Читать книгу The Clothesline Swing - Ahmad Danny Ramadan - Страница 9

Chapter 2

The Tale of the Lover Who Believed Himself an Adventurer

“There isn’t much time left,” you tell me; in your voice, there is a sense of urgency. “It’s okay. You did your best. We all know we’re going to die.”

I stare blankly into your eyes as I beat eggs in a little white bowl and watch the mix as it fuzzes. I always add a teaspoon or two of flour into my omelette. It makes it lovely and fluffy. The sun is coming softly from outside, the sweet, warming late-summer sun of Vancouver. The teapot is boiling on the stove, and I have already placed two tea bags in the dog-themed black and white mugs.

“Ah. I forgot to add salt to the eggs,” I respond. These conversations of impending death and doom excite you; they give you the feeling that you have a purpose. I am taking the final steps of my journey toward death, you must be thinking. Might as well enjoy the ride.

You rarely break our silent routine except to announce one of your gloomy remarks. You’ve always been a master of keeping your thoughts to yourself. You guard them protectively, like a dragon defending her eggs from the hands of the hungry Sinbad. You build walls of one-word answers, head shakes and dirty looks, and leave me to interpret them.

Am I in love with you, or with the voyage of discovering you? Am I addicted to the emotional puzzle you place before my heart? Have I filled all the missing pieces with accurate representations of you, or was I painting the missing colours from my own canvas? I guess I won’t have time to find out.

I’m annoyed, and you are aware of it. “Fuck,” you say, “you’ve lost your sense of humour.” You’ve always been the funny one.

“No. I just do not appreciate conversations about death while I’m preparing breakfast,” I say while pointing the spoon behind my back, where our constant guest sits at the table in his black cloak, wiggling his fork like a child, waiting for his share of the toast.

The older you got, the shorter our conversations got. We used to talk about gods and kings, songs and beautiful springs, and now we discuss breakfast items and pending deaths. As you got older, your emotional mess became overwhelming for you, as if you were a glass filled to the brim with drop after drop of vile water; now it’s pouring over the sides, slipping onto your tongue, and you spit it on me whenever it devastates you.

You weren’t always this locked in. You were the joy of your family, the youngest of your brothers, the last grape of the cluster. Everyone stood by you, surrounded you with love and attention. Your father would ask your brothers to share their candy with you, and your mother would favour you with the last piece of the cake. I wonder sometimes why you rarely talk to me the way you speak to your brothers and sisters; am I a disappointment to you? Would I be able to make you cake the way your mother did? Did I ever make you feel as special as your family did?

“It smells good,” you say from your side of the table, and I know you’re lying; you lost your sense of smell three years ago. “Back in my days in the Syrian army, freshly cooked eggs were so hard to come by. We would spend weeks, maybe months, before we got any eggs. Have I told you about that officer who investigated an egg theft incident in my unit?” I smile; my back is to you as I lean on the kitchen table, but you know I’m smiling.

“Oh, here we go again with those stories,” I say. “Yes. I even remember the punchline: We calculate everything in the Syrian Arabian Army, my comrades.” I imitate a deeper voice. “If you eat more than one egg per day, you will shit the second one.” We both laugh, then you cough; I look to see if you’re all right and then return to the eggs.

“The worst part was when the officer came by our post,” you say, returning to the story. “We were stationed on the Syrian–Jordanian border, you see, and we would get frequent visits from high-ranked officers. They came around hunting rabbits with military rifles while pretending to investigate smugglers. I was once in my underwear, sitting in the heated bunker room making tea when the officer just emerged through the door.”

“That sounds like the beginning of typical military-themed porn,” I say.

“Fuck you. The guy was an ugly sixty-eight-year-old fat man, I was nineteen.”

“Wow. You certainly have a type,” I say. It takes a second for you to figure out what I mean. You stand up, grabbing the back of a chair, walk slowly toward me, and while I’m elbow-deep in egg mix, olive oil and labneh, you place your hands around me and you print a kiss on the back of my t-shirt. “For me, you will be forever young,” you say.

