The Others (23 page)

Molotov missiles, Molotov cocktails—as if it were all a question of cocktails. In a distant memory Hassan had talked to me about all of this, but as usual I was losing my way on history’s roads and forgetting where we were. As soon as I returned home that day, I got onto the Internet and typed onto the search engine
Qatif 1400
. Most of the sites were unavailable. From the half-paragraphs that the summaries offer on the search page, I could not make out any useful elaboration or find a word that would lead me to other search threads. When the search took me to History of Qatif I read about Ashtarte, goddess of fertility and love; Tarut, the oldest human settlement site ever; the Kingdom of the Sea, from which emerged the Chaldeans, Assyrians, Babylonians, Hittites, and Phoenicians, and which was overrun by, in succession, the Accadians, the Babylonians again, Kassites, Assyrians, then Nebuchadnezzar, the Persians, the tribes of ‘Abd al-Qays and thence the Islamic state, and on to Umayyads, Kharijites, Abbasids, Carmathians, the Uyuni dynasty, the Portuguese, and the Ottoman Turks, until finally it became the district of Qatif in the Kingdom, an oasis in the eastern Arabian peninsula. Even the celebrated ancient Arab poet Imru’l-Qays plucked and harvested from Qatif (whose name suggests plucking the choicest morsels) this vast oasis! Dareen did not believe it, but that poet declared,
Here: we are two strangers, here
…

I did not come to know Qatif until the city began to fill in the waters of the sea. Since then I have turned my back to Qatif as I face the water, while behind me emerge streets and quarters and whole districts. I guide Umar on the map I found by chance on a website maintained by one of the consulates. I attempt to introduce him to the city that he has never visited, and he asks me doubtfully, Will I really be thrown out of Qatif if I try to go there?

They know you, I answer. They would recognize you by the particular kind of band that holds your headcloth in place, or by your tiny goatee, that
saksuka
you wear, and they will kick you out in the worst way. And then I laugh, I go on laughing, and he responds, agitated and embarrassed, calling me
stupid
! I mean, after all, he says, I am a Sunni. Then I feel guilty about mocking his question, so I answer him with a soothing proverb. Come, for if the world has not made room for you, loving eyes will. I point to the map: Look, here is where this is, and here is that, and here … He interrupts me, But where is your house? But I cannot find that spot anywhere on the map.

It gives me a momentary fear. Dareen preoccupies and disquiets me with the chaos of her questions. She has been smitten with the world, or poisoned by it, for so very long, and attached to its creatures, while I am afraid of those who have granted me a meaning and a history. I am afraid because they grant me something that stays with me after they have departed—just as I am afraid of greeting cards on special occasions, afraid of gifts and letters. All the little sieges that affect us in some way or other, but this never occurs to us until much later. If I did manage to extract myself from the gifts, how would I be able to rid my head of their loud voices?

She would talk about Qatif as if she were living it in all its varied details with every breath, while all I knew of Qatif was a very narrow stretch of history and geography, vacated of people as far as I was concerned. The word
Qatif
held no real meaning for me, no life, no true value. It was just a word. Dareen, on the other hand, adopted it as a name she carried with her and held it as a memory to keep her alert. This is Dareen: she bears with her, wherever she is, places, objects, voices, scents, and specters of light. In her soul. Everything, no matter how minute or weightless, she crafts into a vessel that conveys her extreme sensitivity. She scares me, because I cannot endure being in constant contact with the world. I cannot sink my fingers into the diaphanous veil of its sands.

I despise the year 1415, she said. I feel like it made the circle of treason complete by aiming at me. Why did they have to go through fifteen years of siege and absence from the world and keeping people in the dark, only to reap such a paltry harvest? What real gains did we glean from it? It is still a homeland that we inhabit by rent, and a land where everyone competes to win over our fealty to it and them. It is still the case that we are governed with incredible stupidity, and we are led to our own guillotines as if we are a flock of sheep. Yet, even now we seem astonished by the stench of the changes that the twenty-first of September has created in us, as if we all had opened our arms to the sky, all of us without exception, and prayed. The angels were so kind that they encircled the world in a snare of flame and death so that the winds of change swirled even around us, buffeting us. We are so clueless that we applaud, because from now on the maps will show redrawn borders. Just imagine what it will look like—the day to come when we will be completely outside the borders—and off the map!

