The Others

by Siba al-Harez

  I fancied that we had erased Dai’s insinuated goodbye and the nine days just past, had leapt over both without either one of us falling. We prayed, and Dai brought in a plate heavy with food. We ate with one spoon and listened to Kazim’s song, and she said that I knew how to appreciate good music. We chattered about the college and plucked out all the feathers of our strutting professors. We grumbled over the exams, for the doors to the examination halls were just being opened and they would not close until the year’s end. We tried to figure out a way to hasten the upcoming Eid al-Adha holiday. I got into a discussion with her over a few choice ideas from her stock of observations concerning the Hussainiyya. I read the first proofs of the article she was engrossed in writing.

  I really believed that no chasm had opened between us after all—until we got in bed. She took off her clothes and mine, and slipped on top of me with a few kisses, then pulled back slightly and gazed at me sadly. I was touching the pair of dimples on her cheeks. Now I saw the rift, utterly wide, in Dai’s eyes. She turned her back to me. That was what gave me the view of dark traces across her skin, some of them so clearly etched that I could almost figure out where each one started, though staring at her back gave me no power to envision the kind of madness that had caused them to be distributed so randomly. Other marks left me powerless to understand how a human being could be responsible for a disfigurement such as this. The sadness of it was mine now. My heart tried to entice me to redraw those traces with my kisses. I should devote myself to her, gently and carefully, but I drew back. When was my role ever to smooth out traces made by someone other than me?

  I was not astonished by the sight of these marks that stained her. Many times, Dai would try out something to see if it would stir up my anger at her—or my jealousy—what was the difference? She would mount an exhibit for me, an abridged scene of an intense physical encounter between her and one of her women friends, always cutting it short so as to leave me with legitimate questions and scurrilous fancies. I was usually certain that she was mixing some lies with some truth, but still, there was tangible evidence of her multiple relationships. It was the first time I had seen such traces clearly, and in this form, and without any attempt on her part to hide them. It was as if she were saying, Hah! Look how good I am at fooling around.

  I placed a tiny kiss on another blue blemish at the top of her forearm, a very small and gentle kiss, out of fear that I might cause her pain. I took my lips away quickly as I heard her moan, not knowing from the sound of it whether it was my proximity that hurt or the particular spot where the kiss had landed. Be mine, I pleaded. I mean, mine ONLY.

  She answered, but only after a long silence, so long that I doubted she had heard what I said or intended to respond to it.

  But I can’t.

  I had the tormenting feeling that I fell at the end of her queue of choice partners. She had a yield to equal the number of fingers on her hand, and so what could possibly make her content with only one! One like me. Me, so naïve and confused about my body. I had a pressing feeling that tormented me just as much, which was that her other choices were better endowed in every sense, were wealthier, had more breadth of experience. After all, weren’t they purely top-of-the-mattress relationships?

  I turned my back to her and each of us sank into the ocean of her own thoughts. Over us slumped the shadow of an excessive and ugly silence. A chill spread across me, starting inside. I lost my ability to feel any concern, to ask any questions, to experiment by heading down some other avenue. I was like someone who has put all of her eggs in one basket, and now Dai had simply given my basket a kick, sending it against the wall to shatter all of my possibilities, without offering any alternatives or reaching toward compromise solutions. It was really stupid for me to come asking her to let go of others, when it was she a few days earlier who had said goodbye, and still, to this very moment, I had not even asked her why.

  Imagining our bareness as we lay there facing in opposite directions provoked a naïve laugh in me. Sometimes, laughing creates a window through which you can let things pass even though they have no relation to mirth or teasing or jokes—things like pain, shock, embarrassment, surprise, being dazzled, black ironic humor, and those truths that always show up too late.

  I sat up, feeling strongly that I wanted to get up and put on my clothes. But at that moment I discovered that I did not have the energy for it. Even a trivial task such as this would require more effort than I had at my disposal. So I lingered as though I had forgotten what I was about to do. She sat up in turn and rested her head against my back. I guessed that she had her eyes closed since her lashes were not moving over my skin, and I sensed her fatigue from the way she was breathing. Something like sympathy or compassion moved inside of me. I wished I could immerse her, could pass my hand over the place where her hurt began, and open the energy of the hell lurking in the heat of her breaths. That is what I wished, but I was not strong enough to do it.

  I worry about you, about what I can do to you. You are so fresh, so frail and sensitive, that I am afraid if I put my hand on you, I will break you. I do not want to hurt you, but this is what is happening. If I get too close to you, I will disfigure you and make you become like me. I am a freak, a monster, can’t you see that? It’s hard for me to explain! Hard for you to understand!

  Never mind.

  There was nothing to be said, and I wanted her to be quiet, so I pronounced that never mind like a huge period that stops up any opening for speech. My throat was full of saliva that burned. No crying, it was nothing like crying, only a temporary state of dumbness. I felt no sudden curiosity about what she had said, and no desire to get inside of it or to try to understand it. How long she had been saying such things, obscure and vague, things swimming through emptiness. Completely useless things, as if she were plastering all the reasons for our stumblings along a secret wall, and leaving to me the labor of evaluating them. I had no desire to play this game any more, the game of making assumptions about what this might possibly be, this thing which is so hard to explain and which exceeds my powers of understanding. And I did not care to negotiate with her over these secret truths of hers.

