The Others

by Siba al-Harez

  Umar was exactly like himself, exactly as I had seen in his pictures and via the webcam in the few times he happened to be at an Internet café. Here were the same facial expressions and gestures, the same sharp aspect with the fine protruding nose ending in a tip that needed only an index finger poking playfully at it, the same dark complexion and deep brown eyes, the hair whose blackness the breeze made fly, his long fingers always ready to sketch shapes in the air, his reserved smile that waited until his face was turning in the other direction to complete itself, his laugh like the breaking water in the fountain nearby, and his broad forehead, which offers an abundant destiny for someone wanting a full life to immerse them. There was his smell mixed with Calvin Klein cologne, his smell that God did not duplicate in anyone, and the warmth of his body, too, which no technique could dispel.

  My entire world had withdrawn into the confines of virtuality, where my features are embodied icons, my voice a “respond” box, and my room a chat window where time falls away and place goes missing. My friends, my little homelands, the man whom I thought I loved, my mailboxes, the cafés where we would meet—it was all virtual, even our names. My cousin’s names were no longer what they had been twenty years before, but had changed to Hiba and Sundus and Aqil, even before the Internet when we had pseudonyms for the magazine. Dareen first introduced herself to me using her Internet name, and then apologized, smiling, and replaced it with the name on her birth certificate. She loved the Qatif region so much, she said, that she had chosen the name of a coastal part of Qatif’s body. She said to me, I wanted a name that would unite the memory of my homeland, Qatif, with Nadia. “Nadia” and “Dareen” share letters. Rayyan chose the name that no one called him by except his mother—and it appears that my luck at its best was with people whose names contain the letter R. Dai said, By pure coincidence my eye fell on the word Dai at the very moment I was registering, and there wasn’t any other name in my head at the time. Only Umar was a fact that virtual reality did not demolish, nor did distances, nor my fear.

  On the horizon of my expectations, the possibility of our meeting as quickly as this had not occurred, nor had the possibility of it happening again this fast. I returned with my head spinning, searching for a way out. Umar would not stay for more than five days, and I would have to make up some convincing reasons to cover two or three meetings during that time without stirring up my mother’s suspicions. My mother—who doubts even her own doubts, and who does not impose enough logic on her rules—did not even allow Salaam to drive me to the college that was outside Qatif, for everything outside of Qatif in her view amounted to nothing more than unknown, foreign towns. Even here, in the city that I had visited some dozen summers in a row, and whose map might as well be drawn on my palm, I knew it so well, and which became every summer another Qatif, so that wherever I turned I would see someone I knew—even this remained for my mother an unknown, foreign city—and no one can trust foreign cities.

  My only way out was Salma. I figured that God loves me and so He sent Salma to me. I called her and I told her a double lie. I asked her to help me claim in front of my mother that she was inviting me to lunch, because, I told her, I was going to meet up with Nuuf, a net girlfriend, and my mother would give us a hard time, and so would Nuuf’s mother, and we wouldn’t be able to find any middle ground to meet on. I was only half lying, because I really was going to meet Nuuf, and we were searching out a secret way to meet without having to get into an argument with my mother and hers which would end with the mothers opposing the idea or expressing their displeasure at our relationship altogether. A little while later, Salma called me back, so that the idea of the invitation would not appear to have been arranged in advance. We talked for a few minutes and then I gave my cell phone to my mother. I know Salma’s way when she is going after something she wants. So I knew that my mother would be embarrassed enough that she would agree without any back-and-forth or bargaining. I got what I had been strategizing for, even though my mother gave me no more than three hours. That was not a problem; I had learned how to bargain with her for more.

  I couldn’t sleep. I stayed sitting up in my bed, staring out the window to the glass façade where Umar was asleep behind one of its windows. Tomorrow seemed very far away and it was taking its time about arriving. It is only 2 a.m., I thought, so hopefully he is not asleep yet, and if I were to wake him up he would go back to sleep. No doubt he is tired enough to fall asleep again. So I called him, and thank God he was not asleep. I told him my naïve need to know which window he was sleeping behind, so he turned the light on and off several times until I was able to find his window. I reminded him not to put on any cologne tomorrow so that my mother would not smell its scent on my clothes. I wished him a sound sleep and clean sheets and a pillow that didn’t hurt his neck, and I hung up.

  In my dreams, Hassan came to me. He had never before visited me in my sleep. His face was covered with a small piece of white cloth that I pulled away, but it returned to cover his face again, growing larger, reaching for his limbs and his whole body. I pulled it off but it came back and grew still larger, and so it mutated from a handkerchief into a ghutra like men wear over their heads, and then into a sheet and then a shroud. I was asking him, Have you forgotten me, Hassan? Why don’t you come? Come with me, okay? Get up from death, and come. All he did was smile, a long and sweet smile, not the kind of smile that indicates the helplessness of the dead when their shrouds bind and incapacitate them. And before the dream was blotted out, he said to me, This is not the right of the dead over the living. What do you mean by that, Hassan? What do you mean? What? and I found myself tumbling into a foggy wakefulness and the room.

