The Patience Stone (4 page)

Suddenly, she thrusts her hand downward, beneath her dress, between her legs. Closes her eyes. Takes a deep, ragged breath. Rams her fingers into herself, roughly, as if driving in a blade. Holding her breath, she pulls out her hand with a stifled cry. Opens her eyes and looks at the tips of her nails. They are wet. Wet with blood. Red with blood. She puts her hand in front of the man’s vacant eyes. “Look! That’s my blood, too. Clean. What’s the difference between menstrual blood and blood that is clean? What’s so disgusting about this blood?” Her hand moves down to the man’s nostrils. “You were born of this blood! It is cleaner than the blood of your own body!” She pushes her fingers
roughly into his beard. As she brushes his lips she feels his breath. A shiver of fear runs across her skin. Her arm shudders. She pulls her hand away, clenches her fist, and, with her mouth against the pillow, cries out again. Just once. The cry is long. Heartrending. She doesn’t move for a long time. A very long time. Until the water bearer knocks on the neighbor’s door, and the old woman’s rasping cough is heard through the walls, and the water bearer empties his skin into the neighbor’s tank, and one of her daughters starts crying in the passage. Then, she stands up and leaves the room without daring to look at her man.

Later, much later, just as the ants carrying the fly’s body reach the foot of the wall between the two windows, the woman comes back with a clean sheet and the small plastic basin. She pulls off the sheet covering the man’s legs, washes his belly, feet, and penis … and covers him up again. “More repugnant than a corpse! He doesn’t give off any smell at all!” She leaves.

Night, again.

The room in absolute darkness.

Suddenly, the blinding flash of an explosion. A deafening blast makes the earth tremble. Its breath shatters the windows.

Throats are torn apart by screaming.

A second explosion. This one closer. Therefore more violent.

The children are crying.

The woman is wailing.

The sound of their terrified footsteps rings out in the passage, and disappears into the cellar.

Outside, not far away, something catches fire—perhaps the neighbor’s tree. The light rips through the dusk of the courtyard and the room.

Outside, some are yelling, some crying, and some firing their Kalashnikovs, who knows where from or toward whom … just firing, firing …

It all stops eventually, in the gray half-light of an undecided dawn.

Then a thick silence descends on the smoky street, on the courtyard now nothing but a dead garden, on the room where the man, covered in soot, is laid out
as always. Motionless. Immune. Just breathing. Slowly breathing.

The hesitant creaking of an opening door and the sound of cautious footsteps proceeding along the passage do not shatter this deathly silence, but underline it.

The footsteps stop behind the door. After a long pause—four of the man’s breaths—the door opens. It’s the woman. She enters. Does not look at him straightaway. First, she examines the state of the room, the broken window panes, the soot now settled on the curtains’ migrating birds, on the kilim’s faded stripes, on the open Koran, on the drip bag emptying itself of its last salty-sweet drops … Then her gaze sweeps over the sheet covering the man’s skeletal legs, takes in his beard, and finally reaches his eyes.

She takes a few fearful steps toward the man. Stops. Observes the movement of his chest. He is breathing. She walks closer, bends down so she can see his eyes more clearly. They are open, and covered in black dust. She wipes them with the end of her sleeve, takes out the bottle and administers drops to each eye. One, two. One, two.

She touches the man’s face cautiously, to wipe off the soot, and then sits quite still, as still as him. Her
shoulders weighed down with troubles, she breathes, as always, to the same rhythm as the man.

The neighbor’s rasping cough travels through the silence of the gray dawn, turning the woman’s head toward the yellow and blue sky of the curtains. She stands up and goes to the window, crushing shards of glass beneath her feet. She looks for the neighbor through the holes in the curtains. A shrill cry bursts from her chest. She rushes to the door, and out into the passage. But the deafening sound of a tank freezes her in her tracks. Bewildered, she comes back. “The door … our door onto the street has been destroyed. The neighbor’s walls …” Her horrified voice is muffled by the roar of the tank. Her gaze travels once more around the room, stopping sharply at the window. She walks up to it, parts the curtains and gasps. “Not that! No, not that!”

