Otared

by Mohammad Rabie

  There were crows in the tree, watching what was happening, hidden in the darkness in their black cloaks. Not moving, not cawing—watching what was happening and shuddering. Their dread was like a blackness.

  By dawn, many had been buried in public parks, beneath the asphalt on the roads and beneath trees, beside ruined walls, behind the pillars propping up the overpasses, under loose paving stones on sidewalks. The night before, there had been a new body every minute, all of them without ID, all killed, and not one bled to death, not one dead from a drop in blood pressure, but all of dread. The chaos had laid waste to everything upon the earth.

  The dogs were in a state of indescribable physical exhaustion, but their spirits were high. They were perfectly content. The dog man longed for death. He wondered when his time would come, and he received no answer. But he knew it would be a long time coming, and that he would see what he had never seen in all the years gone by.

  *

  Insal carried Zahra on his arm.

  He stood outside the entrance to the morgue with dozens of others, all shouting and swearing. Their eyes would roll to the ceiling and they’d proclaim God’s greatness; they would look to the floor and beg mercy. Then one would start shouting with rage. He wanted to go in, he’d bellow. He wanted to see who was inside. Each time someone plucked up enough courage to approach the door, their steps, despite themselves, would falter. A quarrel that flared up between one of those waiting and the morgue attendant was quickly smothered by the gravity of the situation. Most were men. There were just three women, standing over to one side of the hallway, not talking, silent—as one would expect from those awaiting the worst—while the men jetted smoke from their cigarettes and shouted out at regular intervals.

  No one who went into the morgue found what they were searching for. First, they would go through the register, looking for the name of the missing person, and if they didn’t find it then they would enter the morgue and hunt through the nameless bodies, and then leave, the anxiety eating them alive. Not one thought to take comfort in the fact that if they couldn’t find him then he must be alive, because they knew he could be dead somewhere else. Indeed, those who emerged from the morgue thought only of the shortest route to the nearest hospital. All were convinced that the missing would be missing forever.

  Insal wrote out Zahra’s full name on the waiting list and returned with her to the attendant. The attendant seemed more masterful today, more confident, a change evident in the sharp gaze he turned on those standing before him and the decisive tone with which he answered questioners. But he trembled when his eyes fell on Zahra.

  Zahra mumbled, her face creased up, and she started keening in a low voice, readying herself for tears. Perhaps she’d been alarmed by all the people or the disorderly commotion that surrounded her.

  The chaos of smells was oppressive and bewildering. Zahra could make out fear, anxiety, anger, and sickness. She sniffed out sweat and feet and hair. And over these lay the powerful, heavy odor of antiperspirants and fragrances, while the reek of formaldehyde and disinfectant blanketed the lot. From some unseen spot, some corner Zahra couldn’t quite locate, came the faint scent of uncertain hope. This was a memory of her father’s smell. He was here. Or had been. He was so close. All his smells now washed over her: his distinctive sweat, the jasmine water he always wore, his newly washed cotton clothes, his constant concern for her, his contentment when he held her. Other smells, also peculiar to her father, were absent, and in their place were more she didn’t know. This confused Zahra.

  She turned to Insal and asked, “We’ll see Papa?”

  This was the first time she had ever addressed Insal. The first time, in fact, that she’d engaged with those around her as human beings who could be spoken to and questioned. And Insal could think of nothing to say. He didn’t know for certain whether Zahra would find her father or not, nor did he know if she would understand what had happened. Would she accept the idea of death? But he must say something. “Yes, we’ll see him today,” he said. Then he thought for a moment and added, “Or maybe tomorrow. . . .”

  Their brief conversation was overheard. Some people had been chatting with their neighbors, others stared silently at some feature of the hallway, but all heard what had been said and gradually they fell quiet. They understood what this was: the girl was looking for her father. Insal and Zahra were at the center of things now, the most important two people there. Would she find her father? And who was he, the fellow holding her like a daughter? And when the attendant called out the next name on the list, the man stepped up to Insal and told him to take his place. For a few seconds Insal hesitated, embarrassed, but the smell of his trepidation pressed in on Zahra and, without warning, she burst into tears.

