Voices of the Lost

by Hoda Barakat

  Praise for

  VOICES OF THE LOST

  Winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction

  ‘Spare and deep, Voices of the Lost captivates. Hoda Barakat is one of Lebanon’s greatest gifts to literature, and Booth allows her English audience to explore this painful and irresistible present.’

  amy bloom, author of white houses

  ‘Drawing on the power of testimonial, Hoda Barakat’s characters relate tales of loss, regret, and displacement. Beautifully written and filled with a raw, audacious honesty, these lost and found letters draw readers into an extraordinary embrace and refuse to let go.’

  diana abu-jaber, author of birds of paradise

  ‘Hoda Barakat is one of the most versatile and innovative novelists in the Arab world. Here, in a fugue of undelivered letters, she etches the portraits of a series of existential refugees, lost between countries, languages, and lives.’

  marilyn hacker, author of blazons

  ‘A subversive novel that examines sorrow, longing, violence, kindness, and compassion. The places may be named, but the protagonists are nameless. We love them because they are us.’

  fady joudah, author of tethered to stars

  ‘An astonishing novel, superbly translated from the original Arabic, in which grave, naked confessions are delivered by characters orbiting in motion. It is a fierce, challenging exploration of the extremities of rootlessness and desperation, rendered in a shocking clarity of voice.’

  leila aboulela, author of bird summons

  ‘Hoda Barakat’s new novel reveals to us the many faces of power, war, love and despair as destinies mysteriously intersect, and all certainties are shaken. Through these letters, we glimpse the hidden story of immigration: characters condemned to suffer for nothing more than being born in the wrong place.’

  jokha alharthi, author of celestial bodies,

  winner of the man booker international prize

  Also by Hoda Barakat

  The Stone of Laughter

  Disciples of Passion

  The Tiller of Waters

  My Master, My Love

  The Kingdom of this Earth

  The night last night was strange and shaken:

  More strange the change of you and me.

  Once more, for the old love’s love forsaken,

  We went out once more toward the sea.

  algernon charles swinburne,

  ‘at a month’s end’

  Contents

  Part One: Those Who are Lost

  Part Two: Those Who are Searching

  Part Three: Those Who are Left Behind

  ‌Part One

  Those Who are Lost

  Dear

  Since letters must always begin with Dear, then Dear it is.

  I’ve never written a letter in my life. Not a single one. There was a letter in my mind, which I brooded over for years, rewriting it in my head again and again. But I never wrote it down. After all, my mother could hardly read, and so I expect she would have taken my letter to one of the village men with enough education to read it to her. That would have been a disaster, though! And anyway, then I learned that the village had flooded when the dam collapsed. The whole village was under water. I don’t know where the villagers went, or whether they were moved to another place. It was the latest thing in technology, the dam the president had ordered to be built to water the lands that had turned into desert. I’ve probably told you the story of the dam. I don’t remember now, and that’s not the issue anyway. No, my issue, more or less, is the letter that was circling inside my head for so long. What I always meant to do, you see, was to write to my mother about that moment when she dumped me on the train, all by myself. I was eight or nine years old. She gave me one loaf of bread and two boiled eggs. She said my uncle would be waiting for me in the city. She told me it was my job to get myself educated because I was the cleverest brother. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ she said. ‘Don’t cry.’

  But I have to admit that I was afraid. I was terrified. Alone in the world, as wild and aggressive as a little animal, ready to lash out – that’s how I felt the minute the train started moving. I wanted desperately to hurt someone; I wanted it to be someone I didn’t know, so I wouldn’t be faced with making excuses for them, and be tempted to stop. Someone I had no connection with at all, and then I could do whatever I felt like doing without any interference from my mind. Sometimes I get the feeling that my mind is my greatest enemy.

  As the train lurched into motion, a darkness came over me, like the dreary gloom of a midwinter sunset. No, I wasn’t afraid in that moment, and I didn’t cry. I simply felt myself sinking into the sour odour of eggs boiled hours before. I wanted to toss them away but I didn’t dare. It was still very early in the morning – so early that it had taken my mother some force to rouse me. But it didn’t get any lighter. The train kept moving through an unchanging half-light, as if it were in a long tunnel with no opening at the other end.

  That winter twilight lived on in my head, whatever the hour of the day. It was the darkness that falls when the sun vanishes on the horizon, the darkness that invariably makes children cry and fills true romantics with sadness – those well-meaning romantics, from Egypt’s Ihsan Abdel Quddous to Germany’s Rainer Maria Rilke. Melancholy seizes the gentle, good beings in the world and there’s no explaining its grip. When the child psychologist writes about this, she says: ‘Mothers, do not let these six o’clock crying spells alarm you. They’re only a test. A child knows instinctively that, alone and abandoned by its mother, it will certainly die. The child’s sobs are a call, a way to assure itself that its mother is still in the world. That she is here, and because she is here it will not die.’ But she – my mother – was not there. In that moment, and from then on, she was not there.

