The Others

by Siba al-Harez

  We had just finished putting together the program for the Charity Tray, which would take place on the hallowed twenty-seventh of Ramadan, the Night of Power, when verses from the Qur’an were first revealed, as the Qur’an tells us. People would buy food coupons and we would distribute the proceeds to the poor. Now it was time to start organizing the festivities to honor the girls who would successfully complete our three training modules—Prayer and Piety, Morals, and the Articles of Faith—and the women who had served as volunteer instructors. We had to come up with a budget, calculating the minimum funds we would realistically need to put this event on. We had to schedule it, making sure that the date we chose would not conflict with anything that anyone else in any other section was doing, and then adhering to it. It meant we had to assign roles and choose a signature theme for the ceremony. We had to decide on the program and speakers, contacting Hussainiyya women known to be good orators or those who wrote for religious magazines. We would need to select token gifts for the volunteer teachers, and arrange with a stationer to print the necessary number of diplomas. We might ask a group of graduating students to recite verses from the Qur’an. Then there were the opening remarks to write, as well as introductions for each part of the program and the concluding words. The event had to be publicized by means of fliers hung in the front windows of the grocery shops, handed out around the open-air Basta market with its cheap goods spread across the ground, and distributed to Internet listservs. And we were the ones who would spend the two final days before the event decorating the walls and ceiling of the Hussainiyya, reconfirming the time and place with everyone involved, and holding a final rehearsal for the dramatic presentation, if we decided to have one. There would be a few headaches arising from the inevitable last-minute changes and necessary back-up plans, or from disagreements among participants, or because some would count on others to do all of the work.

  My particular challenge was that I had to see Dai almost every day. It was not just a question of seeing her as she passed me by in the building, or of the two of us being in the same place. I had to be prepared for long discussions with her since she was an essential component of our small group, and indeed was the one to sign off on every step we took. To all appearances, we gave the impression of a strong and practical collegiality that went no further. Everyone thought we had a great working relationship, judging by our success at jointly coming up with program ideas. Everybody thought that was all we had. To all appearances, we were simply two individuals whose relationship had not undergone any change or had any special or private dimension throughout the nearly three years in which they had been active participants in the same venture.

  We had not come to any advance agreement about keeping our relationship secret, because nothing called for such an agreement. This was the best thing to happen of its own accord, in a relationship that in the space of a few months had suffered a great deal from repeated and dramatic starts and stops. I was truly grateful to her that this, at least, was not an issue.

  Despite my genuine participation in organizing a successful end-of-Ramadan program, I did not feel for a moment that I had offered an appropriate admission of guilt to God, nor even to myself, not to mention the act of contrition that should accompany it. I remained submerged in my sense of embarrassed disgrace, the tormenting feeling I had that my sin dripped visibly in huge drops off my limbs. I knew in advance that I had been acting out of my need to consume the empty time I had at my disposal, so that I would not actually have to encounter myself and start quarreling again with the reason I was. I had done it to soften the sharp pain of seeing myself so broken and dejected; I had done it so that enough time would pass that I could mold justifications that would convince me, or construct a state of oblivion whose coming would sweep away the images etched on my memory.

  My self-disgust underwent a transformation; it went from being a row of huge exclamation points to a series of question marks whose sharp points abraded my chest. That was when I initiated my oddest phase on the Internet, even though all the gateways to sex were firmly shut. This did not mean that there were no peculiar side trips—for example, when I searched Yahoo’s listservs. They had not drawn my attention before. I discovered that Yahoo was off limits to lesbian groups. That was the work of the contractor who supplied web access for the whole of Aramco. Male homosexual listservs were legit, and that is why I immersed myself in them, joining one after another, to the point where my daily consumption of subscriber emails was up to twenty different groups and my inbox was polluted by wave after wave of images and tales. None of this gave me what I was looking for. I was in search of beginnings and their causes; I was looking for how transformations happen, how the body’s desire is formed and molded. I was searching for the causes provoking a body that had been clean and became dirty.

  My most jarring habit was entering particular chat rooms. I had only done this previously on a trial basis. The site would be quiet and very disciplined throughout the day, because censors regularly checked in. Over the last third of the night, though, it would mutate into a sex bazaar. Everyone tossed their most intractable desires into the ring and waited for someone with similar inclinations to show up. I was no better than any of them, and I did attract some attention, from some of the homos of course, of both sexes. With the guys I took up the role of the bashful young man. As fatuous as this role was, it would quickly fool them. I was learning; in fact, I was getting some fast seasoning, for I began passing things I heard from one person on to someone else as my own personal experiences. I would make the details my own, summoning up a personality suitable to the role I was playing. And so I harvested an inconceivable number of weird practices and unruly appetites. Meanwhile, the young women would easily and rapidly discover how very inexperienced I was, or how difficult it was to get to me, or they would unleash doubts about what my sexual identity really was, quickly making their annoyance clear and hastening to distance themselves from me.

