The Others

by Siba al-Harez

  We were silent for a little, so sad that we could not rise above our sorrow. Then she punctured our silence with words.

  Do you know what the song of our relationship is?

  Of course, it is what you made the painting of.

  And it is just ours!

  Dareen, too, possessed her own particular ability to predict, and this is what she told me as she sang it.

  O Time

  Since these plants threw their shadow on the wall

  And from before the days when these trees grew tall

  O Time, light the lamps, and look at my friends

  They’ve passed on by and I remain all alone

  O friends who are leaving, and the snow that was here

  You’ll no longer return to my door in this drear

  Howl at them, wolf, howl with the winter

  Howl to my friends, and maybe they will hear …

  It was as if she were saying, I will wait for you even if you do not come, and I forgive you for being absent even if I do think it is wrong.

  After we were finished I was careful not to leave anything behind me. The law says: Nothing left hanging behind you when you leave. No words lest they be said, no stories lest they be told, no needs lest they be longed for; because, most of the time, such things come back later to spoil the ambience. I was accustomed to ending my relationships in the most seemly way, what I can call a clean kill. I make our final day the very best day we have ever had, and I make sure that no doubt remains, not even the lightest tiniest tremor of concern, about whether the relationship deserved all that we poured into it. That way, nothing is left over that we are compelled to revisit at a later moment. And so, on that day precisely, I was fulfilling everything required of me, saying everything that needed to be heard from me, so that I could be absolutely certain of not leaving this place before seizing everything due me or paying everything I owed.

  But—Dareen!

  I simply was not capable of taking advantage of her heedlessness, fooling her this way, nor was she capable of playing along—of playing this game with me. I sensed that we would come together; we would find a way through this that would defuse the tension. We would make a relationship that did not leave such a heavy footfall. We would not release ourselves, such that we could be unfaithful, despite the few times, really, that we had been together, so few as to be considered nothing much at all. Times that had always come to a close with the certitude that our intimacy would not repeat itself. We had not been so caught up in our bodies; our desires had not run away with us. But this is what the impossibility of attainment, after its possibility, does. The jealousy germinating in the joints of a body which is no longer able to commit the act, to touch, to kiss; and the belated flame of desire which is fueled only by the power of that other’s existence, and the fire of distance. Perhaps we would meet in paradise, where we could become light, ridding ourselves of the burden of our bodies, released finally from memory.

  18

  Rayyan was a story in one chapter. I do not know which one of us finished with the other one. We just ended it. Supposedly, short stories do not leave vast spaces of sadness behind. Supposedly, transients pass lightly. Supposedly, we remain friends and he leaves the lamp in his window lit for me, so that I may turn to it in my darkest nights, when I make my way along corridors that lead nowhere. But things do not match up with our supposedlys or our prior expectations.

  The worst thing about death is dying slowly, wilting and fading away, dissolving and decomposing. The worst is to find that your every breath holds a little less air. The worst case scenario is when death does not come quickly and decisively; and that was the scenario that overtook Rayyan and me. We ended slowly, so slowly that I have no idea in what moment we actually did end it. I cannot pinpoint or even guess the time span that framed our relationship. We ended so slowly that it wasn’t really an ending.

  We met through pure Internet mischief in an online club. I do confess, Rayyan is one of my favorite writers. I was determined to hassle him, so I highlighted a marginal bit of information in one of his comments, and declared it wrong in a thread I added. Later on, he told me of his suspicion that I was stalking him, likely with some bad intentions. He was outraged and he decided on the spot to break my head, as he put it. Breaking a head takes time and effort, though, and we found ourselves dangling in a certain trap without having realized that we were falling into it.

  When I said to Dareen, What I long for in you is a man, but it’s a man who will never show up, she whispered into my ear, I wish I could be that man.

  But I do not expect anyone, I answered with truly lofty hauteur.

  Without knowing it, she drew my attention to the entity missing in my life. There had never been a man, never at all. In my remotest hopes, in my very feeblest and most secret thoughts about the future, there never ever had been a man. I dealt with the problem of the absent man as a foregone conclusion, a grim reality. Even when the world of the Internet opened before me in all of its tempting, enticing possibilities, that particular absence was a premise whose bases I did not contest. Umar himself was an exception—an exception far beyond the usual or the anticipated. The virtual space where our relationship played out with its natural limitations contained my awareness of him as a presence that had no physicality, no gender, no sex. I expect that if it had not been for the nature of these circumstances, which allowed him to slip easily into the tiniest crevices of me, we would not have come close to completing our second year together as buddies on the Internet.

  Whenever I got close to negotiating with the idea of a certain man’s existence in my life, I had to think about the possibility of there existing a man who would be right. But the sheer question of sexual nature would shove me off course every time I allowed an opportunity to perch in my mind. I am not someone to give my body to strangers. I do not invite to my bed those who will put on their clothes in the morning and go away and not come back. I cannot detach my body from my soul; I cannot fill one of them up while the other remains hungry. There is an enormous distance between releasing my body into the whirl of its desires, and being cheaply and easily available.

