by Raja Alem
The look that accompanied his choice of words put her relationship with the sheikh under the spotlight, but she didn’t respond. “So do you actually keep people from getting killed?”
He smiled. “President Reagan was shot in the four meters between the entrance of a carefully guarded building and his armored car, while surrounded by elite bodyguards. Kennedy was assassinated in the middle of a high-security motorcade. Sadat was killed at a military parade by his own troops, Hariri bit the dust inside his own armored car, and Bhutto was flanked by bodyguards as she stood up in the American-made sunroof of her car. Keeping people from getting killed, like you put it, is a very romantic idea. Assassinations almost always happen in the most fiercely guarded places and you can never predict when one’s going to happen. In the end, it’s probably impossible to protect someone from that much anger and hatred.” As soon as he finished speaking, he began to worry that he’d said too much, so once again he apologized quickly. “Excuse me, ma’am, there are boundaries that shouldn’t be crossed in this line of the work, and one of those is irritating a client with silly conversations.”
“You got a Master’s in philosophy so you could do a job that requires you to keep your mouth shut?” She stood up and walked off; he followed.
Over the next few days, Rafa became more aware of the circle of silence that surrounded her, and he would listen in carefully whenever she talked to her assistant or to the sheikh on one of his fleeting visits, attempting to glean some information about who she was, something to explain the currents beneath the words on the surface. Her every expression was a puzzle. He observed her for long stretches to try to figure out why it was she needed his protection, what it was that threatened her.
“YOU WANT TO GO THERE?!” RAFA WAS SURPRISED AT THE BROCHURE IN NORA’S hand. “The British Cemetery?!”
The resentment in his voice made her want to go even more. “Why not?”
The brochure had caught her eye two days earlier. Sensing her interest, the sheikh pushed it under a pile of papers. The arrival of his barber gave her the chance to snatch the brochure and stuff it into her purse.
They went on a morning that reminded him of his American girlfriend’s words: “rain’s tiny kisses playing music on our faces.” Live, stinging kisses stirred their longing as they drove through the Carabanchel district in the suburbs. The grass in the cemetery was padded with water and squelched under Nora’s light footsteps. The wildness of the place answered a deep need for adventure inside her: a deserted oasis, shaded by cedar, cypress, and plane trees. Rafa was reluctant but had to follow the bewitched Nora, who flitted among the graves. Rafa was familiar with the cemetery, since he’d lived nearby for three years before he’d got a job, but it was so isolated he’d never been tempted to go in until the sheikh had visited it, and now Nora too.
He and the assistant had to hurry to catch up with Nora. They found her leaning against a cedar tree, looking alarmingly pale for a moment. The frailty was instantly masked by that grayish look, her soul absorbed in images of death. In the translucent drizzle, tombstones came to life, names and epitaphs emerged from the granite to share their silence. That morning, the usual void look was missing from Nora’s face; standing there she was a woman torn between two worlds and aware of the yawning gap that separated them. When she was ready to leave an hour later, a morbid silence had descended over the three of them.
To Rafa’s surprise, Nora woke up early the next morning to return to the cemetery. They were met there by bouquets of yellow flowers at the foot of each row of graves. It felt like they were floating on sunny death.
“There are nicer cemeteries to visit than this one,” said Rafa.
She had the feeling that he was trying to get her to leave and when he saw that she was suspicious, he hurried to add, “This is just a cemetery for outcasts.”
“Meaning?”
“It’s kind of sentimental. A morbid repository for people whose mortal remains couldn’t be sent home, but which didn’t belong in the local graveyard either, for reasons having to do with religion and culture. Like other countries in Europe after the Reformation, Spain didn’t allow people who weren’t members of the established Church to be buried in consecrated ground. Long before the Spanish War of Independence, the British and Spanish governments signed a treaty to provide cemeteries for non-Roman Catholics. One government sold the land to the other and the cemetery was inaugurated in 1854. Over the years, it welcomed the city’s dead: Christians—Anglicans, Protestants, and Orthodox—as well Jews and Muslims.”