  Because you are a romantic woman and you grow sad with the sunset, and because you like getting letters written on real paper, which the postman carries in a leather bag hung on his shoulder all the way to your little metal post box, I will write you a letter. It is sure to be the only letter of my entire life, sent or received. And because this miserable sleet, half-snow, half-rain, has not let up since dawn, I will stay at home. I won’t go out in this weather. And I will write you a letter.

  Now I have to find something to fill the lines on this empty white page. I wonder what I can tell you that’s new, when it hasn’t been very long since we last met. But maybe more time has passed than I think? And, well, I don’t have a gift for turning news into stories. I never tell anyone anything very useful or interesting. People only listen to what others say because they are nosy. I talk a lot, and I go on talking as long as I can see that spark of inquisitiveness in my listener’s eyes, telling me he’s seeking out some juicy story that he thinks I might have. It won’t let go of me, this need to relay information, or my need won’t let go of whoever it is we’ve agreed to smear behind his back, my listener and I. Spiteful gossip – though we call it by other names.

  By now you’ve realized, most likely, that everything I say is just the product of the moment, whatever happens to come out when I open my mouth. Like, I’m sitting in the café and in front of me I can see a man perched on a wooden chair, so I launch into a long commentary on the history of woodworking and what the differences are between one variety of wood and another, and the particular ways each kind is used. And then I might move on to the harm that’s being done to our planet’s forests, how love of the hamburger is denuding them and turning them into arid plains, how it is all part of the vicious greed that fuels savage capitalism and our vast multinational companies and governments, and so forth and so on. If the fellow across from me is sitting on a plastic chair, then I dive into the world of plastic, from the history of its in
vention as a petroleum by-product to its latest uses in the most advanced operating theatres, and on to the unique role plastics play in the world of molecular medicine, et cetera, et cetera.

  I have learned a lot since the village train station vanished behind me. I crammed my head (which my mother claimed was so clever and quick) full of things, and I did it with insatiable greed and persistence. I couldn’t be stopped. Collecting information became an urgent need. I wanted to know anything and everything, in whatever field it might be. That’s because I had empty spaces to fill, cryptic hollows like those of bulimia or addiction, where there is no explanation, no memory of why. And then – well, I might as well make the most of this storage vault of mine. Let me use my bank of knowledge to baffle my listener into silence. And why not use all of these words I have to stun women? To stun you, for example. I don’t give your mind any chance to wander free because I’m so afraid that then you might stop and think. Because I don’t want to hear – I’m not interested in hearing – anything more about you than I knew instantly in the first moment I saw you. The other reason I won’t stop talking is that I don’t want to crack open a window that lets any closeness in. Intimacy is a trap. Words muttered in lowered voices between two heads bowed close together, the confession-talk people use to break their isolation, to keep away the loneliness that crouches in the hearts of sensitive creatures who can’t stand solitude, or… A trap, a warta in the original sense of the word: a dark chasm reaching deep into the earth. That’s according to the dictionary. Fancy that!

  OK, about me. By now you’ve realized that nothing of that sort ever happens to me – or happens with me. No emotions! Unless it’s something along the lines of the hell I gave that plumber. He gave me an appointment and I waited all day but he never showed up. But I’m not even very entertaining when it comes down to it, and I won’t be able to, or wouldn’t have been able to, keep you interested. I find myself repeating stupid trivial bits of information that I’ve already told you, and it bores you to hear them again. So you begin making an effort to avoid showing how bored you are, hearing them over and over, and then I begin making an effort to avoid showing that I know you’re bored, hearing them over and over. And so it goes. But when I start again, boring you once more with all my words, actually I’m telling you something. I’m letting you know that this is all I have to offer. No hidden depths, no inner realm. So why would you stick with me? What do you find in me? With me? What do you find there?

  I know I’m a man of average looks; perhaps even that’s a bit of an exaggeration. And I can be somewhat impolite, or rough-mannered… Let’s just say that I lack polish. Like when I phone you at the last minute to cancel our date. I tell you I’m sleepy and I don’t want to go out. But I don’t even invite you to come round here instead. Calculating the time as precisely as I do, I know as I’m talking to you that you’ve probably already dressed and got completely ready to go out. I excuse myself with several loud yawns and hang up before we’ve made another plan to meet. Why wouldn’t you leave me?

  Without punishing me in any way, without so much as a cross word, you show up at our next date. Your heart as big as ever, you bring your head close to mine after our routine little kisses on the cheek. You look me in the eye, and when you blink slowly and then open your eyes wider to focus on me, it’s to show me that you really mean it when you ask, ‘How are you?’ If it looked like you were just trying to open the door to a little seduction, I would have an answer ready. ‘I haven’t been sleeping very well,’ I would tell you. But that would just be for the sake of keeping our conversation going for a pleasant hour or so, exchanging scraps of conversation about sleep and insomnia, the secrets in our dreams, and our waking fantasies about whatever.

  Soon, though, I see you circling closer, insistently, obstinately even, buzzing like a fly in the cloud of carbon dioxide that I let out with each breath.