  Insal’s eyes lingered on everything he saw, on those around him and their clothes, on the tiled flooring and the color of the walls. This was a place for warehousing the dead and cold, not for the living to wait. He walked up to the door, patting Zahra’s back in an attempt to soothe her, patting her mechanically in a daze, and she became even more agitated and tearful. Everyone assumed she was crying because she understood what she was about to see. They were wrong. She was weeping at the stifling stench of fear.

  At the very moment the door slammed into Insal’s shoulder, the smells hit Zahra and she realized that the fear had not been coming from outside, but from here—from behind the threshold she’d that moment crossed, where the silence was broken by the incessant buzzing of a white neon light.

  Not fear exactly, but an ex-fear. The memory of fear, clinging to the bodies. This was the smell of dread taken to its furthest extreme. There was no hope, or anger, or any other emotion, but there were other smells: heavy sweat and gunpowder, steel and brass, many tears. And two penetrating odors: one artificial, that burned the eyes and made you cry, the smell of a wind freighted with stinging dust, and another that Zahra couldn’t make out at all: of a dark, viscous, living liquid. A new smell.

  Refrigerators of gleaming metal were stacked in rows inside the spacious room, their depthless lengths sunk into the wall. The attendant stood by the metal door of the first fridge, grasped the handle, and asked Insal if he was ready. Insal didn’t answer, just stayed silent and stared at the door. The attendant opened it and there was the darkness of the box’s interior. He slid out a narrow tray on which a pair of bodies had been piled: a man in his sixties, eyes half-open and a still-bloody wound in his head, sprawled on the corpse of a fifteen-year-old with no evident injuries but a very pale face, exceptionally fine features, and carefully combed hair.

  Insal was worried that Zahra might cry, but she didn’t. She began staring at the bodies. Obviously her father wasn’t one of them, Insal thought. Zahra’s silence encouraged the attendant. He said nothing to Insal or to her, but slid the tray back in place, shut the door, and opened another. From that moment on, the actions of the attendant, of Insal and Zahra, too, had a kind of mechanical repetition about them.

  Twenty bodies in, Zahra began to moan: a whine, on and off. The sound of mewing cats. The sound of a sadness too exalted to be expressed in tears.

  After thirty bodies, Zahra turned, pushed her face into Insal’s neck, circling it with her arm. In this position, she stopped fighting the smell of the bodies and started searching for her father, letting in the corpse’s smell without the need to look. She seemed calm, her faint moans somehow no indication of either grief or fright. Though Zahra was certainly frightened. Not from seeing the bodies, but because of their smell.

  It was there that Zahra came to know the smell of blood. At last, she made the connection between the smell of the dark fluid, the living liquid, the familiar smell of her father, and the smell of the red substance she saw—sometimes flowing, sometimes dry, and many times in a state between the two. Zahra saw fresh wounds and blood that had leaked from mouths and noses, always with a different smell, slight variations that marked each instance from the others—but that thick, liquid smell common to them all.
<
br />   The attendant would open a door and the faint trace of a body’s odor would materialize around her. Behind the many metal doors lay many bodies, none of which were her father’s. This she knew from the smells leaking through the doors. None belonged to her father.

  The little group went on looking at bodies. Some of the trays held three bodies, while the rest contained two. The number of the slain was staggering. All of them were unidentified, all were waiting for someone to recognize them. In the ledger outside, there were the names of twenty dead, while more than two hundred bodies lay in here. Those were identified, and these were unidentified, and the fates of them all were unknown beyond these walls.

  At last, the tour was over. Insal was delighted because the mission was at an end, because Zahra had not found the body. As he left the hospital, he was thinking how many other hospitals contained the bodies of people killed over the last few days. Tomorrow he would search in another hospital. He would carry Zahra as he had done today, and together they would search through the bodies. It no longer bothered him as it had before. Zahra had been calm. She’d moaned a little, as though in pain, had wept softly, had spent most of the time buried in his shoulder. The day had passed with an ease he’d not anticipated and when, in the taxi, he asked her if she’d been afraid, she nodded her head and fell back onto his shoulder.

