The Others (11 page)

The time for retreat had passed. It was too late, also, for Umar to answer me. I had made a tape of Kazim’s song, “I Am Afraid it Will Rain and You Won’t Be with Me.” On it I wrote, Have I really and truly lost you? I stuffed it into Dai’s
abaya
bag. One try will not cause any harm, I convinced myself. I did not know which song I should choose. When it came to knowledge of Fairuz, I was still in first grade, as Dai always said to make fun of me; and Dai loved Kazim. Not to mention that we always listened to foreign songs, even in languages of which we didn’t understand a single word. Our tastes merged only in that we despised rock ’n’ roll songs, even if they were by U2. I preferred pop, while she really liked rap and was always listening to Eminem. She laughed when we discussed his dirty pantomimes.

She sat down next to me on the bus going home. She had gotten on the bus after me. Lifting her face veil, she began staring around at everyone until she came upon me. She edged over to where I sat and asked, Is that seat saved for somebody? I picked up my bag and answered, No, please sit down. We did not say a single word the whole way.

Did I say, The act of love is exhausting? Then what about the act of desire! An eye to the window and an eye on Dai, and I was split between two opposing longings: one, that the bus would swallow us up into a trip that would never end, where we would have no chance of arriving, even late; or, that the bus would fling me out exactly at my front door. I craved the possibility of our bodies touching, of her fingertip engraving something onto the palm of my hand, either by pure coincidence or intentionally. My nerves would come apart completely, my neuro fluids would zoom around erratically in all directions if even a touch as slight as that were to happen.

The bus arrived at her stop. She tugged me by the hand. She was already half standing up.

Get out with me?

But …

Yallah
, come on!—for my sake?

What about my mother?

Give her a phone call later on. Hurry up, the driver is going to scold me and we’ll miss the stop, too.

I do not know which of us was more insane. I felt acutely shy and embarrassed as soon as I entered her house and her mother greeted me with a dazzling show of welcome. I claimed (lying, and giving Dai some fierce winks all the while surreptitiously so she wouldn’t expose me) that I was fasting. I did not want to crowd them at lunch. It had not been arranged in advance, and Dai’s mother had not prepared for a guest who—according to customary hospitality—would be expected to take half of what was on the table while the rest of the family filled up on half a plateful and on watching the guest eat. Her mother responded, If the noon call to prayer had not already sounded, I would have absolutely insisted that you eat! I answered shyly,
Khairha bi-ghairha
. Another time, I hope.

I called my mother to tell her without giving it much thought, even though I knew that she was seriously dubious about Dai. But it was my mother’s usual way to not demand any explanations from me as long as I was outside the house and as long as I called and could tell her that I was with someone she knew. My mother has that nice quality that makes her sensitive to the limits her children set. Motivated by her self-respecting desire to preserve her children’s images in their friends’ eyes, she does not overstep those limits. Or perhaps it is her certainty about having implanted a dignified pride successfully in her children’s blood.

Shall I say that the hearts of mothers are testimonies, the places where revelation descends, where inspiration is heard? Are they the voice of God in one of its most brilliant earthly manifestations? I had explained the rapid acceleration in my relationship with Dai to my mother by saying that it was a good fate that Allah had willed for me. Was it not splendid that I had found a friend into whose soul I could melt so easily and fluidly, as if I were a stream of water, and she, a delta? A friend who clapped her hand over my fears and stood with me on firm ground?

Even an attempt to explain our contradictory and difficult relationship is beyond me. How can safety or security come from someone whose ability to harm you is a fact that you know well? Since you do understand it, does this mean you prepare yourself thoroughly for it? You know it is coming and you are ready for it, but still, will it not be a shock when it hits you? Does putting yourself as close as this to the source of your harm while somehow retaining your sense of reassurance mean that you are comforted or immunized by knowing from where the weapon will be pointed, when the blow hits the vast body of your aching squarely in the gut?

