Читать книгу No Road to Paradise - Hassan Daoud - Страница 6

Chapter Two

What would go missing in my body: the answer to this puzzle would require another trip to the clinic, another session standing there facing the doctor behind his desk. One body part, I knew, would not be enough for him. And I knew that all the while he was running through the list of the pieces he would extract from my body, I would be feeling this news like successive little lumps in my throat, to be swallowed not once but again and again. He would stare into my face, that wide-open gaze piercing me. He would pause after every word he said as if he were waiting for me to consent to what he was going to do. Or he would be studying me intently, trying (in a very obvious way) to gauge how bad my qualms were, listening to me stumble uncertainly from one word to the next even though in reality I would have little choice in this matter. I would not really be able to say no to anything he suggested. Choosing death over living with a loss of some kind is an event we see only in films or read in novels now and then. Meaning, choosing certain death. I figured that no one who lived before our era could ever be as certain about when and how death would happen as I was now. Those people in the past whom we read about, people who had every reason to expect or even hope to die before long, still knew that a space of time separated them from death. For death was hidden. It lay in their bodies but they didn’t know exactly where it was. In the worst of circumstances they could believe that it might happen, or then again, it might not. It could come now or it could wait a year or even a few years. In those days they didn’t have doctors who studied images and documents and marked out for their patients—in centimeters, no less—exactly how much distance still remained between them and their deaths. My grandfather Sayyid Murtada went on for many months tossing between life and death. One day those around him would be saying, He will certainly be dead by evening. And then on the next day they would say, Well, he opened his eyes and called out to my Aunt Hasiba to fetch him a glass of water.

Curses on this life, how it stretches out! my grandfather would moan. And then after he had been wakeful and alert for two hours, he would ask her to bring him some food, perhaps it would give his body a little strength. Eat, brother, eat, this will give you strength, she would say, bringing a carefully filled spoon to his mouth.

Eat, eat . . . it will give you strength. This is what I say to my father and he obeys me, for the sake of that slight lingering spark of life, though the amount he eats is never enough to give him the strength even to raise himself off the couch where he has slumped or to utter a word, which goes on rising from his belly up to his throat like a bubble of spume that he can’t quite spit out. Eat, Father, this will make you well. Here, this bite will give you some strength. I say these things to him as I gaze into his face, which has gone so pale and wan, his skin as thin and dry and semi-transparent as parchment. I do no different when I start thinking about how this sickly paleness of his might go away, or at least stop getting worse, if only we would take him out every day into the sunshine for an hour or even half an hour. Staying inside alone like this will rot him, I say to my wife when I’ve finished feeding him and I come out of the room carrying his plate. She no longer even turns to me with that look that says: And so why don’t you take him into the sunshine, he’s your father, so go on now, take him out there.

Even when they lifted their rifles skyward, preparing to fire, my father strode forward toward them, his hand raised to slap whoever crossed his path first. Not even the sound of the bullets they began firing into the air diverted him. I stepped back, away from him—one step, and then another—as I tried to balance the fear that was sending me into retreat against my sense of shame at leaving him to go ahead on his own. When one of them put the megaphone to his mouth and started threatening us by saying that they were going to start shooting people, I leapt forward but only to grab him by the edges of his cloak to try yanking him back. But I couldn’t. I was afraid that I might only agitate him further; that any action I took would just encourage him to surge forward even more quickly, determined to shake off the hand that was trying to hold him back. When they lowered their rifles just enough that the mouths were level with our heads, I don’t know exactly how it happened but I let out a scream and began to retreat, now not just a step or two but enough strides that I separated myself completely from the group that still surrounded and followed him, those people who were not frightened by the thought that the soldiers were about to send their bullets roaring into real bodies and heads. I was afraid and ashamed of myself all at the same time. From back there—from where I was now, a distance apart from the last stragglers among those who were following him—that scream came out of me again but now it was addressed to all of them and not only to my father. They’ll get you with their bullets! I was shouting. They’re going to hit you! I don’t know if he heard me, over there in the masses of dust that rose from the ground as soon as he and his companions reached them and began to engage them head on. I could still see him amid the swirls of dust, his tall thin body looming over the others unnaturally as though he were getting as much height as possible in order to bring his hand down sharply onto one of the soldiers. As far as I could make out, they seemed to be in retreat, but they weren’t lowering their guns. In the instant when those few bullet shots resounded, producing general mayhem as more people pushed forward furiously toward the soldiers, I thought they had gotten him. Instead of heading directly over there, overcoming my fright, I began shouting again, calling on them to stop. They’ve killed him! They’ve killed him, I yelled over and over from where I stood, my fear now mingling with my anger at him and even a feeling of hatred. When the bullets stopped and the turmoil suddenly ceased, I saw him standing in between the two groups in an empty space. He stood alone, and motionless, shifting only those eyes of his as he stared at the ground in front of him. All the people around him were silent and still as well, as if they knew that only a short pause separated them from an encounter in which, they sensed, many of them would be killed.

This was not like shaking his cane in the faces of the card players or coming forward to slap a driver who had all but crushed a child to death. At times like that I would stand only slightly apart from him, waiting for him to finish his task. Indeed, as we walked away together after one of these incidents—companions, side by side—I would even have the feeling that together, the two of us, we had done what had to be done. But that time, in front of the soldiers with their rifles raised, it seemed to me that with every step forward he took, he was pushing me back, facing me with the prospect of plunging to that nadir I dreaded, the ultimate, lowest point of shame, fear, and ignominy.

