The Pact We Made

by Layla AlAmmar

  9

  … Produces Monsters

  When I was seventeen I was enveloped, finally, in silence. I functioned, but barely. I went to school; I came home. My grades weren’t slipping anymore, and senior year passed in a blur of ditched classes, bare minimum assignment hand-ins, and avoided eye contact.

  It had been two years. Two years since I’d had to sit in front of Mama and Baba, bleeding where I shouldn’t have been, and tell them what had happened. Two years since Baba had driven like a madman to Uncle Omar, nearly killing him but settling for breaking his nose, collarbone, and three ribs. Two years since Mama had pleaded and wailed and pleaded some more for Baba not to tell anyone, not to bring shame down on us all.

  Finally I had silence. The noise that had raged in my head was quieting. I no longer flinched when any male so much as brushed against my clothes, although that might have been because the worst had already happened and there was nothing left to fear. I had a candle ritual, involving flames and melted wax, that was down to once a month, and I’d only cut myself twice in two years; both times when the noise had gotten so great that the veins in my wrists pumped and trembled in invitation. Slicing into my inner thigh had been an unworthy but sufficient substitute.

  The three of us were on the memsha – Mona to my right, Zaina to my left – when I told them what had happened on that suffocating August night. The egocentricity of adolescence had prevented them from asking too many questions about how I’d changed during that time. We’d all become moodier; we’d all severed contact with one another every so often, only to come together again without questioning the root causes of our separations. They’d hung out at the chalet, and I didn’t return to those beach properties for years; and so, for a time, our threesome had become a twosome. I was left at home with my bleeding ink flowers and itchy skin while they tanned and talked about boys. Our fathers took the families to islands – to Kubbar and Um AlMaradim – to swim and snorkel and tan some more. And not once did they push, really push, for the reason why I didn’t join those weekend trips.

  I finally told them, on that balmy evening, when the sun was a pink grapefruit low on the horizon and kids whipped past on bikes without helmets or padding of any kind. I had to say it twice before it registered; we were still walking when it finally got through. There was sputtering and gasps and a scream from Zaina that made people walking ahead of us turn and tsk (there are always reprimands from society elders – strangers who you nevertheless must address as Aunt and Uncle.)

  They both stopped then, like a frame locking into place, but I walked through it. They called after me, ‘Dahlia’s that were questions, exclamations, even whimpers. But I kept walking, letting them volley the Whys and Hows between them. I kept walking because I could not answer those questions; I didn’t know Why and I couldn’t think on the How, otherwise I was liable to stray from the path and bury myself under a tree.

  They eventually caught up with me, across the road on the second half of the memsha. Quiet, short, and seething breaths on my right, sniffles and fingers rising to swipe under eyes on my left. Other than that, silence. Not outer silence, of course. Around us were revving car engines and boys doing wheelies on their motorbikes; there were children screaming in the playground and chattering groups passing us. The fourth Azzan of the day rang out, a staggered call echoing from mosque to mosque.

  There was an inner silence, though. A calm in my soul now that they knew, now that the secret was no longer there – a leech on our friendship. There was the silence of relief, of knowing I would no longer have to pretend to be whole. I was free to be the stunted, half-formed thing he’d left behind. There were no recriminations from them, only a solitary ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ from Zaina which went unanswered. She slipped her hand in mine, squeezing tight, her left hand passing over her face every now and then when she couldn’t sniff back a tear.

  The muezzins’ calls were winding down, men and boys in dishdashas hurrying across the roads to the mosques to join the prayers. A kid on a red bike pedaled past, nearly tripping us over, and hopped down and up the two sets of curbs before racing across the empty lot, kicking up clouds of dust in his wake. He skidded to a stop, letting the bike crash to the ground and skipped up the mosque steps, yanking off his sandals as he went.

  ‘I don’t understand how this happened,’ Zaina whispered. ‘He was always so nice.’

  ‘He wasn’t nice.’ My voice was a flat monotone. I didn’t want to talk about it. I wanted them to accept it in silence.