  They say that you know love when it shows up in front of you. I do not know if this thing with Rayyan was love or if it was something else. They also say that love comes when we are really ready for it, but it comes from a direction we don’t expect. I was living our relationship as if it were a tightrope on which I had to balance without any safety net below—that below which was deep and very dark. Our relationship took on a strange pattern of absence and presence. Boredom quickly grabbed us if we were in each other’s presence too long. Desire stung us when we stayed away. So we swung between presence and absence, two dubious choices with no third way out. Without any prior accord, we seemed intent on filling an obligation to time our absences and our presences alike. That way, one of us did not have to wait and the other did not have to feel ignored. Knowing from the start that Rayyan would be absent, I did not feel any great fissure opening up behind my ribs if I did not find him there, no gap that solace could not close, no hollow that could fill up only with the muck of regret or the standing water of unbearable grief.

  I always believed that I would not love. Not because love was not capable of including me, but because I was not courageous enough for it. Now, though, I seek to distort or misconstrue some of our truths, or to deflect my thoughts about them, for the sake of convincing myself that I did go through this once. The world can have its truths; I want only some peace of mind within the space of my illusions. Many times—I did not count how many—I said I love you, and he said I love you, and our voices choked on the fierceness of our desire. But these are instances I do not put much stock in. The words we say as a couple of glazed-over sots playing with their bodies across a telephone connection have no value. Many times, when we were on the edge of real grief, he would say, I want someone! Anyone! And I would understand it as: I don’t have anyone! No one is with me.

&nb
sp; How often I have intuitively understood the notion that what begins at boiling temperature ends tepid. Whatever the qualities that create such intensity, they are consumed in that breakneck acceleration of desire, for which there can be no preparation. We are not born as adolescents ready for anything. By nature, we are creatures who develop gradually, and just as this is our nature—and the Creator’s will—so it is also the nature of what we do and think and have. My relationship with Rayyan, which flared and flamed suddenly beneath our fingers on our cell phone pads in a conversation lasting no more than ten minutes, clearly was going to sink and die out just as quickly. We are not giving a relationship enough of a chance if its first moment is its best, for then there will be nothing afterward worth waiting for. And having something worth waiting for is what keeps us going. Probably our repeated truancies from each other on the Internet were half-successful attempts to prolong our hypothetical time together—the time we should have had!—or to grant us a little respite across which we could begin again. But it would not be easy for us to begin again, or to reset the biological clock of our relationship to zero.

  I have sincerely and fervently believed at times that the grief that condemns a certain relationship is also capable of retrieving it. For that sorrow does not leave us. It alights on our pillows just before we wake up, and it seals our eyes shut before we sleep, and it brings those who have left us, or those whom we left, and who all carry that sorrow heavily. Sorrow brings them to us, coming along with them in all of its severe and inscrutable presence. We feel it is the heavy severity of things that hover because they are never forgotten and they allow us no opportunity to overlook them. From Rayyan on, every day of my life, the thought will come to me that those who do not ever arrive—we open a path for them by parting the waters, and still they do not come—are sources of sorrow whose impact we cannot take lightly, although I feign distance from them and claim that I can live with them perfectly well.

  During one of those intervals when our relationship was flagging, Rayyan was in an accident although he was not hurt. I said to him, I do not want you to die! I do not like people who die. I remember that he laughed. That was the moment when I began to observe and count up his absences and mine. As I thought about them, I realized that I no longer found anything enjoyable and appetizing there. It was as though he filled me with stones every time he went away, and I would drown—drown! and when he went away for good, he sent me to the deep and murky bottom without leaving even a breath of air in my chest.

  Our public and passing disagreement lasted a few messages and then extended to long hours of chatter on the Internet, since after all, I was such an expert at immunizing myself against strangers. I found myself opening all my horizons to him. When I heard the little bell signaling that he was entering the site and I read his screen name, Wa-tamuut ma had diri fiik!, “You-die-and-nobody-knows!”, something told me in a whispered voice that I was being taken in by this assured longing for sympathy, and that I would definitely pay the price. I remember my first sentence: On the first of September, many things happen. And I remember his answer: But one of them is not that I will become your Black September!

  It occurred to me that if I had met Rayyan only one month earlier, in August, even in mid-August, then everything between us would have been a mere summer misdemeanor. I am very good at arguing at great length about how negligible are all of the sins or errors I have committed out of pure boredom. I can argue about them and come out of it without any losses worth mentioning. The summer is good for crafting sudden provisional things that are quick to disappear. All things melt in the summer, not only ice and gelati. I can stand it that the ice cream I have with Rayyan melts. But I am not capable of being his tree, and he my autumn, so that I become naked and alone.