  You want something else, something more. You want me to complain, to you and you alone, about the reasons why I can’t sleep. Insomnia offers you a little crack in my defences that you think you can widen and then enter. If you come at me this way, you think, I might start revealing things. But why do you need all of these games? Why, when you can see so easily how smitten I am! How I break into a sweat and start breathing hard as soon as you come near enough that I catch the fragrance of your neck, sniffing at it like a baby animal. Your beauty is so radiant that it could burn me to ashes. You don’t need me in order to know how powerfully attractive you are. It’s enough for you to see that desire in other men’s eyes. Of course, you know this perfectly well, and it’s because you’re so sure in that knowledge that you always humour me like this. Someone in your position has no need of anxiety, or self-doubt, or jealousy.

  Sometimes you are so confident in the power you hold over men, and exude it so spectacularly, that I have to distance myself. Perhaps we’re in bed; so I pick up a book. Or I ask you if you remember that gorgeous woman we encountered one time when we were together, winking at you as I speak, as if we’re guys strutting our manhood, as if I’m just reviewing my seduction skills, how easy it is to pick up pretty women. You just laugh along with me, like you’re in on the joke, without showing any anger or even the least irritation. Then you leave.

  It’s not good enough to show regret. Help me. You need to be a little more modest. Less showy. Not modest to the point of lowering yourself, only far enough to let me know you’re a little attached to me. I assume there’s no need to remind you that I grew up without a family. My father was lost to me. He fell out of the picture, maybe from nothing more than sheer neglect. As if that woman flung him out of the train window as she was flinging me inside the train.

  I don’t know how men love women. In my village, which was wiped out by the collapsed dam, there were no women who loved or were loved. There were just sexless creatures. Or I was at an age then when sex didn’t yet exist. But I do remember being ashamed of my relentless hunger, and how constantly occupied I was with trying to hide or disguise it. The only time I could forget about it was when I was at school or studying. The other boys were always swarming around, in the house or in the street, tens of them, like flies, sometimes like clouds of stinging wasps. At best, like flying cockroaches. There was nowhere to escape to. Nowhere to begin carving out a manhood, or a womanhood. Nowhere for any luxuries of that sort.

  I recall very little of that place and the people there, and what I do remember makes me sick to my stomach. Even when it comes back to me in dreams, it’s all more like a nightmare. These are places eaten away by the mange. Leper colonies. They disintegrate, falling into pieces, falling from the memory as a leper’s fingers and toes fall away from his body. Arid, brittle places sick with poverty and need, long past the opportunity for redemption.

  Whenever I read something about how comforting it is to remember one’s childhood – all that innocence, the tenderness it arouses within you – my head swims. My nostrils fill with the stink of muddy dung heaps until I can’t breathe; my eyes cloud over with a film of dust, gummed together with that thick, persistent infectious pus that I do remember. You would need a lot more clean water than we ever had to rinse off enough of the pus to be able to force open your eyelids even for a moment, for maybe an hour or two before the flies returned in swarms, attacking and destroying, raking across your face almost as though they have claws. They were so used to being slapped away that it didn’t faze them. Is this the kind of thing you want to know? My childhood? Those years that we were taught to believe provide the entire bedrock of personality, from adolescence and beyond, the basis for the man I am today? Those happy years of one’s early life, because, of course, it’s always got to be a happy childhood, right?

  You come back to the issue of my insomnia, taking advantage of the only opening that’s been offered to you. Is this all I will get for myself, this questioning of yours? ‘You’re still not sleeping well?’ you ask. ‘Did you take my advice? That herbal infusion I told you to take, did you reall
y drink it? All of it?’ OK, then why not go further? Why don’t you go on to make some allusion to the insomnia of lovers, for example? Isn’t this what you’re really getting at? Fine. But whatever it was that kept me awake last night isn’t what will keep me from sleeping tonight.

  So. Either I must be lying in order to avoid blurting out some revelation that would be truly intimate – and so you hammer at me even more – or I’m holding back a lie that’s on the tip of my tongue, and if so, it must be because I am an anxiety-ridden, unstable person, and there you are, just poised to hurry to my rescue. Or I’ve changed my mind and now I don’t feel any urgency about keeping your attention fixed on me and my insomnia, and all the rest.

  Why does it never occur to you that the reason for my insomnia might, in fact, be you? Like, why haven’t you ever tried to yank me back when you can see I’m absorbed in some other woman who seems to be chasing the sleep from my eyes? Just for instance?

  Frankly, I can’t stand it any longer – this need of yours to search for meanings in everything. You’ve become just like the stories in those books you read: beginning, middle, and everything wrapped up neatly at the end. An ironclad triangular logic. You’ve become terrifying in your devious cleverness, your attempts to wrench my insides out of me, with the pure joy of a hunter on the point of disembowelling his prey. Victorious, he flashes his weapon, ready to begin slicing from the lowest point of the belly even before the heart has stopped beating and while there’s still a stir of breath coming from the victim’s slack jaws.