The Others (20 page)

This is my little lamb. Nadia.

Nadia?

Yes, Nadia.

Will you tell me about her?

We got to know each other when I was a teenager. I used to suffer from very difficult spells. I hated myself and my family and the world. She was the only one who kept our friendship going. Before this, I used to stay away from school a day or two every week. I got to the point where I had no patience with any day that she was not part of, and so I became more orderly and regular about my studies, and it seemed I had suddenly shaped up and gotten some sense. Yet, there was no end to my problems, no end to my anxieties, to my spells of unexplained crying. But she gave me something bright and glowing, something to make me worth something. She was my only friend—me, who had quarreled with everyone, and I pushed them into staying away from her.

Go on.

At that time, Nadia was the one friend I had a right to visit whenever I wanted, and sometimes without even getting permission. Since we were related, distantly related, and since we were classmates, I would visit her almost daily and spend long hours with her. We would get through our homework, and watch TV and play on the roof. Her brother spent his week in the University of Minerals and Petroleum housing in Dammam. In his room we found a place to amuse ourselves, and secrets to pounce on, and little things to trifle with. One time, we managed to stumble on the hidden key to a drawer that had always been shut in the face of our curiosity, but we were so disappointed to find nothing in it but a few tapes. We put one on and discovered what the secrecy was about. They were sex films. We were totally embarrassed. Each of us crouched in a corner hiding half her face, her eyes spying on the screen, but despite our shamefaced reactions, the way these stirred us up, and our longing to see whatever was there, pushed us to watch all of the tapes, one by one. Time after time, we found that the tapes we had watched had been replaced with new ones. So we got accustomed to our daily appointment with the films. We began to time their viewing to the hour that Nadia’s mother would leave the house, after her father had gone to sleep. Since we did not want to be discovered, we were careful to rewind the film to the frame where it had been when we started it.

Then what happened?

We did this a few times, but we were so afraid of the possibility that we would be discovered, or that her family would start getting suspicious about the way we holed up for hours in her brother’s room. So we started taking precautionary measures. Like, after secreting away one of the films, she would receive me in her home’s formal room, where the men usually sat. We would close and lock the door on the pretext that her brothers were used to coming in without announcing themselves and it would not be proper that they see my face uncovered. The last time—I mean, the last film we watched together, which was a Bruce Willis film—there was a short scene of two women exchanging kisses, then one of them tried to take off the other one’s clothes. That was all. It was a simple and quick scene, and there wasn’t even any real nudity in it.

She turned her eyes to me and said, Can you turn out the light? I did, and she put her head on my shoulder.

The darkness is another common feature in all of my stories, she said. She sighed, and then added, So we kissed each other. I did not know who had started it, or how that scene could stir us up so.

Were you disgusted?

No, never.

You didn’t feel any revulsion about what you were doing?

No, to the contrary, I felt fantastic, elated. My heart was beating massively, and I felt … I don’t know! Maybe I was just dizzy, maybe it was love, maybe I felt like suddenly I knew I had become a woman. An odd thing happened at that moment, some orientation on the map of my life changed, everything changed, the cells in my body changed! I felt as though I had already somehow prepared myself for that kiss, as if I was ready for it, as if it had simply been hidden in some secret place, as if … as if I had lived this before, like, in a previous life, and …

And what?

We did not know—what was this thing that we were making happen? What did it mean, to have such a large, such a flagrant explosion in your body? Why the doubting glances that one of us was always letting fly over the other’s body? What about our fingers, more firmly intertwined the faster our breathing got? We didn’t know, but we did continue, cautiously at first, and then completely abandoning ourselves. Every step led us on to the next, once her last sister had married and she had a room to herself. It was the most awesome thing that had ever happened, or that might ever happen, in my life. When I close my eyes, I can still breathe in her smell, and lift the locks of brown hair from her eyes, and whisper, Death, I love you to death!

So, what happened—how did you separate?