That day I hated him. I hated the courage that had allowed him to transform his body—he was sixty years old at the time—into that of a young man, a body that could leap forward and jump high, oblivious to his turban and abaya and the prayer beads that never left his hand. At the same time, I was too abashed to go back and stand next to him in the moment when everything went still. It was the two men falling to the ground that had put a sudden halt to the clash between the two parties. He just stood there unmoving, staring at the two of them lying dead on the ground. Hovering there as if he wanted to prevent the men who crowded together a few steps away from coming any closer. He stood fixed in that pose for a long time. It made the soldiers nervous. They were already scared of what they had done. His silence kept everyone in a state of confusion and disarray, not knowing what to do with their anger, how to use it, or how to get rid of it.

I hated him and I hated that boldness of his that had caused the two men’s deaths. My first glimpse of the two men’s faces was in the newspaper a day or two later. They could not locate a photo for one of them anywhere in his family home. So the newspaper published a photo of him as a dead man. But the photographer snapped it only after they had lifted his head and chest off the ground to make it look as though he were sitting up, like his mate, who was there by his side but looking out from a different photograph.

The two of them had obeyed him so completely that they had left it to him to decide how far to go before stopping. And he went too far, stepping over the line that he should have kept them behind. But he—he—had saved himself by stopping at the last minute, the very edge beyond which any action would be reckless and foolhardy. He did not leave it to his anger or to his boldness to make that decision that would have led him to his own death. He knew he must stop here, at the limit beyond which the possibility that he would die became a certainty.

My son Ahmad grinned at me as he jabbed his finger at the white bandage wrapping his head. Then he pointed at my head and I realized that he was comparing his bandage to my wrapped turban, attempting to make a joke and suggesting that now he was just like me. As I gestured to ask him what was under the bandage, my wife said that one of the other lads had hit him with a rock and drawn blood. For his part, to show me his wound he raised both hands, wanting to slide the bandage off his head. No, no! I said, to stop him. I took his hand and steered him into my reception room so he could tell me how it had happened. My wife told me that the boys in the street were hostile and aggressive to him, and to his brother too. When I had him standing in front of my armchair, he used his hands and body to act out for me how the boys had kept him and his brother away because they didn’t want to include the two of them in their games. When they—he and his brother—went over to them the boys stopped them by waving their hands around and turning their backs to walk away all together without them. I thought of Jawdat, deaf like them and, like them, unable to speak. I remembered how my playmates had screamed into Jawdat’s ear, vying to see which one of them could get his voice into Jawdat’s head. After trying this out several times they invariably turned their backs and resumed their playing, keeping him out of their midst. Sometimes they insisted he stay a certain distance away; they measured that distance out by seeing how far the rocks they pelted him with would go.

The one who had hit Ahmad with the rock was much bigger—a head taller than Ahmad was. My son compressed his lips and turned his palms upward when I asked him if he knew who the boy’s father was. When I started pressing him to get answers to my questions, he answered with gestures that suggested the boy was very tall and liked to pick fights and always had a scowl on his face. My wife, who was standing near the door, inquired whether I was asking about the boy so that I could go and punish him. I turned to her as if to respond somehow, but then without saying anything—and she had paused there, waiting for me to speak—I turned back to my son Ahmad. I reached for the bandage on his head so that I could see the wound. It was hidden beneath his hair, and it hadn’t occurred to my wife to shave the area. No doubt she hadn’t made any effort to clean or disinfect it either.

He should have been taken to the doctor, I said, peering more closely at the wound.

I don’t have a car, I couldn’t take him.

And there’s no one around here who has a car?

She didn’t answer. I knew she would stare at my face for a few moments, from where she stood near the door, at an angle to me, and then would turn around to go into the kitchen.

Once again I asked him who the boy was and who his father was. And as he repeated the same gestures as before, interspersing them with repeated flourishes of his upturned palms to tell me he wasn’t sure, my younger son Ayman came in and began immediately to act out what had happened. He was more energetic about it than his brother had been, and he scowled dramatically as he acted out the way the stone shot from the hand of that tall boy and flew through the air to careen into his brother’s head.

Did you feel dizzy? Dizzy? I asked Ahmad, making motions as if to faint, moving as though I would drop to the floor.

He shook his head vehemently.

You, I said, pointing to Ayman, you know . . . . Then I completed my question about the boy’s father by making the same gestures. I had to appear concerned, and to question them with a sense of urgency, since that is what families do to make their children feel that they are able to protect them.

When Ayman understood what I was asking, his face took on a pensive expression, like he was trying to remember. To help him out and to show how concerned I was, I lowered my hands to my middle and pressed them in against my waist, trying to ask if the boy was fat or thin. Then I reverted to raising my hands over my head as his brother had done. In response to my insistence, little Ayman raised his hand to his head. His gestures said he would recognize the fellow from his thick disheveled hair, which he pictured for me by blowing air from his mouth while his hands circled rapidly and chaotically around his head.

