The Others (16 page)

I asked Dareen’s leave to give me some time to dry off and change my clothes, and she said she would do the same. I went into one of the bathroom cubicles adjoining the pool. I squatted, letting the heaviness of my body slump over my feet. I was a pair of legs pressed together, arms encircling them, my bowed head above. Like a clock pendulum, my body swung back and forth, back and forth.

In the film
Seven
, as Kevin Spacey is arranging murders that echo the seven deadly sins, he strips off the skin on his fingertips to rid himself of fingerprints. Without knowing for certain whether or not it was even painful, now I saw this as a truly appropriate punishment for Dai. More than a punishment: the only hell I could find that was truly worthy of her. I would skin those two hands that had moved across my body, strip her fingerprints from her, strip away the possibility of solidity, of always being there; strip away that soiling presence. Strip away any possibility of her passing across me, which meant the possibility of her very existence. I would banish her from me. If I did this, I would be free of her. If only I could do this.

I followed Dareen into the kitchen. We stood side by side in front of the basin and I began to wash the dishes in soapy water while she rinsed them. I don’t know exactly how we began talking. What I do know is that we were in high spirits. She was telling me about yesterday’s dreams, a mixture of fantasia and legend and action films. She had an appealing way of pronouncing her words; her
s
seemed always on the point of timid flight and her
r
sort of slithered across her tongue. She left a second’s silence after every sentence that deserved reflection, and then resumed with a little
Naam, naam
—Yes, oh yes—before she went on to the next thought. What also truly struck me was how vivid the scenery of her memory was. As she spoke, I seemed to have a movie opening before me, a film that offered me the entire stretch between her eyes and the very limits of human vision. It ushered me into the magical captivity of her remarkable screen, to the point where I was practically reacting to everything exactly as she had done, even though it was she, and not me, who had seen those images.

We awoke. When I say
we awoke
I mean it literally. We woke up from the bewitching trance of words, from the honey sweetness of dreams, to an electric shock that flew from her bare forearm to mine. We both caught our breath and stared, blinded by this touch, our senses, our breathing, stolen away. Staring through the window at some distant point, she whispered, I want to kiss you. I did not say a word. She took my hand, pulled me to a door that opened into a little room off the kitchen and slammed the door behind us, and suddenly we were in an intense kiss, our hands moving freely beyond our control, our breaths short and sharp. I kissed her and kissed her and kissed her, and I moved downward to her neck and then to her chest. I was in such frenzy that I could not be sure which one of us had asked and which one had given. She followed my lead, her body yielding, and the way she responded to my crazed kisses ground my nerves to nothing. She was so delicious that I didn’t take my lips away until I had used up every bit of air that I had stored away.
Yikhrab baytik
!
Jnnantiini
! I said in a sloppy voice. Go to hell! You’ve made me crazy! She laughed, the sound of it like a hot lick across me, pumping into my blood an unstoppably willful desire for more madness.

What spoiled our moment was an uproar outside. Dareen put her hand over my mouth and plastered her cheek to mine as she listened hard to the screaming. From the smell of the place, its stagnant feel and the dust, I figured that we were in a storage room: in the past five minutes, I had not noticed the surroundings. It was very small, so cramped that when Dareen had rushed onto me my back had crunched up against the metal shelves. I did up the buttons I had opened down her blouse, straightened my own blouse and patted at my hair, and then kissed her instead of saying
thank you
. She went out ahead of me. After making sure that no one was in the kitchen, she called me to come out. She laughed once more and it made me want her all over again.

Haifaa and Ashwaq are fighting.

About what?

They’re always like that. Give them a few minutes and they’ll calm down.