The noise of the tank starts to fade; the neighbor’s coughing is heard again.

The woman collapses on the shards of glass. Eyes closed, voice muffled, she begs, “God … merciful God, I belong to …” A shot rings out. She is silent. A second shot. Then a man’s cry: “
Allah O Akbar!
” The tank fires. The explosion shakes the house and the woman.
She hurls herself to the ground, slithers to the door, makes it into the passage, and hurtles down the cellar stairs to her terrified daughters.

The man remains motionless. Impassive.

When the shots cease—a lack of ammunition, perhaps—the tank drives away. The thick, smoky silence returns and settles.

In this dusty stillness, at the foot of the wall between the two windows, a spider is prowling around the carcass of the fly discarded by the ants. Examining it. Then it too abandons the fly, takes a tour of the room, returns to the window, attaches itself to the curtain, climbs it, and crawls over the migrating birds frozen in the yellow and blue sky. It leaves the sky and climbs onto the ceiling, to disappear among the rotting beams, where it will spin its web, no doubt.

The woman reappears. Once again carrying the plastic basin, a towel, and a sheet. She cleans up. The shards
of glass, the soot that has spread all over the room, every thing. Then she leaves. Comes back. Pours sugar-salt solution into the drip bag, returns to her spot at the man’s side, and administers the bottle’s remaining eyedrops. One. She waits. Two. She stops. The bottle is empty. She leaves.

On the ceiling, the spider reappears. Hanging from the end of its silken thread, it moves slowly downward. Lands on the man’s chest. After a few moments’ hesitation it follows the sinuous lines of the sheet up toward his beard. Suspicious, it turns away and slips between the folds of fabric.

The woman returns. “There is going to be more fighting!” she announces, and walks purposefully toward the man. “I’m going to have to take you down into the cellar.” She pulls the tube out of his mouth, and wedges her hands under his armpits. Lifts him. Drags his scrawny body. Pulls him onto the kilim. Then stops. “I’m not strong enough …” She is desperate. “I’ll never manage to get you down the stairs.”

She drags him back onto the mattress. Reinserts the tube. Stands there for a moment, not moving. Upset
and out of breath, she stares down at him. “It would be better if a stray bullet just finished you off, once and for all!” she says finally. She stands up abruptly to draw the curtains, and storms out of the room.

The neighbor’s cough can be heard, ripping through the afternoon silence in the same way it racks her chest. She must be walking on the ruins of her home. Her slow, faltering steps wander through the garden, move closer to the house. Here is her broken shadow on the curtains’ migrating birds. She coughs and murmurs an inaudible name. She coughs. She waits. In vain. She moves off, murmurs the name again, and coughs. No response. She calls, she coughs. She is no longer waiting. No longer murmuring. She is humming something. Names, perhaps. Then she walks away. Far away. And returns. Her hum can still be heard, over the sound of the street. Over the sound of boots. The boots of men carrying weapons. The boots are running. Scattering. In order to hide somewhere—presumably behind the walls, in the rubble … and wait for the night.

The water bearer doesn’t come today. The boy doesn’t cross the road on his bicycle whistling the tune of
“
Laïli, Laïli, Laïli, djân, djân, djân, you have broken my heart
…”

Everyone is lying low. They are silent. Waiting.

Now night falls on the city, and the city falls into the drowsiness of fear.

But nobody shoots.

The woman comes into the room to check on the sugar-salt solution in the drip bag, and leaves again. Without a word.

The old neighbor is still coughing, still humming to herself. She is neither near nor far. She must be among the ruins of the wall that, so recently, separated the two houses.

A heavy, ominous sleep steals over the house, over all the houses, over the whole street, with the old neighbor’s hummed lament in the background, a lament that continues until she hears noise again, the noise of boots. She stops humming, but continues coughing.
“They’re coming back!” Her voice trembles in the vast blackness of the night.