A heavy silence, and then she added, I am no longer willing to be anyone’s victim, especially my mother’s. I do not hate her. I do not love her. But I do not owe her anything. Nothing at all.

Did you think about that in the past?

All the time! I was a faucet for complaints, and the liquid never stopped pouring out. That got tiresome, though. I have a life I want to live and I am capable of taking things into my own hands.

But your parents were responsible for what happened, weren’t they?

Definitely. I am not taking what happened onto my own shoulders and absolving them of the responsibility and the guilt for it. And I do not have enough forgiveness inside of me to put everything that happened entirely behind me. I am twenty-four years old, though, and I believe I am old enough to make a life where they are not the
alif
and the
ba’
of everything.

What was the first step you took?

A tiny one, and a very peculiar one for me. Suddenly I realized that I was not closing and locking the door to my room. Ever. Some time after it happened, my mother became convinced of my good behavior, and she figured that I had paid the price of my error. So she gave me back the rights she had taken away, among them the right to have a key to my room and to use it. I was no longer capable of exercising that right, though. She had become my subconscious, and without choosing to do so—or feeling like I had any choice!—I was continuing to carry out the punishment she had decided on, as if there would never be a change. It was as if God had ruled that I could leave hell but my feet would not budge. I realized that she was the one living inside my mind. I was always glancing around and behind me, weighing every detail, and counting even my words because I found her there wherever I went. So that was my first step, to turn the key in the lock on the door to my room.

She seemed to be thinking. I knew that my only role right now was to let her sense that I wanted to listen, and to prompt her now and then with a question. Other than that, I simply needed to stay quiet and await her wherever she was, whenever she was ready to start speaking again.

You know something?

What?

One time when we were still living at my uncle’s and there had been a quarrel, my mother spanked me and I hid in Hussain’s room. I started the tape that was in his cassette player and it was Fairuz. I fell asleep to her voice that day. And so, I always try to remember that every time there has been something awful in my life, there has been something wonderful corresponding with it. If she had not spanked me, then I would not have stumbled on Fairuz. If I had not flunked the year, then Nadia would not have been my classmate the next year, sitting right next to me in class. If it hadn’t been for whatever … then maybe we would not be together here right now, talking about all of this.

Can I ask you something?

Anything.

Do you still remember all of the details?

I remember the smallest detail you could think of.

Her telephone number, for instance?

Of course.

What is it?

I picked up the receiver, pressed the numbers as she said them and handed it to her. She was shifting her eyes from mine to my fingers on the buttons and she looked to be in almost a state of terror. I don’t know why at that moment I thought of doing such a thing, nor how I could have rushed headlong into actually carrying it out—me, someone who believes that I have no right to interfere in anyone else’s life, a belief I have adhered to sternly. But Nadia was always there, a figure posed in Dareen’s eyes like an opaque black shadow chasing her even through her remote dreams. There was no point in trying to escape her presence. Dareen was in need of someone who would repair her heart, who would help her to regain her life, who would love her without making demands, without disappointing or abandoning her, and without advance payments of any kind. I was not the one to do it, especially not when I hoped and believed that Nadia had all of the right answers to Dareen’s questions.

Bewildered, she asked me, What are you doing? She gave me back the receiver. A voice was saying, Hello … yes? So I answered. Hello, is Nadia there?

Just a minute, he answered. And I said to Dareen, Now we could hang up as if nothing ever happened. Or you can take it and do something. Didn’t you tell me you have a life you want to live?

But I don’t know what to say to her.

Say whatever comes to you, the simplest thing: You’ve been longing for her, you want her, you will give her some time to think about things, and then you will call her in two days to hear what she has to say.