You toy with my emotions. You take me into your darkness with a swift sentence, then pull me to your sunny light with a gesture. Like a fool, I follow. I’m hopelessly attached to your enigmatic love. The fact that I was your first lover remains a sign of danger that glows red in the corner of my mind—even now, after a million years together. I worry that I’m imprinting upon you. I worry that I’m stealing you from your destiny to meet someone else.

Did I fail you? Was I supposed to work harder, to make you happier? Was I supposed to let you slip away from my complex history and my own burdens? Maybe if I did, someone else might have brought you happiness I couldn’t. Maybe if I did, you wouldn’t be dying, tumbling away from me as we speak.

“You don’t have to bring me flowers,” you say at dinner. “To the grave, I mean.” The dim light of the late sunset is still evading the shadows of our house, slipping inside through the cracks of the windows. On the radio, an old jazz song is playing. I add some Arabian spices to yesterday’s Chinese leftovers and reheat them.

“Are we back to that topic?” I say, tired, sleepy, trying to eat my food in peace, not in the mood for another debate. Death abandons the table, answering phone calls from his agents around the world. “How many times do we need to have this conversation?” I say once again. You silently watch as my emotions get tangled on my face. I hold my tongue for a second, but a final statement escapes: “It’s pointless to talk to you sometimes.”

At night, you show your true colours. You take off your smile like a wet raincoat. Your morning cheerfulness is a beautiful nothing, like a counterfeit coin. You get trapped inside the darkness of your fate, lying helplessly in bed, waiting for a sleep that will never come. You start dreading that moment just before sundown, as the reality rushes faster to you that this will be another sleepless night. This will be another night when the pills and potions will be useless. I see you, like a vampire, metamorphosing into a dark creature greedy for attention and conflict. Your mood slips into the blackness of the night, just like the sun on the final lines of the horizon, changing colour from warm fuzzy orange to dark, gloomy blue.

Depending on the night, this is either the time of day when you and I get together and commiserate, or when I tell you a story that will silence the beast within you and allow us a steady stream of motion to a warm friendly bed, where another story sends you to a blissful sleep. These glorious nights, however, are numbered.

After an appropriate amount of sulkiness on my side, matched by an equivalent amount of bitterness on yours, I decide to test the waters and see which way this evening will go. “When we’re at odds,” I whisper from the other side of the table, “I feel like my life is a slightly tilted painting on a white wall. I can ignore the painting for a short while. But at one point I have to give in, reach out of my comfortable chair and adjust it.” In my hand rests a glass of whisky that I filled in a theatrical way moments ago.

Is that a crack of a smile I see on your lips? Will it be a night of peaceful dreamless sleep? I push further. “You’re my most valuable painting, my rebel against angles and lines. I can’t leave us in a moment of unbalanced anger.”

I don’t tell you, but although our fight started with your constant reminders of death during every meal, which are getting obnoxious, another reason why I never leave things tangled between the two of us is that I am too capable of seeing how Death occupies our future as he does chores around our house. What if I carried on a fight and woke up tomorrow without you? Since every moment between us could be our last, each moment has to be a grand finale.

“Have I ever told you about the morning I got lost when I was a child?” you say from across the table. I smile: yes, you have. “No, you haven’t. What happened?”

“I know what reminded me of it,” you smile. Your eyes brighten as you recall the distant memory. “It was all the talk about graves.”

You say that as if you’re not the one who brings all that talk to our dinner table.

You were eleven, maybe thirteen, when you woke up one day in a state of trance; you felt the need to explore the limits of the unknown world around you. It was a morning when your mind allowed you to wander as far as you could within the protected zone, the bubble your family surrounded you with. You had travelled within it far enough to reach its inner walls. Everything outside looked colourful and easily reached, and you wanted to pop the bubble and explore what lay beyond it.

You didn’t want to escape, like I did. You felt comfort in your kingdom, and you wanted to expand. Your family gave you the world. Your mother, who spent her nights giggling in her sleep, dreaming of ways to treat you better, always made your favourite meals on Mondays and Thursdays, foul b’zayt and mlokhieha. Your older brothers were there to teach you how to hunt for mice and how to care for cats, and where to buy the best meat for your mother’s kebbeh nayeh. Your aunt, married to a distant cousin, would come back from the deserts of Saudi Arabia carrying gifts for you: Nike shoes and toys that require batteries to work. She singled you out among all the youngsters of the family with that magnificent blue horse figure: it galloped upon a touch of a button, then neighed and snorted at the end of its race. The world around you was a safe haven. Damascus opened her arms to you, and you rushed to her embrace.