  I got out of bed and put on my clothes. I handed over her clothes, a gesture to her that she should do likewise. As soon as she was done I opened the curtains and sat down on the edge of the bed staring at the view from the window. That Dai’s home was on the fringes of the city, in the agricultural area that had not yet been hit hard by the asphalt epidemic, made looking out of the window a true and astounding pleasure. I could see blue skies in which the sun blazed, and an overwhelming green as far as the horizon, as if God granted this land an exemption, and it never lost its virginity.

  She came closer to me in search of a kiss, and I made a sign to her: No. Even though the windows of her room were one-way glass, the fact that I could see the street, with people going by and children on their bicycles, and that I could see into the homes of the neighbors, left me with the feeling that they could see me, too. It would make me too apprehensive, as if I were committing a kiss in sight of everyone. Dai smiled. Perfect, she did not understand my refraining from the kiss as a rejection or refusal of her.

  Why? she asked me.

  I don’t know.

  She smiled at me spontaneously, and I felt the curiosity in her eyes exposing me. Think of it as a parachute jump. If you get beyond the first moment, you can overcome everything else.

  But …

  Come here.

  She stole me with a long kiss, I murmured no to her over and over again, and in a rising voice she answered me over and over, murmuring her refusal to accept mine. At first, I tried to disentangle myself from her, but then I relaxed and finally I responded to the pressure of the kiss.

  So? she asked me, as soon as she drew back.

  I did not answer. My heart was pounding and my breaths were overstrained. She winked at me, so as to say, Let’s keep on doing that when the curtains are open. We both burst out laughing
, despite my suspicion that it was not a joke. My response was that she really had gone crazy.

  That look of sadness came back, as my forefinger stroked the slope of her nose. It seemed that there was some defect in my fingers which injected sadness or despair into her. Perhaps I needed to daub my fingertips with a good luck charm, or redo their chemical makeup. With fake annoyance, or with real patience running out, I’m not sure which, I asked her, So, now what?

  You’re angry at me, aren’t you?

  Of course not.

  Are you telling the truth?

  I told you, of course not.

  You won’t hate me, right? Whatever happens?

  I began to grow uncomfortable with the repeated turns that our conversation took, always leading us in the same direction. Batul rescued me, kicking at the door, her words commingled with sobs. Maaamaaaa, come here, come tell them! They won’t play with me, I hope they rot!

  Dai opened the door for her and picked her up. Her little sister’s face was flushed, her cheeks rosy and her eyes cascading tears. Dai brought the little girl over to the bed, next to me, and held her slight form on her lap, a little sparrow whose wings had just barely begun to sprout. She dried Batul’s tears and wiped her nose.

  Yallah, come on, again. Come on, blow your nose, ha-ar-r-r-d. Dai drew out the word and then made the sound of a nose blowing. The little one was responding to her demand with perfect obedience, imitating the sound exactly.

  I’ll break their heads for you. Okay, sweetie. Okay, enough, no screaming. She looked at me. It’s another mawwal every day. A tearful song that never ends!

  She opened the drawer of the bedside table and pulled out a Snickers bar. Batul took it and held it between her tiny hands, gripping it tightly. As Dai soothed her, her eyelids drooped.

  Why does she call you Mama?

  You could say that I have basically been delegated to meet all the demands of her upbringing.

  What about your mother?

  Busy.

  We broke out in smiles at the same instant, me because I had asked such a dumb and prying question as this, and her to let me know that we had gotten beyond the stage where we would hesitate before asking such questions or stick to earlier commitments about where the red lines were when it came to invading each other’s privacy.

  Do you fancy yourself a teacher?

  You mean do I imagine myself being like my mother?

  She left no room for me to object to the way she had understood my question, and she rounded her own question off with an emphatic Impossible!

  And your diploma?

  You know that majoring in English gives me a lot of different choices—Aramco, or a bank or a hospital.

