by Raja Alem
“Go on, get moving.”
Sarab was nailed to the floor, unable to tear herself away. Latifa dragged her away gently but firmly, and turned with her into the building on the right. As they walked farther inside, the nauseating smell of disinfectant increased. Sarab staggered, assailed by memories of the limbs she had helped the doctor to amputate during the siege. The Pakistani woman supported her and gave her a sympathetic glance. She urged Sarab silently to keep moving, and her look confirmed to Sarab that there was no choice, no resistance, no going back, and no way forward other than surrender.
Latifa took her through the corridors of what seemed to be a primitive hospital, and she pointed out a sign marked “Operating Room.” She stepped forward and gave her name to the nurse on duty.
“This is the new volunteer. She will be joining the operations today.”
“Oh, really?” The nurse gasped mockingly. “Since when did we put amateurs in charge of our wounded mujahideen? Do we evacuate them from Afghanistan so we can put an end to them here!”
The nurse seemed prepared to berate them indefinitely, but suddenly she concluded: “She hasn’t passed dissection yet.”
Latifa objected: “But she was the one who saved the Mah—”
“I know,” the nurse interrupted decisively. “But not before she’s passed the skills test.”
Sarab looked at the nurse, inflexible as rock; nothing in her outward appearance suggested a healer. She was draped in a green robe which covered her from head to toe, and a green scarf wrapped her head and neck and dangled over her chest.
“She will start off stitching wounds.”
Sarab was taken aback by the word stitching; it extricated her from the abundance of green, and tears welled in her eyes.
Latifa could only obey. She retreated, taking Sarab down more stairs to the basement and through another neon-lit corridor. As soon as Sarab stepped inside the room she was hit by a stench of blood and urine. Stretching away in front of her were long metal tables with women hovering around them. The scene was like something from a sewing factory but instead of fabric, huge cats and dogs, all drugged, were scattered on the tables. The women were burrowing inside them, removing and transplanting organs, pulling up veins and arteries, like a game of musical organs. It was a sort of primitive operating room, and the animals were used for training. The eyes of the industrious women swiveled toward her, and they whispered to each other, “She’s the one who saved the Mahdi.”
Suddenly everything around Sarab went blurry and then black, and she fell to the floor unconscious.
“I don’t think we have room for this spineless parasite.”
“She’s a tapeworm. If we leave her be she’ll run riot.”
Sarab woke up to this whispered conversation.
“I was so mad I almost exploded, but the Mahdi entrusted her to us, and it was a red-level command.”
“Just cool it till things clear up.”
“This is a real mess, but if we don’t solve it we’ll get the blame. Everyone thinks she’s some kind of savior.”
Before long, Sarab was led to a department at the back of the huge factory, where there was an acrid smell of gunpowder and chemicals.
“I’m warning you: this is your last chance, in the bomb workshop.” Sarab’s hands shook as she resisted the urge to laugh hysterically. What a farce—as she was unable to stitch up wounds, she was being forced to create them.
The supervisor led her to a wing containing an army of women who specialized in making different types of homemade bombs.
“Try not to get yourself blown up,” hissed the worker, trying to strike terror into Sarab as she backed away. Meanwhile, the supervisor pushed Sarab forward and she was met by female faces whose noses had been bound with their black veils to protect them from the acrid fumes of the chemicals.
Sarab realized she was looking at multiple small teams distributed throughout the cubicles of that infernal cistern with rigid screens separating each group from the others. The screens blocked sight, but they were not successful in blocking the various smells which mingled together in an abominable brew and gradually remolded the workers’ features.
Sarab turned away in disbelief at the turn her fate had taken. She wrapped her veil in thick layers over her nose to shield it from the fumes which accumulated and condensed every second. The primitive teams were divided into groups: one group decanted benzene into bottles covered with fabric; another made bombs from medical-grade antiseptic; and another used plastic bottles to mix vinegar and baking soda cleaning products and metals. Sarab was added to a team manufacturing saltpeter. The smell of dung greeted Sarab, and she lost all sense of time as she looked at that black hole full of women sweating over huge pans like some sort of hallucination. She barely heard her instructions.
