The Frightened Ones

by Dima Wannous

  “Afraid of being harassed?” I asked. He shook his head.

  “Afraid of fear.” A pause. He didn’t say more.

  I felt an overwhelming urge to hug him, to embrace the strange man sitting across from me, about whom I still knew practically nothing, just that he had prominent bones and wrote under a pseudonym.

  I knew my encounters with this man and his bones were changing me. Afraid of fear. This phrase was the deep current beneath my life: fear doesn’t have just one form; fear of fear never leaves you.

  I asked him to describe what he meant by being afraid of fear. “Writers are probably better at explaining things than anyone else,” I said. “Is it normal for fear to make someone lose their ability to imagine?”

  “Exactly. Fear ruins the imagination.”

  That’s all he would say.

  Naseem was afraid of fear. Not the fear of being detained, prosecuted, interrogated or prevented from leaving the country, but a fear that came before all those other fears. Since Naseem was afraid of living in fear, he pre-empted it by writing under a pseudonym. This protected him, in a way. I thought more about what he’d said, and realised he wasn’t just afraid of being afraid after the book was published, but also while writing. If he wrote under his own name, that fear would inevitably influence his work. Under a pseudonym, he could write more openly. He was free of self-censorship; he could be braver.

  Under his real name, Naseem wasn’t an author, he was a doctor. Why didn’t he just say he was a doctor, instead of introducing himself as a writer without telling me his pen name? I didn’t ask if he’d ever thought about the owner of the publishing house, whether they might be forced to reveal their author’s true identity? I didn’t ask: I was afraid of fear. Afraid of frightening him.

  I was holding my mobile in my right hand, pressing it hard against my ear. With my left hand, I massaged my right shoulder, then held my index finger against the large vein on the left side of my neck. I felt my heartbeats gallop, racing one after another. I was frightened. My lips went numb, my forehead felt cold and a glassy layer of sweat formed under my nose. I couldn’t hear my heart, I couldn’t understand what it was saying. What I heard was a voice reciting something; I saw each sentence swirling as a strange string of letters. More letters piled up and were quickly lost, obscured by the shadows of other letters. Among them I could make out the first two letters of the alphabet: ’alif, bˉa’…I saw Naseem riding the bˉa’ with its low curve, then holding on to the straight vertical line of the ’alif, while the hamza floated above his head like a hat.

  (This image had been with me every time we’d met. I’d sit across from him and stare at the hamza suspended over his head; he probably thought I was staring off into space. He would seem disinterested, though maybe he was used to me staring at nothing in particular. As we got closer, I often held my gaze there: at nothingness. At anything except for his eyes, which I came to know so well. When you know someone well, when you’ve heard everything they have to say and nothing surprises you, you stop looking. Instead, you search through the emptiness for somewhere you can take refuge; anywhere aside from those painfully kind eyes.)

  When the voice in my head finally stopped, the string of flying letters linked like a train—like a toy you might use to teach children how to read—faded away. They vanished, replaced by the harsh sound of a slap. Naseem. I’d known from the start that our call would end with a slap. I fell silent for several seconds, or maybe just one second, it didn’t matter. It started with a slap to his face: he began fiercely slapping his right cheek with his right hand; I heard the sound of his fingers striking his skin and saw, or imagined, it going red; saw how his cheek glowed between the fine hairs of his beard and how the line he’d carefully shaved grew less distinct against the marks of his five fingers. He hit himself with all five fingers, the whole hand, to feel content, to feel pain. Pleasure is the moment that pain subsides, he told me once. Was that why he was doing this? Was he hitting himself to feel pain, and then pleasure when the pain passed? Or was he giving himself a slap in the face? (An Iraqi friend of mine from the College of Fine Arts used to call an insulting situation “a slap in the face.” Was this what she meant? I imagined her doing the slapping.)

