The Others

by Siba al-Harez

  Without needing any more justification than this, I went back to Dai. A simple gesture from her was all I needed, a sign, a five-minute phone call. My longing alone, mingling with my physical desire, was enough to make me a pawn to her wishes. She used the excuse of my approaching birthday to propose that we see each other, and for my part, I did not wait for any incitement to rip up the pages of the calendar as fast as I could in anticipation of Wednesday, which was so slow to come, just to spite me.

  6

  My next task: to convince my mother to let me move into what used to be Muhammad’s room. It had been a whole year since his marriage, and the same amount of time since Faisal had settled into his university housing; he only came home on weekends. If our home had shrunk since Hassan’s death, it was this double blow that truly abandoned it to an awful, killing silence. It was this that made my mother stare at the belly of Maryam, my brother’s wife, willing it to swell, to bring us a child who would bring back the happy clatter the house had once held. Fatima’s three children were not enough for my mother. Fatima, the sister eight years older than me who had been married, it seemed to me, since the beginning of time, and whom my mother never ceased to blame or scold for her absence, her failure to visit—the signs, as my mother saw it, of my elder sister’s deliberate separation from her. Our home, empty most of the time, left my mother saying over and over again, in obvious distress, There’s nothing left of this home but the maid!

  Half of my arguments with my mother were about overdoing the solitude thing, as she saw it—my long spells of withdrawal into my room, from which I would not emerge unless to leave the house altogether or to take my food from the kitchen, returning to eat it in my room, or to use the bathroom. My mother blamed and scolded me incessantly for always closing the door to my room and blasting the sound of songs into the air behind my walls.

  Muhammad’s room was virtually separated from everything else, and it had its own private bath. This was precisely what made it so difficult to get my mother to agree that I could move there. Even though I possessed quite a range of devious ploys that allowed me to unload my mother when I wanted to, I barely used them. She had enough fatigue and unending worries because of me.

  Finally, I had no choice but to give in to her demands. Eat your meals with me on days when there is no school. Don’t close the door for long periods. I want to be able to check on you, especially if you are taking a bath … leave the door open! Stop staying up so late, sitting in front of that computer nearly until the sun comes up … and TV, too—keep the light on when you’re watching TV, you’re tiring out your eyes for no reason.

  Any other orders?

  Watch out for yourself, sweetie.

  With this last sentence, she touched my cheek playfully. I had come to know this affecting, querulous tone of hers ever since Hassan had been gone, and I dreaded it as much as I longed to answer her with the words, Mama, I miss him too. Me, too!I had not wept for Hassan like a proper sister in mourning. I had screamed, on and on, Hassan is not leaving me! Hassan is not dying! Touch him, rub him, he just feels chilled, he isn’t really stone cold! He is just making fun of us. Please, believe me, this is a silly little game and he is just teasing us. He will open his eyes in a little bit and say, Boo! And no one laugh. I will kill all of you if you laugh. No one laughs at tricks as stupid as this. He is under the sheet now, trying to get the better of his laughter so that he won’t be discovered. Let someone lift off all of this white that covers him. You will see, all of you will see. Believe me. No, wait! No one lift the covers off him! He told me yesterday that he was feeling chilled. This winter is a miserable and mean one—it does not realize how cold Hassan is feeling. Stop crying. You are all letting his hand slip away. You are all letting him go. Stop, all of you! Hassan is not leaving me. He told me that he is a hero and he will triumph. He will recover. He was always saying that hospitals lie—they are the ones who make out like bandits from his illness. He told me that, and he was looking right into my eyes when he said it. He is going to give me an awesome gift for the next big feast, the Eid. On that holiday, my wallet will explode from having so much money stuffed in it! We will go to the seashore together, and to the amusement park, where we will ride the Death Train. I’m afraid of that rollercoaster, I told him, and he said he would hold me really tight and laugh and laugh at me as I screamed in fear. I told him he would never have a chance, no opportunity like that would ever be offered to him. Ohhh, never be offered. Never, never be offered!