I watched the reactions on her face and forgot to follow the words she was saying into the phone. I sensed that her voice was confused but happy. Through the entire conversation, her hand was clutching mine, and I could feel how she was reacting by the varying pressure of her hand on mine. At the end, she let the receiver drop onto her chest. She took one of the small pillows heaped on my bed and put it over her face and then she collapsed onto the bed and said, You … you bitch!

She was not being insolent or ugly with me. It was understood that I would not get angry if she swore at me, that I would not even anticipate it as signaling her displeasure, as much as I would feel it as her praise. I was her
sugar
when she intended to fling one of her judgmental sentences at me, and I was her
sweet cherries
whenever she kissed me. I was
a bitch
when I irritated her. We were too fragile to accept any unexpected mirth without showing our anxiety or letting out our tension. I was
damn you
! whenever I convinced her of my superiority at something. With her, I had a thousand aspects and a thousand pet names, loveable even if they were swear words and insults.

Tell me the good news—what did she say?

I don’t know.

What do you mean, you don’t know?

She dragged my hand along her chest and said, Listen.

Her pulse was racing. After a few moments, she took the pillow from her face and asked me with concern, Wouldn’t it have been better for me to leave her the freedom to call me when she wanted to?

No, that would be stupid.

Why?

You have to guarantee her that you’re the best.

Haaah!

Fine. Look at it honestly. This way, you know you have just a specified amount of time to wait, and so you will not become hostage to another labyrinth, a maze of waiting, a vicious circle that leads you nowhere. What if she were to forget, what if she did not have the nerve, what if she did not know what to say to you? It is better for you to be in charge of the situation if you can, if there is a way to do that.

Do you think she’ll accept? Come back?

I hope so.

She thought for a few moments, biting her lip.

I have a question, on condition that you don’t get mad.

I won’t.

Are you doing this to get rid of me?

Give me a break, Dareen!

Seriously. Answer me.

I am doing it because I … because I believe it is the best thing I could do for your sake.

Get rid of her! I thought. She did not get that right at all, though at the same time, she was not so very far from the truth. Ever since Dareen had gotten acquainted with me, and then had become practically bonded to my very skin and breath, I had felt that I could not go on with her, on to where the waters are no longer shallow and the tide begins to rise. Our relationship certainly had not exhausted itself, through all of our phone calls and conversations and visits, and our strong emotional bond that had developed. Instead, it had begun to enter a deep, deep part of me.

Saying goodbye to her at the door, I hugged her tightly. I had already primed myself that this might be our last time together, so I gazed at her face intently and left her chatting away, letting myself pick up her fleeing
r
and savor it. I wanted to say to her, Take care of yourself for my sake. But I kept those words from coming out, afraid of making her anxious. She was the happiest I had seen her since the first time we had met, and now I could stop feeling that she was a creature whose soul had been half extinguished while the other half blazed so hotly you felt it might go up in flames. A creature who was singing, for it had no alternative.

I did not want her to restrict herself to the question of what she would do about our relationship, which hung in the air between us like a bell that goes on reverberating, impossible to ignore, the space around it only making it echo more loudly. I was not being noble in taking myself away obliquely and without making a fuss, creating room for Dareen to get Nadia to come back. I was not being noble, because in return I was harvesting quite a large share of contentment, having decided that I was doing a good thing. I was getting a full refund on the cost of this choice I had made: so immeasurable was the gratitude she showed me that her overflowing good will became irritating. It got in the way of our phone conversations, the sort of grateful sense of indebtedness that weighs down the debt rather than lightening it.

Since I was implicated from the start in the presumed return of Nadia, I was determined to stay involved until I could be sure of the results, at which point I would withdraw permanently. At the time, Dareen was a mess, always tripping over her words, since she carried inside her the troubling heavy thought that anything she did at this stage of their relationship seemed equally likely to keep Nadia with her or push her to leave. So she surrendered the reins to me voluntarily. It was not particularly hard on me, since I maintained the position of observer no matter how deeply my hands were in whatever happened.