My engagement. I refused at first. I told her I did not need anyone else but her, as long as she was with me. She would answer, But I cannot offer you a soccer team of children! She convinced me. Life is just made up of a series of opportunities, and an opportunity that goes by will not come again. And then, she would argue, there is the fact that he is from a good family, and his principles and behavior are even better than they are, and he works for a bank. It is all very respectable, and his monthly salary is in five figures and he summers in green lands that I have never set foot in, and what being with him offers me is pretty amazing, and it is a lot … and all that stuff. Sometimes I would start believing that I had agreed to it only because she had been so insistent, only in order to please her and nothing more. The whole engagement, the whole thing, was facing me—the marriage contract signing and the dowry and the party and the dress and the drums beating and the huge hall. And Ali’s hands fastening on the
shabka
,
¹
and his hands putting the ring on my finger, and his hands fastening a watch and a gold link bracelet around my wrist, and his hands feeding me cake, and his hands holding juice for me to drink. All of those details looked like a game to me, or a day of fun at an amusement park, something cute and then it would be over. I did not imagine what I would have to go through, or what kinds of traps I would fall into.

Did you love him?

No. He was a good man. He had a big heart, but my heart was entirely with Nadia. Or, to be truthful about it, yes, I did love him as a person, it wasn’t easy not to love him at all, but—as a man? No. From the very first days we had together, she began to get jealous. She would go crazy if he stayed overnight at our house, and she would pelt me with a million phone calls. I was stupid, too, because I enjoyed how things looked on the surface: Nadia loves me and is jealous, how fabulous is this! But her jealousy turned into cords pulling on my wrist, and eyes always searching me out, and fights—she was always convinced that he was sleeping with me and that I was hiding the truth from her. My bad relationship with Nadia affected my relationship with Ali, too. Perhaps I was getting revenge through him. I did really make him suffer. At one moment I would be soft on him and sweet, desiring to make up for my mistakes toward him, but then at many other moments I would slam down the phone in his face for the tiniest slip and refuse his visit. He would be perfectly right not to ever forgive me.

So you separated from him?

Don’t be so delicate about it! Why don’t you say it straight out: we divorced. It was only a few months before Nadia dropped me completely. Everything had appeared to be ideal, had seemed to be going exactly as we had planned. We had been living in the same apartment, in the same room, and on two beds we had shoved together; we only used one coverlet. We were in Riyadh; she was studying sociology and I, art education, and we had just begun level four of our studies. At home, we curled up together day and night, and in the university we were together whenever possible. Everything was as ideal as could be! But after my engagement she changed. If I happened to run into her at the university, she would claim she was just running between lectures and would make a fast exit. If I called her between lectures she ignored the call, and at home she avoided me. One night she complained that I was stealing the coverlet and she used that excuse to bring another one, and thus little by little we were no longer splitting one bed between us. Then she stunned me by deciding to transfer, just like that, to the Women’s College of Nutritional and Agricultural Sciences in al-Milliz! I never could have imagined it. Finally, and in line with her recent sudden decisions, she decided to move to another residence. She complained about our apartment, grumbling that we lived in a prison, a cattle pen, a rabbit hole, a chicken coop—not a human habitation. She could not abide the sealed windows, and if it were not for the thin spaces between the wooden slats that separated us from the world, then we would not even have known that there was a world out there, a sun, streets and people. It was punishment enough to hear the insolent speech of the building supervisor and to put up with the bad behavior of the drivers! These were all she could come up with as excuses. She got what she wanted. My mother was not going to accept my moving to a new residence with an open system, its only rule being a curfew of 11 p.m. or thereabouts. I was not yet beyond my mother’s domain of authority, even if I was formally engaged.