  At midday, as soon as I stepped into the elevator alone, I called Umar to open the door for me. As I walked through the door to Room 1407 he put out his right hand to me. Men shake hands, and we girls kiss each other, and sometimes we hug. I gave him my left hand, since my right one was not free. He took the two plastic bags I was carrying. I went to the window, pointed out my window, the open window on the ninth floor, and said, I am five floors beneath you, and he laughed. He always laughs when a possibly suggestive expression slips out of me. Just as yesterday we sat next to each other at the fountain, where his trousers and my abaya got soiled, today we sat beside each other on a sofa the color of soil under yellow lamplight. He hoisted one of the bags.

  A bottle of beer and strawberry gum … what made you late?

  Two minutes aren’t late unless you are going by Greenwich Mean Time, I said. Often I say any old random thing when he has me cornered and I can’t find words to finish my sentence. In the second bag was a sealed bottle of ∏ cologne.

  Why ∏? he asked me.

  I can always love a man who wears ∏. Another random sentence, I guess.

  In bed, he asked me, Do you love me?

  Since when do you use love as a way to something else?

  Don’t be pedantic—answer me.

  I sang something about waiting for opportunities that always come late, and things that keep you from being well, and your need for a compass that isn’t broken down, for an angel to come and take you from your cold dark room, to empty your veins of memory and make you light, snatching you from your lowliness and making you forget the fear of endings, an angel who flies you somewhere high, to where you are in a safe place.

  Am I your angel?

  More than that, Umar. There is a sentence in the film City of Angels, if you remember it, the angel said something like, he’d rather one breath, one touch, one kiss, than eternity …

  And you are the one to whom I voluntarily cede my eternal angel-ness, if I were an angel, for the sake of human-ness.

  He smiled. We had not put out the light, and I saw how he smiled.

  I love you, Umar. I love you a lot. By the Lord of the Heavens, I love you.

  And although I had said it before, I love you Umar, in tens of circumstances I had said it, these circumstances had never come my way before. I had never s
aid it as a young woman ready to love, a young woman at ease with a guy she trusted and amazed by all the little signs of his guy-ness: his beard, the whiskers on each side of his face, the hair on his chest, the different proportions of his body, his heavy smell—as a young woman who had always been searching for solutions and discovers now that all her possible solutions were there beneath her hand, but she never noticed.

  He asked me if I was afraid. No, I responded. He laughed, for the glint in my eyes gave me away rather scandalously. So I pulled back a little and said, Fine, yes, I am a little anxious. The question was flowing along the edge of my tongue as Umar took it between his lips. Will you be disgusted if I get a seizure when I’m in your arms? I could ask it, knowing that he would close my mouth with a firm hand, and say in a firmer tone, Don’t say that, don’t think about it, okay? Or that he would lightly bite the tip of my forefinger like he does with Jawd, his littlest sister, every time she memorizes a bad word and repeats it without understanding what it means.

  With the kiss, he spread his hands across me and lifted my clothes off. Slowly he lifted them after I had undone the buttons on his shirt, my reaction growing along with every new part of my body he revealed, and as I saw my reflection in his eyes desire burned over me. I had never seen myself reflected in another person’s eyes. His fingers moved down over me and then up—Umar, whom I thought would rip across my body like a sandstorm but who in reality moved more like the ebb and flow of a tide.

  He tried to take off the necklace around my neck and I refused. I had not taken it off for five years—as of last Muharram it was five years—and I could not take it off. It would be as if I were taking Hassan’s hands off me, Hassan who told me as he clasped it around my neck that the angels would protect me as long as I wore it, Hassan, who never for a day believed in the protection of amulets or in summoning angels. I refused, and he murmured, unconvinced, Never mind.

  When he slipped his hand beneath the flesh of my legs, I said, Don’t do that, don’t touch my leg like that. He took a long breath and drew nearer.

  Do you trust me?

  You know the answer without asking.

  I need you to trust me now more, a lot more than ever before.

  I was chewing on my nail and he took it out of my mouth.

  I need a cigarette.

  No, no you don’t need a cigarette.

  I need the bathroom, then.

  I got up quickly, slipping out from under his hands. I went into the bathroom and locked the door behind me. I opened the tap. I stood in front of the mirror. I feel as if I am spoiling these moments, and I don’t understand why I am doing it, and why now I feel that I am weighed down by my memory, possessed by all that has gone by and everyone who has gone by. The old murmurings are hurting me, and the whispers of the darkness, and the vapor of breaths on my face, and my underwear twisted at my feet or thrown carelessly against the bedpost, and panties damp in their stickiness and odors that choke me, and the hand circling the flesh of my leg as I suppress my fear and my crying that must not be heard, I repeat, I do not see, and so there is nothing happening. I do not see anything, and so nothing is happening. Nothing.

  I heard Umar’s footsteps, he must have been spying from the bathroom door.

  Umar, go away.

  What are you doing in there?

  I have to pee, I said in English.

  Why the embarrassment?

  It’s all about dirty words.

