Читать книгу Alligator - Dima Alzayat - Страница 8

Under the bright lights the skin had turned a whitish gray. A bandage wrapped around the face kept the mouth closed and flattened the black hair, made the chin thick and shapeless and pushed the cheeks toward shut lids. Rolled towels beneath the head and neck lifted the shoulders slightly from the metal bed, and under the white sheet the big toes were strung together with twine.

I will do it myself, she had said. Haraam, haraam, the men had replied and she had laughed inches from their faces. And what is this? Is this not also sin? They had waited with her for the coroner’s van, had unlocked the room and shown her where the materials were kept. After they lifted and placed him on the table the eldest among them turned to her once more. Sister, let us prepare him. The rest shifted their eyes as she moved closer to the table, uncovered his face and asked them to leave.

Towels and sheets, white and folded, were stacked on the counter next to a plastic bucket and washcloths. She washed her hands in the sink and let the hot water run until her fingers became red and raw, the rough powdered soap granules burrowing beneath her nails. When she put the gloves on they were tight and pinched her damp skin and she pulled them off and set them on the counter. The hygiene mask stayed in its box and the incense stick stood unlit in its holder.

With a washcloth wrapped around her hand she lifted the half-filled bucket and turned toward the table where he lay. The skin to her looked coated in silver dust, like the ashes that remain after the burning of a great tree. Up we go. With her right hand at the nape of his neck she lifted his head and shoulders and with the left slowly and gently pressed down on his stomach, keeping cloth between fingers and skin. Several times she pressed and released, and without completely lifting the sheet wiped and cleaned between the legs in short, quick moves.

Hanna who is small

fell

in a well he got stung by wasps

poor Hanna

poor Hanna

how

did

you

fall?

Again at the counter she washed her hands and cleaned the bucket. Even with her back to him she could still see his face. The thin closed lids and the brown eyes she knew had to still be beneath them. If she stood without moving she could see him sit up on the steel table and swing his legs over its edge. He would look around and catch his image in the mirror on the wall. How funny I look, ya Zaynab. She gripped the counter to steady herself as warm water filled the bucket.

Where are you?

When she turned around he was still on his back, the brown eyes shut and the lips a pale violet. Look at us playing hide and seek, even now. She carried the bucket and a clean washcloth to the table and set them down, took her time wetting the cloth, dipping it into the bucket and squeezing it several times until there was nothing left to do but begin. She moved the sheet and looked at the hands once so small. Give me your hand, ya Hamoud. Cleaning now between the fingers of hands bigger than hers, moving from the smallest to the thumb.

this is Mr. Tall

and useless

this is the

labneh licker

and this is

the ring wearer

This is uncle

Abu Hatem

this is the

nit killer.

She wet the washcloth again and touched it to the forehead and slowly worked it over the eyes, the moisture clinging to thick lashes, and down the nose, her hand hesitating above the faded scar that began at the bridge and zigzagged down to the right and disappeared. He was three when he had fallen and she was nine and she had been chasing him up and down the hallway when he slipped on the black and white tiles and his giggles turned to wails. She had picked him up and held him as blood gushed from the wound between his eyes. He had clung on to her so tightly, had pulled on the skin of her neck as he cried, would not release her even when their father came running into the room.

Her eyes moved to the top of the head, the gauze that covered, concealed. We’ll clean it, the hospital nurse had said. She had wanted to say No, dizzied by the thought of more hands she did not know, touching and prodding and taking. Now, her eyes fixed on the cloth until she willed them to shift, to follow instead the washcloth she ran over each arm, right and then left, flattening the small hairs against the skin. Within seconds they began to dry and she watched them shrink back into curls. She looked at the hair on her own arms, not much lighter or finer, and a smile flashed across her face and disappeared. Neither one wanting to wait for the other, they used to stand side by side at the sink to make wudu before prayer, take turns running arms beneath the faucet, carrying with cupped hands water to wet their hair and clean their mouths and noses, their necks and ears.

She waited for her breath to steady before her hand again reached toward the bandage and this time worked around it, wiping the black hair that jutted out in thick locks. Hair that once was combed back and gelled, or let loose and framed the face, played against the skin. She held her hand still and inhaled, reached the cloth’s corner below the bandage and cleaned behind one ear and then the next, circled their grooves and ridges. Even now you tickle me, ya Zaynab. She could hear the low giggle that clambered in pitch and tumbled into a steady roll, the sounds coming closer together, the depth of the final laugh that allowed her to exhale. When she moved on to the feet, she put the cloth down and with her wet hands washed one foot at a time, reached between the toes, and massaged each sole.