  ‘And your parents …’ Mona shook her head. ‘Your parents know and haven’t done a thing.’

  ‘Baba put him in the hospital. Beat the shit out of him.’

  ‘He should have killed him,’ she growled, kicking at a loose stone on the path.

  I let them toss their rage back and forth, keeping my head low, eyes on the ground. I had passed rage a long time ago; that space in my chest was hollow. Fury, sharp and acidic, radiated from Mona. This ire that sliced us every time she spat out a word. She threatened to tell her father, saying that unlike my spineless parents, hers wouldn’t hesitate to involve the police. It was only when I’d stopped walking, sobbing and red face in hands, that she’d backed off, promising – along with Zaina – to tell no one. Zaina’s reaction reminded me of Nadia’s: that horrified sadness I’d seen wash over her, the look that said she’d never imagined the world could hold such things.

  We kept walking, both their hands gripping mine, and rounded another playground, with mothers and nannies shouting up at children to be careful on the jungle gym. Girls pushed each other on swings and boys pushed one another off seesaws. The sun was nearly gone, in that in-between period that could herald a new day as easily as it could the night. The streetlights flickered on, one by one, orange and white lights bathing the memsha.

  ‘He rubbed up against me once,’ Mona said, ‘a few years ago, at the chalet.’

  Zaina and I pulled her to a stop, my eyes wide and searching her face for any sign that this was one of her stories, like telling us a guy had said he loved her when really all he’d done was smile at her or something. But there was no sign of that. Her eyes were dark, her brow troubled, her lips a dash across her face.

  ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’ Zaina yelled, looking very much like the world was falling apart around her.

  Mona’s eyes were on mine. She hadn’t said anything for the same reason I hadn’t – because it was humiliating, because we weren’t sure whether or not we’d invited it somehow, because telling someone made it real. That hollow in my chest was filling up with something new, something sulfurous that I didn’t yet have a name for. My heart broke, right there and then. Shame and guilt washed over me. I couldn’t look at them, couldn’t think too deeply about what it meant. I just turned around and ran all the way home.

  10

  Who More Is Surrendered?

  I was a dormant volcano, stretching, yawning, and rumbling awake.

  The Caprices of Goya, that gallery of social condemnation, were calling to me. Did he mean what I thought he meant? The man slumped over the table, over his art, legs crossed, surrounded by beasts: bats flapping at his back; owls looming overhead; that panicked lynx at his feet. Did it mean what I thought, that abandoning reason brings about calamity? Or was I infusing it with my own preoccupations and prejudices? Is art about seeing what’s there, or discerning how it relates to your existence? My reason had abandoned me. I was shattering from the inside, cracks widening, visible where they’d been so well covered.

  I’d tried to stay with Shakespeare’s benign isles and forests. Yousef kept wanting to discuss The Tempest, unsatisfied with the discussion yielded by his film club showing, which I’d been conspicuously absent from. He was preoccupied with the psychology of the play – what it said about the human soul and Freud’s facets of the ego and how he now thought it was ultimately about freedom and service – but all I could contribute was a liking of the aesthetics that surrounded it. Miranda�
�s wild and flaming hair, soft curves, and milky white skin as she watched the shipwreck and the angry waves of the eponymous tempest in John William Waterhouse’s imagining of it. Showing him Walter Crane’s illustrations of the play I told him how I’d spent far too long staring at the one of Caliban kneeling before Stephano and Trinculo. Caliban beseeches the would-be rebels, reminding them that he is ‘subject to a tyrant’, but those weren’t my feelings, not really. I didn’t identify with him any more than I did with the tree Ariel was trapped in. I didn’t feel as if it was saying something to me – unlike the Goyas, which never stopped talking. The Crane illustration calmed me; I found a muted joy in the stones at Caliban’s feet, the leaves all around, the fold of Stephano’s tunic.

