Days of Ignorance (7 page)

With a smile he’d replied, ‘And who else would think about things the way you do?’

As she passed her hand over his head that evening, she prayed to God that if the angels approached him, they would only approach to bring him back to life. She saw a wild deer running through grassy meadows. She smelled the odor of its dung. She smelled the odor of the bed’s cold metal. She smelled the odor of Malek’s body. At the right corner of his mouth she saw a small patch of congealed blood. She took a paper tissue out of a packet next to her and cautiously began scratching it off with her fingernails. When it had all come off, she placed it gently on the tissue in front of her. Then she carefully wrapped it up and deposited it in her purse’s inner pocket.

Why had she done that? She didn’t know. What was she going to do with a clump of congealed blood – put it with his pictures, letters and gifts? Would this be the last thing that remained to her from him – a clump of congealed blood that was sure to go to pieces?

She closed her eyes. But that wasn’t going to protect her from her thoughts.

The beginning of the 18th of Wail, the twelfth year after Desert Storm 1:30 a.m., her room

The next day her father would tell her, ‘You’ve got to stop visiting him.’ And she wouldn’t be able to say, ‘I can’t.’

He’d done what no other man would have done, and she didn’t want to put any more pressure on him. She’d seen how agonized he was as she stood before him in tears in the hospital lobby. ‘Dad,’ she begged, ‘all I want to do is make sure he’s all right! I know I’ve been completely out of line. But I’m about to suffocate, Dad. I’m about to go crazy. And I’ll go even crazier if I keep thinking how my brother is the person who did this to him and I haven’t tried to visit him. Dad, please. You know what kind of man Malek is. Don’t be unfair to him the way Hashem was. And don’t be unfair to me. Please, Dad!’

With a mournful expression etched on his face, her father kept repeating,
la hawla wa la quwwata illa billah
and
hasbi Allah wa ni’m al-wakil
. For a moment she realized how difficult she was being. But then she thought to herself that after all, he was her father, and he’d put up with all her foolishness. At the very least, he wouldn’t slap her and curse the day she came into his life.

Placing his hand on her shoulder, he said, ‘Calm down, Leen.’ Then he took her to the wound-dressing room. He was so distraught, he didn’t know how to turn on the lights. However, he managed to get her over to a bed in the midst of her sobs.

‘Calm down, Leen. Calm down.’

She tried to calm down for his sake. She wasn’t sure whether he would agree to let her stay at the hospital near Malek or not. She was weary, and hadn’t slept a wink for some time. A few moments later her father came back with a nurse. Speaking broken Arabic, he asked her to help Leen.

The nurse replied with a smile, ‘Not worry, Baba. God willing she all right. I give her medicine for sleep.’

The nurse brought her a glass of water and a pill which she placed in her hand with a collusive wink. Feeling grateful for the nurse’s complicity, she popped it into her mouth. Then she gulped down a little water as the nurse began spreading a blanket over her legs. Not long afterwards she saw her father leave the room and heard him muttering across the corridor. Staring into the darkness, she prayed, ‘O merciful God, look upon me. Let Your mercy rain down on me. Let me wake up from this nightmare. O merciful God, if You aren’t angry with me, send down Your mercy onto my spirit. Send down Your peace, O God of the heavens.’

At some point she drifted off, but she woke up, alarmed, to the sound of her parents’ voices rising in the darkness. Where was she? No sooner had she gotten her bearings than the door flung open and she saw her mother standing in front of her. She heard her voice ringing out, ‘I obviously didn’t know how to raise you! Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Do you want us to be the talk of the town?’

She hadn’t been dreaming, then. Her father really had left her at the hospital. And her mother? Her mother, who had given birth to her, was standing before her unable to show her any compassion. Leen made no reply. She kept her head bowed, her eyes fixed on the reflection of the light coming from outside onto the room’s dull tile floor. After sending away some nurses and a doctor or two who’d come running to find out what was going on, her father came inside and closed the door behind him.

With muffled rage he said to her mother, ‘We didn’t come here for you to raise your voice!’

‘You don’t want me to raise my voice? If you’d raised your daughter right, maybe I wouldn’t be raising my voice!’

Then, turning to Leen, she said, ‘God damn you, you smarty pants! I’d rather have died than had you! You come along with me right now!’

Grabbing Leen by the wrist, she began tugging on her. However, Leen wrested her hand violently from her mother’s grip. Taking a step backward, she said breathlessly, ‘I’m not leaving the hospital. Do whatever you think is best. You can even stay with me. But I’m not leaving here.’

The rage pent up from all the years past had begun flowing in her veins. It was the rage of a ten-year-old girl who’d come to an early awareness that she wasn’t wanted but didn’t understand why, the isolation that had confined her spirit, the loneliness that had sapped her, the neglect, the disregard, and the belittlement of everything she’d ever accomplished in her life. For more than twenty years she hadn’t meant a thing to her mother. So how could her mother expect to drag her away by the arm now, just like that, as though she were still a little girl, or as though nothing and nobody had changed?

Her father bowed his head, while her mother continued to eye her, her breathing rapid as she struggled to keep her rage and bewilderment in check. Leen didn’t know how to remind her mother that she was her daughter, and that people would never stop looking down on her no matter what she did. They would always find some excuse to despise her and talk about her behind her back, while her mother, with her screaming and carrying on, had given them all the more reason to do so. She thought of going over and kissing her on the forehead, but she knew her mother would callously push her away, and she didn’t want to make her pain all the worse. She was tired, and all she wanted to do was to wash her face in cold water, hoping – and not for the last time – to discover that everything that had happened was nothing but a long, long nightmare, and that she just didn’t know anymore how to wake up from it.

