The Others

by Siba al-Harez

  Yes, I told you that.

  But that isn’t the way you sound!

  You left the door open for me to walk through.

  I did?

  Yes, you. Haven’t our conversations about Dai and your relationship with her bothered you, even upset you, starting with the very first question I put to you?

  Yes, a lot!

  Even so, you didn’t tell me that.

  I don’t understand what you mean!

  Yes, you do understand. Don’t expect others to be firm about respecting your limits if you yourself are not firm about them.

  She never returned to the subject. I was sure that she had a secret crystal ball that gave her the appropriate answer to every question I would put to her, and the perfectly crafted, controlling sentence with which she could keep the wheel of conversation moving in the direction she wanted. I did not know whether this certainty about things was something she had possessed since earliest childhood or whether, like me, she lost herself with every next step and then found her way again only after a certain amount of time had passed. Time, time, time. Cursed, this time! I was the one who always chanted that song: The snow came and the snow went … twenty times snow came and went. The more grown up I say that I am, the more mature I become, the more I fall back on the sensation that I am only a little girl whose dress the breeze plays with, making it fly.

  Life is nothing but a reflection of you, my mother says. And I reflect on whether her words are correct. Everything my mother says is right, of course, but why is my reflection as contradictory as this? A wounding reflection that sends my face back deformed when I look in my mirrors. Another reflection in Dareen’s eyes, that of a lost child searching for a hand that will pull her out of danger. I experiment with the idea that my mirrors are not muddy or cloudy or distorted, that my reflection on the watery surface of life does not wobble, torn up by twenty rocks that poke up through the water.

  1 An engagement gift, traditionally of gold. Usually a heavy gold necklace.

  16

  Believe me, the only truth that exists in the whole world is the one that you are living and that I lived: the absence of my father. Not the glory of his heroism, nor the wide expanse of his guardianship, but his absence. As far as I was concerned—me, that little girl whose heart was a series of patched-up holes, a heart rent with overwhelming feelings of orphanhood—these were nothing but useless words and fantastic myths by which I was rocked to sleep. These were the things my grandfather would tell me, his beard moist with the tears of a white dawn, or my mother, whenever I tired her out with my questions and my digging for answers.

  When he went away, my mother told me, I did not sleep, not for an entire two days. She would wrap me in something that held one of his scents to quiet me because I would not stop crying, as if I knew that his traveling concealed a black fate for me. He did not return. For eight years on end he did not set foot over our threshold. He was on a trip to Iran to arrange his affairs there, and from there he would come back to collect us. When he did come, they exchanged his home for prison bars, and his bed for a tattered old blanket.

  The world was a place in revolt. Qatif was afire, smoky with the bombs of … ya Allah!The empty Pepsi-Cola bottles, the squares of white cloth, a tank of kerosene, and there you had it, flaming missiles and everything in splinters. It was a very simple and small intifada, when what everyone wanted was something on a grand scale to overturn the balance-scales of the world. The Iranian revolution was sending blinding rays into everyone’s eyes, and offering them a shining display, a structure to emulate. I will never understand what happened after that, what came to a boil and bubbled over. What was it? What caustic blend of elements changed the face of Qatif? I do understand perfectly that I lived one of its very worst nightmares.

  And I no longer had a father. Fathers do not inhabit images, the pictures we possess, or the tales that others tell. I remembered nothing of him; he had gone away when I was still a crawling baby. Because God is very merciful and erases from our lived days our earliest memories, my father was, in my memory, only a blank, dark space. I grew older, my grandfather treating me compassionately in my fatherless state and my mother pitying me, and pitying herself, sorrowful over our aloneness, over the confinement of her shadow with no one to shoulder her burdens. Meanwhile, my father’s brother acted as an unending treasury to be spent on hosting guests.