By sometime in the next university term, Nadia had disappeared, and with her Hanan, who also lived in our residence. I did not need to hear very many whispered conversational asides to know where she had moved and who her mate there was. As determined as I had been to disbelieve and deny it, even if only to myself, I had become conscious that Nadia was prepping for something to happen between her and Hanan. Surely, she had not transferred to Hanan’s college or changed residence for any reason but to be closer to her. I wasn’t in denial just because Nadia was in the process of detaching herself from me and living in a state of crazy passion with another woman. No, it was also because she was letting go of her fervor about not wanting to be the first experience for any girl. With one glance, I could tell that Hanan was nothing more than a gullible, raw new recruit, who had not yet lived her life, and yet Nadia was insistent on chasing her and leading her to her bed. I don’t know whether she succeeded or not. After she spent one year at the agricultural college, I heard that she had withdrawn and had applied to the Institute of Administration. She would not have done that if her relationship had remained good with Hanan. Maybe she was infatuated with another girl and was seeking to please her! I felt that she had betrayed me. She abandoned me after bringing me into this world by sheer force of will. All I could feel toward her was heavy resentment and a longing for revenge. Her absence was a real blow, and it was frightening for me, too. I was depressed and I cried all the time, and for the most trivial reasons. Ali supported me without hesitation, without flagging, whenever I needed him. I cried in his arms a lot. He would say, If you don’t love me, if I don’t please you, if someone forced you to marry me, I release you from all responsibility, I can rid you of me if that is what you want. At that, my crying would just get worse and I would cling to him, saying, I love you, I love you, don’t leave me! By then, I had come to terms completely with the idea of marrying him. In fact, I thought it was a tremendous idea. I began to treat him lovingly and truly bring him into my heart, and I was tender and gentle with him. It was during this time that we made our first attempts to touch each other, little kisses … I would close my eyes so he wouldn’t sense my disgust.

What were you disgusted at?

Ali.

Ali!

Yes. Maybe you are thinking that he was bad, or dismal at the physical thing, or for instance, that he was ugly. But he was absolutely the opposite. Any other girl would dream of being loved by this man. Any other girl would vow her body and her life, and she would lay all her days at his feet. Any girl, any, but not me. I was not created for a man. I had a dread of his body. He assumed that when I closed my eyes it was supposed to signal that I enjoyed what he was doing. The more I tried to respond, the harder I tried to feel any pleasure from his body, the more nauseous I felt. Once I pushed him away from me and ran for the bathroom. I almost threw up. I felt so much shame and embarrassment, both with myself and with him, for degrading him so much. He did not deserve all the bad things I deluged him with, and so I asked him for a divorce. I know for certain that I did marry a truly lovely guy who had no anger toward anyone before he became attached to me, and I destroyed the vast hopes that he hung on our marriage. I did apologize to him. If I could have done anything more, I would have. I even considered telling him about my relationship with Nadia, and about the desires of my body, but I was afraid. I did not want to disfigure my image in his eyes any more than I already had.

So the two of you ended things without any problems?

My family objected and so did his. They tried to reconcile us but we were determined to keep absolutely silent. We had agreed to keep everything utterly to ourselves. In the end, everyone gave in, and the divorce happened.

You didn’t try to get Nadia back?

I tried, but with no success. At that point, she wasn’t even coming into town more than once a month. She did not answer my phone calls. I often heard about her; from our mutual friends, I got the details about how she had changed. She was acting completely blind to the world, leaving one relationship and throwing herself into another that was even worse. That was not the Nadia I had known, the one who was maybe kind of dumb and careless and chaotic but who was not deliberately self-destructive. I tried to restore our relationship from the point where she had broken it off. I tried at least to make her aware of what she was doing. I tried to show her how totally pointless this was, and how utterly she was destroying her life, but she kept me at a distance and went on throwing herself into those relationships of hers in a truly repugnant way. Her harshness toward me, the antipathy she showed, froze me in my steps as I tried to approach her in every way I could. For long moments I would feel the utmost hatred toward her. After all, she was the cause of what had happened, so why was she cutting me off, as if I were the criminal here! Finally, I had to tell myself very firmly that there was no use at all, this was what our relationship had come to.