If only we arrived at birth accompanied by an illustrated guide that we could open and read. If only it would tell us what we need. How do you operate us? How do you shut us off? How do you recharge us? What are the best ways to employ us, to maximize our functioning, and what are the best ways to maintain us so we won’t go bad? If it were possible to have such a thing, I would be grabbing the user’s guide to
me
and comparing it to Dai’s. Then I would understand something about the enormous hollow that she seemed to have filled in me, even as she opened up an aureole of fear. She stopped the irksome ringing that seemed deeply, permanently etched in my ears, resounding as soon as I tried to exchange hellos or handshakes with anyone. My anxiety would immediately tell me that I was in an unsafe situation, and it would push me to withdraw, to retreat far to the rear, inside the cavity of my heart, after closing my outside doors upon me. What was it that Dai did, what extraordinary miraculous thing did she do, to get me to rely on her enough to smother the frenzy in my blood and the promptings of extreme fright?

I fancied that we had erased Dai’s insinuated goodbye and the nine days just past, had leapt over both without either one of us falling. We prayed, and Dai brought in a plate heavy with food. We ate with one spoon and listened to Kazim’s song, and she said that I knew how to appreciate good music. We chattered about the college and plucked out all the feathers of our strutting professors. We grumbled over the exams, for the doors to the examination halls were just being opened and they would not close until the year’s end. We tried to figure out a way to hasten the upcoming Eid al-Adha holiday. I got into a discussion with her over a few choice ideas from her stock of observations concerning the Hussainiyya. I read the first proofs of the article she was engrossed in writing.

I really believed that no chasm had opened between us after all—until we got in bed. She took off her clothes and mine, and slipped on top of me with a few kisses, then pulled back slightly and gazed at me sadly. I was touching the pair of dimples on her cheeks. Now I saw the rift, utterly wide, in Dai’s eyes. She turned her back to me. That was what gave me the view of dark traces across her skin, some of them so clearly etched that I could almost figure out where each one started, though staring at her back gave me no power to envision the kind of madness that had caused them to be distributed so randomly. Other marks left me powerless to understand how a human being could be responsible for a disfigurement such as this. The sadness of it was mine now. My heart tried to entice me to redraw those traces with my kisses. I should devote myself to her, gently and carefully, but I drew back. When was my role ever to smooth out traces made by someone other than me?

I was not astonished by the sight of these marks that stained her. Many times, Dai would try out something to see if it would stir up my anger at her—or my jealousy—what was the difference? She would mount an exhibit for me, an abridged scene of an intense physical encounter between her and one of her women friends, always cutting it short so as to leave me with legitimate questions and scurrilous fancies. I was usually certain that she was mixing some lies with some truth, but still, there was tangible evidence of her multiple relationships. It was the first time I had seen such traces clearly, and in this form, and without any attempt on her part to hide them. It was as if she were saying, Hah! Look how good I am at fooling around.

I placed a tiny kiss on another blue blemish at the top of her forearm, a very small and gentle kiss, out of fear that I might cause her pain. I took my lips away quickly as I heard her moan, not knowing from the sound of it whether it was my proximity that hurt or the particular spot where the kiss had landed. Be mine, I pleaded. I mean, mine ONLY.

She answered, but only after a long silence, so long that I doubted she had heard what I said or intended to respond to it.

But I can’t.

I had the tormenting feeling that I fell at the end of her queue of choice partners. She had a yield to equal the number of fingers on her hand, and so what could possibly make her content with only one! One like me. Me, so naïve and confused about my body. I had a pressing feeling that tormented me just as much, which was that her other choices were better endowed in every sense, were wealthier, had more breadth of experience. After all, weren’t they purely top-of-the-mattress relationships?

I turned my back to her and each of us sank into the ocean of her own thoughts. Over us slumped the shadow of an excessive and ugly silence. A chill spread across me, starting inside. I lost my ability to feel any concern, to ask any questions, to experiment by heading down some other avenue. I was like someone who has put all of her eggs in one basket, and now Dai had simply given my basket a kick, sending it against the wall to shatter all of my possibilities, without offering any alternatives or reaching toward compromise solutions. It was really stupid for me to come asking her to let go of others, when it was she a few days earlier who had said goodbye, and still, to this very moment, I had not even asked her why.