  Zakariyya was the only one who appeared natural to me in my restricted world that was clouded by a peculiar secrecy and confinement. I stuck to him like his shadow and that was the first of my problems. We often quarreled and made our peace within an hour or less after forgetting the pain left by the blows we had exchanged, offering each other a toy or a puzzle, while our mothers remained at odds for days on end. They would not speak to each other, and each would turn her face away when the other walked by. We were just a couple of children, while they were stupid enough to track our silly little differences, keeping them going and transforming them into major issues that could never be shrugged off. Later on, we entered that ring, too; we could no longer escape the recriminations and the punishment that followed every quarrel. We each took our share of blows, not to mention the kicks we aimed at each other. My grandfather would step in to make peace between my mother and my uncle’s wife, trying to placate them, for each of them wanted all of his sympathy, wanted right to be entirely on her side, leaving the other woman wholly in the wrong. My uncle just let them fight on and did not interfere.

  I grew up with Zakariyya. We were partners and rivals, buddies and antagonists. He was my brother, my father, my friend—for me, he was everyone. Despite his swagger when he was around me, despite his typical boy coarseness, now and again he would come through, showing me some kindness, offering me something unexpected. He often quarreled with his friends on my behalf, taking my side when they were humiliating or making fun of me because I was a girl, and girls don’t stand up to much in the savage world of boys. Sometimes this made me happy, but there were also occasions when I would blow up at him for assuming I needed his support. He taught me how to be a boy, how to pick a quarrel and fight like a boy, how to curse like a boy, spit like a boy, steal and cheat and gull people and raise pigeons and play ball and bargain on the price of everything I bought for my mother every time she sent me to the grocer’s.

  At school, I unleashed my most inventive lies. My father is traveling. My father has gone to heaven. My father is a pilot. My father …I did not pay much attention to consistency: what was important to me was that no one find out that my father was in prison—that my father was a thief and a criminal! How, after all, at the age of seven, could I understand the meaning of his imprisonment? As far as I was concerned, if he was in prison, he was a criminal, a thief, a murderer! He was anything at all, but he wasn’t honorable. I could not understand that there might be honorable reasons to go to prison, or at the least causes that were not evil, that did not bring shame. Anyway, if I had understood—if my grandfather’s words had not been so vague and puzzling, and my mother’s so ambiguous, and I had understood—how would I have explained it to myself, let alone to the others? There was a revolution going on, and that particular spot in the world where it was happening was no longer acknowledged to exist, and my father had gone there despite the travel ban. All he wanted was to study God and take on the turban of a religious shaykh, and then to take people by the hand and lead them to God so that they would not get lost on the path, and then, when he returned, they put him in prison. It was not really this simple, nor this straightforward, of course. At the age of seven, we do not understand anything about politics; all we know is that we have an inherited hatred of America and we curse Israel and Iblis in the same breath. Whenever my mother happened to get word of my lies from one of the neighbor women or the mothers of my classmates, she slapped me across the mouth as if to say, You have no right to be ashamed of your father. In response, I would simply persist in my lying, as if to say, This man abandoned me and I have the
right to do with him whatever I want and need to do. It became a routine, and routines do not cause pain.

  Then he returned. My grandfather and my mother had been trying to prepare me for his return, while I simply laughed at them and assumed their heads were in the clouds because they were so insistently expecting him. They would talk to me about it, but then he would not come, and I would slip from their grasp and leave them talking to themselves about his impending return. But then he really did come back. At first it did not mean anything to me except a lot of fumbling resistance and uncertainty and fear and fragmentation. What was he going to change in my life now, in my life and my mother’s? What was supposed to happen? How would things be now, having suddenly acquired a father? Who was this man? What was he like?

  Our home was transformed into a wedding party for seven whole days and nights, with all of the good wishes and sweets and incense and trills of joy. I saw all of the relatives, our female relatives, and neighbors and other women who had never entered our home. My mother was happy, although she did not sit still for even ten minutes at a time, while my uncle’s wife muttered and grumbled over the chaos in her home. The mass celebrations ended without bringing this manifest joy to a standstill. Up to that point, I still had not stopped lying, not for a moment, as my friends asked me about my father’s return. How had he come back, and from where? But my mother was too utterly absorbed to even notice this elaborate structure of details that I had concocted, let alone to scold me for it. My questions remained without answers as my mother scurried from place to place and my grandfather closeted himself with the men who were always meeting in the grand reception room and our home filled incessantly with guests passing through. And there was my father, this stranger with a grave and apprehensive face, telling me nothing—those angular features, always so silent and still with misgivings. I was afraid even of sitting down with him at the dining table. I would avert my eyes from him, in constant dread that he would notice if I started giving him sidelong glances, searching his face to find a reason for all that had happened.