“You have to fix the charcoal filter onto the sieve, put the sieve over the pan, and fill it with goat dung. Then pour this boiling water over it slowly, and then. . .” A primitive, endless operation to extract crystals of saltpeter, or potassium nitrate.
Sarab was lost in the steamy cistern which was piled high with old graveyard dirt saturated with human remains and decomposed vegetation; she was manufacturing death from the ground of death. She didn’t know how the day passed as she stood over that pan, until the women pulled her outside and she was stung by night falling over the camp. She inhaled deeply, cleansing her lungs from the dung, and exhaled all the saltpeter crystals, wishing never to wake up to another day of that process.
“Move, your highness!” The Egyptian woman’s yell plucked her out of her deep coma. She realized it was morning, and the whole, merciful night had passed. She jumped out of bed like a steam train, thrust herself into the black robe, and followed the others to the factory; she was barely awake and her soul was still somewhere else, far away.
But before long she was transported back to a reality that she could never have imagined. There had been an unexpected transformation in her fate, and the mixture of disdain and servility with which the supervisor greeted her made her realize that an order had been given to move her. She didn’t know if it was solicitude or revenge that made the Mahdi move her to another team that appeared to earn a higher wage for a correspondingly higher level of danger. Here, she was squeezed among piles of saltpeter to turn it into gunpowder.
“Joining the team making black powder is the greatest of honors; here, you will make the pipes of martyrdom and glory.”
The supervisor spoke in an aggressive tone, and Sarab didn’t take in anything she had said; she was floored by the irony of being back in such a terrible situation, particularly one so closely associated with her father, Sheikh Baroud—"Sheikh Gunpowder.” Sarab’s distraction alarmed the supervisor, who kept up her profuse instructions, carving into Sarab the dread of what she was being thrust into.
“Now you are in the service of the secret army which will spread far and wide and work in silence. They will blow up the infidel French and Americans, everywhere they have been stationed to meddle in the affairs of our people.”
She didn’t slow down to let Sarab fully comprehend just what it was she was being embroiled in.
The new supervisor greeted Sarab and introduced herself sardonically: “I’m Napalm. That’s the most important thing you’ll need to know around here.” She was Ethiopian, round and compact as a ball, with a juicy smile that split her face like a wound. That smile revealed large, gleaming teeth, in startling contrast to the darkness of the vault where the dynamite was produced. “And another helpful tip: keep your mouth shut from now on.”
Sarab couldn’t decide if Napalm was serious or sarcastic; she never relinquished her flippancy, even when she was explaining Sarab’s destructive task to her.
“You will load these pipes with eighty percent saltpeter, and the rest with charcoal, then fix this reactor to every belt.” Sarab was thrown into confusion at the idea of being girdled with death. It was beyond any recklessness she had experienced in the line of fire.<
br />
Napalm’s exaggerated cheerfulness perplexed Sarab. She constantly broke into peals of laughter, and she never stopped rolling between tables, doling out jokes along with her instructions. Sarab noticed Napalm had very fine fingers, like antennae, in sharp contrast to the sturdiness of her body. She would pass these probes over the pipes like insects, arousing the admiration of the workers.
“Today we raised the dosage to three grams.” The hands suddenly stopped working and all eyes swiveled toward Napalm, who stood in front of the table at the back of the cellar. A worker meekly handed her the specified quantity of gunpowder and, with a theatrical gesture so that everyone could see, Napalm wrapped the powder in a green leaf and swallowed it, to the amazement of her audience. Their awe was genuine, even though it was clear that this was a show that had been repeated often, and today had been singled out to dazzle the new arrival who didn’t care what was happening and didn’t understand its significance.
Sarab’s concern was the overarching darkness which made it difficult to guess the time. Lumps of time were heavy in that place, which was more like a graveyard.