That didn’t mean that I had really gotten Ayman to understand what I was asking. In fact, most often his movements were invented out of thin air because he wanted to convince us that he knew what question he was supposed to be answering. To make certain that I would believe him, he would give his gestures an extra volley of enthusiasm.

Looking in at us from the doorway, my wife said that most of the time the two of them played by themselves. I pictured them in my mind, standing together engrossed in their own silent play while several steps away, a group of boys made a racket with their shouts and their movements.

She stood there motionless next to the door, waiting for me to say something in response to her words. When I remained silent and kept my gaze on Ayman as if to tell him I was once again giving all my attention to what he was telling me, I heard her say, as she turned to go back to the kitchen, It’s not your concern. You’ve got other things to occupy you, after all.

It had not taken her long to get used to the idea of my being an invalid. The last time I had come home she had given no appearance of waiting expectantly for my return in order to hear from me what the doctor had said. And even with my illness she did not stop complaining. She did not stop making those half-obscure insinuations loaded with indirect meaning from which I was supposed to understand that she was still and always carrying around her fatigue, burdened by this life of hers. She could barely endure them, her life and her exhaustion, and yet despite it all she would have to go on bearing up, in the circumstances.

There is no school for them. Neither here nor in Sidon, I said, raising my voice so that she would hear me, even if she was already standing in the kitchen.

I noticed that I was constantly watching myself. I was studying me just like a man who has to keep close watch over another man. Out on the street, holding onto my sons, one in each hand, I would have appeared—to someone who might see me from the window of our house, for example—as a timid man. My gait would have told them as much: I looked as though I were trying to conceal or erase every step I took with the step that followed it. I had to drag my sons forward with me, to urge them to go faster, in order to make it clear to them that my intention was to punish the tall boy or at least to face his father directly and speak to him in a commanding, even ominous, voice.

Where were you when he hit you with the rock, where? I asked, illustrating my intention with what I hoped was a suitably threatening expression to go along with my words. We were in the middle of the wide square, about where I figured Ahmad had been when he was struck. I thought he hadn’t understood me, so I repeated my question and acted out the scene: the rock being thrown, sailing through the air to hit his head. But he just went on staring at me with that brooding, hooded gaze of his.

I started pressing for an answer, even though I was very aware that I wasn’t the kind of man who would take the issue to its logical conclusion anyway. From above, from the balcony of our house, which sat high on its stilts and was now behind us, we would have been a strange sight, standing out there in the middle of the square. Me, my back stooped as my hands grasped both boys firmly, and them balking, both of them, trying to stand their ground and making no response to the flailings of my hands or my expression as I brought my face down and very close to Ahmad’s. Here? From here? Is this where he threw it and hit you? I began asking, pointing across the square with a sweep of my arm. Here? Or there, was he over there? My finger now indicated the narrow lane at the end of the square. He made no answer, nor did his brother, who had been so full of zeal when we were still in the house. Ayman had understood his brother’s reluctance. Perhaps he knew, with that sort of tacit accord that they shared, that it was better for them to remain reticent.

I tugged on their arms and then I let them go so I could show them my fists, closed and taut. They would sense the strength there and not be afraid. Their fear upset me so much that now I really wanted them to lead me to this lad. I started dragging them over to where the houses began, forgetting—or not caring—how we would appear to anyone who happened to be observing us, especially if they were able to study our faces. Now the two of them walked obediently, complying doggedly with the fierce tug of my hands. When we reached the head of the lane I pointed to one of the houses and asked, Here? Is this the one? Turning to the house facing it, I repeated my words. Dragging them, I walked the entire length of the little street. My anger was growing as I turned from one façade to the next and pointed, again and again. It did occur to me, as furious as I was, that I would not know what to say if anyone opened their door and saw me like this, propelling my two sons along in front of their home.

Did you find him?

She had left the door open so that she could ask her question the instant I appeared at the top of the outside steps. I didn’t answer. My fury had tired me out because it had pulled me away from the person I was. Anyway, she didn’t say another word. She meant her contempt to just hang there in the air, an oblique presence, fleeting enough that I would not really even be able to respond.

It wasn’t that she was ignoring my illness or forgetting its presence. When I lingered in the doorway to the reception room she waved to the two boys to stay outside rather than going in with me. He wants to be alone, she muttered in a tight voice that they would not even have heard as she turned to shepherd them along in front of her to another room, away from me. No, it isn’t that she overlooked or forgot my sickness. The way I saw it, she had demoted my illness from the position it ought to have gone on occupying, there at the front of her brain, and had left it to find its own little corner in that confused and complicated mass of thoughts at the very bottom of her head.

Your father didn’t stop vomiting until mid-afternoon, she commented, this time not even coming near the doorway.

And now? Is he still vomiting?

Go and see for yourself.

The children, all three of them, were massed in that narrow space at the end of the corridor, leaving the door closed between him and them. I stopped there a moment to pinch Hiba’s cheek. She was sitting on her little chair, submitting to the slow advance of the large comb that Ayman was pulling through her hair.

I’m here, Father. I’ve come.

Everything around him looked clean. He sat slumped over, but his dishdasha wasn’t soiled and there was nothing on the floor directly in front of him. But I did catch a whiff of vomit that soap and water hadn’t succeeded in suppressing. When I bent over, wanting to get close to him, and brought my face near his, the residue of that odor got stronger.