  It was a while later that I turned to a more serious form of research. I read all the pages the Google search engine would give me when I typed in the English words homosexual and bisexual. The pages that came up made my head hurt. I felt as though they were forcing upon me awareness, an acknowledgment, of an orientation that was not really mine. And yet the pages that came up on the screen when I searched for the Arabic equivalent, al-mithliyya al-jinsiyya, all veered from tahrim to tajrim, interdiction to criminalization. That would drive me to close the window before I could even finish reading, as these pages screamed into my face that I was rocking God’s throne in His heaven. Finally, I resorted to my own thought processes. No doubt, here was where all of the answers were, in my own body. But my body would always shut the doors in my face and recede.

  I could not abandon my shame. I would shift my eyes away from the mirror in my room, and I draped a cloth over the bathroom mirror so that I would not see myself naked as I bathed. In fact, I went back to bathing with my underclothes on, a practice I had shed a few years before. I was so mortified that I could not place my hand on any part of my body, even if accidentally; I could not move a bar of soap across my own skin. The shame was like an enormous pair of steel boots stomping across my chest.

  I went on like this, in a state of estrangement from myself, while my body began to truly harass me with its demands. I was perfectly conscious of when I could fend it off and when I had to take its desires seriously. But the touchstone here was what it was that my body wanted. Not pieces of candy, nor two extra hours of sleep. What it wanted was an other sin, one that would lower the water level again, an experience that would break yet another bone and color the skin above it with bruises. The critical thing now was that my body itself had become an offense, a sin, and I must bury it as quickly as I possibly could, for otherwise it would get the better of me and slip from my grasp once again.

  4

  Wretched and weak, I was laden with conflicting feelings, sleeping two hours a day and then confusing what I saw in my
meager dreams with real events. I would accost people I knew on the basis of dream events that they had not shared, pelting them with words that would never have entered their wildest imaginations. I was tottering under an enormous weight of guilt, ignominy and self-doubt. I was sinking under the burden. I was falling apart.

  I had just hung up on Umar. Sounding deliberately naïve, I had asked him, Ready to come play a little game? How about some loving? We laughed. We laughed for a long time. At that moment, I was not thinking about what it all meant, the playfulness I was proposing; nor about its well-kept secret content. The minute I closed my phone, though, the thought came to me that likely this was the one single thing that could prevent me from staying completely immersed in the wrong I had committed with Dai. Likely it was the only thing that could protect me from the crimes of my own self.

  I was bent on distraction. There was nowhere safe to turn but Hiba. Can you loan me a pillow? I asked her. Ever since that night of mine with Dai, I had not touched anyone in any way, except for those cursory handshakes that my meetings at the Hussainiyya demanded, or the grasping of hands when I met up with one of my friends, someone I hadn’t seen for a few weeks or months. I held myself back, not kissing them, and I made do with letting them plant their kisses on my cheeks. Even my own body—I didn’t even touch that! I averted my eyes from others, from other women whenever anyone came near. I was completely drained and exhausted by my fear. I closed down my senses; I was terrified of what I might discover in my body—what else I might find in addition to what Dai had already revealed there.

  I needed to be near to Hiba. I needed to touch her and I needed her to disclose to me that there was a place in myself that had not yet become soiled. That the cravings which had passed through my body were not a flaw in my physical chemistry that would lead me to commit the offense a second time, and then a third. I needed Hiba’s body to be close by, and I needed to find that nothing had changed about what I felt toward it, or my ability to look at it without framing it in sensuous physicality. I needed to find that I could brush against it without the blaze of my lust flaring up. Hiba was in a state of noisy excitement, showing off her new possessions, and so she completely forgot to answer my question. She finally managed a laugh, and said, Bring your own pillow or else pay me for it in advance. Nothing is free, gorgeous! I laughed just as smoothly in response. Ya hilwa inti! Speak for yourself, gorgeous! Then you’re selling me the pillow, not renting it out!

  I do not have a pre-existing framework that allows me to define exactly what Hiba was in relation to me—or in relation to anyone but herself. It is not a problem of ignorance as much as one of knowledge, or more accurately, what my own scheme of knowledge about people is. That is, I tend to be attentive to particular details about people, their finer points which are the traits least likely to draw the attention of other people, and which probably do not mean much of anything at all. For example, the fact that some guy really likes the European football league and the Liverpool team, or that some girl has a room painted the color of cappuccino froth, even though I don’t know who is on the Liverpool team or what its history is, or anything about that girl’s room except the color of the paint on its walls. I wouldn’t set much store by the guy’s or the girl’s other details, facts which appear to people other than myself more important, more worthy of committing to memory, more appropriate to circulate: how many brothers and sisters they have, what their fathers do for a living, what their mothers are like, what their skin tone is, and what the names of their friends are. This means that I do not often have the correct answers when faced with questions about one of my friends, like How would you describe her facial features? Is she from a wealthy family? Her sister is studying medicine in Bahrain, right? She’s reserved for her cousin who is going to marry her after he graduates, is that so? Even I do not understand my particular brand of selectivity when it comes to details; I do not really fathom how it is that knowledge of others, as I gain it, is in the end so abstract—pointillist, if I can put it that way. When asked such questions, the most I can offer are vague and approximate answers, reserving for myself the truth that I do not know, and that anyway, I do not care that I do not know! I do not really see anyone, I guess. That is the truth in its simplest and starkest state.