The men should do this, they had insisted while waiting for the van to arrive.

And who are they to me, these men? Or to him?

Still they persisted. You will need more people. To lift and turn and wrap.

I have lifted him before, she had hissed. I will remember how to do it, inshallah.

The bucket again cleaned and re-filled, she dropped from her palm the ground lote leaves they had given her. She watched the green powder float on the water’s surface. Will you be dust now, ya Hamoud? She stood beside the table and looked at his face. When they were children he would sometimes lie still while they took turns playing surgeon and patient and whoever moved first when poked with plastic knives or tickled with cotton swabs would lose.

Let’s wash you.

Upper right side and then upper left, she knew, then bottom right and left. Head to toe. From his body the water trickled into the table’s grooved perimeter, ran down to the opening that drained into a second bucket placed there. She held her breath as she loosened the bandage and paused to watch the mouth. When she saw that the lips stayed closed, a sound left her own mouth, a sigh that escaped from the floor of her chest and burst the stillness of the room. She would not lift the bandage completely, would not with her hands touch where she knew the bones would give, where tissues and nerves like sponges would sink beneath her fingers. From the cloth she squeezed enough water to wet what hair was visible, from her palm dribbled more over the back of the head. Around the neck and over the shoulder she worked the cloth, across the chest and down to the navel. When she tilted him onto his left side so she could reach his back she was surprised at his weight and felt the muscles in her arms strain to keep him from slipping.

The last time she had picked him up he was ten and came only to her shoulders in height. Their father had not come home from work and their mother sat in the kitchen whispering into the telephone in between splintered sobs and breaths that dissolved in the cold air. She had found her brother on the living-room carpet, shaking. He had wet his pants and a silent panic had pinned him to the floor, would not let his body do anything but tremble like the final leaf on a winter tree. She hoisted him up, her arm around his waist, and asked him to walk. But his legs continued to quaver and she knew then he could not stand. In one move she lifted him and wrapped her arms around his legs. In the bathroom she undressed him and sat him in the bathtub, and only when she made the deep low sounds of a freight ship and splashed her hands like fish pirouetting out of the water did the shaking stop.

Keeping the sheet over his torso she reached beneath it, cloth wrapped around her fingers, and cleaned underneath and between the legs again, down the right leg to the toes and then the left. Thoughts of unknown hands that might have touched where she now did, their intentions different and beyond the things she knew, she forced from her mind. A strangeness remained in their place. She knew she would have to repeat it all. Three times, five times, nine. Until you smell like the seventh heaven, like Sidrat al-Muntaha itself. But with each repetition, her movements became less certain, and she glanced several times at the face in reminder as she wiped.

When she filled the bucket one last time, the colorless camphor dissolved in the water and released a smell that reminded her of mothballs and eucalyptus, of rosemary and berries. She removed the sheet still covering him and left only the small cloth spread from navel to knees. In the fluorescent light his bared body looked long and broad, and she thought of once-smaller hands she had cupped in hers, narrower shoulders she had held. From head to feet she poured the water and inhaled the scent that rose as it ran along the table’s gutter and splashed inside the plastic bucket.

I saw a butterfly with my eyes

flitting

it wasaround

me

I ran trying to catch it, but itescaped

from my hands.

Where is the butterfly?

It flew

away.

She unfolded one of the large towels and began to dry him. Gently she lifted his head, dried his hair one lock at a time, felt the water soak through the cotton and onto her hands. The skin of her fingertips had shriveled from so much water. They might never dry again, ya Hamoud.

The day they returned her father, with clenched fists her mother had beaten her own chest, pulled handfuls of hair from her scalp until the neighbors came. Her brother screamed for doctors until someone pulled him away. She was old enough to know that no doctors were needed, that what now lay in the courtyard, covered in burns and cuts and skin that curled back to reveal shredded muscle and blood clotted and congealed, was a body she no longer knew.