At the time, Syria was enjoying a change of course. The country was blooming economically after President Hafez al-Assad ended years of tense relations with the West and accepted an invitation to a peace conference with Israel. In the eighties, the lines at the government-subsidized markets had been long and tiring as the country ached under US-led sanctions, but now people stopped buying cheap rice and sugar that never sweetened their tea from the government, and started to buy imported goods. Your father’s factory, producing paper to print books on and to box gifts within, was profitable again. He returned from his long day at the office carrying apples, oranges and kenafieh from the Nabil Nafiseh sweetshop at the corner of Malki and Arnous streets. He even bought a car for your older brother, a 1961 Mercedes that roared across the street and scared the girls in hijabs as they left the Islamic school in Bab Sharki.

Damascus felt clean, soapy and filled with possibilities. The people shed their seven-year-old jackets with rotten elbows covered in fabric patches and managed to afford some new clothes. The shops in Hamidiyeh were filled again with children’s toys and decorated backgammon sets.

The farthest that you had explored was when your mother took you to Zanket el-Setat market. Women bought fabrics there to make their own dresses. The market was narrow and filled with tables outside the shops, making it even more crowded. Women pulled the hands of their children and powered through the crowds looking for their prized fabrics and the latest styles in hijabs and niqabs.

Your mother bumped into an older woman who she knew well. The old woman was carrying a lot of bags; she had blue eyes and a sweet smile. “This is Samira the tailor,” your mother explained. “She is the best in her business. She makes dresses for the rich wives of police officers and government officials.” You looked at the old woman as she walked away, and forgot her name instantly.

Your mother pulled your hand into a corner in that tight street, avoiding the eyes of the men bargaining and advertising, and slipped with you into a shop with a low door that she needed to lower her head to enter. Inside, on the walls and under a glass table, you saw women’s lingerie organized neatly according to size and colour. Your mother pointed to one of them; it flickered with gold and fake diamonds, and she asked for its price while your face turned red.

“Tomorrow, your woman will also buy herself stuff like this,” your mother whispered wickedly in your ear, a smile on her face. “Don’t be shy, son. This will be your marital right. Your woman will be the queen of all brides. She will wear all the gold in the world for you.”

You walked out of that shop knowing that you were a righteous king on the throne of your future. Damascus became your kingdom, and you wanted to explore it further.

That fateful morning the rain, generous back in those days before the drought, covered the old streets with a layer of sparkling water puddles and you wanted to jump in each one of them. The smell of jasmine around your old Damascene home was tickling your senses with sweet promises. The fountain in nearby Abaseen Square was still pouring water, and the yellow taxi cars—their paint cracking under the spring sun and giving layers of metal skin to the wind—roamed around it. The smell of the apple blossoms coming from Ghouta rode on the breeze and filled the hills of Damascus with an inviting fresh aroma. The giant Umayyad Sword statue in the middle of the city shone with the colours of the rainbow under the warm late-spring sun.

That morning, when your sense of escapade peaked, and you wanted to accomplish more on your own, you convinced your sister. “We need to go visit our grandfather’s grave,” you told her.

What made this enter your mind? You’re not sure. You were too young to give reasons for things you wanted to do. I would say that you wanted to relive the experience of the Ramadan feast. During the last Ramadan, your father took you in the early morning to the graveyard near your house, to visit your grandfather. The tradition of visiting the dead, wishing them a happy feast, is the gloomy opening to a long day of treats and cash gifts, followed by eating too many sweets and singing racist songs on a swing.

“Ali will never die, for his daughters are black and ugly like monkeys.” We sang those songs for the Ramadan feast, way before feasts forgot to visit Syria, unaware of how inappropriate they were.