  The Goyas, by contrast, were dark, maybe even dangerous. They gnawed at me when I was asleep, flashed across my mind at morning meetings, superimposed themselves on family gatherings. His entire gallery was open in a hundred tabs on my browser, and I had a habit of clicking from one to the next, searching out a print I might be able to try. And this one, number 43. The sketch is monotone, like all the others. Color gone, seeped into the abyss. It is dark, dense, and consuming. Hues are swallowed, shapes disintegrate. Everything implodes. No, implodes is the wrong word. It’s entropy, decay, and a stain that can’t be cleaned. Loneliness, too, is a constant. It had been with me so long I’d forgotten how to connect … like those Romanian babies that never learn to love.

  The bats were acquiring faces. The big round owl eyes looked familiar. And the lynx curled on the floor was looking like a ‘me’ that was dangerously close to being real.

  Friday evening, Yousef and I met for sushi. We were scandalous and unapologetic, showing up at the crowded Japanese place in our workout gear and wet hairlines. Yousef at least had showered at the gym, but I had come straight from the memsha, just pulling my hair into a matted bun and dousing myself in perfume on the way.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said when we greeted each other, waving a hand in front of his nose.

  ‘You’d prefer my natural musk?’ I asked, dropping into the seat across from him.

  He winked. ‘I think I would actually.’

  The waitress brought over green tea and an amuse-bouche of avocado and salmon. There were more people there than I’d anticipated: groups of girls in spiked heels and caked foundation and guys in dishdashas or jeans and polo shirts, all eyeing each other up like chattel at an auction, wondering who would be the next to go.

  ‘Oh, I meant to tell you,’ Yousef said, dipping an edamame pod into some spicy mayonnaise. ‘I showed Zacharia some of your art, and he loves it. He wants you to put on a show at the gallery.’

  ‘What?’ My eyes went wide, my bite of salmon pausing in the air before my mouth. ‘When was this?’

  ‘I told him about it ages ago,’ he said with a wave of his hand. ‘But at the party the other night, I showed him some pictures of it on my phone. I mean, the pictures weren’t super clear obviously, but he loved the work and wants to see the sketches for real.’

  ‘Why would you do something like that?’

  He frowned at me. ‘Because if I don’t, you never will. You’ve been drawing for ages, Dahlia, but you don’t do anything about it.’

  ‘I’m not trained. It’s just doodling.’

  He looked at me like I was an idiot. ‘It’s more than that and you know it. And anyway, who cares? You think all those people who sell their “paintings” for thousands of dinars are professionals? Or those photographers with shit pictures of Buddhist temples and Asian street markets? Nobody here is a pro. They just act like it. And you have actual talent.’

  ‘I don’t want to sell them,’ I said, horrified by the prospect of parting with my sketches.

  He waved that away too. ‘You don’t have to sell them if you don’t want to. He has some open dates towards the end of the month, and he just wants to display them for a few days, have an opening and everything.’

  An opening, like those pompous events staged by the glitterati all over the city, like it was Manhattan or London’s East End. The hipsters with their thick-framed glasses and perfect hair, with the designer clothes and fancy cars, they showed up to be seen. They did it for the Snaps and the posed Insta-shots, for the appearance of it all. Yousef dipped his toe into that scene, but the girls and I never got into it. We preferred to spend our free nights parked in front of a TV show instead of standing in line at a pop-up coffee shop.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, making way for the salads the waiter was arranging on our table.

  ‘I know you hate shit like that, but it would just be for a few days.’

  ‘What would be the point, though?’

  ‘To do something with your art, to feel a sense of accomplishment about it, to show people your talent; who knows where it might lead?’

  ‘They’re just flowers,’ I said, thinking of the dahlias and orchids that most people saw.

  He looked down at his plate and mumbled, ‘I’m not talking about the flowers.’

  I stared at him, quiet until he met my eye again. ‘The replicas? How did you even get pictures of those?’

  ‘Don’t get mad, okay?’ he said, holding up his hands. ‘I take pictures of the sketchbook when you’re at my place. When you’re done with one, you take them out of the book, so the sketches I’ve shown him probably aren’t the final versions, but they’re enough for him to want to show them.’

