The Others

by Siba al-Harez

  Just little things, the things that he was going to send to my cell phone but was forced to actually write down on paper instead, to keep himself from sending them right at that moment. To cool the need in his blood, he would say. We savored our state of chastity, but at the same time each one of us was thoroughly tangled up in the other, and we also savored that to the point of addiction. One time when real stupidity got the better of me, I sent him a strong and probably hurtful message, which I started by saying, Honestly, doesn’t your heart pain you over me? I did stop saving up my transient daily details to tell him, because doing so filled me with more need for him. It made me turn and turn again in the same maze, coming out one door only to find it sending me back inside the very same maze through another door. I would fill up with need that I would try to blot out, and then, when we were together again in virtual space, and close, I would start feeling sorry for myself and so I would revert back to absences.

  He told me that he had been unfaithful to me for a short time at the start of our relationship. I laughed at his use of the word unfaithful. His girlfriend had returned to him and his longing for her had intoxicated him, and so they had had sex, he said. He tried to lighten the presumed impact of the news on me by saying it only happened two or three times, on the basis that a little unfaithfulness and a lot of unfaithfulness are not the same thing; meanwhile, I was thinking, Once is enough for it to count as unfaithfulness. But in fact I didn’t consider it that. Our very ambiguous relationship did not permit me to interpret what he had done as unfaithfulness. I listened to his tale all the way to the end. Afterward, I made no attempt to cut any of the long and entangled threads of it, for that would require me to make some sort of decision, and I did not want to do that. Although he saw my reaction as a lack of interest, I considered it an attempt to remain impervious to scratches.

  He was always repeating that it was up to God to put him in paradise, if not as compensation for denying him any assurance in life, then at the very least because he had repented of all his sins out of pure anxiety. We did not see eye to eye at all whenever we got onto the subject of God, nor when I would ask him, Have you visited your mother? He would respond, What you mean is, have I visited my mother’s grave! Rayyan encumbered himself with other people without any of them having any right of possession over him. No one permanently inhabited him; he was a many-roomed mansion, housing others when he lived on nothing more than the screech of the wind that came in through the cracks. God moves in mysterious ways, he said to me.

  Both of us hark back to the same northern region, even to the same tribe, a fact which caused Rayyan two minutes of pure astonishment and a passing cackle before he could take it in, and a coincidence which gave me a moment’s doubt about the passed-down tale reciting the origins of our family. A distant male ancestor of mine, when I was only a latent prospect in God’s will, left his northern home and settled somewhere near the Gulf, after switching from his Sunni-ness to the path of the Shi‘is. I mull over the possibility that he was a great man. I do not care how he changed or from what or why. What is important is that he did it. It seems a great thing to me that he looked to God with his own eyes and not with theirs, a wondrous thing that he left all of his former hazy doubts and began with a new vision. It is not important that others might have seen him as a freak.

  This difference between us was nothing if it was not a spur to caustic banter. We would deride even ourselves, and the stupidity that had made our difference into an instrument of so much coercion, rights put on hold, and demi-wars waged in secret. We were constantly trading jokes and jibes on the subject of our difference, even that one time when we talked in what-ifs. What if we were to get married? What if we had children? His words got lost in his laughter as he said, I am probably capable of convincing my family about my marrying a servant in the household, but a Shi‘i woman? That is the most impossible of all. At his words, I felt the slap of a hot gust of wind on my temple. But I just let it go, determined to see it as simply a slightly tasteless joke. Then we disagreed on the name of our firstborn, although after a lot of banter we came to a solution: his name would be Muhammad, a name that no Shi‘i or Sunni could contest. The drift of our conversation carried us further when he asked me about the religion of our children and I exclaimed, By God, what will they be! He answered me, I don’t want my children to be rawafid.

  Rejectionists! That was what some Sunnis called us Shi‘is. Rawafid! Oh, Rayyan.

  And then I said some very bad things, although I do not remember now exactly what they were. I cannot remember what I say when I am in a state of blind anger. I would have let it go as any polite person would, had anyone but Rayyan said it. But not him. The enormity of the letdown that he flung at me when he said that, the scale of the loss, the atrocious degradation, filled my eyes with tears. Later, after he had tried to excuse the whole thing by telling me that it was a bad attitude that he had been brought up with through the whole of his twenty-five years and could not slip out of easily, no matter how hard he tried, and that inside of him there would remain traces that he knew were despicable, I cut him off in mid-explanation. I will not negotiate with you over your convictions, I said, no matter what they are, but you are obliged to respect my difference from you. What if it had not been a slip of the tongue after all? I reflected.

  At that moment I considered some kind of revenge that would let me get even with him. But I pulled back because I was convinced that it really was extremely difficult for him to understand what it means for your own homeland to have an exclusive vision that keeps you out. How could he really understand what it means for your neighbors to band together and conspire against you? For you to exist in an area that is something less than the land that is yours? For you to have to argue for your rights, and to feel that everything coming your way is a charitable donation, bestowed graciously, even when it is the labor of your own hands that provided it?