  I screamed for a long time. But my screaming never went any further than my head. I wiped my tears, the drops swelling out of my eyes in spite of myself. I swiped at them with true disgust. I must not cry. If I cry, it means I am confirming Hassan’s death, and then he really will have died, even though Hassan is not someone who dies. Hassan is not someone who goes back on his word. I can give him my blood! But Hassan, my blood is not clean enough. Still, its corpuscles are prettier than yours, Hassan, and they are more fastidious. Mine are round and plump, because I have fed them for eighteen years on sugar and watered them with Cola. With what have you watered your blood to make such bad things pierce its corpuscles, to cause a violent scythe to slash them, reaping all of your dreams, my beloved brother? Come, tell me, with all your usual sarcasm, that no, I am not fastidious, not elegant, that my blood is not exacting. Say that if my blood tastes like sugar, as we Arabs say, it is the taste of noxious sugars. Say that you were just worried about the state of your monthly stipends and you escaped so as not to pay me any cash during the Holy Feast. Do you think that I will go easy on you? Of course not. Just come to me, that’s all. Hisabak asiir ma’aya! I am going to call you to account. You are not imagining, surely, that you can make what is in your head happen as easily as this, and get away with your very obvious plotting! Just come, just come or … okay, look, I will not take any of my medications until you back down. I will get sick. You know how stubborn I am. I will get really really sick and mother will put all the blame onto you. Mom will cut you off, too. She does not like it when you frighten her like this! She cries, and she says to everyone, Do not put out Hassan’s candle. She says that it is not easy for her to see you stretched out full length in this expanse of whiteness, this tall frame of yours, which after today, she thinks, will find refuge only in the soil. Tell her she is wrong. You are totally wrong, Mother.

  But Hassan did not speak. The dead do not have anything to say. Their final word is their death. The dead do not talk. They turn their steps toward worlds we have never pierced, and they do not come back. They overdo the silence bit, yielding to us a space that everyone knows is designated for talk and plaint and shrieking and weeping and blaspheming God and all inglorious forms of rejecting what is right and true. They stare into the void, into that absolute space where they fix their grip on all that we do not yet know. They will not connive with us to steal a glimmer of light from that unknown space, a flash that we could hold onto. They will not solve a single riddle for us. With their newfound arrogance, they shut the door, slamming it closed with all the energy of the lives they had, rather than seeing the angels of death suck that energy away. We are not allowed even a keyhole or the sliver of space beneath a door, to make it reveal the momentous secret whose details no one is willing to share with us.

  What hurts me so much are the details of him, for they are impervious to my mind’s usual ability to forget. With total recall I can hear the timbre of his voice and see the pupils of his eyes flitting whenever he speaks. I can recollect how he waved his hand about and exactly how his fingers moved, the particular ways he walked and stood, and his own special manner of holding the prayer beads or his car keys, how he toyed with his hair if he forgot something and was trying to remember, how he slammed the door when he was irritated, how exactly he balanced his spoon with all five fingers and ate like a child. I remember the mole just where his hair sprang out, as close as could be to his left temple, and how his temples pulsed when he had a headache or if he was seriously an
gry. And even though he seldom got angry, I recall him snapping Khudh lak! when someone stepped in front of him and blocked his way. I remember him praying quietly, free of any care, and I remember him when he got sick and the whites of his eyes turned yellow. I remember him scooping out those miniscule fish, harpoon fishes, from the little dam nearby so that I could raise them in the shiny gold Abu Kursi shortening cans, where they would die. And then I was afraid to cry lest his face melt from the impact of my flowing eyes, afraid that his face and its minute details would leave me, afraid that he would abandon me in my awful solitude.

