The Others

by Siba al-Harez

  My mother had a tendency to pronounce snap judgments that came as a surprise and left no room for lightening them up. Sometimes she would reject my relationship with some friend or other simply because she did not feel comfortable about the girl. When it came to that, I had only my time on the school grounds to help friendships grow instead of remaining subject to her refusal.

  I really don’t know: Did the world itself slip out of its old skin and, like me, leave behind the years of harshness, moving on into an open space to which it had never before even seemed headed? Or did my mother age suddenly, so that closely tracking the steps of her children became too fatiguing a task? Or was my freedom among the endowments that always accompany the age of eighteen, but do not show up immediately with one’s birthday and the gifts you receive on that particular date?

  On her own accord, Dai moved first to shut off the light switch. I asked her if this was supposed to be a part of my gift. After all, she had tried to coerce me with a thousand-line petition asking if we could put out the lights. She answered me with a diminished smile. I know this mood of Dai’s, when her mental sky is cloudy and there is a cause for it, but she will not tell me what that cause is, no matter how I try to outsmart her. But, contrary to my suspicions, she just came over and turned my face to the wall and lay down with her forehead plastered to my bare back. She began sketching crazy zigzags across my skin with her fingertip and then she burst into sobs. For several minutes I was so bewildered that I could not react. It was the first time she had cried like this in my presence. I made an attempt to turn toward her but she prevented me, keeping her hand firmly on my lower back. When she spoke, she sounded completely overcome by profound fear. Why did you desert me for so long? she asked. All this time?

  I was confused. I needed some time.

  Some time! Do you know how many days it was?

  I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to cause you any pain. And look, I’m here with you now.

  You’ll leave me. There’s nothing that keeps you here with me. You will leave me. Even Balqis left.

  I conjured up in my mind the roll call of names we shared between us, from our days at secondary school and then university, and at the Hussainiyya, trying to figure out some thin thread of intent in her words. But I didn’t have an inkling of what she meant. I knew nothing that had any connection to this name. Later, in one of our most intensely intimate moments, she would tell me about Balqis, the girl who transformed her into this maskh, as she put it. This freak, this deformed creature, this monster.

  She began to shiver, her crying a clear sign of the pain she was feeling. She allowed me to turn over and take her in my arms. I’m with you, I said. I’m staying with you. I will not leave you.

  Hah!

  This explosive hah of hers stands at an uncertain point between sarcasm and suspicious doubt. Like someone waving at me and saying, Please—you may give me that bullet shot known as I will not stay instead of the slow-acting and fatal poison, I will not leave you. Please, do not give me a hope that has such razor-sharp edges!

  She got up out of bed, blurting out a half-hearted joke about her sobbing, sounding like a little girl who has been knocked down by one of the kids down the alley who runs off with her purchases. She walked across the room to turn on the light. She came back, mounted my body and began to drown me in feverish kisses. I was used to her unexpected reversals of mood, for which I could rarely find any reasonable explanation. Her behavior was exactly the same way, contradictory and open to various interpretations. One moment, she would be weak and resigned, and within seconds, she would suddenly have regained her despotic ways and her sharpness. Sometimes when she appeared she was as sensitive and delicate as a fine summer morning, and other times she would shatter me to the bones like a hurricane coming through. From the beginning I believed utterly that she exceeded my powers of comprehension. She was simply too cryptic for me to fully understand. So I stopped working my mind so hard to solve the riddle. That way, Dai was more beautiful. She was a secret I would never divulge because I would never really know what was at the heart of it.

  No sooner was I engulfed in Dai’s body than a knock came suddenly on the door, doubling my heart rate instantly as various thoughts raced through my brain, colliding head-on. Fear ran a marathon race through my veins. I shot upward in less than a second. Doing up the buttons on my shirt required two tries, both unsuccessful, and then a third, with Dai’s hand, as she got up calmly to put on her clothes, without any haste, and without a single change of expression on her face.

  I opened the door to see our maid standing there. I let go with my rude tongue as I jabbed my finger toward a sign slashed red to signal NO ENTRANCE. It hung on my door and meant that I did not want anyone to bother me, no matter what the issue, no matter how serious it was, because I was asleep or I was taking a bath or I had gone to hell. All that mattered was that no one knock at my door! For her part, Edna faltered and stuttered as she tried explaining something to me that had to do with the telephone and Hiba. I know Hiba. If something has gotten lodged in her head, she will not retreat even momentarily for any reason at all. She must have called and refused to hang up, letting the phone ring and ring, and then nothing would satisfy her but insisting that Edna knock on my door. I thanked the maid apologetically and turned back into my room, making sure that the door was once again closed and locked.

  Hugely sarcastic grimaces had swept over Dai’s face. She did not comment; she did not ask, even. Her face alone was expressive enough to fill an entire dictionary of sick jokes and giggles. She stared at me as she would at a clown who has not done a good job of putting on his face, maybe forgetting his red nose in the dressing room, and then when everyone laughs at him—because he is so funny, he assumes—they are actually laughing at him for being so stupid.

