The Others (4 page)

I hurried to the bathroom, in a fast attempt to pull myself together, dying for a cigarette. One cigarette that the tightness of my throat would put out, just as the cigarette itself put out an urgent need I felt to drain the filth from my insides in the shape of an incoherent story where the details were missing. If I did it, if I told that story, I would blast a hole in Hiba’s heart with the acidity of this old, festering news. Even in the sights of a person who sins abundantly, my sin was not one to be forgiven. And I was blindly taking a huge chance that I would have no roof to shelter me, nor a pillow to give me any rest. I would be an exile from God’s sphere and from Hiba’s world as well.

Never mind. I am not suffocating now. I will breathe deeply, deeply … deeply. The need in my blood will fade. An evening without cigarettes—the world won’t end. Sooner or later, the accursed longing for nicotine will stop knocking against my head. I am fine. I am really well, really well. I feel dizzy, but it is not a problem if my dizziness is still here, the twelfth night after Dai. My body is expelling the filth from within, after all, and my eyes are draining the impurities they hold. Soon, I will be able to see.

The cigarettes are not the worst of Dai’s legacy to me. She had offered me a cigarette to lighten the heaviness of the physical blockage that had me in its hold. I took that cigarette. I was sitting on the edge of the bathtub in the bathroom off her room, trying as hard as I could to keep down the fury I felt toward her, as an alternative to turning the remaining hours we had together into a stupid argument and a series of verbal bombardments that we would launch at each other. I was not yet convinced that I could grant her more than the few centimeters she had revealed by pulling up my shirt, but she wanted more. She always wanted more.

I incarcerated myself in the bathroom. She followed me in, though. She ran her fingers through my hair, but I pushed her away. She knew how much her touches irritate me when I am angry, but she would not stop. She held out her cigarette toward me. This was not quite the first cigarette I had tried, but in a few seconds, despite the coughing and choking and the cloudiness in my eyes, it calmed my feverish blood. With just a tiny dose of nicotine she bribed my nervous gestures into growing regular and quiet. I found in cigarettes and bathtub a safe place where Dai could not reach me, where the pain she could cause was too remote to cast its hand over me.

Since I do not enjoy the taste of Faisal’s cigarettes, and in any case it would be too hard to steal from him—this guy who suddenly and for no reason had begun to smoke two cigarettes a week—in the beginning I took all I needed from Dai. Then, I managed to convince Salaam, our driver, to bring me cigarettes along with the beer that he was already smuggling in for me. In my mother’s custom, even beer was unlawful: our religion said so. Drinking it in our home was as bad as drinking a whole bottle of hard stuff. No difference there!

My addiction, as I claim, is not to the taste of cigarettes or the way they tame my blood. It is to the feeling that suddenly comes over me whenever I toss a cigarette butt into the toilet and then tug the flush cord. With it goes my entire brain; I find myself suddenly unable to think through anything, as I follow the swirl of the water sweeping away the cigarette and my unease with it, the garbage of my murky thoughts, and those nightly phantom birds of mine that arrive constantly to peck from my brain their fill of worry, fear and suspicion.

I was in the bathroom, overcome by nausea and without a cigarette; all I needed was two fingers jammed into my throat. If we inherit the ways our bodies habitually react to stress, what my genes had given me was a welling nausea whenever things went bad with my mother. I would do better than her, though, by making myself throw up. Aah, the superiority of my inherited traits! This was the only just thing, it appeared, to have gotten mixed into my nucleic acid, from among the interlaced, jumbled obscurity of quirks I inherited, one of which stripped from me the right to eat
ful
beans while another made me liable to break out sobbing at any moment, turning me into a tiny duckling-like creature who had just gotten wet and in the cold could not rid himself of his constant shivering. My parents were kind to me, in any case; I cannot deny it. They did not bestow on me infected blood corpuscles or a faulty pancreas.

I came out of the bathroom depleted, my vision blurred and my head spinning. I grasped Hiba’s hand and smiled sourly.

Huuba, dearie, did I tell you that I flunked?