She stepped back and looked at the body before her now, clean and damp. She scanned for places she had missed, where she might again pour the water and run the cloth. At the sound of the door opening behind her she moved closer to the table before turning to see the same older man from before, the only one who had spoken to her. A younger man followed and between them they wheeled another table, smaller and without grooves. She stepped aside and stood silent as they positioned it next to where he lay, but when the younger one began to unfold the stacked shrouds, she drew closer, placed her hand on his and made it still. With eyes wide he pulled his hand away and stepped back, but when he opened his mouth to speak, the older man leaned toward him and whispered words that kept him quiet. Wallah, they don’t know what to make of this, ya Zaynab. She could hear the amused tone, the smile in the voice.

Two large sheets she unwrapped and placed, one atop the other, on the empty table. The smaller sheet she carried to where he lay and unfolded over his body as they watched. Her hands hesitated when the sheet reached his neck and she could not lift all of him at once, she knew. She drew back enough to allow the men to move to either side of her, her fists tightening at her sides when with gloved hands they reached for him. As they lifted him the neck gave way and the head tilted back and she pressed her feet to the concrete floor. After they lowered him onto the second table and the head again rested flat, the older man reached beneath the sheet and removed the cloth covering the thighs. The younger man gripped the sheet’s corners and began to pull it higher. She moved toward him. Stood close enough to feel the youthful swell of his belly protrude and recede with each breath, to make out the nose hairs that shivered as he drew air. Again the older man intervened, held the younger by the elbow and led him toward the door.

With the soil still new on her father’s grave, they had come for her brother. Men with masked faces and heavy boots who slapped her grandfather across the face and threatened to tear off her clothes as her mother watched. And like a good boy you sat so quietly. In the kitchen cupboard behind pots and jars and sacks of rice and flour. When they left they took her grandfather with them, and the blood drops from her mother’s nose spread like petals on the tiles.

She stood now at the counter mixing the sandalwood paste in a small bowl. Over and over she inhaled the scent and tried to keep her hands steady. You will smell like the earth, ya Hamoud, like a tree and its soil. Back where he lay, his face still uncovered, with her fingers she dabbed the paste onto his forehead and nose and rubbed it in, but still the brown tinted his pale skin. With his hand in hers she worked the paste into one palm and then the next, reached beneath the sheet and dabbed the knees, and then the feet. She wished it were her feet on the table, her legs, her body. Imagined his hands stained brown as he touched her forehead instead. But his face, as she imagined it, contorted in silent grief, pushed the thought from her mind.

The three of them had arrived in a new country seeking darkness, the quiet of unlit rooms and the absence of knocks. A place where names had no meaning. Together they searched for the missing pieces of their mother, the stories that had shed their words. Not knowing why, she felt relief when he grew taller and bigger than she was. When he was found in the early morning hours behind the shop where he worked, his skull opened and spilling blood that ran through the black hair and onto the asphalt, she had been the one to call for doctors.

I had a little bird.

I looked after him,

and when his feathers grew and he was big,

he started to peck my cheeks

Zik zik zik zik zeek

Gently now she bent the left arm so that the palm flattened against the chest, folded the right arm so that the right palm rested on the left. And this is how we pray, ya Hamoud. When he was six, she had taught him to bend and clasp his knees with his hands, to touch his forehead to the ground. Her parents laughed that he was too young, but she had spent years waiting for him to grow, to learn words and what they meant, so that she could show him things, teach him what she knew; the alphabet and how to ride a bike, the names of animals alive and extinct, the planets in the solar system and their moons. So when she stood beside him on the prayer rug and told him to move as she did, he did as he was told, touching hands to chest and then to knees, forehead touching the carpet and back up again. For years after he would only pray if she led.

She stood beneath the bright lights, her fingertips grazing the sheet’s edge. Her eyes traced the arc of his brows, the hairs that strayed from their place. She imagined what they looked like when he smiled, the way they drew together, and noticed for the first time the thin lines near his eyes. Whose eyes will see us now? Her mother, she knew, would never speak again. Her own words as she pulled the sheet above the mouth and then higher still were like boats with neither sails nor oars. After the sheets were wrapped around him, the center looped with ropes, the ends fastened, she stood with empty hands. Make me like a sandwich, ya Zaynab. She would have him lie on the bedsheet and roll him from one end to the other, and through the layers she could hear his giggles. If her mother or father was walking by, they laughed with them. Make sure he can breathe, ya Zaynab.