We went back to the sink. I noticed the barely perceptible
love bite
I had left above her breast. I told her to button her blouse over it and she said she didn’t care; her friend didn’t say no to things like this. Basically, their relationship was falling apart, and anyway, from the beginning it had been an open relationship.
She
had not made that rule, and it wasn’t the way she had wanted things to be, so now let her friend swallow the results of her own decisions. She let me know that, starting right now, she intended to see their relationship off to its final resting place. For the first time, I was hearing expressions like this:
open relationship
. And I suddenly understood why Dai had been treating me as if I were a child who had not learned her lessons yet, and she was the one who had taken on the task of teaching me!

Dai will kill me! I said.

Dareen’s face took on a different expression, shaded with regret.

It wasn’t your fault, I added.

Do you regret it?

No way!

Her face lit up again.

The shouting faded away gradually until all was quiet. She grabbed me mischievously and said, Come on. We tiptoed toward the room bordering the kitchen and pressed our ears against the door. We heard the sounds of crying, excuses and pleas, breaths sliced short by longing. We went back to our tasks in the kitchen. We got the dessert ready to go, served it onto plates and carried them on two trays to the sitting room where we had eaten our meal. She let everyone know that dessert was ready.

We all re-gathered. As Haifaa and Ashwaq showed their faces, Dareen and I both giggled, though we swallowed our laughter as quickly as we could. Dai had sat down beside me. She began to grill me about every moment I had spent in Dareen’s company. I answered her casually, with no show of concern, hoping to put her off track. Her finicky questions made me want to scream: the only thing she neglected to ask was the color of the sponge I had used to wash the dishes, and since she didn’t ask me about that I told her voluntarily. Dareen broke into our conversation with wicked smoothness, demanding my phone number. I began repeating the numbers but she was scrabbling around in her bag. She looked up at me and said, I don’t have any paper, and then got to her feet very quickly, before she could be waylaid by some offer of a piece or two of paper. She sat down squarely in front of us, leaning against Dai’s legs and putting her left hand in my lap. She handed me her pen so that I could write my number directly onto her skin. I could feel a coming storm: Dai would explode in anger at the very moment I would erupt in malicious satisfaction and Dareen would blow up in ecstasy.

As evening came, after prayer time, Husna brought out a massive tape recorder. She plugged it in, turned out the light, and tried out several tapes. I couldn’t make out what they were; I must not have heard any of them before. Almost everyone stood up and readied themselves to dance, swaying and bending as though they had to warm up their hips and heat up their appetites. This was surely a recurring ritual, I thought, but it was one in which I had no experience. At first it all looked quite abstract, but the dance steps quickly assumed a more shocking definition.

Just then, I had an image in my mind of Umar saying,
Here’s all you have to do—just let your spirit go, and free your body
. Or maybe it was the opposite, I’m not sure. Crazy Umar finds a philosophy for everything that makes whatever it is simple. I would never know whether these ideas were the product of original thinking, or mostly a matter of words carefully crafted in advance, or whether he was just making it up as he went along according to the needs of the moment. Or was this philosophy of his a truth bestowed on everyone, like the aphorisms of the famous medieval writer al-Jahiz, which people might encounter anytime? But since I am not someone who is particularly interested in staring at the middle of the road as she walks along, I don’t stumble over meaningful and awesome notions such as this.

Dai, who is jealous even of her suspicions about me, and who imagines the air as a creature with many hands, all of which are touching me, and who thinks of the sheets on my bed as a vast body that gives way to desire, had given me an odd image of her world, as if it were a world where everyone had gone completely mad, a world of rabid dogs rather than of humans. It is a mistaken image, perhaps—or maybe one that is accurate, yet hideous. My badly shaken confidence in Dai would not give me any definite answers, nor grant me the truth, nor confer on me the ability to offer such judgments. Caught between her hesitations and her inconclusive stance about my dancing, she would flaunt me proudly all the more, exhibiting what my body hid. This was exactly what made her step into the background, leaving my revealed body susceptible to the other girls and to the looks they sent my way. Caught between Dai and Dareen’s secret summons coming to me in ghostly forms through the darkness, I chose to dance. This was what I had never done in public, indeed what I had wished never to do, even covertly, except in submission to Dai’s commands.