Sarab’s fingers were trembling from exhaustion when Napalm released a cheerful whistle. At once the women stopped working and moved outside, and Sarab followed.
Waiting for them in the next hall was a pot overflowing with rice and meat. Every worker spooned some into a bowl, took a disk of bread, and fanned out to sit on the ground. Sarab could do nothing but take a plate and choose a spot by the door to sit. Her whole body was shaking and she had entirely lost her appetite from exhaustion. Meanwhile, her new comrades proceeded to use the bread to scoop up the rice with relish.
“Is the local cuisine not to your majesty’s satisfaction?”
Sarab was taken aback at Napalm’s attack; she had been watching Sarab closely. Sarab hurriedly plunged her fingers, still sprinkled with gunpowder, into the plate, pulling out meat and potatoes and scooping up the rice, cramming whole handfuls into her mouth in order to demonstrate her enjoyment and deflect the supervisor’s displeasure.
The women studied Napalm, who had positioned herself between Sarab and the rest of the group. Sarab felt all movements freeze and a watchfulness settled over the workers. The Ethiopian didn’t waste time; she released a thunderous fart and burst out laughing, and the women chorused with laughter in her wake; although, coming from those wretched, exhausted bodies, it sounded more like a lament.
Sarab was hit by a foul blast that made her retch. Bile splattered over the rice in her bowl and Napalm’s gloating voice came amid the women’s laughter.
“That was mid-level destruction; we chose it today as a little welcome for you.”
Over the following days, Sarab was inducted into the team manufacturing self-induced death and its supervisor who presented them every mealtime with a thunder calculated to shock.
Sarab was less unnerved by Napalm than by her task of destruction. She sat in between veiled women and felt the coal-blackness of her own veil seeping into her lungs. From sunrise to sunset she prepared a toxic brew while her surroundings blurred: the containers of coal and saltpeter swelled in front of her; the gunpowder smearing her hands thickened and spread. She stuffed the pipes mechanically, and the limbs that would be torn apart by each bomb formed a suffocating pile around her. Whenever she wanted to run outside and escape, she was pierced by the eye of the elderly woman assigned to watch her. The old woman’s fingers worked of their own accord while her eyes remained glued to Sarab, boring into her and goading her to hurry her pace, even though she was feverishly cramming saltpeter into pipes in the hope that they might explode in an act of self-sacrifice. The old woman eventually dozed off, her fingers still briskly stuffing saltpeter as her observation slackened. Sarab gradually lagged and left the remaining pipes empty except for charcoal, hoping to minimize the explosion, and thus the casualties. She was mired in an act of betrayal either way; to carry out her appointed task was to betray herself and the victims, and to be caught gambling with the recipe in this way would see her branded as a traitor to the Mahdi, who had moved her to that position either as a promotion or a way of breaking her obstinacy.
Day by day, Sarab grew thinner as a result of her aversion to all food other than milk and a few mouthfuls of dry bread at the evening meal in the factory. Her features were tinged with gray from the nightmares that never let her close her eyes in peace. Every night before going to sleep, the Egyptian woman would sit on her bed, and her reprimands competed with sleep for control of the women’s drooping eyelids. Their bodies groaned and vied for attention while she declaimed lectures of chastisement, which mainly revolved around scenes of torture and the serpents that waited for them in their graves. She would describe these beings as though she could see them physically there in front of her, and every night these monsters gained a new horn and even more toxic venom. Still unsatisfied, she would interrupt these living pictures, focusing her gaze on Sarab, to hiss, “The snakes get intimate with cowards and traitors; they bite them so their flesh falls off, and the wounds ripen and split from the pus.”
Pus was the Egyptian woman’s favorite topic. She dragged it into conversation every waking hour. As soon as Sarab drifted off to sleep, her body would be draped in pipe bombs and she’d wake up terrified, counting each laceration and burn on her chest. The hours she spent in the pipe-bomb workshop accumulated on her skin like layers of armor, ready to blow her up along with the camp.