We will change your dishdasha, Father, I said, keeping my eyes on his face as though I was waiting for him to agree.

He didn’t answer. That is, he didn’t make any of those usual responses of his that I understood and that told me what he wanted. He didn’t raise his head, for instance, even that minimal movement that let me know he was awake and had heard me and understood what I had just said. He kept his eyes lowered, fixed somberly on the fabric of his dishdasha where it covered his legs.

We’ll change the dishdasha . . . we’ll do that now, we’ll get you a clean dishdasha.

In his periods of alertness he would give his body an almost imperceptible shake, which meant that he was preparing himself for what I was about to do. This time, though, he remained exactly as he was, hands gripping the armrests, head bowed as though he were deep in thought or had fallen asleep sitting there.

This smell, we’ll get rid of it, I said, which was my way of declaring that we would do that but at the same time of asking—as I did with everything I said to him—whether he agreed.

We’ll bathe you right here, I said, twisting back to look at him as I was already turning to go out.

A few moments later I came back in, shutting the door behind me. The water is heating up, I said. Just a few more minutes and it will be hot. I didn’t know if he could smell his own vomit, but with his head bent like this it would be hard to escape that smell, hovering there around the lowest part of his chest. I wondered whether keeping his head bent so low was his way of announcing that he had decided to shut down all his senses, or at least to bolt the door against the possibility that anything might reach him by means of his senses.

Here’s the water. Hot water.

I set the little plastic tub down on the floor in front of him, as close as I could to where he sat. And we’ll keep the door closed, I said as I retraced my steps to shut it. When I came back, ready to take off his dishdasha, he jerked his head upward—so suddenly that it seemed as if this movement was unexpected even to him—and he looked straight at me. But seconds later, his expression seemed to say he regretted this moment of alertness. He shut his eyes again after seeming to glance momentarily at the objects nearest to him.

I’m going to lift you now. Help me to raise you up.

He was so light that it only took one hand to keep him lifted slightly off his seat. After I had brought his dishdasha up above his waist I sat him down again, his legs exposed. The bare skin attracted his attention. He stared at his legs. Maybe he was surprised by how pale they were or how thin they had become.

I took him unawares, too, telling him to lift his arms so that I could pull the dishdasha off him entirely, tugging it from his chest and over his head. He had shifted his eyes from his legs to my face, as if he had just recalled something he wanted to ask me. It lasted only a second or two before he lowered his gaze. His eyes remained fixed on the floor as if he were deep in thought.

With the loofa, I’m just going to wash you with the loofa, I said, rubbing soap onto it. He sat there naked, so very thin that I had the feeling it could not be only his flesh and skin that had shrunk and thinned but his bones as well. He kept his gaze there, on whatever it was he was thinking about, and he remained utterly motionless.

We mustn’t spill any water on your easy chair, I said as I rubbed his chest with the loofa. He was so gaunt that his chest looked hollowed out, giving his belly in contrast an even more pronounced roundness, like a little toy ball. As I moved the loofa to his arms and then down to his hands and fingers, I realized that before he had become ill and I had brought him to my home, I had never seen any part of his body, not his chest, not his back, not even his arms. Maybe they had always been like that, as sallow as the arms of a chronic, bedridden invalid.

The respite that separated what I was now from what I would be after the operation was not fixed. It wasn’t a specific period of time set by the doctor. He did not tell me to come back in a week, for example, or in a month or in two months. He left that to me. He left it to me to measure the distance between who I still was and the moment when my illness would kill me. As for what I could rely on to form my own estimation, that came down to my sense of the words he had used with me and his manner of speaking; how he had said those things to me, all of this preserved in my memory, word for word. According to that language of his—and that little smile, from which he could not erase a touch of the cunning that was a mark of his profession—I could see that he was leaving it to me to subtract a little from, or add a little to, the period of time before returning to the hospital, which I had figured could be a month.

A month: and I could lengthen it a little, letting it eat into the next month. That way, I could reason that I was getting a little more benefit from the remaining time I had in which I could still think of myself as physically whole. What the doctor in effect told me was: Just take a month for yourself. That was so that I could compensate, in that one month, for what I would no longer be capable of doing afterwards. We use the days that remain to us profitably when we truly know that we have to use them fully. That was the doctor’s thinking, I reckoned. From some film I had seen once, I remembered the doctor who told his patient he had six months left. So we will go to the Bahamas, the man responded, turning to his wife who was standing there next to him. He had already prepared himself for this, even before he fell ill, and certainly before he knew he would die. Maybe he smiled, there in front of the doctor, or his wife smiled. For they—she and her husband—would spend the time that remained to him in the best way possible.

As for me, I would spend this respite—this one month for me—wondering whether it would be better for me to go the next morning to the doctor and offer myself up to him then and there. Because I wouldn’t be able to shake off the feeling that what would take place a month from now would be better taking place right now. I thought this way because I wanted to be rid of the worry and the fear of it all, but also because I couldn’t help being curious. Those feelings pressed on me, insisting that what I wanted most was to find out what I would be like after it, were I to survive the operation. Were I not to die.