  Dai treated me as if I were a child of five who did not understand anything yet. When I kissed her, she would slouch into a short and derisive laugh before receiving the kiss from me with a slightly intimate familiarity as if she were a dear and highly respected friend. It was not long before she enrolled me in school. She dictated and made me write out the domestic chores associated with five or six girls’ school curriculum options, and she prescribed punishments arising from every mistake I made, no matter how tiny. At the year’s end, she gave me my diploma signed off with her professorial moniker. My diploma was a sentence she wrote in black ink onto my body: You are a possession of mine and of mine alone. She said it would be hard for me to understand the full import of this signature if I did not have any immediate feelings toward it. And in truth, at the time two contradictory emotions were sweeping over me: one feeling urged me to hurl my body away from all of this and outside of Dai, and the other craved her power over this body of mine.

  I called Hiba because the little demons jumping around inside of her would never quiet down if I did not call her as quickly as I possibly could. Indeed, she had dialed our house phone number so insistently that she had practically scratched out the buttons on the phone. She drummed up a trial against me, with an imaginary panel of ten judges. I was accused of bad behavior on the basis of shutting my door and turning off my cell phone as well, and then additionally of alarming the servant.

  Now I’ll become the champion of the oppressed and it will all be because of you, she said. I asked her what she wanted in a voice that did not hide the hurry I was in. She wanted me to stay over at her house tonight. The time of Hiba’s call, and our phone conversation itself, sent a vague sensation of anxiety moving through my insides, despite the clear enthusiasm in her voice. It was not normal for her to call me at a late hour on a Wednesday night asking me to come and stay over that very night. Indeed, it was very unusual for me to be anywhere but at home overnight, unless it was summer vacation or a Ramadan night, since the timing of everything, and everyone’s schedules, was turned upside down during Ramadan. I put my middle finger to my forehead and, my eyes wandering, smiled vaguely toward Dai, who for her part stopped surfing th
e TV channels. Her question took me by surprise.

  What do you think of Sundus?

  Several years before, when I had begun to attend summer religious courses, Sundus was a popular and familiar face to all, year after year. Gradually, our reticent smiles had turned into greetings offered from a distance, and then into handshakes and a friendly, casual companionship. Finally, she asked me to work with her, writing for a magazine called Dawn. With Hassan’s encouragement, and after some hesitation, I agreed. Sundus was the female bridge connecting me to Aqil, her brother and one of the managers of the magazine.

  Months later, Sundus and I had weathered the year of true terror: the third year of high school with its awful exams. Together, we were accepted to the College of Sciences in Dammam. My turn came to take the initiative just as she had, and I invited her to join up with us at the Hussainiyya. As I was new to the place, everything there was completely foreign to me; in Sundus I saw a shield to protect me, someone whose confident steps my wary, uncertain feet could follow. (Naturally, when I had offered the same possibility to Hiba—for she was my closest friend—the reaction was a loud guffaw.) Hidaya, for whom the Hussainiyya was a family-founded religious endowment, and who was related to my mother, treated me like the group’s spoiled daughter, especially as I was the youngest among them. She did not reject Sundus’s membership. In fact, she welcomed her warmly, perhaps because her reputation as a writer in a religious magazine had preceded her.

  The two of us remained wrapped up in our own little cocoon. We mixed with the other girls, but we were equally able to do without them. Perhaps this was because of the unmistakable age difference between us and them, with the exception of Dai, who was about our age. At that time, though, Dai made no friendly overtures toward us. And even though the relationship between Sundus and me had not taken on any special warmth, in her I perceived one of those people who make you embarrassed because of the extreme humanity you find in them.

  We thought alike. I didn’t have to explain myself twice for Sundus to get what I was saying, even if the ways we expressed ourselves differed. Sundus’s take on things was that you had to look at everything with reflection and patience. You couldn’t even hope to get close to your goals if you did not give them a lot of deliberation. These sorts of things that we were working on required a lot of time to build. I, on the other hand, found this attitude too lenient, too easy going, and it produced no real benefit. The way I saw it, we had to be forthright about dealing with our pus rather than letting our blood corrupt and rot.

  I was really put off by Dai’s sudden, unjustified question, especially since Dai had never showed any gentleness toward Sundus. So my response was cautious.

  Sundus is a great girl!

  And pretty, isn’t she?

  Pretty, yes, very pretty!

  Only?

  I don’t understand what you’re saying.

  Wasn’t it true that before—

  Dai had not even finished her question before I could tell, from her raised eyebrows, what she was alluding to. I interrupted her, marked disapproval in my voice.

  Sundus doesn’t do that.

  But we—we do. And she started to guffaw.

  Once again, she had caught me, in unevenly applied slapdash cheap makeup, neglecting my red nose, leaving it behind in the dressing room. All of her features bespoke one thing: I found you out! I felt myself shrinking, as she swelled magnificently. She had arrested me in my most contradictory state. She did not even have to strip anything off me. I was already completely naked.

  You know I’ll kill you if you’re unfaithful to me?

  I laughed sarcastically, trying to leave an impression with her that I was unconcerned about this threatening tone that she was using with me. And you’ll drink my blood, too, I appended to her sentence.