  Many days passed in this way. The only thing that concerned me was that I still slept in my mother’s embrace and in her bed. In our bed. Every night, she would tell me a tall tale. What mattered was that my mother was still telling me stories to get me to go to sleep! Then, one day, I discovered that she was tricking me. I had woken up, afraid. It was the same nightmare that I always had, the specter of a man chasing me with blood coming out of his mouth. I awoke afraid and did not find her beside me. That is how I discovered that she was leaving me alone as soon as I fell asleep. She was going to him in the majlis,where the men would sit. I was furious at her. I stopped speaking to her. She told me that she was leaving the room only to make him his supper. So, if I had been lying, she was lying too. But unlike her, I did not slap anyone across the mouth. I did not slap her.

  All but collapsing on the floor because he was laughing so hard, Zakariyya said to me, I saw your father doing it with your mother! I saw them in the majlis. Damn him! All the demons of hell leapt and danced in front of my face, and I went for him. We fell to the ground. I used all the moves I knew, plus some that I had just now invented, and started testing them on his body. I used moves both legitimate and unfair. What he had said was the worst insult and curse that two boys could exchange, and it enraged me. My mother was betraying me, and she was doing so with him. That strange man had stolen her from me. Zakariyya was witness to the end of my days of glory. Here were three blows that I could not endure. My uncle’s wife, who was liable to transform every little thing into a multitude, was shrieking hysterically. The insane girl was going to kill her boy! I would not stop attacking and he would not stop laughing.

  My father came to separate us and I flung at him that sentence which had led to my fight with Zakariyya. I cannot even imagine now how angry I must have been, for me to say those words in his presence. There was a moment’s silence, and then, his voice raised as it had never been before toward me, he ordered me to go to my room. Inside myself, I was screaming. What gives you the right, you bastard? In reality, I was terrified by the way he looked at me. It occurred to me that he could easily make my face fly into smithereens with a single blow, and so I obeyed him at once.

  I was commanded to stay in my room and Zakariyya was ordered not to come near me. Things were at their tensest ever between my father and my uncle and also between my mother and my uncle’s wife. A certain thought hovered over all, but no one dared to bring it up for discussion. I saw it clearly in their eyes and in their silences, and it was at its clearest when my mother inspected my body carefully as I bathed, searching it for something. As far as she was concerned, I was still her little girl of three whom she worried about slipping in the bathtub or getting soap in her eyes. They were thinking: if the two of us were close enough that he could say such a thing as that to me, if he could use such a sentence, might that mean that the relationship between us had gone further than they could see with their own eyes? Suddenly, they had all sorts of suspicions about what might be between us, and they must have mulled over all of those times, those long spells that we spent far from their eyes almost every day. Where had we gone? And how far? It was a silly thought, the stupidest one ever that came to them.

  After an interval, to flee all the added problems, we moved to a separate residence. Zakariyya was not welcome there, while my uncle’s wife couldn’t stand to see me. It all ended as two cousins exchanging annual greetings for the Eid once a year—at most. Perhaps I forgave my mother her betrayal and my father his absence. But I never forgave the two of them for barring me from Zakariyya.

  The business about her staying in the majlis became my own particular joke. Whenever she slept in his room for a week or two, it seemed, her weight went up and her behavior grew erratic. Soon she would be throwing up morning and evening, spending the entire day in her room with the lights out. I do not know how she managed the apparent inevitability of it—how she arranged for it to happen, and how it became a seemingly permanent state. I was twelve when my first sibling was born. I had the sensation of being exchanged for a baby chick tinier than me, and then another one, and then still another. All I wanted was to hear her give me a single reason for having all of those children. I wanted a reason for her to demean herself, to sacrifice her dignity, when he was the one who abstained from her. But that is the way women are. They need a lot of children to feel assured that they still deserve to be alive.