You and your younger sister walked hand in hand in what you assumed was the right direction. When I heard the story for the first time, I knew you would get lost; you have a horrible sense of direction. You walked down the covered street of Medhat Basha, your nose stuffed with the smells of exotic spices from all the shops on both sides. Then you took a left toward Qanawat Street. Back then, the old men used to sit around and drink black tea while playing tawlieh; they swore at each other over a wrong turn of the dice, and each pulled puffs from his beloved arjileh. Each one of them brought his own, proud of the beautiful design of the arjileh he had bought. You and your sister walked by them, unaware that those old men would soon be replaced by thrift shops opening on the corner of every street. The thrift shop owners would spend their days shouting back and forth with old women buying cheap clothes for their sons and daughters, bickering over five Syrian pounds’ difference between the price she wants to pay and the money he wants to make. Those thrift shop owners were similarly unaware that soon they would be replaced by people protesting against the Syrian regime, carrying green flags and screaming their lungs out for freedom. The protesters were equally unaware that they would be replaced by soldiers carrying guns and swords, shooting people on sight.

Deep in the old streets of Damascus you walked; the streets were painted with the sweet light of early morning sun. Your sister shivered a little, but you have always been resilient to cold. The cold weather waved within your soul as you walked down that road. It brought fresh bursts of energy within you. You felt alive and all-knowing, like a god on his throne. Your smile broke into a grin when you saw the entrance to the old graveyard. It was the doorway into the forbidden, the far-away and the special. As you took your first step into the graveyard, you wondered for a second if someone would ask you and your sister if you should be there. Someone would tell you, “But it’s not the Ramadan feast yet, son,” and send you back to your parents.

No one stopped you as you entered the graveyard.

In the morning, these places lose their scare factor; they become quiet calm places, where the distant noise of cars passing feels muted. You walked on the right side of the graves, saying the Islamic salute to each one of them, like your father taught you. The tombstones were embedded with Quranic phrases and names of the bodies resting underneath. The tombstones in Damascus are always formal: they write your first and last names, the name of your father and the date of your death, followed by religious prayers. It feels impersonal and lonely.

But then comes Eid and people pour into the graveyards. They carry flowers and myrtles, and they gather around their loved ones’ tombstones. They tell the dead stories, follow up on the news of their loved ones, pray for them and read passages from the Quran. Fathers tell their sons stories about their dead grandfathers and exaggerate the details to fill the imaginations of the children with a glorious past.

“My grandfather had four wives,” your father told you upon your first visit to the graveyard, as you stood there listening intently. “He used to own a little piece of land on the outskirts of Ghouta, near Mashrou Dummar. He built a house over there, surrounded by gardens. He planted two trees of each fruit he loved so they could mate and reproduce.”

“He called it Noah’s Garden,” your father said, amused; in the background you heard the distant prayer of a crying woman.

Your great-grandfather’s wives used to gather in that garden, where their husband had built a pool. They loved each other, your father attested, and were close to each other like sisters. “They used to swim in the pool, all four of them surrounding my grandfather, bringing cherries, apples and figs for him to eat while he rested in the cool water, escaping the heat of August.” Your father explained that even while swimming in the water, his grandfather never took his white hat off. Your father assumed that he kept it to hide his receding hairline.

You realized, a bit too late, that you were drifting within your memories of your father’s stories and had lost your way in the graveyard as you walked aimlessly with your sister. Fear slipped into your eyes and your hand tightened upon your sister’s. Suddenly you freaked out. You realized that you had taken too big of a bite from the world; you were suffocating with it.

Your sister saw your tears and automatically she produced some of her own. You started running around, trying to find an exit. Instead of comforting her, you scanned your surroundings, looking for someone else to deal with her. You knew nothing of how to care for her, and instantly thought of your mother, who was always there to carry your sister on her lap and bounce her until she calmed down. By then your sister was crying loudly. Her weeping was heard across the graveyard. The tombstones were towering over you both. You saw them as towers denying your view of others who might come to your rescue while she imagined them as monsters that would devour her. The thought drove her to a hysterical cry.

Suddenly an old man appeared behind one of the tombstones; he was wearing a white shirt and a little white hat. You approached him, and something familiar about his long face, big white moustache and black-framed reading glasses made you feel comfortable and safe around him.