I knew I must guard against showing any hesitation or indecision in front of my wife: saying to her for instance that I would be going to the hospital the next day and then not going. Instead of telling her I’m going to the hospital and then she finds me back in the house only an hour later, I thought, I will put my hesitation to the test on my own. So here I am, turning the key in the ignition and backing away from our house. Here I am going all the way out of the village, leaving the last houses behind me as I reach the main road. But there my fear gets the better of me, putting an end to my indecision by telling me to stop the car. I turn it to head in the opposite direction and it carries me back to the house. There, my wife will not ask, Where were you? She is accustomed to my comings and goings, from one hamlet to the next.

My wavering over what decision to make was not the only thing sending me down to the car and out on those little trips from which I returned before they were completed. What pushed me even more was my restlessness and my sense of irritation with the house, an aversion to sitting there at home. It got so bad that, with every return, the moment I arrived I felt instantly how much I loathed it. Even from the outside, not just when I was indoors. I despised the faded, badly leaning outside wall that hid the balcony and the high windows looking directly down onto the square and the passersby below. When I came back from Najaf, this house was already prepared. My father had said that it was the appropriate house for me. All I had to do was to respond that it would suit me, as though I had chosen it myself. What pleased him wasn’t just the privacy of a house set high above the road and walled in, but also its proximity to the mosque. If people didn’t find me there, they would find me here. He knew I would not be like him, always moving about, circling through the villages.

Just over there is the shop, it is very close by, he said, as the two porters lowered my belongings from the truck. He strode toward the shop certain that I would follow him. Here’s where he is, he said as he waved his cane at the shop owner. He didn’t complete this gesture for the man; he didn’t announce to the shopkeeper that from today, I would be the imam of this little place. He came out and began walking me through the narrow lanes he knew.

As-salaamu alaykum, people murmured as we appeared, greeting us before we could greet them, as was proper; standing up as we drew near and remaining on their feet as we passed, while all he did was to raise his stick as if it was acting on his behalf, responding to their greetings. It was clear to me how, in all of his dealings with people, he didn’t think ahead. He made these hazardous judgments of his about what to do. On the day of the confrontation with the soldiers, this was what had led to the deaths of the two men.

I wasn’t capable of getting my voice to respond—Peace be upon you as well—on behalf of the two of us. I just lifted my hand to my chest and then to my head, once and then once more: the first time for myself, and then again for him. He wouldn’t have seen me doing it, because he would have already stridden ahead. When we walked together he always stayed a step ahead of me.

Many years passed before I could explain to myself what he had meant when he said those words to me in one of those moments when he was giving me advice. A person’s faith is not mature until he knows that people are no better than animals. He said this to me in the days when I was first standing behind the pulpit, my voice coming out weak and tentative as I faced the people seated in the Hussainiya. I couldn’t feel satisfied interpreting that saying of his simply as an expression of scorn for human beings. I went on turning it over in my mind, reflecting on its various aspects, now linking it to Sufi sayings, now thinking it must have been pronounced by some orthodox jurisprudent, now deciding it had to do with the demands placed on anyone wholly immersed in his faith. On those days when he would emerge from his room—there in his house—crossing beyond the paved area before the garden to go out to the road where he stood—just stood—with his back to the door in the wall, his demeanor would make it clear that he was not a man to return the greetings of any man who might walk by. Those passing by understood this, and so all they did was to mutter their salaams without even raising their eyes to his face.

This is your house. This is your house and it is exactly the right house for you, he said to me back then. And he took me around to the people here as though he needed to show me to them but there was no need to do anything more than that.

I did not say to him that I would have preferred to choose my own house, or that I wanted to get to know people on my own, now that I had become the imam of their mosque.

Ahlan, ahlan. Welcome to the Sayyid, she said as usual. But she sounded surprised.

I didn’t move. I stayed standing in the doorway as though I needed to ascertain for myself whether I ought to go in.

I’ve been wanting to see Bilal. So I thought I would come by and pick him up, and take him to our house.

Please, come in. Come in, Sayyid, she said, standing aside to make room for me to enter.

The instant I was inside I knew that she was alone. That made me hesitate but I kept walking, heading for my usual perch. She too sat down in her usual place, turning her face to me as she tugged her skirt down to cover her bare knees.

He went out with his schoolmates. If he had known you were coming . . . .

I didn’t say anything.

Coffee, Sayyid?

This time I did not glance at my watch. I didn’t make a point of looking as though I had to check on how much time I had.

But perhaps you were getting ready yourself to go out?

No . . . no . . . I’m here . . . I’m staying here, she said, getting up and straightening her skirt again.

She was on her way to the kitchen and I stole my usual glance, quickly at first, and then a second and slightly less fleeting look. Still, it was just a tiny glimpse. She wouldn’t turn back and see me do it, I was certain, even if by chance it occurred to her suddenly that there was something she wanted to say. I was confident of this because I had an inkling that she sensed it, falling on her, that look, there, trained on the expanse of bare leg which she had left uncovered.

From in there, and before she lit the flame under the coffeepot, she said something to me about Bilal. When I didn’t answer, she repeated it in a louder voice. He’s been getting his things ready for the past two days. He’s going to the camp with his mates.

Are they schoolmates?

She didn’t answer right away. Then she said that they were all in his year.

I thought about going in to where she was. About going into the kitchen. This time I will get up, I told myself, willing myself to pair the thought in my head with the movement of my body. To get up, exactly at the moment when it occurs to me to get up; to not stay as I am, only thinking about moving and instead staying absolutely still precisely where I am and waiting for her to return.