  I kept quiet because I didn’t know how to stop him: I’ve never known what to do in crazy situations like this. I get confused. It’s not that I’m afraid; I just get confused and freeze up. Then the call dropped, just like it always did. I heard nothing. I thought about my hands. I’ve never hit myself. I have used them to give myself a hug, not something I do often, and I can’t remember the last time, but I wrap my arms around my body until my fingers brush the sides of my back. I hug myself, run my fingers through my hair and whisper, “Don’t be afraid, darling. Take a deep breath, nice and slow. Don’t be afraid, habibti. It’s just another panic attack. You’ll get through it. Breathe.”

  * * *

  —

  A dream. I was driving a car. The road was going uphill; I didn’t know where it was leading. Though I couldn’t feel my body, I was also sitting in the passenger seat, next to myself in the driver’s seat, occasionally casting sidelong glances at myself. The me sitting next to me wasn’t anxious at all. But the me that was driving the car up the hill was dying of fear and anxiety. On the other side of the road, the ocean stretched as far as I could see. The wind was raging. (I hate the wind. I can handle the cold, no matter how bitter it is, and torrential rains too; I can be soaked and still delight in the downpour. But I hate the wind. I’m afraid of the sound it makes. When it roars, my soul heaves, and I feel as if it’s going to throw me off balance or knock me down. Even when I’m at home and able to hide, the sound terrifies me.) I was driving up the hill and the wind was raging, dumping buckets of seawater onto the road where I was driving with myself. I had to hurry and reach the summit: my house was there. I didn’t know if it was actually my house, but it was a house I was steadily approaching. My heart began pounding as we drove further, and this surprised me; it wasn’t as if I was running uphill. All I had to do was press the gas pedal with my toes for the car to accelerate. But my heart insisted on galloping; I felt it was about to explode. I glanced across out of the corner of my eye and saw myself gazing calmly, indifferently out at the sea battering itself on us, as if my other self were sitting on the beach enjoying the warm May sunshine, among families laughing and delighting in the arrival of summer. Meanwhile, I was racing uphill before the sea swallowed us whole. (In reality, I am not actually afraid of the sea. Water doesn’t terrify me. I am a good swimmer, skilled at navigating the current and letting my body drift with the motion of the waves. It is Naseem who fears the sea. He will only swim parallel to the shore and he told me he would drown if his feet couldn’t touch the sand. It has nothing to do with his swimming ability; he too is a good swimmer. But as soon as he goes into the water and lets it cover his body, he becomes as heavy as a stone. He feels too weighty to move, and flounders.) But Naseem wasn’t with me as I drove up the hill and as my heart pounded in terror. Sweat poured from my body, as if it were a sponge left to soak and then wrung out all at once. Naseem, who was afraid of the ocean, wasn’t with me. I was with myself. What did that mean? Was Naseem the fear that made sweat stream from my skin, his spirit nestled in mine, inside me? In the depth of my imagination and the folds of my memories, ones I had experienced and ones I had yet to create? Why was I so afraid? Then suddenly, as if to explain, we were somewhere else. I don’t know where exactly. Somewhere that looked like an airport. I do have all sorts of fears associated with crowds and people running with their bags, out of breath. Planes, flying, crashes, death. But this time I wasn’t scared. It was as if I’d borrowed Naseem’s fears of the sea, water and drowning and now, in the airport, I was rid of my own. I swapped my fear of the sky for his fear of the earth, or at least the parts of the earth that were covered by water.

  I was sitting at a large table. Naseem was
sitting far away. And next to me, as if by chance, sat Kamil, drinking a coffee and smoking a cigarette. I didn’t ask how he dared to smoke in an airport. I wasn’t surprised to see him next to me, didn’t ask how he got there. He looked at me the way he always did, from behind a cloud of smoke billowing from his mouth and nose. He began chastising me. Said I hadn’t changed in all these years. Whether sitting, standing, speaking, eating, drinking, smoking or thinking, I was still the way I’d always been. Hadn’t budged an inch. This annoyed me—why had he come to chastise me and make me doubt myself, after all these years? (I borrowed his phrase, all these years. Even though it has only been four and a half, not ages, just a few months in a neat little stack. Though perhaps they really are all these years, because how could anyone comprehend everything we’ve experienced in just four and a half? Impossible.)

  “What have you done with your fear, after all these years?” he asked me.