“Uncle, please tell me, where is al-Bezorieh?” you asked him, and he smiled.

“It’s far. It’s far away.”

Your little hearts dropped to the ground, but while your sister started to cry out loud, you remained calm, if only on the outside. “We want to go to school, Uncle, take us to school, please.”

The man walked and gestured for you to follow him; among the graves he peacefully floated, touching each one, saying al-salamualykum to all of them. He spoke to them as if they were old friends, long missed. You both followed him, trusting his knowledge. In seconds, you found yourselves at the doors of the graveyard. “You go down this road,” he pointed with his finger, shaky and bony, “and you will find yourselves in familiar places.”

Late to school, you started to run, but you gave a final look behind your back and the old man was nowhere to be found.

“I miss Damascus,” you tell me and I detect your change of mood; I’m losing you to the darkness once more. Death has decided to join us again, as we roam the house in a rhythmic act of final moments. He helps us turn off the lights and make sure the fire of the stove is not left aflame. You and I continue our conversations as we dance that early evening dance. I pass by the yellow carpet, and you turn off the lanterns in the seating area. I pass by the kitchen, while you take your medicines in the bathroom. The dogs, old like us, attempt to follow us at first, then sit down in a corner, pile up and sleep.

“You miss your Damascus; I have been telling you that it’s gone for years now.” I remember having this same conversation three weeks ago. “The Damascus you know, where grandfathers come back from the afterlife, the one where jasmine grows on beautiful red-haired women’s balconies, and where we met, has been devoured by the war.”

I exit the room and I find you standing, depressed, in the hallway. I realize that I pushed you further down the rabbit hole of memories. “You will keep it alive,” I say as I come to your rescue and hold you closer. “We will keep it alive together.”

Death, from a corner, smirks before examining the ears of the sleeping dogs. It’s not their time just yet.

As you enter the bed, and before you turn off the light, you welcome the cold sheets on your body and then turn to me. “Will you bring flowers?” you say. “To my grave?”

“No. I will bring my stories,” I say, and you adjust your head on my shoulder. Before you ask, I begin telling you a story. Like the sultan, you know your wishes for entertainment are my command. “Once upon a time there was a man who went far away from his beloved land, and when he returned, everything was changed.”

In the name of Allah, the merciful! One! Two! Three! Four! Five!

He was still half-asleep when they broke down his door and entered his room. He didn’t move from his bed as they searched his apartment; he honestly believed that he was dreaming. They ignored him as he sat on his bed, scratching his head with his fingernails, trying to understand what was going on around him. He did not try to resist them until they grabbed him and started to pull him through the door. He saw them climbing the stairs to the roof of his little house. He used to carry canvases up to his rooftop, where he had turned a small, abandoned room into a studio. He used to close the black curtains and work in his small studio until the early hours. He realized that this was not a dream when the reality sat upon him that one of them was carrying a bluish painting under his armpit, and the sweaty armpit was mixing the colours, adding an artistic touch to an unfinished work.

As he was pushed inside the trunk of a car, witnessed by women in scarves wallowing on balconies, the morning sun was still at ease, but its rays promised a long, hot day.

Six! Seven! Eight! Nine!

When he arrived at the police station, he couldn’t tell what they were arresting him for. He never showed his paintings to anyone, so he knew they must have come to his house for a different reason. He tried to understand their problem, and what led them to this anger. He tried to grasp his mistake; he knew that he must have made some sort of a mistake. He was afraid and he started to recall the events of the previous week, only to find it uneventful. He might have offended a member of the royal family unintentionally; maybe he cut one of them off while he was driving his car. He squeezed his thoughts and tried to remember, but his efforts were in vain. I knew this car would lead me to a catastrophe one day, he thought. He knew his ability to drive was laughable, but sometimes he would just jump in his car and drive as fast as he could. It allowed him the sense of escape that he always longed for, allowed him to feel that he was in total control of his life, and maybe also his death.

When the investigator entered the room carrying one of his paintings, he knew that whatever the original reason they came for his arrest, that was no longer the problem.

Ten! Eleven! Twelve!