  I shook my head. ‘Those are replicas of classic work by world-class artists; there is no way I can show those. I’d be laughed out of the gallery.’

  ‘By the kind of people that show up to those things?’ he asked mockingly. ‘Sweetie, most won’t even know the pieces aren’t originals.’

  ‘But some will, and if it is as you say then why bother at all?’

  He huffed and said, ‘Because they’re beautiful, Dahlia! And they’re more than just replicas. You put a spin on them, you don’t just try to copy them.’

  ‘Some might say that’s worse,’ I replied, thinking it’s one thing to copy a famous work, it’s another thing to make changes to it, as though I don’t have the talent to replicate it, or – worse – think I can do it better.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘It’s just a little show. It won’t be that bad. You might even enjoy it.’

  ‘Hmm.’ I left it at that, but I could tell he would take it as acquiescence.

  Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. And if the reception was good, it might give me the confidence to go further, to apply to an art program, to bring up the idea to my parents. I could point to the success of it – provided it was a success – and leverage that into an argument.

  Our main dishes came and I changed the subject, telling him about my experience with Um Khaled; at first he was cackling, then he was horrified. ‘Do people actually use a khataba anymore?’ he asked. I told him that, judging by the state of her ‘office’, not as many as Mama thought.

  He pushed the food around on his plate. ‘We could get married.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We’ – he indicated the pair of us, like he could possibly mean anyone else – ‘could get married.’

  ‘Why … would we do that?’

  ‘Well, it would certainly shut people up.’

  I shook my head at his suggestion. ‘What people?’

  He looked at me like it was obvious, linking his fingers into some sort of prayer fist beneath his chin. ‘Your family … mine.’ This last he said in a mumble.

  ‘Yousef.’

  ‘It makes sense though,’ he said, leaning forward, his features alive and determined. ‘We’re really close, we adore each other, what’s the problem?’

  ‘What’s the prob— What about love?’

  He looked genuinely confused, his eyes flicking down to the table for only a moment before they were back on me. ‘What about it?’

  I shook my head again. ‘Don’t you want a marriage of love?’

  ‘I love you,’ he said with a schoolboy shrug.
/>   ‘You know what I mean.’

  He sighed, dark eyes wandering this way and that, avoiding mine. ‘It would be for convenience, so if one of us, later on, fell in love with someone, we could divorce.’

  ‘So you think I would fall in love with someone who thinks I have a morally lax attitude towards cheating?’ I asked with a frown, Mona and Rashid’s faces flashing against the wall of my mind.

  He shook his head and ran a hand over his neatly combed wet hair. ‘It wouldn’t be cheating.’

  ‘I agree, but he wouldn’t know that, not at first. This is Kuwait; one of the first things he would learn is that I was married. Or should I get “Married for Convenience” tattooed on my arm?’

  He chuckled, nodding to the waitress when she came by with the pot of green tea. ‘Well, you were thinking of getting one.’ I laughed as well but turned my face away, shaking my head at the proffered tea. ‘It doesn’t have to be so complicated.’

  ‘But it is,’ I replied with a shrug. ‘Say I do fall in love. You can get on fine as a divorcé, but what happens if you want out? People won’t be so kind to me.’

  He frowned, but his response was quick and on point. ‘No offence, but divorced at, what, thirty-two or whatever might play better than having never been married at all.’

  ‘Ah.’ I nodded, poking my chopstick at the wasabi. ‘It would take care of the what’s-wrong-with-her question.’

  ‘Exactly,’ he replied with a wink.

  I shook my head again. ‘Crazy man.’

  His laugh was quiet and sincere, but his voice when he spoke again was painfully earnest. ‘It’s not that crazy.’

  ‘Maybe not, but you are.’

  I was being dismissive and he wasn’t pleased. He took up his baby chopsticks, with the rubber band holding the tops together, and inhaled three pieces of sushi in rapid succession. With a mouthful of avocado and shrimp and crab there was no more talking to be done, and his eyes remained locked on his plate. I rescued a saturated bit of tuna, set it aside and reached for a fresh one.