The Frightened Ones

by Dima Wannous

  It was my last visit, and I didn’t even know it.

  The waiting room was still crowded when I left Kamil’s office, and I asked Leila to walk me to the front door. There I asked if she’d be willing to meet me at a coffee shop nearby when she finished work. I told her I wanted to speak to her about something important. Leila agreed to come as long as we didn’t stay late, because she wanted to get home.

  I waited for her at a juice shop on al-Taliani Street, where the owner had expanded his shop by staking four tables on the pavement, which ate into the pedestrians’ pathway. He’d also bought a little machine that made coffee to order. Al-Taliani Street was crowded. I saw a heavyset woman in her fifties lying down on the pavement, and noticed that she was wearing swimming goggles. She had a snorkel in her mouth, too, and was holding a phone to her ear. She was shouting into it, but it didn’t seem like anyone was on the other end: she was at sea trying to rescue her son, she said, but so far she’d only found pieces of a wrecked boat.

  None of the passers-by paid attention to what she was saying, nor did they laugh at the sight of her swimming on land. Not even the policeman standing there paid attention to the story of her drowned son, who had run away from death in Syria straight to death elsewhere. I thought of Naseem. Was this because the woman was wearing swimming goggles, breathing through a snorkel and talking about drowning? Or because he’d travelled to Germany the same way, with his traumatised, paralysed father? I had never asked how he managed to carry his father to the boat, and from the boat to the shore, from the shore to the Greek border and from the Greek border to Germany. How did you manage that difficult route? How did you shoulder your burdens, and your father too, when you could hardly support your own body seething with panic?

  Leila arrived, tired as usual, her face looking wan. She ordered a cup of coffee with milk, lit a cigarette and gazed blankly at the woman “snorkelling,” as if she were someone she saw in the waiting room every day. I sprung a question on her immediately: “Leila, do you have a brother who’s ill?” My question seemed to perplex her. She cocked her head and narrowed her eyes. Suddenly the tips of my fingers went cold, as if I’d plunged my hand into the same icy sea in which the woman was swimming.

  “But you know about my brother!” she said. “I’ve told you about him several times, and you always ask how he’s doing.” Then she offered a kind smile tinged with surprise. “Have you lost your memory?” I felt confused; the narrow pavement transformed into a vast sea, and suddenly I was swimming too.

  Had I lost myself in the story of the young woman in Naseem’s book? I couldn’t distinguish what I knew from what she knew any more. I’d mixed us up…I envisioned myself cradling her memories in my hands, and imagined her doing the same with mine. I had thought she was the one who knew about Leila’s brother! Had I lost my memory and borrowed hers? Was I going mad? Had Kamil gone mad too, along with me, Leila, the woman snorkelling and searching for her son’s body, and the policeman who was apathetic towards this drowning? Had Kamil’s prophecy come true; had we lost our minds, all of us?

  My voice wavered in my throat; my vision flickered. I thought my mind wouldn’t rest until I met this unnamed woman who, like me, had lost her father; the woman whose story Naseem had stolen and penned…Naseem: a writer like the woman’s father, a doctor like mine. The woman who embodied my stories so completely that for a moment I’d thought my experiences were hers.

  I summoned the courage to ask Leila whether there was a woman, someone whose name I didn’t know, who had seen Kamil regularly until three years ago, when she’d stopped coming back to Damascus. Leila looked lost in thought. I felt as if she were searching my eyes for some other detail.

  “She’s a writer in her thirties,” I told Leila, “her father died when she was fourteen, she lives in Beirut now and suffers from panic attacks…and is fluent in French.”

  Leila smiled. “You know all this, but you don’t know her name?” she asked.

  I told her I’d run into the woman a couple of times in the waiting room, and once overheard Leila speaking with her in French. Another time I heard her mention her father in passing, when they were talking about Leila’s father, who had also passed away. Elaborating on my lie, I added that I hadn’t run into her for a while and missed her, and was worried about her disappearing, especially in these difficult times.