  What I really do hate is how she put me in an observation chamber twenty-four hours a day for the sake of one single suspicion among those she had about me. And then, when I committed the first of my sins, she stripped me of all of my privileges with the cold-bloodedness of a hired killer. Like one of those single-use cameras, that slip was a single-use mistake. One time only. Apparently, though, we are just like CDs: we are a space that is not rewritable. And the membranes of our virginity—we do not have a spare copy, just in case.

  I was always aware that she was constantly watching me. It was so obvious that even my uncle and aunt could see it. She would call my classmates whenever I was five minutes late coming back from their homes, and she would stand at the door of the school waiting for me to come out. Whenever I needed to buy a notebook from the bookstore nearby, she would lead me there by the hand. There were times when I felt she still loved me the way she had in my father’s absence and that was why she was throttling me with her attention. But doubt and suspicion have a smell that the senses never mistake.

  It was a cold night, one of those nights when it seems like all the threads that bind you to the world have snapped. And it was just a game, as are most of the things in my life. I punched the numbers and lifted the receiver, my hand trembling, and said hallo in a manner I tried to infuse with the tone of voice of an experienced girl. I tried to give my voice those provocative little flounces and sillinesses in the lilt of girls’ voices to hide the fact that I was someone who was merely naïve and trying out what I had never be
fore tested. Hallo, then I was quiet. When my silence grew long, whoever held the other telephone hung up on me. I dialed more numbers at random and asked for Fatima. I figured that all the homes here must have a Fatima, since the name of the Prophet’s daughter, who married our hero Ali, is the Shi‘is’ favorite female name. Then it occurred to me, though, that I would be putting this Fatima who was the victim of my random choice in a fix if I called at that time. The world was not as it is now. We would go to sleep at ten o’clock and all of Qatif grew dark except for the streetlights. And there was no Fatima. It seemed I had woken up whoever it was that had answered the phone. The sound of his irritation intoxicated me, and I redialed. He answered me sharply. I told you, wrong number. He hung up on me. I thought this was a pleasant enough game and I went on making spontaneous random phone calls. More than once, I happened to call my uncle’s home, and Hussain answered so I put down the receiver. Every evening I would think about Zakariyya. My family had been able to tear Zakariyya from me, but they did not have the power to uproot him from my mind.

  Before I turned around I was already sure it was my mother. She operated on the principle that every punishment must be appropriate to the sin that led to it. When I was little, since I was a professional at biting other children, she would bite my arm exactly as I did with any of them. She slapped my hand when I stole, and slapped me across the mouth when I lied, and cuffed my ear when I raised the phone receiver and played around. I doubt it ever took her as much as five minutes’ thought to come up with any of those trivial punishments that made me denounce and regret my errors. It was enough for her to treat me like a dog and deny me the privilege of my humanity.

  At that time Qatif was a different place. They say it was a simpler place. But I believe that it did not sleep securely. At that time, the cliché the walls have ears really meant something immediate and real. The spies were many and the secrets were even more. The secrets were exorbitant and oppressive, and it was not possible to live peaceably or securely in their shadow. Everything was sharp and conclusive. A religious book had as much worth as a rifle. A cassette tape equaled a pistol shot. A mourning ceremony for Hussain was tantamount to a whole opposition corps. Maybe it was then that Qatif learned how to be on permanent alert, always ready, always closed and incomprehensible to strangers. Sometimes, I long to see through the eyes of strangers and look at the place; or your eyes, because whenever I’ve tried to cover over the year 1400 with a finger, I see it spilling out from between my other fingers. I have searched, but I have not found anyone writing any histories of Qatif for that period. Perhaps it was all an affair about which we were better off keeping quiet. But it stamped Qatif with another face that we all live with. We will all go on living it. Our problem, perhaps, is that we are ignorant of what really happened, of the details and concealed truths. Or, our problem is that we are too ignorant to be capable of really absorbing it. Often, I figure that I don’t understand what happened because I am a woman. Women don’t understand history because they did not record it; after all, history is only a corrupt policeman to be bought with money and power.