  “Fear matures with us,” I told him. He looked into my eyes with that steady gaze of his, the one that seemed to well up from his soul.

  “Fear doesn’t mature with us.” His words emerged from lips hidden behind a thick moustache. “But it can stay with us our whole lives. What have you done to make fear cling to your soul?”

  “It doesn’t cling to my soul,” I objected.

  “No?” he asked, his gentle smile laced with something mean. “I see it streaming from your eyes, pouring right out of them.”

  As he said this, I felt a sharp wind lash across my face. I shut my eyes and wished that when I opened them it would all be over, but I knew nothing stopped that easily. I opened my eyes…and everything was the same. Kamil, and Naseem, and the place that looked like a stuffy, grimy airport. I was the same too, unafraid. Even though I was in an airport, I was calm. (It’s a terrible paradox: you have to be afraid to observe your fears and monitor them carefully. You try to push them away, to grab them like a handful of leaves and throw them far from you. But leaves are light. So then you try to grab your fears like a handful of stones and throw them far away, and they do land far away, they’re no longer stuck to you, or even near you, like the weightless green leaves were.)

  Then I saw Naseem walk off without me. It must have been time to board the plane. I didn’t call out to him, I didn’t shout. No. I stood up, perfectly calm, said goodbye to Kamil, and slowly walked in the direction that Naseem had taken. He’d vanished behind a throng of quickly moving people with bags. Then I glanced to my left and saw a friend of my father’s, Elias, exiting a room made of wood. Elias and my father worked together at the Italian Hospital. I went up to him and noticed blood dripping from his left nostril. He put his finger in his nose, trying to staunch the flow, and said, almost begging, “Please, Antoinette, do catch up.” I didn’t know who Antoinette was. Then, someone who must have been Antoinette emerged from the room wearing white clothes and white shoes, like the ones nurses wear. She caught up with him and eased him into a long, metal, coffin-like box. As soon as she laid him down, blood began pouring from every part of his body, the way sweat streamed from mine as I drove up the hill. Elias was close to drowning in the hot blood spilling from his arteries, bright as a chrysanthemum. To his left, stretched out in a long metal box like the one in which he lay, was a man I didn’t know. His head and face were half open. His eyes were detached, but he could still see. He stared into my eyes, pleading for help. I stood there, unable to do anything. It wasn’t like I felt frozen, as happens sometimes in dreams when you try to move and realise you can’t. No, I was completely powerless. I tried to take a step closer and my feet were there, but I couldn’t make myself move. I looked down at his head. It was cracked down the middle, split open, and filled with onions. Peeled, boiled onions of all different sizes. I’m not sure how I knew they were boiled, I just did. Maybe I could tell by their shape or colour. I don’t know. Fresh or boiled, it didn’t matter. I left the two men on the brink of death and ran. I wanted to catch my flight and find Naseem, whose fear of the sea I’d borrowed. I boarded the plane, it lifted off and we circled above the city, flying so close to the ground that people could raise their hands and brush its metal underbelly as we flew by.

  * * *

  —

  I opened my eyes to the soft, dismal light of dawn and wished that I really could borrow Naseem’s fear of the sea. I wished I could take his fear in exchange for all of mine. Then I thought about the boiled onions growing out of the strange man’s head. Merciless, these dreams. No sooner had I caught my breath from the day than I was out of breath in my dreams.

  Again I heard a voice, reciting; I saw each sentence swirling as a strange string of letters. More letters piled up and were quickly lost, obscured by the shadows of other letters. And then they vanished, replaced by the harsh sound of a slap. Why was I living this scene again? I didn’t know.