  My relationship with Hiba was a cacophony of memories—long silly conversations, meeting at the Basta market every Thursday, walking along the water, staying up late together when we had the next day off from school, and the walking stick of a grandfather from whose trunk our branches sprouted. We cooked up things that no one but us would possibly take the risk of tasting. We stuck a cardboard plaque on the door proclaiming our names as owners of the room, or to be more accurate, as an owner and her live-in partner, and of course the first of the pair was none other than me. True, I scoffed at some of her craziness. This human being appears natural but she drinks her tea only after it grows cold, reads the newspaper starting at the back page, and bathes in icy water even far into a wintry night for no reason but to spite the cold.

  We were two lines that never intersected, and only rarely did we manage a little miracle across which we would truly come together. I am slow, apprehensive about everything, and perpetually suspicious. Hiba is an explosion always in the making, its echo never silent until she has scattered slivers everywhere. She is always on the move, rushing in absurd directions. She considers it an unforgivable waste of time to think twice about taking any single step. She appreciated her life, which as she described it was simultaneously empty and full, whether that life was on its way forward and upward or whether it was heading in reverse to careen downward. Every breath is a sacred blessing from God, she would say, and so why exhaust it in noisy irritation over things we cannot help?

  It was natural that we would differ. Everything about our two lives diverged. Only occasionally did my family assess me on the basis of my studies, my volunteer work, and whether I was well-behaved or in a good frame of mind. My uncle and his wife, however, appraised their Hiba according to anything and everything that would enhance her opportunities in life—and according to them, life was summed up entirely for a girl in marriage. As they would always say, My Lord protect her with His shielding Hand. Thus, Hiba’s value plummeted every time her weight increased a few kilos or whenever she stopped accepting invitations to weddings and other social occasions for a while. It had all become harder since her decision to stop her studies after successfully finishing her first year of high school. At first, her parents paid little attention; it did not seem to bother them. In recent years, though, university study had newly become a near-universal condition on the list of desiderata for any respectable marriage, and so they wanted her to continue. However, their attempts made no headway in convincing her to return to her place in the high school classroom (and nor did mine, even if our goals differed). She would come up with excuses; she claimed she could not possibly sit at the same tables as children. Anyway, she said, her mind had grown too lethargic to be awoken by the riddles of mathematics and the enigmas of grammar.

  The two of us were neither complete opposites nor very much alike. We were a pair of unlike territories, and only proximity linked us, while we had no shared topography to unite us. The yield? When our shared stock was at its highest, the indicator pointed to no more than one in ten fingers. Yet, true to her name, since Hiba means Gift, she gave me something which all the accords and alliances of this world are powerless to give: abundant security, in the shape of a soft, open hand; security crafted frequently like a bar of chocolate, or lit up on a screen where waves of color surged.

  Why are you so down?

  We’re all colored gray around this time, every year.

  At the approach of the New Year, the whole world wears a dark grayish overcoat, the whole world grumbles and weeps, and the cold etches lines as long and as wide as it wishes, the scratches crisscrossing along my bones. I had just put on a recording of Fairuz and my hoarse voice followed and soared above her Lebanese
warmth.

  How often people

  at the crossroads see people

  and the world goes wintry

  and they carried off my sun

  and here I am on a pure clear day

  and no one sees me

  Though I envied Fairuz’s voice, hearing it against my own scratchy one, which emerges from a throat that is like an ice grinder, I did not dare enter the paradise of her voice and forget myself there. Or perhaps I already saw myself there. Hiba’s face took on a clouded-over byway, her features displaying a query composed of twenty question marks. So what’s the matter with you, huh? I opened a secondary road in the conversation to avoid falling into the trap laid by her expression. I posed a question about what I could possibly hope for in any period of time, ranging in length from about now until the end of the year, and then I rushed in to answer my own question.

  God would be treating me really well if Hidaya were to be pulled from my shadow.

  Does she annoy you?

  I’m tired of the whole thing! I’m bored. It’s all absurd.

  This wasn’t boredom, though. It was the overwhelming fatigue brought on by wasted efforts. For every single occasion we concocted the same arrangements: the hollow glamour and pomp at weddings and the gloom at funerals, the words of presentation to which no one listens and whose sense no one understands, the faces that never change, our closed and narrow meetings where nothing new is ever brought to the table. As soon as Hidaya would demarcate the event’s theme or focus, and parcel out the roles that each of us would play, we would claim to be hugely busy taking care of extremely serious tasks. Every new idea was a locus of doubt and suspicion. Everything that overstepped some boundary ended up in the wastebasket. I do not understand what we are doing here, then! People won’t accept it were the doom-laden words that would overpower the simple wooden dais on which we acted out our naïve and repetitive thoughts and ideas. Fear God by fearing to wrong his people, we would hear, and the pronouncement would flatten our voices before they even came out of our throats, to resound and tremble through our consciences as if signaling a private hell. Beware of the zones of evil. That sentence sent blindness into my eyes and uncertainty into my heart.