He didn’t know that after they delivered him to prison, they spent some time talking about his paintings, about the naked women drawn in the strangest positions, while calling for Allah’s mercy because they glimpsed these paintings while they were arresting him.

He knew better than to draw the women’s faces; he wanted to protect the identities of his muses. The men could see that he had mangled the faces of all the women in the paintings. The eyes were the hardest part; they were full of hopes and dreams. They had demands and aspirations. While painting those women from memory, he painted their faces in full and then used a small brush to mute the eyes, the noses and the significant facial features.

A week or two later, the police storage officer was doing inventory in his facility when he realized that all of the paintings were missing but one. He stood there, puzzled by the disappearance of the paintings, and took another look at his papers. There were supposed to be seventeen paintings in here!

The officer took a step away, preparing in his head the list of paperwork he had to fill out, but then flipped the painting around to take a look at it.

The painting portrayed a young naked girl from the back, standing inside a house, gazing from the cracks in of a closed wooden window to the world outside. The officer gazed as well; his eyes were eating the well-drawn corners of her full buttocks and her naked back, drawn like the stretch of a violin.

As he headed back to his little office, the officer had the painting hiding under his shirt. When he was in the safety of his office, he pulled it out, opened the lower drawer and encased it inside, before locking it with a key. He had his key inside his pocket as he headed toward the makeshift kitchen in the storage area to make some tea.

Thirteen! Fourteen! Fifteen! Sixteen! Seventeen!

The artist’s lawyer slipped him the ointment underneath the table, so the police guard wouldn’t see it. He told the artist that he would be deported the next day. The artist didn’t understand why and asked the lawyer if he could keep his job. “You got fired,” the lawyer explained. “Your boss fired you when he heard about the paintings.” The lawyer said that someone had reported him for reckless driving, but when the police found the paintings they decided to jail him for his indecency. Without his job, he didn’t have grounds for a working visa anymore, and he would be deported.

He gazed for a second at the ointment in his hand before he slipped it into his underwear. He thanked the lawyer before he headed back to his prison cell.

In his way back, as the door to the prison cell opened for mere seconds, the eyes of the other prisoners gazed at the small circles of light that entered the darkened room. The door closed, leaving them without a hope of light, and he searched with closed eyes for an empty spot on the floor until he found one.

He slipped his tired body on the floor; the cold, moist stone floor felt nice on his back, easing the burning he felt there. The smell of shit and vomit filled his nose for a second, oozing from the bucket in the corner of the cell, but he ignored it. The smell gradually became familiar, before it disappeared into the back of his mind.

He felt the heavy breathing of the many prisoners on his forehead. A week ago, when he came to this place for the first time, he had feared the other prisoners. Rapists, thieves and murderers were gathered in one room, and he was a weakened man. He tried to hold his urge to piss for so long, shying away from their gazes, knowing that the only release he had would go into that bucket. Then the call of nature overwhelmed him and he had to walk slowly to the bucket, avoiding eye contact with anyone, and relieve himself. The smell that exploded on his face made him dizzy and he almost fell to his knees.

Eyes wide open, he turned around looking at the other prisoners, waiting for a rapist to grab him or a gang to kill him. Instead, he saw them avoiding his eye contact, looking in different directions. He suddenly realized that they feel equally naked, and that he was safer in here than outside, in the hands of the guards.

He was on his back, and he could feel the pain there. It felt like a V-shaped burn rotting away on his back. He imagined it as a bird, carrying him away from this place, taking him back to his homeland. Out of nowhere, a hand reached for his chest, causing him to jump back in agony, but his eyes, now capable of seeing in the dark, managed to see a young boy, fifteen or sixteen. The face of the boy was covered in dry blood, and it seemed that his nose had been long broken. The artist smiled a weak smile and got closer to the boy, allowing him to touch his chest once more; the boy rested his head there, wet drops of tears raining endlessly.

Eighteen! Nineteen! Twenty! Twenty-one! Twenty-two!

He was hoping that Amal would be waiting for him in the airport, but she wasn’t. Only Abdul-Salam, his high school friend, and Bassem, his brother, were there. He looked them in the eyes, and didn’t ask, and they didn’t try to explain.

