The Others (7 page)

Sundus is a great girl!

And pretty, isn’t she?

Pretty, yes, very pretty!

Only?

I don’t understand what you’re saying.

Wasn’t it true that before—

Dai had not even finished her question before I could tell, from her raised eyebrows, what she was alluding to. I interrupted her, marked disapproval in my voice.

Sundus doesn’t do that.

But we—we do. And she started to guffaw.

Once again, she had caught me, in unevenly applied slapdash cheap makeup, neglecting my red nose, leaving it behind in the dressing room. All of her features bespoke one thing: I found you out! I felt myself shrinking, as she swelled magnificently. She had arrested me in my most contradictory state. She did not even have to strip anything off me. I was already completely naked.

You know I’ll kill you if you’re unfaithful to me?

I laughed sarcastically, trying to leave an impression with her that I was unconcerned about this threatening tone that she was using with me. And you’ll drink my blood, too, I appended to her sentence.

I got up out of bed, wanting to make sure that the door was really shut, since it looked to me that the doorway might bring me breezes I didn’t want from places where the sun did not shine. She grabbed me by the arm. I tried to wiggle out of her grip, and could have if she had not pushed me onto the bed. In a second, she had come down on top of me, in her eyes a look that only the devil could produce.

Did anyone before me have your body? she asked.

I didn’t say anything.

Answer me!

Stop it.

Answer me, first!

Quit acting like a child.

I hate her when she moves me as if I’m a doll or a dummy—a doll that will not be injured or destroyed no matter how sharply you twist her limbs in the air. I turned my face away from her. She grabbed me at my jaws and forced my face back toward her, so I kept my eyes trained in the other direction. Her voice strained, she went on saying
Answer me
but I did not. She clapped her left hand to my neck while her right hand pulled my hair, as all the while she muffled me with sticky kisses that bore down on me painfully. They were closer to bites than to kisses.

I knew that if I kept refusing, her madness would only get worse. My refusals gave her redoubled impetus to conquer me and plant her flag on the virgin territory of which she had stripped me. Despite her evident slenderness and the feminine softness clear in her build, Dai was light years ahead of me in bodily strength, which meant she always had a huge advantage in subduing me when I resisted her.

I withdrew into myself. I gave her the side of me that was completely the contrary of what she wanted and tried to impose. I became as cold beneath her as the ice that preserves corpses in fine physical form. By behaving this way, I was training my sights exactly on target, for I was giving her all the victory flags she could want, to plant wherever she wished, but they were lowly banners that she implanted in ground she had not fought to gain, and thus whose conquering was hardly a victory to be deserved or trumpeted.

She finally released me when she saw no sign that I was softening, when she was convinced that I was frost that her heat could not melt. She sat on the edge of the bed, angry. A heavy silence bore down on the room. Very quickly it became a dreary quiet so thick that neither of us could see the other.

One question rocked the stillness of the room and toyed with our heads. Who would be first this time to let go? I chose to be the one. Be rational, I told myself. Be big. This silence will take the two of you exactly nowhere. I started trying to open a door or at least a window in our barren muteness. Her face was blank, her expression transient, like someone who has just recently figured out some slightly elusive truth. I put my hand on her shoulder and she pushed it off. In a voice I laced with pleading, I asked, What did I do?

You’re always like this! You get me angry for the sake of nothing. You get a kick out of seeing me beg for you!

I hugged her, encircling her waist with my arms, as I replied, There’s been no one but you. Hey, is everything okay now?

She chose to offer an answer heard only by the bedposts and the sheets, and as usual, it was much more like a squabble than like the lovemaking that they always talk about so passionately in films.

I was not yet beyond the hard and rocky road of growing into a mature young woman—I was still getting all of those bruises that one picks up on the way, the many slaps on my body, and now I was feeling crushed beneath the wheels of a million-ton freight train named Dai. It was too early then for me to understand how far her savagery would go, and how every bit of it would be my loss. Did I yield out of love? Desire? Worshipful slavery? The number of candles I extinguished was matched by the hot tears I swallowed while she was on top of me, lighting up and burning and going to ash like a meteor passing to its final destruction. I was paying the bread of my body as a sacrifice to keep her happy, and she was sucking out my embers, so deeply that no trace would remain in my depths.