“Look! There’s a line of Arabic poetry on that gravestone: ‘Tread softly over this earth for it is made of bodies.’” Like a child, she wanted to venture ever further, and he had no choice but to follow.
“It’s by the famous blind poet Abu l-Ala al-Ma’arri.”
Rafa’s attempts to put a stop to those visits just made them more alluring. Over the next few mornings, the death of those outcasts became a compulsive puzzle for Nora. Despite himself, Rafa joined her in discovering gravestones witness to nearly a thousand burials over 150-odd years, engraved with unique messages of love and bereavement in all sorts of languages: English, Latin, Spanish, French, German, Hebrew, Serbo-Croat. The cemetery became like a book, with each gravestone a granite page, and Nora the engrossed reader moving about, asking Rafa to translate for her, empathizing with the stories of adventurers who’d died far from home. She thought she too could die and probably feel at home there, where the boundaries separating the deceased had all been washed away. She might find a missionary lying beside a music-hall artiste, or an accountant or waiter or diplomat, nannies side by side with doctors, journalists, lawyers, teachers, and butlers. The cause of death might have been old age, war, sudden illness, traffic accident, or a plane crash, but they all ended up ruminating on the same serene death.
Nora made a ritual of visiting the cemetery. Every day she would choose a different grave to sit on, as if trying on dresses. Sometimes she would sit as she was sitting now, staring into space, but flinching back whenever something caught her attention. She’d blink and find herself in the distant past, then blink again and be back. Her mood changed most when she tried to communicate with the tombstones, tried to decipher their messages.
“Don’t you feel the urge to break through death with a message for all these spirits? I wonder how expressive they could really be. How well they could convey what they’re experiencing right now, in death. Doesn’t it blow your mind how we have this need to go on communicating and writing, long after death? Despite death?” Her question was more rhetorical than it was aimed at him, but Rafa responded by translating the lines written by Sophocles and spoken by Antigone:
“Come, Fate, a friend at need / Come with all speed! / Come, my best friend, / And speed my end! / Away, away! / Let me not look upon another day!”
Nora felt the spirit breathe those words down her spine. She chased Sophocles’ scattered words through the cemetery, searching for a hidden gravestone.
“When I have suffered my doom, I shall come to know my sin; but if the sin is with my judges, I could wish them no fuller measure of evil than they, on their part, mete wrongfully to me.”
—Antigone.
She flinched, as though those words were a message directed at her. It made Rafa hesitate before translating the words of Oedipus on another gravestone:
“When he discovers the truth of his actions, he is wrought with horror and self-loathing. He now devotes himself to his own punishment. He plans to walk the earth as an outcast until the end of his days.”
—Oedipus.
Rafa shivered at the echo of those words, augmented by her deep silence. He sensed she longed to hear more of the tormenting messages. She turned to face Zoroaster’s words on the gravestone behind her:
“What am I? and how and whence am I? and whither do I go?”
—Zoroaster.
That summed up her mood. Trying to avoid Rafa’s inquisitive look, Nora noticed some
Hebrew lines:
“A loving son and father, I am to be remembered as number 10, creating and animating matter, expressed by 0, which, alone, is of no value.”
She found refuge in that zero, surrounded by invisible voices and emotions unfolding within her. She was connected to the longing in those messages, finding some vindication in Neruda’s lines:
“Dies slowly he who avoids a passion, / who prefers the dots on the i to a whirlpool of emotions.”
Near the gate she met another Arabic inscription:
“Here lies an Iraqi poet who faced many winters, stuffing his clothes with Arabic newspapers, ruminating on their defeats, and still dreaming here, amid the kindled ashes of outcasts, of a land that seeks respite so it may catch its breath and gather the ashes of its scattered sons.”