She was so incredulous that she left her mouth hanging open. How could I fail, for the first time, when I was only a year away from finishing my years of study, and capping a span of time that had been full of certificates of excellence and diplomas and my ranking at 94th percentile in my third year of high school! I knew how violently this news of mine would slap Hiba, who was always keeping after me to focus on my studies, who would phone me after midnight during exams to make sure that I was still awake, and who would ask me urgently, What page have you gotten to? All of that stored-up motherliness in Hiba pelted down on me in a concentrated storm. On me, the girl who was one year younger than Hiba, but five years her senior in my studies. I clung to this motherly Hiba as if she were a last fortress that no one had yet been able to breach.

Ever since I began at the college, and ever since I felt sure of a successful first year, I had gotten into the habit of picking up my results late, each term’s grades sometime during the following term. The woman who supervised my department in the student affairs office would give me odd looks. What level of unconcern was this, which led me to go all this time neglecting to pick up my grades, not knowing whether I had passed or not? Even worse, I would hold onto that sealed envelope carrying my grades until there came a time in which I needed some happy news that would lift me out of my moody state. Luck had never betrayed me until now. This time around, the result was a complete fizzle.

And, Hiba, you are going to laugh at me when I tell you that I failed in the stupidest, most trivial subject possible. I made a dumb choice, passing up all the subjects in my major, in which failing would at least be honorable, and then I went and failed a general-ed course!

Neither of us could sleep that night. But we both lay there rigidly, neither one wanting to turn over, so as not to let the other one surmise that she was awake. We each passed the hours of darkness counting the lambs of sleep—or the beasts of anxiety.

I drew out the black notebook from a shadowy niche inside my chest. I recorded one more stroke, just as before I had recorded my very first sins: the first song I listened to, the first prayer I abandoned, the first ritual ablutions I postponed, the first longing I toyed with, the first fast day during which I ate, the first kiss … and now, the first full discovery of my body. I documented them all, with their dates and their details.

If dates can be derisive, mocking, and sadistic—and carefully selected, of course—then that precisely was the status of my dates when they concerned Dai. Our first kiss was like the sweets at Qurqii’an, the evening halfway through the month of Ramadan when children gather in their new clothes to celebrate the birth of one of the Prophet’s grandsons, whom we revere, Hassan son of Ali. They go round to people’s homes to ask for candy. Or it was like yummy peanuts halfway through the month of Sha’ban. The prayer of the body, the night of my fate, my power, my own Lailat al-Qadar, but at the beginning of the final third of Ramadan instead of at its very end. I do not know if she was aware of it at the time, but with perfect mastery and precision, Dai gathered between her thumb and her index finger all those years of mine that were uselessly gone; she rubbed them until they became dust particles so fine that they no longer had any substance. Then she sat back, one leg crossed over the other, a crowned and contented queen. Radia, “the Lady Contented with God’s Will,” as so many Muslim queens have been named.

In my past few years I have lived a double life. I prepare intensive summer courses in Islamic jurisprudence and the theology of Oneness that is the basis of Islamic belief and morals and the science of logic. I do volunteer work. I write for a magazine focused on the proper cultural education of the young. I march into battles doomed to fail, only so that my voice will have a place to resound, and my steps, a pavement on which to fall. In half of my responses, I am giving myself cover, and I try to leave the other half vague enough so that no one can observe what I have been doing in my life, far from the eyes of others, or can look into my thoughts, which would inevitably appear tarnished by stupidity or their deviation from the correct path of the upright.

From a few stories and intrigues I knew that my life, and the lives of every one of us—by which I mean those whom other people categorize as workers for God—were permanently under the microscope. My errors, any way in which I might fail or stumble and fall, were not private issues concerning me alone. They were owned by everyone, and they were always on exhibit for eyes that had been thoroughly trained to catch any missteps. Whenever any one of us held the microphone or put an identifiable signature at the end of an article for the sake of seeing our names circulate, we were volunteering ourselves as defendants on trial; we would be interrogated, judged and sentenced in tales told at the end of the evening, tales that always got around, leaving sharp reactions in their wake.