  “You know her name is Salma?” Leila said with a smile. “Salma. Suleima. Your name is a nickname for hers.”

  Her words seemed to slap me. I felt my knees go slack. I heard her repeating the sentence again and again, without stopping. I was afraid. I couldn’t make sense of my confusion in the moment, and Leila sensed the bewilderment streaming from me, onto the table at which we were sitting, pouring off it and flowing across the ground, all the way to the woman swimming on land in search of her son. I pulled what remained of me together and asked her why Salma had stopped seeing Kamil. Leila said that Salma was living in Beirut, working at a Lebanese publishing house and an NGO that served refugees. She was afraid of returning to Damascus because she was wanted by one of the security agencies.

  What else did Leila say? She said she hadn’t heard from Salma in two years. Salma used to call from time to time, until she didn’t. Somehow words came then, and I told Leila that she didn’t call because she was afraid of not being able to reach them at the office. Leila was silent; she clearly didn’t feel the need to respond. Then I told her that I had plans to go to Beirut soon, that my work had been selected for an exhibition about Syria, and I wanted to invite Salma. I asked Leila for Salma’s phone number. She said she didn’t know her number, but she wrote down the name of the publishing house where she worked. I took the paper between my fingers and gripped it like a talisman.

  I’d lied again. I had stopped painting in early 2012. I couldn’t even bear to be in front of a canvas any more. I’d stand in front of the white, pick up a brush, submerge it in blue and then find myself without the strength to lift it to the canvas. I could see a painting in that white space and so to use colours seemed futile. I felt that adding any colour to a white canvas would destroy it. I stopped drawing too. The white canvas was still in my room, though the colour had changed; the fabric had faintly yellowed.

  * * *

  —

  I decided I would go to Beirut.

  Why hadn’t Naseem ever written anything about Salma’s work? Maybe it was missing because his novel was unfinished—but why hadn’t he mentioned her name? Salma?

  She had my proper name. She carried me in her soul, and I carried her in mine. Her name completed mine; just like Leila said, mine is a nickname for hers. She might even be carrying my memories and suffering with them, just as I’ve suffered with hers. I’ve dreamed of ridding myself of them all at once, as my father did.

  Was Naseem’s manuscript really about me? My name just happened to be similar to Salma’s? But no—she is in Beirut, not Damascus. Her father was a writer, not a doctor. And she really exists!

  I felt utterly lost. Naseem’s manuscript was like a mirror: I read it and saw myself, nameless and without a home. Had he not thought my name was worth the trouble, and left me without an identity?

  I called Naseem and left a voicemail, saying: “I finished reading the manuscript you sent me.” If he listened to it, he didn’t respond. I texted him and said I wanted to talk. He wrote back curtly: Not in the mood. I told him I was going to Beirut the following week. He didn’t ask why, didn’t say anything. Just silence, as usual. Even his silence was apathetic. It turned me into someone who belonged nowhere, someone entirely unmoored.

  * * *

  —

  The next time I saw Kamil, I told him this wasn’t just about madness, it was bigger than that.

  “Not that long ago, you were afraid of going mad. Now there’s something bigger than madness?” he asked with a hint of irony, his lips stretching into his usual lacon
ic smile.

  I told him that what I was feeling was deeper than madness. I felt like I didn’t exist, and it frightened me. I’d begun seeing everything through a lens of terror, and felt like nothing existed beyond my own body. I felt my mother wasn’t there any more, like Fouad, who had disappeared, or my father, who had passed away, or Naseem. Or maybe they existed somewhere separate from me, and did not sense my existence. Eventually I lost my words, unable to express myself.

  “I don’t know if you understand,” I whispered to Kamil.

  He smiled tenderly and nodded. “If I understand…if I understand…Go on.”

  I told him I was also afraid that I wasn’t actually sitting in his office right now. I felt as though I didn’t exist or belong anywhere, and it kept me up at night; I felt so alone, as if I were on the verge of death.