Nora usually ended up resting under the poplar tree. There, she discovered an unmarked grave hidden deep in the grass, a sheet of gray stone blending into the earth as though it wasn’t a grave but the torso of a man who’d laid down for a short rest, leaning his head against the poplar trunk, and then turned into stone. There was an old key affixed to the stone with two hooks, beside which an Arabic inscription read “The Keyholder.” The deceased’s name was buried beneath a thick protrusion of poplar roots and Nora didn’t bother to try to uncover it.
“Very few burials take place here now because the site’s full, but they do allow people to bury ashes still,” Rafa said.
“The idea of a land saturated with dead, the soil closing over their faces—it’s horrifying. Where I come from graves are filled and emptied continuously, like buckets, so that every newcomer has a place to rest.”
“Here, people own their burial plots.” The idea did seem odd at that moment even to him.
Over the course of their visits to the cemetery, Rafa could see the change in Nora. It was as if a door had opened between her and those people, as if she had been smuggled through the usually sealed door in the back of her head. Rafa was sure that some kind of barrier separated her from her past.
“So you grew up without a dad. What’s it like to be fatherless?” The question came out as naturally as a line on one of those stones, and his answer was equally spontaneous:
“Cancer was there with me and my mother from the second I opened my eyes. We made such a compact little triangle. Between my mother’s needs and school, I didn’t have a spare second to pity myself. All I wanted was for the chemotherapy to stop the disease advancing in Mom’s liver, but they eventually had to remove it.”
Nora saw her own face in the mirror of his; death was the morning coffee they shared under that poplar tree. “Was it easy to find a donor?”
“They used a piece of mine. It’s amazing. You can grow a whole new liver from a tiny piece of someone else’s!”
“Like the will to live. Even when you chop off its head, it grows leaves again.” The gravestones around them listened, sucking on their peeled hearts. “Was she sick for long?”
“We were very close for a long time. We didn’t think of those years as years of sickness but as years when we were close to each other. I considered her an extension of my own liver! You might say I got to know her better than I’d ever been able to get to know myself. Taking care of a sick body is totally different from taking my obliviously healthy body for granted. I knew her needs better than my own. Anyway, the piece of liver lasted ten years before it finally failed us both.”
The surrounding graves felt restless, and pigeons flapped in the air. The dead were eavesdropping, releasing their stories to provoke the memories and nostalgia of the living.
“Do the graves make you think of the torment going on inside of them?” she asked. “I grew up thinking of death as a date with torment.”
Looking around, all Rafa could see was the abstract map of his life: the dreams he’d left behind, the children he hadn’t brought into the world.
“Graves remind me of the torment that happens on the outside, to tell you the truth.” His answer revealed in front of her eyes a map whose contours spiraled out from inside the grave, to show that those who’d died weren’t cut off from the world they’d once inhabited. They carried their ordeals with them and smuggled them into their graves, into their dry bones and sodden soil, constantly pushing and spreading their death into the outside world. Death was a re-reading of the map.
“Sometimes I think death’s a decision we make with our eyes all the time.” The fine drizzle faded away and the sun poured through the clouds, freshly washed and shimmering. Nora continued, “When the eye fails to see, the heart follows, dragging the whole body down. Death is blindness, a total eclipse of insight.” She was absentmindedly rolling a lock of her hair around her forefinger, bringing it up to her nose and sniffing. Lately, her hair had begun to smell like grass warmed in the sun.
A way off, a homeless man was kneeling at a grave with a bouquet of yellow roses. Nora watched him taking the bouquets from grave to grave, kneeling, mumbling verses and moving on, joining each grave together in his prayer of yellow flowers. The row of graves he visited looked like they’d been freshly dug that morning, but she knew that no burials took place there any more.
Like the birds chattering helplessly, Nora went on. “It might have been a blessing if my father had got cancer. But he was above cancer—in the sense of the rapid proliferation of cells. For him, any excessive growth at all was considered a sin.”