  As the taxi passed through one of the city’s squares, three brothers were felled, killed by the bullets of a single sniper. The first dropped, so the second tried dragging him away and he, too, collapsed, at which the third brother approached and also fell. For two hours they remained as they were, anyone attempting to go over to them warned off by others. People knew the snipers occupied the rooftops and were moving easily back and forth between them. They knew, too, that the snipers soon lost interest: they’d take down a target, then leave their position, moving around in search of a new one. They weren’t after anyone in particular. They fired at random.

  But the sniper who shot the three brothers didn’t lose interest as quickly as the others. He preferred to hold position and observe events through his rifle’s scope, to keep a proper watch over his victim—before the shot and immediately after it—and then to stay put that so he might see what happened when people found the body bundled up on the ground, to see how they touched it, how they hesitated before covering it with newspaper, how they stood before it, staring motionless at the scene, not brave enough to lift the sheets of newsprint, just staring at the vaguely human form beneath the words and images.

  The sniper knew that this time he must claim three victims. He didn’t know they were brothers—he didn’t care if they were brothers or simply friends: he just had to kill them. By chance, the second brother fell onto the first. A one-in-a-million shot, thought the sniper, and resolved to shoot the third brother so as to drop him across the others. This is how the sniper liked it: for the body to freeze in midair for an instant, a moment of joy for both sniper and victim. Then he’d be sure that the soul had left the body. You couldn’t appreciate the moment if someone died in their bed or while sleeping. When a person was killed in motion, their body would always freeze for an instant, for the tiniest fraction of a second, just enough time for the soul to break free before gravity reclaimed the lifeless corpse.

  During the course of his work over the last few days, the sniper had wished that his scope might register, if only once, the soul’s ascent or even its departure from the body. He thought to himself that his victims’ souls must be standing over their bodies and fixing him with their gaze, that they had to know where their liberator was hiding. He’d gazed upward into the sky above the prone bodies and peered into the darkness, but had seen nothing. He’d widened the scope’s field of vision and swept the heavens, but had seen nothing. Picking up his gun and aiming it aloft, he’d scampered about, in danger of exposing himself to everybody—but all precautions were pointless and a waste of precious time. He might have failed to carry out a mission or two at its scheduled time, but that was how this sniper was: his victims mattered to him, the human condition mattered to him. For some reason, the sniper thought of himself as a species one step above mankind.

  At last, the sniper moved. He trotted over the rooftop to the other side, overlooking a street busy with pedestrians. He steadied his rifle, took aim, and began to fire.

  5

  SO FAR, INSAL AND ZAHRA had visited three morgues. A morgue a day, each time poring through the registers—first the lists of the wounded and those in comas, then the books of the dead—then entering the morgue and searching among the bodies. Three morgues, and not a trace of Zahra’s father. Even the memory of his smell, which had brushed Zahra in the Qasr al-Aini morgue, was gone. The man had vanished.

  If only Insal had known: that the dog man was burying the dead; that thirty-five corpses lay heaped in a room on the rooftop of the Mogamma in Tahrir Square; that three hundred and fifty-five bodies had been interred on the city’s outskirts.

  The cramps gnawed at Leila’s belly. Too late, she realized that the baby was coming now, that she was miscarrying. She told herself that the four-month-old thing would be emerging alive, and that made her think of her milkless breasts, and she called her mother to ask her advice. Fluids and blood were flowing out of her. She couldn’t remember when the pains had begun. A shiver ran right through her body. Her soul was slowly being taken from her. She told her mother to call the pharmacy and order powdered milk for the child. While the milk was being delivered and the baby was emerging, the mother must come to the apartment and prepare for the birth. When she heard this, her mother gathered herself and told Leila not to worry. She played along, understanding that the miscarriage was in its final stages, but unable to account for Leila’s sudden detour into irrationality. Who would have imagined that a clear-headed woman her daughter’s age would act like this? Her mother put on her clothes and hurried downstairs.