The boots are near, now. Arriving. They chase away the old lady, enter the courtyard of the house, and keep coming. They come right up to the window. The barrel of a gun pokes through one of the shattered panes, pushing aside the curtains patterned with migrating birds. The butt breaks open the whole window. Three yelling men hurl themselves into the room. “Nobody move!” And nothing does move. One of them switches on a torch and points it at the motionless man, barking, “Stay where you are, or I’ll smash your head in!” He puts a booted foot on the man’s chest. The faces and the heads of the three men are hidden by black turbans. They surround the man, who continues to breathe slowly and silently. One of the three bends over him. “Shit, he’s got a tube in his mouth!” He pulls it out and yells, “Where’s your weapon?” The recumbent man continues to stare blankly at the ceiling, his gaze lost in the darkness where the spider may already have spun its web. “We’re talking to you!” screams the man holding the torch. “He’s fucked!” concludes the second man, crouching down to pull off the watch and the gold wedding ring. The third man rifles through the whole room—under the mattress and pillows, behind the plain green curtain,
under the kilim … “There’s nothing here!” he complains. “Go and check the other rooms!” orders the other, the first man, the one with the torch in his hand and his boot on the man’s chest. The other two obey. They disappear into the passage.

The one who is left lifts the sheet with the barrel of his gun, exposing the man’s body. Perturbed by its lifelessness, its total silence, he grinds the heel of his boot into the man’s chest. “What d’you think you’re looking at?” He waits for a groan. Nothing. No protest. Flustered, he tries again. “Do you hear me?” He scans the vacant face. Exasperated, he scolds, “Cut your tongue out, did they?” then snorts, “Already dead, are you?” Finally, he falls silent.

After a deep, angry breath, he grabs the man by the collar and lifts him up. The man’s pale and disturbing face scares him. He lets go and backs away, stopping in the doorway, unsettled. “Where are you, boys?” he grumbles from behind the strip of turban muffling his voice. He glances into the passage, dark as blackest night, and shouts, “Are you there?” His voice rings out in the emptiness. Like the man’s, his breathing becomes slow and deep. He walks back over to the man, to stare at him again. Something intrigues him, and distresses him. His torch sweeps over the motionless body, returning once more to the wide open eyes.
He kicks him gently on the shoulder with the tip of his boot. Still no reaction. Nothing. He swings his weapon into the man’s field of vision, then rests the barrel on his forehead and presses down. Nothing. Still nothing. He takes another deep breath, and goes back to the doorway. At last, he hears the others sniggering in one of the rooms. “What the fuck are they doing?” he grumbles, afraid. His two comrades come back laughing.

“What did you find?”

“Look!” says one of them, brandishing a bra. “He’s got a wife!”

“Yes, I know.”

“You know?”

“You moron, you took off his wedding ring, didn’t you?”

The second man drops the bra on the floor, joking with his mate: “She must have tiny tits!” But the man with the torch doesn’t laugh. He is thinking. “I’m sure I know him,” he mutters as he approaches the man. The other two follow.

“Who is it?”

“I don’t know his name.”

“Is he one of ours?”

“I think so.”

They remain standing, faces still hidden behind the strips of black turban.

“Did he speak?”

“No, he doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t move.”

One of the men kicks him.

“Hey, wake up!”

“Stop that, can’t you see his eyes are already open?”

“Did you finish him off?”

The man holding the torch shakes his head, and asks, “Where is his wife?”

“There’s no one in the house.”

Silence, again. A long silence in which everything is pulled into sync with the man’s breathing. Slow and heavy. At last one of the men cracks. “What shall we do, then? Get out of here?” No response.

They don’t move.

The old neighbor’s chant is heard again, interspersed with her rasping cough. “The madwoman’s back,” says one man. “Perhaps it’s his mother,” suggests the other. The third leaves the room via the window, and rushes up to the old woman. “Do you live here, Mother?” She hums, “I live here …” She coughs. “I live there …” She coughs. “I live wherever I like, with my daughter, with
the king, wherever I like … with my daughter, with the king …” She coughs. Again the man chases her away from the rubble of her own house, and returns. “She’s gone completely nuts!”