  “The dead can’t die,” said Kamil.

  True, but it wasn’t that I felt like I was dead, just that I didn’t exist—or maybe that no one else exists, and that we’re all just a figment of imagination. Then I saw tears streaming from my eyes. I say “saw,” because I didn’t feel them falling, or even pooling in my eyes before they did. I was separate from my body; I saw its eyes fill with tears and I saw it cry.

  I lit a cigarette and took a tissue from the box next to me. I wiped my tears. Maybe the tears made my soul more porous, because next I told Kamil that I thought Naseem might be the reason I felt I didn’t exist. How could I exist when I was with someone so absent, who didn’t feel as if he existed himself? How could I feel my body when I was with someone who inhabited the margins of life, like a shadow or a ghost?

  Kamil nodded, and a smile of hidden triumph traced its way across his lips, as if to say that all I needed to do was make the slightest effort and I could cross from the hidden to the seen. Yes, I knew. It was Naseem. Who else could it be? It had nothing to do with him leaving the country. Ever since he’d come into my life, fifteen years before, I hadn’t existed and neither had he. Was he an illusion? Did this man with his bones, this man I loved, ever actually exist?

  Then Kamil led me further, to the other shore, and reminded me that I had never loved Naseem. I loved someone else, someone I imagined; I sketched his features, chiselled his muscles and bones, exhaled a soul into the body and called him Naseem. The man I loved had only ever existed in my imagination.

  No sooner had Kamil helped me cross to the other bank than I felt lost all over again. A strange feeling trembled in my ribcage: a heavy lightness that made my body feel parched, and at the same time as solid and fixed as a nail. Gravity intensified, as if it had just been discovered! Or as if it hadn’t existed but had suddenly sprung into full force, to defend and entrench itself. I felt a weight pulling me to the ground; I felt my bottom sinking deeper and deeper into the brown leather sofa, and I couldn’t move it at all.

  * * *

  —

  I texted Naseem a classical poem that evening when I returned from seeing Kamil:

  Oh in his love so cavernous

  I am revealed diaphanous

  I cannot help but speak his name

  Yet could not say he feels the same

  He thinks of us, and tears subside

  I think of him, my tears arise

  His face shines with benevolence

  And sees in mine no friendliness.

  I changed it slightly, but I don’t think I altered the general feel. I changed the start of the fourth line from “And can say” to “Yet could not say,” replaced “tears arise” with “tears subside” in the fifth line and added “no” to the last line: “And sees in mine no friendliness.” I texted it to him. He read it. He said nothing for a few seconds, and then texted, You transcribed the poem wrong! I wrote back: I didn’t transcribe it, I memorised it! Immediately he wrote, Same thing. You memorised it wrong!…followed by a long silence, punctuated by my rapid, jagged breaths. I saw the olive tree on the balcony where I had buried myself and remembered the obituaries in his desk drawer. My thoughts began to disintegrate…and images of his other women appeared before me. Their eyes peered out of the photographs, staring into mine, and all I could think of was his sudden departure and how he had not asked me to go with him; then I heard the slapping sound he made as he struck himself, and finally I remembered my own hands, and I hugged my body in fear.

  All my thoughts and memories started colliding with each other; I found it hard to breathe and began to sweat. Another panic attack, and the blind desire to be rid of everything, every experience I’d ever had, every thought, every image I’d seen, my name, her name, everything. My heart rate accelerated. I picked up my phone again and texted, Are you still in touch with Salma? Silence. I imagined him slapping his face. Then I could see that he was typing and typing, until I thought he might send me an excerpt from the novel; he kept writing for minutes, and then…what? Nothing. Just silence. He didn’t send a single word.

