way? Sometimes I think I must be the male hyena cub that the female – the mother – rejected. Life threw me out. And after that, no pack of hyenas would ever accept me. What flock of creatures would ever let me in?

  ‘I’m homeless and I’m a bum,’ I told them. ‘But I’m not a murderer. I may not have the best principles but if I’d known what that criminal planned to do, I would have informed on him.’ I told them I’m royalty when it comes to informants. I turned in my own brother, and I stole my mother’s last penny in order to escape that place and come here. ‘So why,’ I asked, ‘do you think I wouldn’t inform on that Arab if I’d actually known anything?’ I told them that all I was asking for was a few minutes of their time, for them to listen to me. If they could hear about the terrible things I really have done in my life, they would be horrified. They’d believe me. If one of them would just listen to me. ‘You’re condemning me to death,’ I said. ‘So allow me one last request before I die.’

  This world! People of this world, listen to me! Yahooooo!

  But from this moment on, no one will speak to me or listen to what I have to say. Now, and here, I’ve been absorbed into the garbage of this foul world we live in, nature’s waste, as if I’m an animal’s stinking, rotting corpse. That’s why they’ll dump me into the aeroplane and tie my legs and arms to the seat.

  And I’ve no hope of being allowed to see anyone after I’ve been sent back there. There, they will whip-drive me from the aeroplane straight to prison. They won’t believe anything I say once I’m inside, either. Not about the Arab and not about the gang. Even if they were to give me the time of day, to listen to what I have to say and then to believe it, who would protect me from getting killed on the outside? Why would the s
ecurity forces give me protection? What use am I to them? I’m nothing but a little mafioso with a pitiful crime record, who fled from their justice only to find myself running from the justice of the country that’s thrown me out. I’m nobody.

  It’s better for me if they don’t believe me. Better if they throw me into a locked cell and keep me there. Of course, the gang is perfectly capable of sending someone to assassinate me inside prison. There are no extenuating circumstances as far as they’re concerned, not when they believe someone has turned on them. I know them very well, and I did turn on them. They will be very happy to see me come back.

  Why did God put that Arab in my way just when I was on the road to repentance? Is it because God rejects my repentance no matter what? Is it because there is no repentance for someone like me who has committed so many sins? Or is God treating me as He treated the prophets He loved? Putting me to the test? On trial?

  But what’s the use of putting me on trial when I’m already dead at their hands?

  I will chase her to the ends of the earth.

  Because of her, I lost years of my life. I was an ass to do what I did for her. I considered myself responsible for her, even though she’s three years older than I am. Women are a curse, a punishment to the sons of Adam ever since Creation. Just like all the books say. What the books say about them aren’t simply made-up stories or a figment of someone’s imagination.