by Jamal Naji
I had indeed seen two big scratches on his back when he returned from his trip to Paris.
She also told me that he had a lot of hair on the backs of his shoulders.
That woman awakened me to the truth, but she arrived too late. Much too late.
Fawaz had become someone else. He had suffered massive injuries and required many surgeries to put his body back together, and get it functioning again, as the doctors said.
They took him to Paris to treat him and fix him. I refused to go with him.
I didn’t tell my father about Fawaz and his son. I was embarrassed. I felt insulted. So I chose not to tell him anything.
Most likely he knew everything, though. My father had eyes.
Why didn’t I pursue what was behind that dreadful laugh of Fawaz’s, the one where his teeth and upper gums show? That laugh that manifested itself before my eyes twice? Once when he returned from Paris more than thirty years ago, and again when I asked him what Uroub told him the night of his sixtieth birthday party.
Sari got what he deserved.
When I visited him in the hospital the second time, he told me about Uroub’s prediction and what the Indian sage they went to see said to them.
He told me that surprising Fawaz by bringing Uroub to his sixtieth birthday party wasn’t his idea, but had been my father’s idea, though he hadn’t attended the party that night.
He said it with the tone of someone refuting an accusation made against him.
Maybe I was nicer than I should have been, more patient than I should have been, and had given Fawaz my full and boundless trust too easily. Now I realized there was nothing in this life that was boundless. Even our planet Earth had boundaries. Maybe our entire universe did, too.
My father came to visit me. We sat at a table beside the fountain with the houri sculptures. The sky was vast and the day was glaringly clear and the wind was fiddling with the white umbrella over our heads. He looked into my eyes and said, “I’ve known everything for a long time.”
“I suspected so,” I said feebly.
My tears started to flow.
He looked up to the skies and said, “It is true that he did what he did secretly, without our knowledge, but fate has punished him twice. Once when he lost his son forever, and again when his car blew up. Do you want more?”
“I heard that it was his son who tried to kill him.”
“I think,” he said, scratching the back of his right hand with the fingernails of his left, “I think his son died in Syria.”
I was gripped by a terrifying feeling concerning the kinds of revelations I was exposed to every day. Every hour, actually. I started asking about everything in a loud voice mixed with a tone of anxiety.
“He died? How? Who killed him?”
“He might have been killed in one of their battles,” he answered. “Maybe he carried out a suicide attack. I will know the details soon.”
I asked in that same voice, “Then who tried to kill Fawaz?”
“They are still investigating,” he said.
“And what about Uroub’s prediction?” I asked hastily.
“Since when do you think this way, Samah? Watch yourself,” he said.
“But her prediction is the reason why all of this happened!” I said.
He looked at me in astonishment. “Fawaz betrayed you thirty years before she arrived.”
I said, with a thought having suddenly sparked and gone up in flames in my mind, “True. But if Uroub hadn’t shown up in our lives, then everything that has happened from the night of Fawaz’s birthday up until this very moment would not have happened. Am I wrong?”
When he didn’t comment, the idea burned even brighter, and in that same anxious, raised voice I said, “I feel as though Uroub is not real, as though she is a lie! Or something of that nature!”
He smiled, and his smile was wide but not innocent. An evil shadow glimmered in his eyes, and from the wrinkles on his face that had formed as a result of that smile came a cloud of fright I could practically touch with my hand.
I lost my sense of place and time. I felt like a feather floating in a bottomless abyss. My brain became like a calculating machine, running heavy analyses of everything that happened. It worked without slowing down. My father was tracking my facial gestures like someone waiting for a patient to come out of a coma.
His cell phone rang. He answered it. “Hello, Porcupine. Great, great. I’ll see you tomorrow. We’ll talk in the morning.”
Then he hung up.
I said to him, again in that anxious, raised voice, “As though you are fate . . . Or maybe its accomplice?”
He imposed those blue eyes of his upon mine. “Do you know what the Indian sage said to Fawaz?”
While contemplating what was behind those eyes and those wrinkles of his, I said, “Sari told me everything in the hospital.”
He looked up and said, “I like what the sage said to Fawaz. But one thing he said about fate didn’t convince me, for Fawaz is not one of the main cogs in the great machine of fate.”
Notes
iFrom a poem by poet Ahmed Shawqi, written while in exile from Egypt.
iiFrom Surat Al-Ahzab (The Clans), Verse 23. Translation from Quran Database: http://www.oneummah.net/quran/book/33.html. Full verse: Among the Believers are men who have been true to their covenant with Allah: of them some have completed their vow (to the extreme), and some (still) wait: but they have never changed (their determination) in the least.
iiiQiyam al-Layl, literally ‘standing at night’. Voluntary prayers performed after the Isha prayer (last of five obligatory prayers) from the middle of the night until dawn and involving recitations from the Quran while standing. See http://www.ahya.org/amm/modules.php?name=Sections&op=viewarticle&artid=83
ivSalat Khauf, literally ‘prayer of fear.’ Special prayers performed in shifts during times of fear or danger. See http://www.islambasics.com/view.php?bkID=20&chapter=35
vFrom Surat al-Anfaal (The Spoils of War), Verse 17. Translation from Quran Database: http://www.oneummah.net/quran/book/8.html
viFrom Surat Al-Ma’ida (The Table Spread), Verse 99. Translation from Quran Database: http://www.oneummah.net/quran/book/5.html
viiFrom Surat Al-Waaqia (The Inevitable), Verse 79. Translation from Quran Database: http://www.oneummah.net/quran/book/56.html
viiiFrom Surat Al-Baqarah (The Cow), Verse 286. Translation from Quran Database: http://www.oneummah.net/quran/book/2.html
ixA breakfast favorite, consisting of marinated chick peas and fava beans seasoned with olive oil and lemon juice.
xFrom Surat Al-Anfaal (The Spoils of War), Verse 27. Translation from Quran Database: http://www.oneummah.net/quran/book/8.html
xiThe reference is to Al-Gama’a Al-Islamiyya, the Islamic Group, an Egyptian Sunni Islamist movement.
xiiFrom Surat Al-A’la (The Most High) Chapter 76 Verse 9. Translation from Quran Database: http://www.oneummah.net/quran/book/87.html
xiiiThe reference is to Omar Ibn Al-Khattab’s Miracle. Omar was giving his Friday sermon in Medina and shouted, “O Sariyah Bin Zunaim, the mountain, the mountain!” Sariya Bin Zunaim was in the midst of battle hundreds of miles away but heard Omar’s cry and knew to take to the mountain to shield his troops. The Muslims eventually won their battle with the Persians as a result. For more see: https://books.google.com/books?id=j0KZBQAAQBAJ&pg=PT33&lpg=PT33&dq=sariyah+bin+zunaim&source=bl&ots=TYEASkAhML&sig=QGCZbPMVql_6_WscujWi0GlGjKY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB8Q6AEwAGoVChMIxNn9joeIxwIVSpmACh2HfQqb#v=onepage&q=sariyah%20bin%20zunaim&f=false
xivThe reference is to the complete utterance when Omar shouted “O Sariyah Bin Zunaim, the mountain, the mountain! He who is the wolf that catches the lamb is an evildoer.” See: https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/
xvFrom Surat Yusuf (Joseph), Verse 28, translation from Quran Database:
http://www.oneummah.net/quran/book/12.html