Fadil has asked for my hand.

Eyes shining and face worshipful, she added, I haven’t told my family yet what my answer will be, but I believe I’m going to say yes.

It is truly a cause for regret that she was not joking. Neither her features—suddenly those of a woman who has come to own the world in one fell swoop—nor the shy tremulousness in her voice gave any hint of jesting. Meanwhile, something patted me gently on the heart and said, Don’t let it get you down. Not yet. Hopefully, you won’t lose her, too. All the while, though, another voice was abrading my ear, a loud and overbearing voice that would not stop laughing at me as it addressed its words to me. Do you understand now why she got in touch? It’s classic. She is saying a graceful and upbeat goodbye to you, this girl who has finally stumbled upon a man!

I don’t remember anything I said to her in response. I must have put on some show of joy and congratulated her, perhaps I even gave her a big, enthusiastic, warm hug and a genuine kiss. I must have said a lot, and together we must have sketched out a pretty image, a nest holding a couple of birds: this one is Hiba, and that one is Fadil. But where am I? This nest is very small, my dear friend! And you won’t make any room for me after today. You will leave me to run with only one shoe, in the wild wilderness of my loneliness. You will cease to be either the step beneath me that keeps me steadily going forward, or the road I tread.

We women make the same mistake over and over again, and we’ve been doing it since the beginning of time. We truncate our lives, reducing them completely to the man who stamps his name on us. We leave our family and our friendships, our diplomas and our dreams and all the small matters and trivial things that make up our daily lives, and we go to worship at that prayer niche—I’m talking about the
mihrab
of a man. For his part, the man does not have to do very much in the way of self-alteration. He holds onto the circles he has, with their constant motion, and they keep widening, growing and growing while we remain simply a still point in the crowd. We are so very naïve!

As I touched Hiba’s face—which was both remote and enormously expressive—I kept before my gaze the list of things to be stolen from me: late-night phone conversations, sleepovers on summer vacation, fresh projects, promenades on the shore, our running shoes. And her heart!
Ya Allah
, nothing will remain for me. My fingers burned; and there were not enough of them to let me count up all my losses. No doubt, a few inches away, she was making a list that was similar, except that it was headed by the image of a hero. Fadil alone was the master of her ticket window now, and I had no choice but to stand in line like any common person, like the hoi polloi, the dregs of society, the lower class, waiting my turn, which might well never come.

Fadil had inspired the burning taste of envy in my throat since our earliest childhood. Hiba had worshipped him when she was little and now here she was, leaving to marry him. Son of her maternal aunt, a boy with greenish eyes and light hair—their boy. At the time, there was no boy I hated the way I hated him. He just made me so mad with the way he rode a bike so well, how good he was at it, when I never could do it with any skill. And if there was not a boy in the world who had the right to claim superiority over me, the spoiled and childish girl, then how could a boy have his sort of swagger? That was why I would stir up his rancor by saying those damning words, Hey, you American you! For children who woke up and went to sleep to the anthem Death to America on Radio Iran every day, this insult of mine was a completely unacceptable dishonor, but for Fadil it was a disgrace that could not be refuted. Its scandalous signs were so blatantly there, and could not be veiled.

Of course, Hiba would travel with him abroad when he had a work assignment somewhere. She would drive their car, she would give birth to four children, and she would traverse all of God’s wide world. She would summer in Paris, stare full on at the Mona Lisa’s smile, make snowballs and fashion a snowman with a cap and red nose … and so, what else, Hiba? She might barely remember an old friend now and then, a cousin, no less, flicking the dust off that face and sending her a postcard from the last capital city she happened to visit.