We were not saints, nor were we preserved and protected by the name of God alone. We were nothing but a lowly rabble, third-rate workers, which made us nothing more than an onion skin or an orange peel—quickly pierced, thoughtlessly discarded, something everyone was allowed to deal with or dispose of in whatever way they wished. We were held accountable as the vulnerable breach in a long line of institutions and beliefs that protected them, such that people hardly dared to treat badly any person who might try to get ahead of us in that holy queue. The kicks aimed at our backsides continued, and people relished them. They transformed our every little slip into an extremely serious issue that could not, in any circumstances, be hushed up.

Thus, although there was no written statute on the books to tell us so, we had to remain blank slates, perfect in every detail, without a single scratch, honorable and ever lustrous, as extraordinary as prophets and as pure-white as angels. We were what stood in the way of anyone who might try to demolish the structure made up of a thousand stories reaching all the way to the sky, and yet we represented the flimsiest bricks in the building. What is unshakably true is that we garnered nothing from this except some traces of false glory, a few mean compliments, and perhaps a bit of good will. But at the same time—behind the scenes and the tightly shut doors—we were sustaining plenty of blows below the belt, whether we knew of them or not.

I was perfectly aware that my secret life, my other life, was an extremely dangerous gamble and a harmful one, and that was part of what made it so pleasurable. I was gambling straight out, but I thought I knew what I was doing. I was aware of how long the path of retreat was, how enormous my reversal would be if I were forced into it. A measure of intense adrenalin pushed me onward, and I bore real and true dread of God’s wrath and felt the weight of a terrible guilt complex. I sensed the heaviness of hell upon me, and the heaviness of the others, and of the possibility that my cover would be blown. I searched for my salvation as feverishly as I could. But the more I tried, the more deeply I found myself divided, hopelessly submerged in my two worlds, as deeply in one as in the other.

I did not leave. As sick and despairing of everything as I was, I did not go away. I went on watching Hassan, and figuring that he was watching me from that other shore of his, though I had not wanted him to see the hasty reaction of mine that followed his final departure. If I had known that he would abandon me and go away forever, from the start I would not have negotiated even two seconds that I could squander in that wasteland I now inhabited. What had started me out was the pull of the adolescent hormones of a sixteen-year-old who needed desperately to see herself growing older in the eyes of others. Hassan infused me with the ability to feel proud of myself, and to spread my wings in the sunshine. Whenever he gave me a pat on the wings, I flew—I was a seagull who never ceased embracing the skies. Hassan remains my eye: Hassan is the eye that sees me, and he is all of my mirrors. He is the eye whose light was put out, setting me into a blind nighttime in which no one could see me or sense that I existed.

From where I had been, I had cut a path that I could not retrace or wipe out. In bright red lines, I drew the letters that composed the name
Dai
. Next to that name, I set down the new date of my body, and I closed the notebook. Something would happen, I decided, that would be no worse than what had already, and really, happened. Her impact had been so overwhelming that now, gradually, my body could only lose its need for her, and eventually I could deflect my longing to love her. I might even learn to hate her if I could see clearly enough how very scandalously she was disfiguring me. I would slide with her to the very lowest place she could bring me down to, and at that point I would dare to leave her, for it would not be in her power to do anything more—anything worse—to me.

Without needing any more justification than this, I went back to Dai. A simple gesture from her was all I needed, a sign, a five-minute phone call. My longing alone, mingling with my physical desire, was enough to make me a pawn to her wishes. She used the excuse of my approaching birthday to propose that we see each other, and for my part, I did not wait for any incitement to rip up the pages of the calendar as fast as I could in anticipation of Wednesday, which was so slow to come, just to spite me.

My next task: to convince my mother to let me move into what used to be Muhammad’s room. It had been a whole year since his marriage, and the same amount of time since Faisal had settled into his university housing; he only came home on weekends. If our home had shrunk since Hassan’s death, it was this double blow that truly abandoned it to an awful, killing silence. It was this that made my mother stare at the belly of Maryam, my brother’s wife, willing it to swell, to bring us a child who would bring back the happy clatter the house had once held. Fatima’s three children were not enough for my mother. Fatima, the sister eight years older than me who had been married, it seemed to me, since the beginning of time, and whom my mother never ceased to blame or scold for her absence, her failure to visit—the signs, as my mother saw it, of my elder sister’s deliberate separation from her. Our home, empty most of the time, left my mother saying over and over again, in obvious distress, There’s nothing left of this home but the maid!