  I am a person who forgives and does not forget, and he is one to apologize but not erase his wrong. This lapse stopped us cold. We did not refer again to what had been said, nor to the way we had exchanged jokes and drummed up bonus laughs at the expense of my sect or his. We no longer ended our messages with A Shi‘i and she’s prettier or A Sunni and you love him. No longer when I called him on the phone at noon on Friday and reminded him to pray, saying, Come on, get up and go pray, our Lord will be pleased with you, would he answer, I don’t have any need for the Shi‘i Lord! He no longer exclaimed, You sectarian-monger! when I wished him good night by saying Masa’ al-rida, May your evening be full of peaceful contentment. That had not been his response in the beginning, only after he asked me one day what the secret was behind the label by which we were called, Twelver Shi‘is. I explained to him about our twelve holy Imams, and when I was counting them off and reached the Imam al-Rida peace be upon him, my ninth Imam, he immediately picked up on it, as if he had pounced on a treasure: So that’s why, ya la’ima, you are always saying Masa’ al-rida! It’s your Imam-of-Peaceful-Contentment! Evening of Contentment with God, how do you like that! The whole silly thing became a wall erected at the center of our relationship, behind whose curtains there was a fissure rather than a window.

  After the rawafid incident, I stayed away for a little while. I cut myself off from him, from the Internet, our tiny virtual homeland. This was not revenge or punishment so much as it was an attempt to forget. And when I returned, someone among my net friends informed me that Rayyan had come to my defense when some anonymous user had made a comment against me. I knew what had set this off. I was aware of it because it had begun in my personal inbox with a few messages that moved gradually from greetings to open harassment. At the time, all I could do to counter them was to ignore them completely, which is all they deserved, anyway. So I knew the beginnings of it, but I remained in the dark about the ins and outs of how it ended. The topic at issue, with which that person tried to put me in a bad light, ended with suspension of his membership.

  I was gr
ateful to Rayyan for standing in solidarity with me on this. I leaned on him to give me the details, but all he said was, Their pebbles only stirred up the surface, they didn’t reach the bottom. I returned to the net as if nothing had happened. Even selfless and noble behavior in the virtual world is measured by the teaspoonful. When you defend somebody and stand by him, it either signals a lot of affection and care or it tells everyone that you are part of his personal clique. Defending a woman can mean only that you are a greedy cuss who is trying his luck with her, if it does not mean that in the real world, you are a close friend and an exquisitely noble individual who carries five stars on your shoulders. It’s all a bunch of electronic filth! The virtual world holds as real an opportunity for everyone to empty their trash at their neighbors’ doors as it does for a person to cleanse himself, empty his trash, and start fresh. The virtual world is making its way toward resembling the real world a little more each day, losing its old gleam and ceasing to be a miniature homeland or nation or dream. But why should this not be the case, when the virtual world is run by the same minds that order the real world and mold all of its features?

  Finally, it was Rayyan who said the words that formed the entire character of our relationship, after he changed his name on the chat screen to You-are-stuck-at-the-edges-of-my-eyelashes-but-my-eyes-don’t-see-you.

  There isn’t anything about what is between us that is real, he said. I am only a wandering electron where you are concerned. Nothing real! I kiss you but I do not taste the wine of your lips that poets are always talking about. I make love to you but I don’t know what the silk of your body feels like or the flavor of its milk and honey. I have actually smelled that perfume you wear, Le premier jour, but I don’t know what its fragrance becomes when it is on your skin. I know now that you have blue pajamas, like the color of the sky, since you’ve told me so, but I do not know exactly what blue that is, or what sky exactly you have in mind, and precisely at what moment of the day. You say it looks like the sky at Qatif right at this moment, as you write, but I have not seen the sky at Qatif, ever, at any moment. I know Qatif, through you, I know it a little, and you know Riyadh, also a little. But you don’t know what Riyadh really is, just as I don’t know what Qatif really is. You have my pictures but you would not know my features without a square of glossy paper and a camera flash. You have my voice but you don’t know what I sound like when my voice is not traveling through a medium. We have everything, almost—and we have nothing. What piece of me will stay with you when I leave? A lot of words. This is all that is between us. A lot of words. What kind of memory is this, a memory that words manufacture? And my picture, the picture of me, Rayyan, which I want to stay inside of you always, isn’t even a picture. It’s only a vague composite of an incomplete presence in an unreal world.

  These words, which opened a black hole in my heart and did nothing to close it, these words of his seemed the ultimate and final truth with which he illuminated my nights. We are nothing but groups and series of ones and zeros, lined up, and electrified telephone lines with twenty amperes shooting through them. This is Rayyan: a memory of words, tens of words, hundreds of words … and an image with sham features. I would read his texts over and over, endlessly, trying to extract his soul from them, but it was no use—it was hopeless to try to fill in the gaps this way.