He returned with them to his old house, where his mother welcomed him with kisses. Her eyes were teary and her heart was skipping a beat as she pulled him closer and gave him a hug. She smiled at him and stepped back to allow him to reach his father’s wheelchair. He approached his father without speaking a word, and kissed his father’s fingers in a respectful gesture. The father, however, looked away before demanding Bassem come and take him to his bedroom, closing the door behind them with a slam that sounded like a bullet.

Twenty-three! Twenty-four! Twenty-five!

The artist woke up frightened in his old room and looked around to make sure he was in his family’s home. He jumped off his bed, but that made him dizzy. He opened the curtains, allowing his homeland’s warm, calm sun to enter the room, and he felt it like warm water spilled over his body. He smiled and scratched his chest with his fingers. He took a step back and looked at his reflection in the mirror before he started to take off his brother’s pajamas and put on the same outfit he was wearing yesterday.

His mother entered the room, unannounced, while he was still in his underwear, and she gasped in surprise, commanding him to stop what he was doing this very minute. She left the room and came back with a set of clean, shiny clothes. She started to help him put them on, just like when he was a child still learning how to button his shirt.

He felt serenity that he hadn’t felt in ages, and he tilted his mother’s head to his chest and printed a kiss on her forehead before going outside with her.

As he entered the living room, he saw all of his family members sitting there: his father, brother and his widowed sister’s daughters. He felt their eyes examining him, so he avoided their gazes and reached for the landline, calling the embassy to ask for his stuff, which they had promised to send to him. When the phone went on ringing without an answer, he remembered that today was one of the glorious national holidays, celebrating a revolution of the past.

Twenty-six! Twenty-seven! Twenty-eight! Twenty-nine! Thirty!

He tried to reach Amal on the cell phone that he had sent her on her last birthday, but he couldn’t reach her. He remembered asking her to put a ringtone especially for him on her new mobile: “Kiss,” by Prince. He didn’t know its lyrics exactly, but he had seen it once on a TV show, and the TV presenter translated the lyrics, providing him with a vivid lyrical memory of the whole song. He could imagine her shiny new phone, asking for a simple kiss from the love of his life, over and over.

When she didn’t pick up, he knew he had to call her mother.

The old lady picked up the phone, but she wasn’t the carrier of good news. Amal had left the house and escaped with a lover days ago. The old mother was in shock when it happened, slapping her face repeatedly and crying the name of her daughter time and time again; but now, she had come to peace with the news, after speaking about it seven thousand times to seven thousand different female neighbours. She told him that Amal had taken all the money he used to send her for their wedding and escaped with Saad, who was barely twenty-one years of age.

He wished the mother well and hung up the phone before he started laughing hard.

Thirty-one! Thirty-two! Thirty-three! Thirty-four!

He opened his old painting case, pulled some white paper from the drawer and started to unleash the colours from their little prisons. He tried to speak to the colours the way he used to, and he tried to imagine each one of them stretching out perfectly over the white paper, drawing a new naked body aching for freedom.

After an hour, he lost hope; he had just splashed his colours on the painting, creating a faceless figure of colours.

His back was acting up again, so he went to his parents’ room, knocked softly on the door and opened it. From the small crack he managed to see his sleeping father and his mother sitting on a chair, giving him her back, gazing out of a wooden window with her hands touching softly in her lap.

He murmured her name and she woke up, as if coming out of a coma, and followed him to his room, where he took off his shirt and she grabbed the ointment.

Thirty-five! Thirty-six! Thirty-seven! Thirty-eight! Thirty-nine!

While his mother was placing the ointment softly on the burning wounds on his back, his mind wandered, against his will, to the moment when they took off his shirt in the middle of the desert. There were two men witnessing him sitting on his knees and begging for mercy, while a judge was standing apart. “For your crimes against the decency of society, you’re sentenced to forty lashes,” the judge said. “May Allah have mercy on you.”

A man wearing a black mask held the whip high, praised Allah the merciful, and started counting.

Forty!

“You slept?” I say, whispering.

…

“Are you awake?” in the quietest range of voice I can possibly produce.

…

“I love you,” I say, not expecting an answer.

“I love you too.” Your voice comes from a land within a dream.