I got up. I had a strong urge to take these first few steps of mine, here, that she would hear. That she would hear as different, and then that she would see. She would see that I had really taken these steps. She would take her eyes off the coffeepot to see it. I did take those steps that, once they headed me in a certain direction, could not swerve or retreat. These steps of mine that resounded with all of the heaviness that was in me, mounting from my abaya and my turban and my beard, but not ending with this foolhardy venture of mine, an attempt to appear to her somehow differently, and as she had never known me.

To do something there, to employ my hands in some useful way, in whatever way they would help me out. But the cups were already there on the tray, and the coffeepot was on the burner. The sight of it stopped me at the doorway into the kitchen, a pause heavy with my own expectations, waiting for myself to say something, or to hear something.

Is anything upsetting you, Sayyid? She spoke without lifting her eyes from the coffeepot which she was monitoring closely.

This initiative on her part, which was meant to help me out, wasn’t coming this time from her strength, I thought. It was a response to the discomfiture we both felt—she and I alike—at how close I was standing to her.

The coffee has boiled, she said, but more as if she were talking to herself. She set the coffeepot down on the tray next to the cups; but then she paused as if she had to think about what she should do next.

I’ll carry it in, I said, taking a step forward.

No, no . . . , she said, her hands gripping the tray firmly as she turned toward me. Now I was the one who didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know whether it was better to step aside so that she could go by me, or to walk ahead into the sitting room to clear the way for her.

Ahlan wa-sahlan to the Sayyid, she said, striding forward and leaving me to follow her. She repeated her words of welcome as she bent to set the little tray down on the table between us. And I, who could understand that very ordinary welcome in any way I pleased, was thinking that my sitting here, this time, somehow must not be a copy of all my previous visits.

Are you upset about something, Sayyid? She had already sat down and was bringing the coffee tray closer.

For the second time she had substituted upset for afraid. What she should have repeated was that very first question of hers: Afraid . . . are you afraid? She looked at me, wanting to see, as well as to hear, how I would respond. What I would say about how upset and frustrated I was, and how it was my whole life that upset me, not just my feelings on this day that had driven me to her home so unexpectedly.

Upset . . .

I didn’t know how to answer, even though by phrasing her question in this way she had steered the conversation to where I wanted it to be. Now it was up to me to confess my feelings of weariness and frustration. That was exactly what I wanted to do and what I meant to do. Perhaps like nothing else, such a confession, or complaint, like this one could be a means to carry us away from our usual cautious and circumspect exchanges, which kept us so very far apart from each other, each in our own solitary space.

Upset, yes, and other things, I said, not knowing quite how to launch my quest for something that could form the beginning of a real conversation. I was immediately conscious that I hadn’t prepared anything to say to her. And, worse, that I was not capable of inventing anything. All a man like me could do was to try his best to come a little closer to her. To be less detached, only as far apart as the space that brings her hand close to his. That is, to begin from the place where I yearned to begin.

That’s what she was waiting for. I knew it from the way we were silent together. It was a silence that held the two of us in suspension, as if we had already surrendered to a certainty that what we were doing was going to lead us to something other than speech. I knew also that when she got to her feet after that spell of silence, holding her cup of coffee between her hands, she would go out of the room but only to reappear a moment later. She would be giving me another chance to make my attempt.

What I must begin with is her hand . . . or her hair. I could just put my hand up and brush it lightly against her hair. I could run my palm across the top of her head and downward the whole length of those evenly cut locks of hair.

She came back and sat down a little closer to me. But not so close that I could be certain of anything. It was as though she was letting me know that this first step, which meant shouldering the responsibility for whatever might arise from the recklessness of it, had to be mine.

She wanted to preserve the weight of the silence between us. She didn’t break it in order to say just anything. Only her hands moved, in synchrony, grasping the little coffee cup and raising it to her lips and then lowering it to sit motionless once again in her hands.

In that instant—the moment when caution collapses into risk—the pale skin of her hand and the bright red color she had painted her fingernails were what brought my hand closer. Desire, rather than a decision taken to go ahead. Desire. That was what pulled my hand to hers. I enclosed her hand in mine and our clasped hands dropped to hang halfway between us in that emptiness between us. I noticed how she turned her face to me, but I couldn’t tell if her expression and the tilt of her head meant she was annoyed or simply quizzical. But she kept her hand in mine, motionless and inert as though the force I had seen in her lived only in my fancy.

It only lasted a few seconds. Her hand slipped out of mine and encircled her coffee cup, which must have been empty by now. Her face, which should have told me something, displayed only that confusing smile that didn’t help me to understand anything, since it gave no explanations.

Had she wanted her hand in mine? Had she accepted this from me? Did she accept it but want to say that this was enough for one day? Had she left her hand to me out of pure embarrassment? Or was this just one of those signals women give that entice men at the same time they warn them off?

Even before she got up to look out the window, pausing before she opened it to let in some air, I already knew it would not be good for me to repeat what I had done just now. But at the heart of my confusion, spurring my questions, was the reality that she had let her hand rest quietly in mine for two seconds, or maybe three, or four or ten or more, it didn’t matter how many if I could feel that it had gone on long enough.