Rafa breathed slowly; by breathing he allowed her to dip farther into the past. A poplar leaf blew at Nora and she squeezed its juice between thumb and index finger. “I remember the lemon leaves that the woman who raised me used to crush and rub under my armpits before sending me to say good morning to my father at dawn on feast days. I’d sit there itching all over in my gold brocade dress while my father lay in the corner, dozing, oblivious to my existence. I would wait breathlessly for it to be morning, tugging at him to take me to the special holiday prayer at the Holy Mosque. I remember one particular morning, with the silence heaped in mountains separating me from him. In the darkness I knew what was wrong: father never looked me in the eye, never really saw me. He saw nothing but the male heir I’d deprived him of. That dawn, I wanted him to see me. I came so close with the gas lantern, peering into his closed eyes, that suddenly his beard caught fire, waking him up and startling us both. I put it out with my bare hands.” She opened her palms wide for Rafa to see the traces of burn. The lines on her palms, for life, heart, and head, were gone. “I don’t think Father ever forgave me for it. He haunted me with that pale, charcoal-blackened face, a permanent nightmare.”
Rafa had no idea how many spirits passed back and forth in between them, scooping up the echo of their words, as he looked into Nora’s cloudy, faraway eyes, gone somewhere he couldn’t even reach to pull her back. He sat silently waiting for her to re-emerge, and when she did, her voice was a sarcastic whimper. “For the first seven years of my life, we—me and the woman who raised me—used to look down on him from above. Sometimes he’d send me a bar of candy, noting down its price in his list of goods that had gone past their expiration date, but apart from that all I shared with him was that yearly feast-day breakfast of cheeses, olives, and date paste. When I took off the plastic tablecloth, the annual encounter would end, and I’d run back upstairs to the woman I regarded as my second mother.” Nora avoided using names so that she could see her past self from a stranger’s perspective. “People don’t die of old age, they die from cutting all the threads that link them to the living. That’s exactly what my father did.”
“If there are threads that tie us to those we love, then my mother is a spider web that guards me. I can still feel her all around me, even now.”
“A bodyguard guarded by the dead!”
He looked up, stung, expecting derision, but he was received by her enveloping seriousness instead. He was moved.
Insomnia
“I CAN’T SLEEP.” THE WORDS ESCAPED HER INVOLUNTARILY, AND HER ASSISTANT stopped what she was doing
. It was the middle of the night, and they’d just gotten back from the hotel swimming pool where Nora, in her knee-length swimsuit, had struggled bravely in the water for hours. When she was defeated in her attempts to swim, she floated on her back and let time settle and clear around her. Only rarely during her stay at the hotel had she had to share the pool with anyone else at that late hour.
The deep wound on her left knee floated inside its bandage and the waterproof layer around it. Three days earlier, Nora had given them all a fright by disappearing from her hotel suite while her bodyguard wasn’t paying attention. She’d woken up very early and slipped out without telling anybody, heading to the British Cemetery; the short time it’d taken Rafa to guess where she’d gone and catch up with her was enough for something to happen. When Nora reached the poplar tree where the gravestone with the key was, she’d found the homeless man—the one who usually wandered around placing yellow flowers on the graves—chiseling at the gravestone, bent on destroying the inscription. Her sudden appearance startled him, and for a moment he remained crouched where he was, staring into her eyes. The empty look sent chills down her spine, giving him the chance to lunge at her. He shoved her and she fell back, her knee crashing against the broken gravestone.
When Rafi arrived, he saw blood on the gravestone and the grass, and in the gaping wound across her knee. Nora sat watching in shock as Rafi knelt down in front of her and lightly but deftly smoothed the torn flesh back over her knee, then tore his white shirt into strips to wrap around the wound and stem the bleeding. Shock had numbed the pain and all Nora could do was watch like an onlooker. The words she did manage to string together didn’t mean much to Rafi: “The hobo with the yellow flowers…”
When they took a look at the tombstone, they discovered that the old key was missing, leaving only a depression in the gray stone, and that the name had been chipped away entirely, except for a few letters: “Sh … i.” Luckily Nora’s wound—her knee needed ten stitches—wasn’t as bad as it could have been.