  I continue to try to deal with Hassan’s absence by writing, and I deal with writing by making sure of my own personal absence from it, and I deal with this absence of me by maintaining a brittle presence that is nothing like me, a presence that could only resemble a creature without well-defined features or a clear demeanor, without even an identity, an I, in that world where I could open a computer window and march through it. A world in which I can decant my features simply with the dust particles of words, fishing for laughs and cries with ready-made icons.

  Whatever distances I set out to cross, in directions I have already traveled—my studies, my trivial volunteer work, writing, my friends and my mother—all of these are nothing but a long, deliberate, and persistent attempt to keep myself fixed in the image where Hassan left me. I was an image pounded into the wall with a nail with an inscription at the lower edge: as Hassan was this … thus. I remained terrified of the thought that he might return in the form of a hailstone or a white gull and would find nothing but a girl whose wonderful wholeness had dwindled away in his absence. That he would look down on me from his other world and it would frighten him to see me alone, abandoned and fragile. Inside, I was that girl, exactly that girl, and so I went to great lengths with powder and laughter even when I didn’t feel like it—whatever might keep anyone and everyone from noticing the despondent way I had receded from life. In the space of three years, I wilted, and here I was, on the point of breakdown.

  If it had been up to me, I would have moved into Hassan’s room. In his bed, I would have been able to breathe in his existence, to inhale his dreams as I buried my head in his pillow, and to feel, wrapped in his bed linens, the warmth that had moved and walked among people. Had I done that, I would not have dared to go on and do any of the foolish things that I did. I would not have been able to lead the compass of his mind astray by saying, Yes, I prayed just a little while ago, or to claim that Dai and I had been completely absorbed in the film on the screen and so we didn’t even hear the knock on the door. His face was all it took to return God to my heart. I knew that his trusty moral compass, which kept him headed in the right direction, and which had kept me on the right path, too, would have exploded out of its accustomed direction if my lies had been revealed.

  No sooner did my mother give me the faintest possible green light than I moved myself wholesale into Muhammad’s room. I had already dealt with the chaos of my belongings, certain that my mother would soften in the end and agree to my plans. I did not take any of the furnishings from my room except the television and computer and the tables on which they rested, plus a few picture frames, all of which held Hassan’s face. The number of books in my bookcase paralyzed me. I could not possibly move them all at once, and that led me to an idea that I really liked: the notion of having two rooms, completely separate from each other, with two different sets of furnishings, and different capabilities. I would read in one room and watch TV in the other, and perhaps I would sleep one night in this room and another night in that one.

  Muhammad’s room, with its serious and practical workaday atmosphere, suited me very well. The sparse furniture left a huge expanse of room free and available to the flights that my mood would take. The space allowed me to sleep some evenings on the floor, to stretch out in front of the television with my legs raised and hanging on the table edge, to have my phone conversations as I paced to and fro across the room, to study in its most remote corners, so that I had nothing around me but bare walls and corners, to park my body just behind the door, where I could hide while I got myself through the various stages of my depressions, and to toss out my many pillows and let them scatter, transforming the floor into a space where one could not easily set one’s feet down.

  What was even more agreeable to me was the bathroom. Late at night I would leave the bathroom light on while I sat in the doorway thinking, planning, writing, finishing my homework. If it had not been for the sound that would echo too widely, I would have brought over my phone and frittered away the whole night chatting with Umar or Hiba. And, once finished, I would sit with my back leaning against the closed door of the bathroom, from inside, and smoke my daily cigarettes, or rather my nightly cigarettes. The scandalous pleasure of the nicotine creeping through my blood mixed with the warm intimacy of my cooped-up berth, and the curtain offered by the nighttime, and the utter silence of our home—all of it sent into me an intense, comforting kind of numbness.