  Leila tried calling Insal. She wanted to let him know what was happening. The lines had been down for days, but she’d heard they’d been back up since yesterday. She tried calling his phone, and failed. She tried many times, and she failed each time, and when she gave up for good she sent him a short text message: I’m giving birth.

  At that very moment, Insal was standing before the morgue’s door. Between the thick concrete walls and the inundation of attempted calls, the networks had all jammed solid. Insal’s phone was dead, and in his temporary absence his child was coming dead into the world.

  The fetus slipped slowly from Leila’s body. She stared at her surroundings—the chair next to her, the bedside table, the ceiling, the curtains—then fixed her gaze on the empty place in the bed where Zahra had been sleeping just hours before. Leila went utterly still. By not moving, she thought she might be able to hold the fetus inside her. Maybe her movements were the reason she was losing it. But the fetus had slipped out, leaving a void in Leila’s soul.

  The fetus lay on the bed below her. She nudged it with her finger. She touched its indeterminate limbs. She tried to guess its sex. She could only make out the legs and a narrow waist. At last, she understood it was stillborn.

  Leaving it like that wouldn’t do, she thought, and she took a little towel, itself no bigger than a grown man’s hand, and wrapped the fetus up in it. To protect it. Its arm tangled with the arm of the Mickey Mouse printed on the towel. Mickey was leading him away to a make-believe world far from the present. Leila wished she could join them both wherever they were. She heard the clatter of her mother coming in through the front door, and Mickey’s make-believe world vanished. All fondness for the fetus vanished, and nothing remained but sorrow. She gathered up the wrapped scrap in the palm of her hand and inspected its reddened, bloody features, the tissues that had started to take shape months before.

  As she covered the short distance from the front door to the bedroom, the mother called her daughter’s name. When Leila didn’t respond to her initial greeting, she shouted her name in fright and hurried forward in fretful s
ilence. She came in as Leila was examining the fetus. Leila was thinking about her final duty: should she recite from the Quran? Say prayers over the dead? Had it died, or had it never lived at all? Would Insal have to get a certificate issued for a death or a birth? Can one pray covered in blood?

  Her mother was as remorseless and angry as she ever got. She didn’t ask about the absent Insal. The question never occurred to her. She knew the answer. Insal wasn’t shouldering his responsibilities. He was busy with that girl and her missing father, and had no time to take care of Leila. She didn’t ask Leila how she felt. She knew how a woman feels just after she’s miscarried. She knew that she wouldn’t be able to stand a single word of reproach, that she wouldn’t speak for days, and that the shock was greater than Leila could have anticipated. Leila’s mother gazed at the dead fetus on the towel. She saw Mickey’s arm, his hand hidden in the white glove and, her mind completing the picture, his smiling face. Mickey’s face was hidden beneath the fetus.

  All Leila had to do was wash. She must clean off the sweat and dried tears, and then dress in clean clothes. No, not the house-robe: she must put on a loose-fitting dress and come to her parents’ house. She wouldn’t live with Insal any more. Insal was finished the moment the fetus slipped out. Leila would have a new start, away from him. Leila looked at her mother and she was all hope. “Take me with you,” she said.

  Leila got changed and her mother started to pack a little case with the necessities: medicines and a few clothes. She took Leila’s gold jewelry from the bedroom where she contemplated the fetus lying in the little towel. This was her revenge on Insal. Her grandson, sure—but her daughter mattered more. She left everything as it was and went to the kitchen to fetch a little dish. She lifted the fetus from the towel and placed it on the dish. The fetus looked extraordinarily tiny and frail against its colorful surface. Big-headed. Red. Only if you knew it was a fetus could you tell, otherwise you’d assume it was something else. Who would put a fetus in a dish as revenge against its father?