  Haven’t we said words this dirty and shrugged them off?

  We’ll say them in English. Now, go away.

  I am tired of my old features. I want to wipe them away, I want a clean memory, and a body without traces of anyone’s passing across it, a body free of sobbing and oblivious. I washed my face. I washed it several times. And I came out of the bathroom.

  I went to Umar, sitting on the edge of the bed, and stood between his legs. He wrapped his hands around my waist. I withdrew his right hand, put the necklace in his palm, and folded his fingers over it.

  Take me, Umar. Take all of me!

  And he did. Not as Dai did in all of our scrabbles in bed, nor in the state of lightness I had gone through with Dareen, nor in the fear and shame I had felt having a strong and forceful heel pressing down on my body for years. Now and then, out of an extreme of desire or love, I would be on the point of saying, Don’t stay outside of me! Don’t steal your children from me! But I held back, afraid that such big words would frighten him.

  And my virginity, which had never meant anything to me, not since some woman came to our home one day when I had not yet changed out of my blue school uniform, and I did not let my mother see the white ribbon knotted into a flower shape that the teacher had attached to my collar in recognition of my excellent work. I sensed a strange aroma in my mother’s behavior. She was enticing me toward something I knew was frightening and terrible, except that I didn’t know what it was. Enticement gave way to the chase, and when they seized hold of me, the strange woman cooperated with my mother to strip me naked, pull my legs apart and disfigure me with her fingernail scratches before stuffing a piece of my flesh in a handkerchief and throwing it into the waste can in the bathroom. I had not yet begun my periods but now I saw the first sign of blood. I understood then that everything my mother said about modesty and covering the body and the privacy of its parts was meaningless. She would warn me, Don’t let anyone put his hand on you! to the point where I would no longer put my own hands on my body, but it was all meaningless. In my feverish, reckless play, I didn’t care about my virginity, except in the narrow limits within which I had to remain sealed. And now, at the beginning of things with Umar, I wanted to say to him, Take it! I don’t want it, take it! Then he kissed me and asked me, Do you love me? and I answered, More than you can possibly imagine, Umar. I wanted to say to him, I want you to put your children in their home, come! but I knew it was not in his power to do so.

  We spent ourselves and he dozed off immediately on my belly. I could not believe that Umar would sleep the minute his desire was met. I don’t know why, but I could not believe it, even though I had heard so many bizarre stories that by comparison this was ordinary. After all, he did not eat an apple after making love, nor was he addicted to yogurt.

  As I restrained my breathing to not disturb his sleep, his features were calm. If I had the power to spy on his dreams, if I could intervene and change their colors and smells and venues, if I could simply live in his eyes, and open them slowly, drinking in his face, and his eyes drink in the light … he opened them, and smiled. His smile kills me, and he knows it.

  You miss a lot here, when you’re sleeping.

  Since you aren’t being unfaithful to me I am not missing anything.

  How do you know?

  You can’t be unfaithful when I’m asleep on your body.

  He reminded me of a saying: Go to sleep on my body, and implore God that daylight not come! I don’t know where I picked that one up, among the many Internet sites I’ve visited. Although I am certain that my supplication to God will not be answered, I will not stop trying. There is one difference, though. It is not daytime that I want to keep from arriving, but rather the night.

  Tell me, what did I miss?

  Seeing yourself asleep.

  My eyebrows are like this and my mouth is like that.

  He was crooking his fingers over his eyes, and stretching out his lips in a laughable way.

  You are so good to be true! I said in English. Maybe my English wasn’t perfect but the sentiment was real.

  Did I please you?

  I could praise you all the way until tomorrow, but you will not judge yourself or base your self-esteem on my opinion.

  Don’t go back to being pedantic.

  You know you pleased me.

  And do you still love me?

  Even more.

  What didn’t please you? Don’t make a fool of me and say, Nothing! I won’t believe you.

  You have to let me try you out again so I can
judge.

  Let me try you again!

  I thought, we might not be here again, Umar, we might not meet, Umar, I might not see your eyes again, Umar, and you might not smile in my face, Umar, and I might not be able to cling to you and say, Save me! And …

  Umar?

  Yes?

  I love you.

  I feel like I’m hearing, “I love you, but …”

  Like a night of firecrackers, things I had read with Umar flared and exploded in my mind, leaving behind a smoky film and the terror of loss. They were sayings like,

  My hands open the curtains of your existence.

  I love you to exhaustion.

  Someone who looks like me greeted me and passed on, leaving me here on earth alone, isolated, and broken-hearted.

  Soon the full moon will come out and every one of us will lose our chance to remain alone, and our need for regret.

  If only love were a matter of words. My nearness to your body creates a language.

  The windows will fall one after another and what will remain is a building of wind with its thousand floors.

  My scattered thoughts ended with the memory of a poem I had read to Umar. He had imagined that behind the emptiness of my voice lay a story called “All of Those I Love Change!” I pressed up against him.

  Umar, don’t leave me! And don’t—

  I won’t. Trust me.

  And you won’t die! I don’t love those who die. Say that you won’t die.