  I went to the nightstand between my bed and the balcony, opened a drawer and took out a photograph of him. I stared at the face that still made my body tremble, and was rocked by the longing that welled up in me. His face lived inside me, and when it disappeared, I lost my way. I gazed into his shining eyes, so vacant, cryptic and self-contained. His smile, tinged with uncertainty. I noticed that his smile was traced only on the left half of his lips. I placed my hand over the right side of his face, precisely at the midline. When I looked only at the left half, I saw a smile, verdant and ripe, holding a whole world of happiness. Then I covered the left half of his face, and looked at the right side. There I saw a mix of sadness and indifference, and that scowl stitched between his brows. I covered the right side again. I was perplexed by the smile that unfurled with such difficulty, not even across his whole mouth, only the left side. As if it might retreat at any moment. An incomplete smile. Just half a smile.

  I applied my paintbrush to his deceitful half-smile, desperately wanting to snatch it from his mouth and transport it onto canvas, where I could make that half-smile whole. But I couldn’t. I’d lost my ability to paint. I’d spent my time writing instead. Was I emulating Naseem, who wrote in lieu of practising medicine? Who carried his soul in open palms, and found more space to express himself in writing than in treating patients in their last hours?

  (He’d never dreamed of studying medicine; it was his mother who wanted her only son to be a doctor. So a doctor he became, though one lacking in courage and generosity, and in the end all he did was kill his mother, again and again, with his obituaries. When she died for real, he wasn’t there, and didn’t have the chance to save her. He once told me that in a practicum in his third year, or maybe his fourth, he collapsed on the floor in front of his fellow students while watching the professor open a cadaver’s stomach with a scalpel. He told me that the stomach of the man in the morgue was a real stomach, that he felt the scalpel pierce the man’s soft flesh and heard the sound of metal against that pliant mass. He smelled something, saw a flash of red, began to sweat and then fainted, prompting a round of teasing from his classmates. “You’ll never be a doctor.” Full stop. That’s what the teaching doctor told him when he regained consciousness.)

  I don’t know when I fell asleep. The photograph was still in my hands, with its dull, extinguished eyes and incomplete smile.

  In my dream we were sitting on the little living-room sofa and he had his arms around me. My feet were hanging off the edge of the sofa and a soft beam of light flicked towards them, with the tip of its tongue. I buried my head in Naseem’s broad chest and breathed in the wet scent of rain. I told him that it was raining in the living room, and that we should build a roof before winter grew colder. He said nothing. I raised my head and saw only half of his face. That graceful beam of light had scrambled up my legs to his face and thrown the left side into darkness. I could only see the frowning half of his lips. I went to grab a handful of light from the left side
of his face and to pull it back like a curtain. I could grasp it between my fingers, I swear. It felt moist and tender to the touch. I wrestled with it, trying to cast it aside, desiring the side of his mouth with the smile.

  A terrible loneliness stretched through my chest, once I saw and understood the despondent side of his face.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “I’m grabbing a handful of the light and trying to throw it back.”

  “But you’re hurting me.”

  I stopped throwing it aside and rested my trembling fingers on my thighs.

  “Why did you rip up my photo?” he asked. “Why did you only keep the eyes?”

  “Because the eyes are the mirror to the soul,” I said, as if I knew what he was talking about. “And your eyes hold my soul.”

  “My eyes hold your soul,” he repeated. “And your eyes hold the other women’s souls.”

  I woke up in terror, with his photograph quivering in my hands.

  * * *

  The moments passed, and I waited for morning. When I left the house, my mother was sitting by herself on the sofa, probably still reading the same page. I hadn’t the energy to check. It was 8:55 a.m. (My relationship with time had long been riddled with anxiety. I don’t like quarter- and half-hours; I prefer whole hours, like nine, ten, eight.)

  I took Fouad’s car, a black Peugeot 206. It was Friday and the streets were practically empty. I parked in front of Naseem’s building, and saw that the checkpoint nearby was empty, save one disgruntled officer. I thought of Yasmine, Salma’s friend, who fell in love with the officer manning the checkpoint in front of her grandmother’s house in al-Mazraa.