She forgot Rue Bonaparte. Its scents were effaced from her mind as if they had never been. She was certain that if she was left alone for long enough to fully remember, simply thinking of it would be a curse on that street; she would pack it with her pipes full of saltpeter, she would exchange the streetlamps for clusters of gunpowder. Her greatest obsession was the detonator fixed to every pipe belt. However much she scrubbed, the smell of gunpowder rose from her black robe and the roots of her hair, lancing her veins and scraping in between her teeth. She was powerless to resist the suspicion that her father was haunting her. Her movements became cautious, as she was certain that she was flammable. She flinched at every spark, especially from the Egyptian woman’s flashlight; she carried it constantly, pointing it at them accusingly, as if it could illuminate lies and evil intentions.
“God save us from those haunted by Satan,” the Egyptian hissed whenever she turned over in bed, her immense height causing it to wobble dangerously. Even when the batteries ran out, in Sarab’s mind this flashlight became a sort of detonator connected to her sins; one spark could set them alight at any moment and obliterate her from all existence.
“When your soul rises, because it definitely will, we will wrap your demon in your shroud and lock it in your grave with you.”
The Egyptian nurtured a particular hatred toward Sarab, both for her delicate body and for being “the Mahdi’s woman.”
In contrast to the brutality of the siege, the rough living of the camp and the hostility of its occupants wounded her because it touched her most vulnerable, sensitive parts. The women’s rejection stirred up old feeling of being rejected by her mother and brother, and she was unable to assume the detached position of an observer that had saved her in the Grand Mosque. She betrayed herself this time, and surrendered to the feeling that she was sinking, alone and reviled, into her grave. She remembered Raphael’s exclamation: “Why this obsession with death?” His question resounded through her head, trying to pluck her out of this capitulation. Sarab got thinner and thinner, and lost the sense of her body she had gained in Paris. She went back to denying and distorting her body.
A moment of joy gleamed in the dormitory, radiating from the gray military uniform Latifa guarded carefully. It had been smuggled to her by the Kuwaiti volunteer who had been appointed to marry her. He had started sending his clothes for her to wash, and in the sweat of each garment she could smell his prodigious passion for her.
“Abdel-Salam slipped some dinars into the pockets for me,” Latifa confided to Sarab one morning as t
hey were on their way to the factory.
Sarab’s features burst into an encouraging smile; it was the first spontaneous mark of warmth she had received since arriving in the camp.
But the situation reversed that night. When they returned from the factory, Sarab’s relaxed demeanor roused the suspicions of the Egyptian and her Kuwaiti friend, another giantess who had recently joined the Mahdi. The Egyptian had taken her under her wing at once, and they moved like two dinosaurs among the cowering women. They kept Sarab under close watch. The other women did not miss the scent of open hostility, and the more peaceable among them avoided Sarab so that her curse wouldn’t fall on them as well.
Sarab was on her way to the bathroom when she was stopped by a shout of, “Hey you!” The shout was like an accusation. She turned to the huge Kuwaiti with her dark lips.
“Hoity-toity, cat got your tongue? You don’t speak?”
Sarab had no chance to reply.
“You look down your nose at us. Are we too insignificant for you to exchange a few words with us?”
“What should I say?” It was the first time Sarab had spoken; her voice seemed thin and weak in that vast room.
“Your story. This West that you sold your religion and your honor for—what is it? Tell us.”
The Kuwaiti seemed determined to make Sarab speak. A reel of the events in Paris passed through Sarab’s head. Every scene was guaranteed to incriminate her.
All she could say was, “When you are in the abyss and the world caves in on you, there are pills they give you, and they lift you out of the darkness and fear.”
Indifference bordering on defiance made Sarab choose that topic over any other. Her words sounded like a silly joke; she had been silent for days and now she had broken her fast of words with that piece of drivel. She was disgusted at herself.
The Yemeni dismissed her with: “Huh, that’s no different from qat.”
The Kuwaiti seized on that disparaging objection. “True. Tell us something new and interesting.”