Her jelly-like face pains me. Her silence pains me—she who has never been silent. If only she would say something!
Anything
. How can Fadil alter her to this extent when he has not been close to her, has not revealed himself to her, and has not occupied her very being yet? He has not even put an engagement ring on her finger! How can she suddenly be so much older, with secrets and private matters and things that I have no right to unlock and know, when only yesterday she left all the drawers in her chest open for me to riffle through? Why didn’t she teach me from the start how to spy and steal, so that now I would be able to know what she was thinking, why she was as silent and still as a wall, her life as secret as a solitary holy man’s hidden cell? Now I am the stranger in the room, and I curse my presence, even though not long ago, our phone conversation had been all I needed to make me feel like I was alive.

Say something, Hiba! Anything!

If only she had not spoken!

She dropped her head onto my shoulder, and I could no longer pick up anything but the murmur of lips wanting to say something but stumbling over the words. I put my arms around her and what I heard was like a mighty kick that struck a distant spot behind her ribs. She held my hand tightly and said, I want to call him … we need to agree on some things. And I want … I want to do that without my family knowing. I don’t want to cause him any embarrassment when we don’t agree. Are you going to help me? Can you let me use your cell phone? And stay with me, I mean, while we’re talking. I don’t want to feel like I’m committing some crime.

Half minutes, or quarter minutes, went by between the end of one of her sentences and the beginning of the next. Heavy—that is how the time going by felt against my body, and a mix of bitterness and sorrow stung me. Something drove me to feel relentless pulses of sorrow, feelings of regret that I did not understand at all, a sensation like that left by an old betrayal. I pushed her far enough away from me that I could look her in the eye. I explained to her that I could not be a third party in a moment so intensely intimate as this. I left my phone with her. I promise you, she said, I will not spy on your list of numbers or answer any of your phone calls or play around with your messages. It’s not a big deal, I said in English. She told me to send Salaam over tomorrow, when she would give him the phone along with a few other things for camouflage, and I left.

I am not a water-based creature. Weeping is not one of my distinguishing features. Between the two of us—moisture and me—there is no particularly intense, intimate relationship that one can depend on. It is true that I am the water’s child, and my feet carry the flavor of salty sand. I am like as can be to a seashell as I move along the ground; in my cupped palms I conceal the reverberations of the Gulf. If you were to scratch at my memory, you would see nothing but astounding blue and boats and the splash of the tides. But it is true as well that I have inherited a superabundance of weeping that goes back to an ancient era. Ever since Karbala, ever since the death of that young man so long ago, we Shi‘is have been weeping, and our tears never have dried up. And since Karbala we have come to understand our weeping as an ongoing, never-ending daily act, a deed that is always there. It is not seasonal, selling us its goods and leaving town. And so, I do hold inside of me a profuse reservoir, tears that exhaust me every night, but I do not cry.

Ever since I was a semi-boy or a sexless child, I have gotten used to the idea, never challenged, that children do not gain the qualities of their sex until after marriage, when the girls give birth to children and the boys go out to work. Because I was so naughty, and because I always brushed up against a handful of devilish boys, I was used to not crying. Weeping gave a pretext for sarcastic lashes and yielded an especially painful quiver of jokes and heart-jabbing jeers. I certainly had no need for a tattoo of shame that would stick to me like a buzzing insect. When I got a little older, I told myself that it would be best for me to continue my abstinence, allowing only a few pure white tears for the black days—and at that point in my life, I had not seen a black day. It was Hassan, and only Hassan, who changed my crying habits. He left me a map washed clean of any features and a broken compass, and then he said to me, Go on!

I awoke in a very troubled mood. I was not going to give in to all of the weeping that was accumulating inside of me in a terrible hard lump of melancholy and oversensitivity (not to mention the closed doors—my mouth, my phone, and likewise, the door to my room). It was Saturday, and even my face exhibited an enormous question. Where and how would I come up with enough endurance to get all the way through another day, so that I could fall asleep once again?