Imagining our bareness as we lay there facing in opposite directions provoked a naïve laugh in me. Sometimes, laughing creates a window through which you can let things pass even though they have no relation to mirth or teasing or jokes—things like pain, shock, embarrassment, surprise, being dazzled, black ironic humor, and those truths that always show up too late.

I sat up, feeling strongly that I wanted to get up and put on my clothes. But at that moment I discovered that I did not have the energy for it. Even a trivial task such as this would require more effort than I had at my disposal. So I lingered as though I had forgotten what I was about to do. She sat up in turn and rested her head against my back. I guessed that she had her eyes closed since her lashes were not moving over my skin, and I sensed her fatigue from the way she was breathing. Something like sympathy or compassion moved inside of me. I wished I could immerse her, could pass my hand over the place where her hurt began, and open the energy of the hell lurking in the heat of her breaths. That is what I wished, but I was not strong enough to do it.

I worry about you, about what I can do to you. You are so fresh, so frail and sensitive, that I am afraid if I put my hand on you, I will break you. I do not want to hurt you, but this is what is happening. If I get too close to you, I will disfigure you and make you become like me. I am a freak, a monster, can’t you see that? It’s hard for me to explain! Hard for you to understand!

Never mind.

There was nothing to be said, and I wanted her to be quiet, so I pronounced that
never mind
like a huge period that stops up any opening for speech. My throat was full of saliva that burned. No crying, it was nothing like crying, only a temporary state of dumbness. I felt no sudden curiosity about what she had said, and no desire to get inside of it or to try to understand it. How long she had been saying such things, obscure and vague, things swimming through emptiness. Completely useless things, as if she were plastering all the reasons for our stumblings along a secret wall, and leaving to me the labor of evaluating them. I had no desire to play this game any more, the game of making assumptions about what this might possibly be, this thing which is so hard to explain and which exceeds my powers of understanding. And I did not care to negotiate with her over these secret truths of hers.

I got out of bed and put on my clothes. I handed over her clothes, a gesture to her that she should do likewise. As soon as she was done I opened the curtains and sat down on the edge of the bed staring at the view from the window. That Dai’s home was on the fringes of the city, in the agricultural area that had not yet been hit hard by the asphalt epidemic, made looking out of the window a true and astounding pleasure. I could see blue skies in which the sun blazed, and an overwhelming green as far as the horizon, as if God granted this land an exemption, and it never lost its virginity.

She came closer to me in search of a kiss, and I made a sign to her: No. Even though the windows of her room were one-way glass, the fact that I could see the street, with people going by and children on their bicycles, and that I could see into the homes of the neighbors, left me with the feeling that they could see me, too. It would make me too apprehensive, as if I were committing a kiss in sight of everyone. Dai smiled. Perfect, she did not understand my refraining from the kiss as a rejection or refusal of her.

Why? she asked me.

I don’t know.

She smiled at me spontaneously, and I felt the curiosity in her eyes exposing me. Think of it as a parachute jump. If you get beyond the first moment, you can overcome everything else.

But …

Come here.

She stole me with a long kiss, I murmured
no
to her over and over again, and in a rising voice she answered me over and over, murmuring her refusal to accept mine. At first, I tried to disentangle myself from her, but then I relaxed and finally I responded to the pressure of the kiss.

So? she asked me, as soon as she drew back.

I did not answer. My heart was pounding and my breaths were overstrained. She winked at me, so as to say, Let’s keep on doing that when the curtains are open. We both burst out laughing, despite my suspicion that it was not a joke. My response was that she really had gone crazy.

That look of sadness came back, as my forefinger stroked the slope of her nose. It seemed that there was some defect in my fingers which injected sadness or despair into her. Perhaps I needed to daub my fingertips with a good luck charm, or redo their chemical makeup. With fake annoyance, or with real patience running out, I’m not sure which, I asked her, So, now what?