  I got up out of bed, wanting to make sure that the door was really shut, since it looked to me that the doorway might bring me breezes I didn’t want from places where the sun did not shine. She grabbed me by the arm. I tried to wiggle out of her grip, and could have if she had not pushed me onto the bed. In a second, she had come down on top of me, in her eyes a look that only the devil could produce.

  Did anyone before me have your body? she asked.

  I didn’t say anything.

  Answer me!

  Stop it.

  Answer me, first!

  Quit acting like a child.

  I hate her when she moves me as if I’m a doll or a dummy—a doll that will not be injured or destroyed no matter how sharply you twist her limbs in the air. I turned my face away from her. She grabbed me at my jaws and forced my face back toward her, so I kept my eyes trained in the other direction. Her voice strained, she went on saying Answer me but I did not. She clapped her left hand to my neck while her right hand pulled my hair, as all the while she muffled me with sticky kisses that bore down on me painfully. They were closer to bites than to kisses.

  I knew that if I kept refusing, her madness would only get worse. My refusals gave her redoubled impetus to conquer me and plant her flag on the virgin territory of which she had stripped me. Despite her evident slenderness and the feminine softness clear in her build, Dai was light years ahead of me in bodily strength, which meant she always had a huge advantage in subduing me when I resisted her.

  I withdrew into myself. I gave her the side of me that was completely the contrary of what she wanted and tried to impose. I became as cold beneath her as the ice that preserves corpses in fine physical form. By behaving this way, I was training my sights exactly on target, for I was giving her all the victory flags she could want, to plant wherever she wished, but they were lowly banners that she implanted in ground she had not fought to gain, and thus whose conquering was hardly a victory to be deserved or trumpeted.

  She finally released me when she saw no sign that I was softening, when she was convinced that I was frost that her heat could not melt. She sat on the edge of the bed, angry. A heavy silence bore down on the room. Very quickly it became a dreary quiet so thick that neither of us could see the other.

  One question rocked the stillness of the room and toyed with our heads. Who would be first this time to let go? I chose to be the one. Be rational, I told myself. Be big. This silence will take the two of you exactly nowhere. I started trying to open a door or at least a window in our barren muteness. Her face was blank, her expression transient, like someone who has just recently figured out some slightly elusive truth. I put my hand on her shoulder and she pushed it off. In a voice I laced with pleading, I asked, What did I do?

  You’re always like this! You get me angry for the sake of nothing. You get a kick out of seeing me beg for you!

  I hugged her, encircling her waist with my arms, as I replied, There’s been no one but you. Hey, is everything okay now?

  She chose to offer an answer heard only by the bedposts and the sheets, and as usual, it was much more like a squabble than like the lovemaking that they always talk about so passionately in films.

  I was not yet beyond the hard and rocky road of growing into a mature young woman—I was still getting all of those bruises that one picks up on the way, the many slaps on my body, and now I was feeling crushed beneath the wheels of a million-ton freight train named Dai. It was too early then for me to understand how far her savagery would go, and how every bit of it would be my loss. Did I yield out of love? Desire? Worshipful slavery? The number of candles I extinguished was matched by the hot tears I swallowed while she was on top of me, lighting up and burning and going to ash like a meteor passing to its final destruction. I was paying the bread of my body as a sacrifice to keep her happy, and she was sucking out my embers, so deeply that no trace would remain in my depths.

  8

  Fadil has asked for my hand.

  Eyes shining and face worshipful, she added, I haven’t told my family yet what my answer will be, but I believe I’m going to say yes.

  It is truly a cause for regret that she was not joking. Neither her
features—suddenly those of a woman who has come to own the world in one fell swoop—nor the shy tremulousness in her voice gave any hint of jesting. Meanwhile, something patted me gently on the heart and said, Don’t let it get you down. Not yet. Hopefully, you won’t lose her, too. All the while, though, another voice was abrading my ear, a loud and overbearing voice that would not stop laughing at me as it addressed its words to me. Do you understand now why she got in touch? It’s classic. She is saying a graceful and upbeat goodbye to you, this girl who has finally stumbled upon a man!

  I don’t remember anything I said to her in response. I must have put on some show of joy and congratulated her, perhaps I even gave her a big, enthusiastic, warm hug and a genuine kiss. I must have said a lot, and together we must have sketched out a pretty image, a nest holding a couple of birds: this one is Hiba, and that one is Fadil. But where am I? This nest is very small, my dear friend! And you won’t make any room for me after today. You will leave me to run with only one shoe, in the wild wilderness of my loneliness. You will cease to be either the step beneath me that keeps me steadily going forward, or the road I tread.

  We women make the same mistake over and over again, and we’ve been doing it since the beginning of time. We truncate our lives, reducing them completely to the man who stamps his name on us. We leave our family and our friendships, our diplomas and our dreams and all the small matters and trivial things that make up our daily lives, and we go to worship at that prayer niche—I’m talking about the mihrab of a man. For his part, the man does not have to do very much in the way of self-alteration. He holds onto the circles he has, with their constant motion, and they keep widening, growing and growing while we remain simply a still point in the crowd. We are so very naïve!