As I drove slowly down the road her smile came back to me—now reassuring, now one of acceptance, now sly. What would I do the next time; from what point would I start? I had no idea. What I did know is that whatever I did, I would not lead up to it with words. Silently I would come in. She would be just as silent as she fell back from the door to let me enter. In silence we would sit down on that sofa and after a short interval we would shift position, so that we were slightly closer to each other. Pondering all of this in the car, I realized that I had nothing at all to say to her. Not even a single word. It wasn’t a question of that sort of complimentary chitchat on her health, or about how Bilal was doing, but the other kind of speech, the kind of talk that lovers continuously prepare in their heads in anticipation that there will come a time when these words can be said.

I have nothing at all inside of me to say to her, I thought. Not one word. What I felt toward her as I sat there in my car was nothing more than my own desire for what I imagined the reaches of her body to be, those parts of it I had seen as well as those I hadn’t. To look at each different region of it, my eyes close; and to stroke it as though to confirm for myself that I had achieved that closeness for which I so yearned.

That was it. I was not expecting her to say the kind of words that I should then respond to appropriately in an exchange that would leave me looking at her with some sort of bemused contentment afterwards. The kind of words that force the eyes closed momentarily as though they have to let this dream waft through the mind without anything troubling or corrupting it. The sort of talk that, after hearing it, would give me no choice but to take her in my arms.

I knew that if I could say something, whispering it into her ear so that only she could hear, and something I really meant, it would be: I love every square centimeter of your body. Just exactly like that and nothing more, falling back on vocabulary I had memorized in my schooldays.

My car journey halfway over, as I got farther away from her house I found myself resisting the idea of going anywhere that was a part of the life I knew. Not to the house—not to my home—and not to the mosque where I was also expected to be. Not even to drive through the streets and alleys that I often resorted to in my car when I needed to get away from things. I did not want this dream I had had—or this victory of mine, as I saw it—to be interrupted by anything that was familiar from my everyday life. Still heading toward the house, I swiveled my head in both directions at every intersection as if I was trying to choose the one that would best satisfy my needs. I would move the steering wheel slightly but then as the car swerved I would straighten it out and continue on my way down the main road. Here . . . or here . . . no, here, I muttered as I proceeded on to another intersection, farther on down the road, where I might park my car just off the main thoroughfare if the spot seemed pleasant enough. There, still in sight of the main road, I would just sit in my car, still enjoying the sound of the moving air that I would go on hearing after shutting the engine off.

*

It was not as if I could forget my illness just because something else was filling my head. It would still be there, crouching in the same location inside my body, a mass of matter whose size I could only approximate vaguely by opening my fist and stretching my fingers as wide as they would go. The mass sat there at the bottom of my stomach, quiet sometimes but then growing bolder as though those tiny huddled organisms that made up this density were stirring, and simmering, and then boiling over as some organisms rushed ahead of the rest and brought it all erupting to the surface. When that happened I had to get up. I had to walk, pacing slowly in one direction, and then taking the same number of steps back. Or, when that effervescent struggle inside of me flared up until it became too bad to ignore, I went down to my car and sat inside as the tug-of-war intensified. I would stick the key into the ignition and turn it quickly as though I meant to stay ahead of the turmoil that all of this movement inside of me was creating.

For the sake of keeping myself in the race, I would have to be very quick. As the mass feels like it is ascending all the way to my head, making me dizzy, I try to treat it with my own imaginings that are also fighting each other. Into the midst of it I introduce, among the objects I’m imagining, those shiny little medical instruments that treat you and are supposed to cure you, as well as pills that are tiny but so powerful that surely what they contain must have an otherworldly origin.

Even though I had some sort of premonition that this disease would find me, it was still a surprise. No one among my clan had died of a disease at this age. My grandfather Sayyid Murtada lived so long that he could be heard exclaiming how everyone he knew had died. My uncle Sayyid Aqil was killed by old age and its infirmities, while my aunt Hasiba didn’t slow down at all even after she turned seventy. Every time he saw her approaching our home, my father would call out to her, Slow down! Slow down, Hasiba. You are seventy now! But the only thing that could kill her was one of those vehicles she used to climb into early in the morning to go out to one of the villages where she would spend several days in the homes of people she knew, doling out various fatwas she had memorized. Our venerable grandfather Sayyid Abd al-Husayn was the sage of his era, she would proclaim to her hosts. Or she would recite a fatwa handed down from some other ancestor of ours that went counter to what one of the senior religious authorities in Najaf had decreed—on the topic (for instance) of what was to be done in the case of a woman separating from her husband. They were all ancient, those people she invoked, but they went on living inside the stories she told about them and the things they had said that she passed on. I could not imagine them except as gray-haired figures stooped by the heaviness of their turbans. Alone among them all, I had been afflicted while still at this age. Surely it had happened to me because of my fear of illness. That fear, ever-present in my mind, made it seem as though I was beckoning the disease to come to me, or as though my unshakable foreboding that it lived in me kept it going until it really did become a real disease. Those who came before me, to the contrary, believed a man dies after he has aged. Their bodies believed them. And so their bodies obeyed them.

There are special schools for deaf children, she said.

One of the teachers here had told her so.

I know, I said, as I tossed my car keys down on the side table.

Have you known for a long time?

Everyone knows about them.