  I transport myself to a higher world; concealed, not really there, I follow vestibules and doorways and corridors, secret ones that exist only in my mind. I trace their details and twists and turns, trying to keep hold of them, rubbing my fingers against them and burnishing the truths there until I can see them clearly. I’ve never had a galloping imagination, not even in the first years of my life. Only the sting of my curiosity got me to approach the earth and its tangible objects. But here in my head—and only in my head—I feel as though I am rebuilding myself, brick by brick. I can decide what I will allow to make its way stealthily into me, and what I will prohibit from entry. I absent myself from the world as a way to bridle my desire to swallow it whole, convincing myself that I would choke on it immediately, for the world is hard and I must learn to let it pass me by rather than enter me with its arrogant self-propulsion. And there are the others, the others always, my first precaution and the cause of my fears. I do not want anyone to touch me, to reach me. No one, and nothing, either.

  Being alone is reassuring. It gives me enough space to come as near as I wish and to stay as far away as I want. To choose your own solitude does not mean that you stop being at the heart of the world. In its simplest forms, it means that you are there, or anywhere, only by choice, and that you take in hand your own being-there, holding it within your own personal boundaries so that no one can roam widely enough to steal you from your self suddenly, or mold your face according to his wishes, or harm you, or twist the neck of the compass that guides you.

  If my room, before, was my stern isolation from everything outside, the bathroom became my ultimate refuge, where no one could violate or disturb me, nor could they see the marks of violation on me, abbreviated or whole. All I had to do was to close the door to be sure that no one would see me. The door was my trustworthy guard, and the breach through which I could penetrate to my special private world that concerned no one but me. The bathroom was where my brain was—my slate. My thoughts are my chalk, a chalk of pure white. I will color the world in the light of God, and my own world is no exception.

  7

  Wednesday came, and with it came Dai. When the clock hands met atop the four she was kissing me, and with her lips she closed the final moments of my first year as an adult—or a rightly guided person, as we say—before taking me by the hand as I stepped into my new year. For an entire twelve months now, I had been lifting one foot, and with the other leaping into a new hopscotch square, but I did not know how I was supposed to deal with any of it, nor what was demanded of me in this new stage of things.

  For years, I carried a mental image of the age of eighteen as a glowing lantern, and I had been ready and waiting to cross in front of it so that it would light my face. Of course, the enticements were simply that I had gotten through and beyond adolescence and was entering the university. This made it inevitable that I would riffle out my feathers and swell up like a peacock, as I would raise my index finger and shake it in the whole world’s face.
Stop treating me like a little girl whose anklebone will become twisted if she plays ball, or who will lose her way back if she sets out alone to the neighborhood store!

  I made it past eighteen, and teenagerdom, and the first of my years of university, and no big changes came about. I was still getting an allowance and I still needed permission to leave the house, plus practically an old-style military order, a firman from above that carried absolute authority on the acceptance or rejection of every new friend in my life. I hung up my second lantern, twenty-one, with a huge red star and the phrase, Finally I will be taken seriously. I was not. In the eyes of Hidaya, whose very name meant guidance and who represented for me the power of adults, I remained that little girl who had not yet absorbed enough life experience.

  But between the two lanterns something changed. I cannot exactly pinpoint that something’s starting point, nor the manner of its first steps. It was not a single thing, but rather many things, taking on new colors and changing shapes and qualities until I was incapable of following the changes closely, let alone monitoring them.

  I would put on makeup, pluck whatever extraneous hair I could find, and leave the house without doing more than leaving word for my mother just so she would know I was out. If she were out, I did not even leave a note, since I was a sensible girl, and anyway, my steps were restricted by where the driver would agree to take me. If it was late I would call, since I had a cell phone. And I withdrew into a seriously astonishing whirlwind called the Internet. There, I could address anyone as my dear, even though I was daughter to a society where to address anyone falling in the category of sound male creature would be considered as either utterly inconceivable or a brand of prostitution, unless, maybe, it was a male parrot that I was addressing. Out of my roster of friends, my mother knew only each girl’s first name, and only in a quarter of the cases did she refuse my wishes to spend time with them.