I danced. I wished that the tambourine interlude would never come to a close, that I would never stop dancing, that the nighttime would never end. I yearned to spend myself entirely, to annihilate myself, to fade to nothing. I became as light as air. I was ethereal, and I did not want to return to my humanness, my solid and visible body, where the luminosity of my spirit was held captive, unable to emerge through its pores. There is no one who can hold onto the air, no one who can grab it by the wrist and refuse to let go, and I did not want anyone to hold onto me. My dancing was akin to pleasure’s fulfillment, which is also its loss. After it, you absolutely do not wish to wake up. It was a total, crystalline absence into otherness.

And then a different sort of music began, and Dai cornered me. She ruptured my wings and returned me to the wobbly, uncertain, gelatinous world, and I wanted so badly to cry, to cry and not stop.

Dai and I returned from our excursion quietly and safely. I sat apart, glued to the window, my eyes on the dusty street. Dai pulled me toward her, but I would not move. She placed her hand over mine; I pulled my hand away. She slid closer to my side, and I squeezed harder against the window. She shoved her hand between my thighs and I all but screamed at her. I hugged my bag and hunched my body into a ball, pushing Dai outside of it. Outside of me.

¹
Farm or plantation.

Always and forever, any kind of math had been my worst subject when it came to grades, and I was the dumbest of the students when it came to understanding it. Honestly, my mind turned instantly into a machine out of order whenever it came to math. With truly gigantic persistence and patience, my father tried to reformat my brain into compatibility with the requirements of mathematics, or at least to improve my ability to learn, but in vain.

It so happened that our neighbors’ daughter, who was in her second or third year at the university, was a mathematics student. My mother made an arrangement with her to take me on as a pupil, for a trifling fee to be paid at the end of each month. With an enormous sense of grateful obligation toward her, every school day afternoon my mother would nudge me out of the house and over to the neighbors’, where Balqis always gave me a warm welcome. Very soon, my grades were hiking above their usual level, and my eagerness to be at the neighbors’ shot upward, too. The amount of time I was spending in Balqis’s company would exceed the single hour agreed upon in advance, inching toward two hours or even three. My parents were delighted with the results, and viewed Balqis’s genius admiringly, praising her astonishing ability to tame and cow my stupidity into obedience.

Balqis might have been almost a decade older than I was. In my first year of middle school, I had already seen my friends reaching the stage of being women, their chests mounting and rounding enough that they concealed them beneath bras. I would catch them talking in a language of strange words about their secret blood. I was still a child most of whose companions had grown up, leaving her in the isolating company of her dolls.

I would hasten away from the odor carried by adolescents, because it sparked in me a disgust and aversion as nothing else in my life had ever done. Only the smell of Balqis bewitched me, capturing me in a mantilla of pure white expanse and goodness. She was an angel gliding, swaying, borne along on her pure wonderfulness. And I wanted to think of myself when I would be older smiling exactly as she did, and walking and talking just like her, dressing the same way and entering university as she had. I even wanted breasts exactly like hers. Naturally, back then, I did not think about all of this in such detail, but I saw in her a complete woman, utterly mature, and I wanted God to make me exactly like her. She was the only one who did not treat me like a little girl, and at the same time she did not demand of me that I be bigger or older than I was. She stayed—and allowed me to stay—on the edge of both childhood and adulthood, at a midpoint, and she was the only person who could do that for me, maneuver that edge without teetering and swaying.

I reached that moment. All of a sudden, on a heavy summer day, I felt as though I were melting and flowing. I panicked, a terrified girl huddling in the bathroom. Everything I knew about blood I had gleaned from the odd words I heard my girlfriends say about it, and basically what I had learned was the imperative of remaining utterly discreet. Had it been something proper to talk about, then my father would have talked about it, I figured. I did not know how else to think about it, or what to do. My relationship with my mother could not endure such a scandalous event as this. It was a relationship that had never been exactly bad, but neither had it ever been good or comfortable.