Gazing into her mother’s angry face, she said to her forlornly, ‘Wake up, Mom. You must be dreaming. What happens to me and what I do is of no concern to you. It was never of any concern to you in the past, so why should I believe it’s of concern to you now? You’re not even worried about me. (
God, have mercy.
) You’re only worried about Hashem. But believe it or not, Mom, I won’t say a thing. Are you afraid I might talk? I won’t. And I assure you that when Malek wakes up, he won’t talk, either. So don’t worry. Trust me, if only just this once. Go to Hashem and tell him, “They won’t do anything to hurt you. They wouldn’t do that. Everything will be forgotten.” Now go away and leave me alone. I don’t want anybody here anymore. I don’t want anybody anymore.’

She ran to the door and opened it awkwardly, then took off in search of a bathroom where she could wash her face. When she came back, they were gone. The door of the room was open, and the scent of sorrow emanated from its every corner. But does sorrow have a scent?

3 a.m., her room

She remembered walking distractedly through the hospital lobby two nights earlier in search of Malek. Her search hadn’t lasted long. She’d requested a taxi in the wee hours of the morning and left the house without saying a word to anyone. She sat in the back seat feeling sad, bewildered, angry and apprehensive. Strangely, she’d felt happy because she’d learned that, although his condition wasn’t stable, he hadn’t died. When she called his house, his brother Yusuf had answered. She’d paid no attention to his wary, surprised tone of voice. She’d wanted to know what had happened to Malek, and was prepared to let Yusuf think whatever he wanted to. Suspicions had steadily eaten away at her spirit. She didn’t ask him for any details. She simply asked about Malek. When Yusuf told her he was in the hospital in a coma, she sat down on the edge of the bed. Before calling to ask about him that night, she’d spent hours standing in front of the window, and she’d wept as she watched the morning approach with sluggish breaths. Standing at her window, she’d thought she would never see him again. She’d summoned an image of his face and nearly burst into tears. She hadn’t seen his face since the day they’d met at the Dar Al Iman InterContinental, and her longings confused her. Did she miss him because she’d been uncompassionate toward both him and the two of them on that day? Or did she miss him because she knew that even if she saw him, she wouldn’t find him – he wouldn’t be there? He would be far, far away, like a star on whose points the tattered remains of her dreams now hung, and she would wait patiently without being distracted by anything, even sleep.

O God, is there no sleep to be had?

She wasn’t going to fall asleep. She turned toward the other side of the bed as even the tiniest details of her grief kept coming to mind.

She loved him. She really did. However, the issue had to do not with love, but, rather, with the way people around her looked at this love, the way people in her country would deal with a love that had torn through the transparent partition that was raised like a protective barrier between different colors, races and ethnicities when it came to love and marriage.

In the beginning she and Malek had stood on opposite sides of this transparent barrier. He’d spread his hand on it from one side, and she’d spread hers on the other. There hadn’t been any warmth. They’d been right up against each other, so she would rest her head on his chest under his right collarbone, but he couldn’t put his arms around her and feel the contours of her body. With a growing exasperation she’d dug her fingernails into the meadow of his chest from behind the unseen wall. Then suddenly, part of the see-through partition between them had torn right between his left collarbone and his heart. Quietly and cautiously, she’d started widening the hole until she managed finally to cross over and touch him. Every time they met, she would pass through the hole and touch him.

And how she’d loved to touch him.

She’d loved to let her hand roam through the grass on his chest as they talked. They would talk a little about themselves and what awaited them, and a lot about life and its problems, about Al Ittihad, the people’s football team and Al Hilal, the government team, about the crossword puzzles she’d collected in her desk drawer so that they could solve them together some early morning, and about Taher Katalouj’s songs. He would sing them to her, which made her laugh and love him even more.

Every time her hand went roaming through the grass on his chest, she would glimpse a little deer grazing along the edges. It was a pale sandy color, its eyes wide and glistening with little white windows lined up inside them, and it would peer out at a horizon she didn’t recognize. It was a lone deer in an open expanse without a hunter in sight. Did the deer love him? How happy she must be! After all, the aspect of their love that might cause the gazelle pain was the part that was past, not the part that was yet to come. The deer could go on grazing on the grass on his chest despite the white splint, and when he opened his eyes, she would be the first to know.

Leen closed her eyes. But what good would that do?

Everything they’d ever said and done lay hidden in the deep darkness of her spirit. She recalled the first time he’d ever called her. She’d been leafing through files stacked on her desk when the telephone rang, and he’d been on the other end. He’d told her he was writing a newspaper report on runaway girls, and that he hoped she would help him given the nature of her work at the Social Welfare Home. There’d been nothing strange about such a call, and it hadn’t even occurred to her to ask him how he’d gotten her number. That had been the beginning. Everything had begun from that point without their knowing it. As they talked, she’d noticed that his questions were different from other people’s. They struck her as the questions of someone who tries not to dwell on outcomes because he wants to understand the causes. They’d talked for a long time that day, and the following days as well. Later, when he told her how books had become his consolation, she’d known what it was that made him different.

When the report was published he called her to tell her, and they went back to talking like a couple of friends who’d been out of touch for a day or two. He expressed genuine sympathy for the girls, saying he believed that what drove them to run away was despair of finding any other way out. When she got up the courage to speak to him about the little notebook where she wrote down her observations about the girls and some of her conversations with them during their stay at the Home, she somehow knew that Malek was going to be more than just a passing acquaintance.

‘Observations?’ he asked in surprise.

‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘Little thoughts.’

‘About all the cases?’

‘No, only the most striking ones, the ones that leave me speechless, and that force me to stop and think.’

‘I think that’s part of the beauty of your work.’

‘It’s also part of what makes it unpleasant.’

Quite some time later he had asked her in passing, ‘Leen, do you remember the notebook you talked to me about, where you write down your observations about the runaway girls?’