  When I heard his voice on the telephone, sounding wounded for no obvious reason, I could well believe that distance creates a temptation that you never feel with anything or anyone nearby and easily available. I told myself that Rayyan was a chance at love that would not come again. He seemed such a sure thing, exactly because he was so far away. He could not really hurt me when he was 400 kilometers distant. Besides, Riyadh—which teaches its children how to be tough and severe—taught him well how to distance himself from people, among them me.

  The borders around our relationship were imposed in advance, without any need on our part to interfere and make adjustments. We did not give the matter any thought. After all, we would not actually meet, and so we could not become embroiled in questions such as, Where will this relationship lead us? How far should it go? There was nothing there to merit such questions. There was no what about later on? to plague us. It was a beginning that had no tomorrow. This was an ideal situation as far as I was concerned, since I am someone who refuses to allow anyone to pin me down so that I cannot move. That day he had to change his name to A safe place for love. But he was a human being, he said to me, not a place. We are all places, I replied.

  That wounded voice of his tinkered with my heart and mind and changed the whole order of things in there. It was the disordering impact of a man on a woman whose only triumphs were over ordinary matters, her only successes within tightly contained boundaries, and her only achievements governed by stern laws. This is what men are so good at, and they have no rivals. They make a woman into a woman and nothing more.

  Rayyan had an attractiveness about him that I could neither resist nor outdo. He knew how to be beautiful in his sadness, desirable in his anger, compellingly extravagant in his thoughts and ideas. The Internet—that ground across which we sowed our first steps—was, as he saw it, the only space that offered women balconies for love trysts, in a country which mounted perfectly arranged conspiracies to turn its sons into deserts—dry and harsh. When I told him that his personality made him extremely good writing material, he answered me sarcastically, So will you kill me off, the way that Algerian writer Ahlam Mostaghanemi does with her heroes? Then he added, Writing does not give me glory. Only praise and women!

  Rayyan is like this: he says things he does not mean, and inflates his words grandly and shoots them out, while at the same time concealing what he truly means ever deeper below the surface. His double-sidedness slays me: sometimes he is frivolous and trivial, but far more often he is incredibly stupendous.

  Once the froth that floated on Rayyan’s surface was swept away, what drew me to him was the fact of our difference. We were opposites who could only accommodate difference, like God’s dark night and His day, woman and man, a Shi‘i girl and a Sunni guy, the ancient Bedouin purity of his blood and my sedentary inheritance—for my blood runs with green heads of grain—dry and rainy, sharp and fine. Even my same-sex experiences fell opposite to his background, which was fundamentally a straight and proper line between two points, reflecting his thoroughly upright character. For him, I was something else for sure, something other, as he was for me. It was obvious from the many issues that came up and astonished us. We would talk about these things, on and on, question marks popping up to which we provided answers, each in turn; and massive differences of opinion that we argued over before giving them a figurative slap on the nape of the neck and telling them to go away. When he saw a picture of me, he said, The origins of people from the Qatif region must go back to Iran. If not, where do you get all this pale skin? Inti haliib, ya bint! You are milk, girl!

  We advanced play by play in our game of e-absences, with its persistent rhythm of recurrences, but whenever we overdid it we returned to our policy of frugality. I recall him saying, Only with you I sense how light my absence is, how little impact it has. And I would ask myself at what point on the path of our relationship had we wrongly taken a side road that became a shortcut leading us toward the end—the end of us. Our absences had become something we celebrated and treated with utmost respect. Our absence became more important than our presence. This is the hardest part of it all. I don’t know what was wrong. Why did we come to an end? What was the final obstacle on the road
that we stumbled over? The hardest thing about it is that I search for the reasons and don’t find them, and so I cannot finally or definitively escape him, nor can he truly rid himself of me. We would continually return, having conversations of an hour or two. I would go on feeling angry about our predicament. I would think, This is not where we were meant to end up. When he returned, I would still feel that I needed him, and I would shelter him for an evening or two. He did the same for me, leaving his door slightly open. I remained certain that it was not a question of one of us playing with the other, raising all of this dust in front of our steps and sending all of this inflammation into our eyes. We were still attached. We still came back. We still did not come back.

  In his wallet, he kept a scrap of paper filled with notes and observations, and when he returned he would read it to me, like a sacred book, even if it only inscribed little things. “I am having a falafel sandwich for supper, I am not inviting you. Anyway, your bad blood prevents you from accepting my invitation.” “I am watching The Others, are you still crazy about it?” “I am feeling kind of blue and I miss you.” “The exams are at a bad time for me to read Love in the Time of Cholera, and anyway, I am longing to hear you say, On condition that you don’t make me eat eggplant. And instead of my saying, I am returning the keys to your life to you, I found myself thinking, If you cross the street you will find me dead when you come back.” “I know you despise our Abbadi, as famous as he is, as great a lute player and singer as he is! But hey, listen to this … or, never mind!” “There is someone who is a lot like you and she is egging me on, she wants me to seduce her. Are you using a new nickname?” “Still love me?” “It isn’t the hunting season, but I am going out into the wilds for the weekend … just so you know, my phone will be off, but don’t worry.”