  I didn’t tell Naseem when we next spoke that I’d dreamed about him, or that he had boarded the plane before me, without waiting for me. Or that for the first time ever I wasn’t afraid of airplanes or airports. More importantly, I didn’t tell him how I’d borrowed his fear of the sea. When I called him that morning, I didn’t tell him that I had rid him of his fears for ever, and so he shouldn’t worry. Did he keep slapping his face after the end of the call? Did he cry? (No, Naseem doesn’t cry. He says that men don’t cry. I don’t tell him that crying isn’t the only thing that traditionally men aren’t allowed to do; they are not allowed to feel afraid, either. I’m not just talking about the fear of drowning, I mean more complex fears.) Naseem didn’t let himself cry. Tears welled up, his eyelids grew round and his eyes gleamed, but he didn’t let the tears fall; they receded. He swallowed them: his eyes could swallow the way his throat did. The way, when I was little, my mother told me, “Zip it and swallow them…swallow them.” She forbade me from crying by telling me to swallow my tears. I wondered if Naseem was afraid of drowning in his tears. Had his fear of water grown that bad? So bad he’d stop himself from crying, afraid his tears might pour out, submerge him and leave him splashing around, unable to breathe?

  I said none of this to him.

  * * *

  —

  He’d sent me the manuscript for his fourth novel, the one I thought he’d already finished. I still had never been able to read any of his previous books. I inhaled this one word after word, letter by letter, drinking in commas and devouring full stops. And as I did, I realised that it was unfinished, not as a novel should be: it was more like a memoir, about a woman shaped by fear. Like me. Like him.

  What did Naseem want? Did he want me to write the ending? Had he started the novel, only to be consumed by fear? Did he not have the strength to finish it? Didn’t Naseem know that absence makes me feel complete? Did he think that if I completed his novel for him, I would feel complete, the way I had the night years ago when I dreamed I was sitting on the roof of a low old building in Damascus, dangling my feet off the edge, the full moon in my heart? I hadn’t told Kamil about that dream at the time; I’d been distracted by the man with the prominent bones sitting on the other side of the wooden door. Was it a coincidence that we met just hours after I saw the moon fall from the sky? The moon was full that night, and I’d felt complete, but this novel, it lacked an ending.

  NASEEM’S MANUSCRIPT

  I remember our living room well. I remember our carpet, green with dark green embroidery, and how I often rolled it out to play. The only thing that cut the silence was the creak and chirp of the wooden shutters. I lived my childhood in silence, so much so that when I summon the few scenes I do recall to memory, they appear without sound. They’re silent. No commotion. No voices. No music. Just windows chirping.

  The electricity often went out in our building for days at a time. Those across the way would still be lit, while we alone were drowning in darkness. Our power lines were connected to the close-knit neighbourhood of Esh al-Warwar, some distance away, where most residents were from Alawi
te officer families. When they experienced power cuts, so did we, and ours would be the only building in our neighbourhood to go dark, right in the middle of all the others. I remember the first telephone number I memorised: the emergency number for the power company. They rarely answered the phone, and sometimes left it off the hook intentionally for hours.

  These frequent dark spells were one reason for the depression that began to settle over me. Another was that home meant illness. In the kitchen, my mother kept odd-looking herbs and plants with foreign names like alfalfa, aloe and nettle, which she washed, chopped and juiced for my father to drink. He did not like the taste and complained about his wife’s natural recipes, but he hoped they would boost his immune system and return the colour to his face. My father lay in bed for hours, reading or writing. When he tired of this, he moved from his room to the sitting room and listened to the radio or a record of Fairuz, Vivaldi, Bach or Jacques Brel. At home, I was his shadow. But a very still shadow, one that hardly moved. All I remember doing as a child was sticking to his side. Watching him, listening to him breathe. Catching his gaze and trying to decipher it. I knew him so well that often I knew what he was going to say before he said it. It wasn’t hard: we shared the same thoughts, as if by a secret pact. We were exhaustingly candid. Held nothing back. There were no limits to our thinking, nothing forbidden, no right or wrong. No absolutes. Everything was open to discussion, often endlessly and extensively so. I was expected to speak and listen, and this made me ask more of life. I was insatiable, always seeking more: I had no time for endings, and knew nothing more beautiful than beginnings. Things never ended, they only began, and as soon as we discovered one beginning, we started searching for the next. Locks were forbidden, and naturally keys as well. Secrets too, because we trusted each other. Shame was forbidden. We dressed and undressed with the doors open, because we were not embarrassed by our bodies. What could there be to be embarrassed about?