  During one of his long absences, and after I had wiped his images from my computer memory, I awoke belatedly to the realization that I did not know his face. I could describe him, sure, and with all the tiny details, but behind this description of mine there was no consistent image on which to rely in my cold and lonely nights. There was only the gelatinous image that I could not pick up with my hands. I realized that what I had been seeing was not actually him, it was only his voice, with its particular ways of speaking and its allusions. I saw that voice so clearly, from the marhaba1 that began every one of our conversations, that I could immediately weigh how much salt or sugar his voice carried, depending on his level of emotional fatigue or comfort. It was not Rayyan’s face that was fading, because the face itself was never there in the first place; the longer his absence was, the more eroded were the details. His distance made him remote at the same time that his words were many and large.

  At a late point in my relationship with Rayyan, and because I was so very sure that there was no longer anything between us that was strong enough to keep us together, nor anything strong enough to push us apart—our choices seemed equal on both ends—I sent him a message. Xcuse me 4 showing up lk thieves of d night do! Thks 4 everythg. Rayyan, gdbye.

  I hated being so stealthy, via the cold screen of a mobile, in a nighttime whose limbs trembled with the savagery of the wind’s breaths. I hated it even more that he was more gentle with me than I had been with him, asking me, Do you really want to leave me? Do you want me to help you to get over me? And I hated everything that was happening even more when I found myself answering him with some swagger, I can handle my own business, don’t worry. When I am one who never says goodbye because I believe that goodbye is a bullet that pierces the heart suddenly and unnecessarily, right at its center; because I believe that there are gentler ways to not be there; because I believe that there is no justification for leaving mournful elegies in our wake. With Rayyan I had reached a final conviction. I knew I would always leave the door slightly open for his sake if I did not slam it now, close and lock it firmly, and throw the key into the ocean.

  The following autumn after we broke up, we were no longer friends, but I understood what it was that I suffered each time I said to him—quoting from somewhere, but I don’t know from where—To love is one thing and to fall in love is something else. I am certain that it would be an excellent idea to bring in something here from the song archive of Talal Maddah with the longing in his voice, or from Abbadi with the sadness in his songwriting pen (this is how Rayyan always elaborately describes the two of them). Except, what I would choose to send to him would be the voice of Fairuz which does not know the Najd dialect with its unique accent and vocabulary; nor our vernacular Nabati poetry, which is so different from that of Lebanon; nor the hunting seasons; nor the old-fashioned “house of goat hair,” the tents that our people used to live in, that you see now only in special exhibits or commercial shows. Nor the schools where children memorize the Qur’an, nor the crescent moon, nor the istraahas2 that groups of friends rent to spend their free hours, nor Riyadh’s famous neighborhood al-Ulya, nor the wide congested streets and narrow morals of Riyadh, which Fairuz does not know and neither do I. I sent him a song by Fairuz: I remember you whenever the clouds come …your face is a reminder of the autumn …you return to me as the world gets darker …like the breeze that does not moisten lightly … And I headed my message with a question that was like his wounded voice and his face wiped of features: Still, Rayyan? The song, after all, asks, Are you still with me? And I ended it saying, A Shi‘i girl who loves you, neighbor.

  1 Hello.

  2 Lounge.

  19

  My ability to convey the essence of things—whether objects, events, images, places and odors—almost nil, now. Perhaps it is that my ability to communicate has all but shifted into a particular and unintended sort of lying: that is, I am hopeless at squaring the reality of any object with the transmitted images of it. There is a conspicuous lapse between the two that I do not know how to explain or interpret. It is not that I intend to say the opposite of what things say about themselves, nor to give them an aura any falser than what is already there. But that is how it always ends up; I leave that gap as well as a trail of questions about the true nature of things around me, questions about how well-equipped I am to put the truth of them to examination, or to look beyond their surfaces to their essence and spirit. And that is why often I arrive at each disclosure, each confession, with a single result: a hateful feeling that what I have drawn is an entirely new world, an ambiguous and dark world with no link whatsoever to the world that I intended originally to pass on thro
ugh my mind and words.

  Umar justifies this to me by saying that I am trying to preserve my image of the world for myself, so that it will go on being a complete image that nothing disfigures and that no one else can imprint with his own traces. I know in myself that his justification is not an accurate one; I know that I am the one who is not allowing the world to pass across her. Every passageway is low ground, a heavy step, and my heavy steps across low ground give me no pleasure.

  I can regret, too, that as a person who will not talk about things except as a strategy to forget them, I was allowing my experiences to stay alive, if not in my memory, then in another’s memory, Umar’s memory, where I had extended the threads of all of those happenings that had left me so fatigued and upset. Where his mind could spin them into something more substantial.

  Now, I told him the secrets—the only secrets whose doors I had closed to Umar, who was the only one, with the lightness of his being, to open them. I relived the secrets as I told them, chattering on and on wildly, unsure of whether I could really enable Umar to understand what happened, as it was not a question only of his knowledge of the events. And I was uncertain of whether I could forget them. The attempt absolves us of the failure, anyway, I said to myself.

  I made a final point and came to a stop. Umar had said nothing the entire time except little mumbled exclamations that meant he was following my words, plus some questions and comments, just a few, to urge me on. He had made me halt for two seconds as soon as it was somewhat clear where my endless chatter was headed.