Why didn’t you say anything, if you knew about them?

Because the boys are still young.

What do you mean, young? Boys their age started school more than two years ago.

Schools for the deaf don’t take children that young, I told her. I was waiting until they got a bit older because I didn’t want to send them off, and all the way to Beirut, when they were as young as this. Every time I imagined getting them out of the car and taking out their belongings, I would feel such sympathy and misery that I couldn’t stand it. I could only imagine it as a scene of abandonment, with me leaving them alone and in the hands of someone who would not know how to treat them.

You just aren’t interested. Because you never have to listen to them, that shrieking all day long.

I found it odd that she called the sounds they made shrieking. As if the only significant thing about the sounds she heard coming out of her sons was how annoying they were and how they gave her such bad headaches.

Today again they had a fight with the boys. Ahmad came home crying.

Which boys?

The boys, she repeated, as though she had to remind me of what she had just said a second ago.

I mean, which ones, what boys?

I don’t know . . . all of the boys. She was standing in the doorway to the reception room, the threshold she never crossed except when she was bringing in the tray to set it down on the table, after which she always went out immediately.

The teacher said she would go with me, if I take them there, to the school for the deaf.

No, I will take them, I said, putting my hands down firmly on either side to lift myself up from the sofa. She knew this meant I was announcing that I was finished with the business at hand and that she must go out and leave me alone. But this time she did not go out. Not before saying—having raised her hand as if she were repeating an oath—that she was not going to leave the two of them like this any longer, in a state where they were not learning anything.

Out there in the kitchen she gave vent to her irritation and she made certain it was heard. The noises coming from there told me she was banging everything her hands picked up and slamming things around. The arrival of the two boys a few minutes later with their sister in tow just increased the loud fury of the show she was making.

Come! Come, now come, she began repeating as she pushed them all forward into the room where I sat. When she had made certain they were standing immediately in front of me, she clutched the doorknob and slammed the door shut.

The boys stood there staring at me. Their sister shifted her gaze from me to them as if she were waiting for something to happen, some action that must follow from the fact that they were all standing together in front of me like this. The two boys were also expecting something. Otherwise, why would their mother have pushed them so hard all the way in here, not letting go until they were standing directly in front of me? They looked afraid that I was going to call them to account. They seemed worried that their mother had denounced them to me for something they had done.

I didn’t want to prolong their nervous wait. I put my hand out to Ahmad, expecting him to respond likewise by shaking my hand. He did so and then I tried to give him some additional reassurance by smiling at him, inviting him to grin back at me. Hiba was looking from me to them and from them to me, not understanding what was going on. Where’s your doll? I asked her, as I reached out to clasp her empty hands. She didn’t answer. Instead, she turned to her brother Ahmad and looked up at him. The missing doll came into my head, with its soiled hands, its straw-like hair and its vacant smile.

Still the two boys stood there solemnly, waiting and wondering. For a moment I panicked, thinking I didn’t know how to chase away their wariness. I put out my hand to Ayman this time, aiming for his upper arm. I wanted to look like I was testing the strength of his muscles. He didn’t tighten them immediately as he usually did. He was waiting to see if my little game with him was genuine. He needed me to shake his arm not once but twice before he tightened the muscles just slightly. His face remained unchanged, both questioning and watching.

Finally, when I saw that they were still standing there stiffly even after I had stood up, I began thinking their mother must have done something to frighten them. I left them as they were, standing and waiting, and went to ask her, there in the tiny vestibule outside the two bedrooms.

Yes I spanked them, she said. For stealing.

Who did you spank?

The two boys.

The boys, stealing? Both of them?

Maybe Ahmad was pulling the wool over his brother’s eyes. But it was the two of them who took the household money.

And you spanked . . .?

I spanked both of them and locked them in their room, and I made them understand that you would discipline them when you got back.

What did they do with the money?

They didn’t even try to hide the chocolate bars they bought at the shop. They even gave their sister her share so she could eat half of it and then smear the front of her dress all the way down, with the other half. They stole, and they lied too, said their mother. They had told her that the shopkeeper gave them the chocolate bars without taking any money from them.

When I went back into the reception room where they were still standing, she followed me. I went in but she stopped in the doorway. I stared back at her to make her understand that I wanted to be alone with them. I felt a lot of sympathy for the boys. I could imagine them cradling the chocolate bars, carrying them as they walked across the square from the shop to the house. I felt even more sympathy for the misery of their situation when it dawned on me that their joint participation in this theft just showed how alone the two of them were, with no one making any effort to even come near them.

I put an appropriately serious expression on my face. But, trying to give them some advice, I couldn’t maintain my stern demeanor. The terror that Ahmad had tried to conceal was slowly revealing itself on his features. That reminded me of Jawdat, who always looked alarmed and scared. As boys, back then, we always used to say that when Jawdat laughed, it sounded like he was scared to death. It was that same look, terrified and silly all at once, that I was seeing on Ahmad’s face: the lips stretched wide but with no suggestion of a smile or even a question. I couldn’t make them understand what they needed to understand. That stealing was wrong. It was wrong and shameful and forbidden. It wasn’t that this was hard to explain with the usual hand and body movements, but rather that I couldn’t endure this scene any longer, seeing them holding themselves rigid like this, wary and frightened.