  Without any preliminaries and in contrast to her usual practice of keeping things to herself, she started talking volubly about her mother. What does daily life mean under the burden of doubting our mothers’ love for us? She had been a highly strung, stubborn daughter, to the point where the distribution of roles between the two of them did not long remain those clearly defined domains of a mother and her child. Rather, Dai had been a little one butting her head against rocky ground whenever she got angry, and her mother chose to confine and whip her hard for behaving badly. When Dai grew older she became a very calm person, aware and smart and older than one might suppose. Her grandmother began urging her to follow her path, the one taken a generation earlier by her mother and her aunts. They had all become Hussainiyya reciters. Their voices offered the glow of condolences and mourned along with bereaved women, all of them in black. They revived Hussain, thirsty and alone, on every Ashura. But Dai would slip out of her grandmother’s hands. Then, with a young teenaged girl’s recklessness and self-pride, she had rushed to try out her gift for writing. She had imitated in miniature the novels of Khawla al-Qazwini, the most felicitous of women writers during a time when our society was very conservative when it came to any sort of writing that fell outside the sphere of the religious authorities or the state’s Islamic sensibility. Dai’s novel circulated from hand to hand among her friends and received much approval and a lot of praise, but her mother offered nothing but a cold gaze and open sarcasm. Don’t waste your time in such trivia. Concentrate on your studies. That was when Hidaya extended her hands—Hidaya who tries to nationalize the creative production of talented women in the country, according to Dai’s way of putting things. For Dai, this was an opportunity to aim a successful blow at her mother; and for her mother, it was a chance to spread the branches of her tree much wider—that family tree which Dai’s earlier behavior had seemed to chop off almost at the trunk. Often, then, when I was with Dai, we would reach a point in the conversation where Hidaya’s name was bound to come up, and I would stop talking, for I am not nearly strong enough to take up a defensive position in a scuffle that Dai would start and refuse to let go, the cause of which would be Hidaya.

  Even if the world were to love me, she said, the whole world, I would still be convinced that no one loves me. As she finished this sentence of hers, she picked up Batul to carry her to her own bed. I yearned to take her hand and say, No. Stay, just like you are right now, like a mythical goddess, a woman at the apex of her motherhood. If I were a photographer or a painter, this scene would not have faded from my mind before I could recreate it fully: a lap molded to welcome the little body, two hands reaching around to embrace its frailty and drawing out of that transparent form a sprite exuding light and warmth. This is not Dai whom I know, not the sociable and elegant personality at the college, nor the astute artist at the Hussainiyya, nor the ferocious mauler in bed. This is another Dai, one I have not known before, in whom I did not catch whiffs of heaven as I do now, ya Allah! Is this what motherhood does to us?

  As soon as Dai pulled the cover over Batul, she woke up and refused to go back to sleep. Dai opened the chocolate bar for her and she took a bite, murmuring over and over, yummy yummy. Then she went out of the room, still carrying the little girl, and I heard her scolding her brothers about their Play Station and threatening to make TV watching off limits for a while. Noticing the particularly loud echo that reverberates through a new house, I realized that she was yelling down from the top of the staircase. Some moments later, she returned.

  You can’t imagine the degree of madness and chaos those naughty boys cause!

  In fact, I am incapable of imagining it, having always lived in a home nearly empty of children. She added, in a tone of heavy and almost angry sarcasm, Four demons pouncing on one piece of candy, Batul—my God, it’s beyond belief!

  She laughed, and I laughed along with her. I love this sunny mood of hers, and it bewildered me to see the reversals and mood swings that I so often saw in her—when, at moments like this, I liked her so much and she makes me feel so good!

  I pointed to my lips and raised my eyebrows at her to get her to realize that there was a chocolate smudge on her lips. She shook her head and commented, When will you start really remembering your lessons and begin applying them?

  She was on the point of kissing me, but I nibbled on her fingertip instead, showing her that something was occupying my mind.

  What is it? What are you thinking about?

  Come on, let’s go for a walk, how about it?

  11

  It was a completely ordinary day. Nothing about the way it began or the brilliance of the morning light gave any hint that it might be different. Nothing turned my attention toward any possible breach or miscalculation. At an early hour, I finished reviewing for my exam. I got dressed, waited for the car, got in, and arrived at the usual time, ten minutes before eight with a few seconds to spare. The place was like a beehive; the usual routine of exams never changes. I performed reasonably well on the exam and was ready to leave the hall a little before the time was half over. From the start, my calculations did not include setting very high expectations, but nor did I predict the worst. I went out and searched for Sundus unsuccessfully, but I knew which lecture hall she would be in for her last lecture on Wedne
sdays. Room 7, Building 3, the guillotine of the math wing, as Sundus calls it. I was sure to find her in the end.

  It had happened before that Aqil had given me a two-day deadline, insisting that I finish my article and turn it in, or he would be forced to finish writing and editing the magazine without my essay appearing on the next-to-last page. It had never happened before, and it would not be his choice for it to happen. I hated this promotion, as Aqil asserted it was when he removed me from the trial list and added my name to the roster of the magazine’s essayists. At the time, I got very annoyed at him, and so he told me that he knew my interests better than I did; what an overbearing guy! I was so irritated that I took my time coming up with a title for my corner of the newspaper, and so he named it for me. He called it I Hear You. And because I was the last to understand the intent in naming it that, just like any reader, he explained the whole thing in Platonic fashion. My writings as a whole were insistently focused on one idea: we must listen to each other instead of screaming into a void, in a miserable, futile attempt to make all the others listen to us—those others who were older, more mature, more seasoned and farsighted.

  I had finished my article the day before. When I turned on the computer to make a copy and then send the file, I discovered that the computer was frozen, suffering no doubt from stress and overexertion. The only thing I could do, then, was to hand it directly to Sundus.