Voices of the Lost

by Hoda Barakat

  Yes, of course I’m exaggerating! That’s precisely because you always insist on taking words literally, with absolute seriousness, as if they’re a document submitted as evidence in court. Because one day I used the word unique, I guess. I said there was nobody like you in my world. But any run-of-the-mill woman, even one without much intelligence, would immediately consign words like that to the little box marked ‘silliest and most banal male seduction techniques’. It is true that I also said, on one occasion, that I was completely crazy about you. All right. As if no man has ever been crazy about you before! As if I am the only man on this planet! You lowered your eyelids and smiled like a practised flirt, not forgetting to add a little touch of confused embarrassment. You didn’t say anything. You didn’t say, ‘I’m crazy about you too.’ Then…well, then you began waiting for the story to begin.

  Which story do you want, my child? Wasn’t that ‘confession’ of mine enough for you? Even the folktale hero Clever Hasan had to have it explained to him in One Thousand and One Nights: what he had to do to win the princess, Sitt al-Husn, the Lady of Goodness and Beauty! And it was only after he followed instructions that the little fish with the precious gemstone in its gut jumped into his lap. So, my Sitt al-Husn, is that what you want? Do I have to go and catch some fish? Or do you want me to sing to you like the crooner Farid al-Atrash with his weepy ballads? It seems we’ve got ourselves into a terrible misunderstanding and

  Wait a minute.

  There’s a man over there who won’t stop looking in my direction. He comes out onto the balcony, his eyes already trained on me. He’s been standing there behind the glass, staring at me, facing me and looking straight at me, just standing there, on and on.

  This is really getting to me. I’ve tried waving at him to get him to stop, to go away. I’ve tried to make him realize I’m not a customer of any of the lowlifes around here. No doubt, given his constant surveillance of me, or almost constant anyway, he must have seen you here at my place; he must have been watching as we pulled the curtain shut in his face. This isn’t rational, what he is doing, and it isn’t all right. The curtain blocks my one source of light, and I don’t want to have to keep it permanently drawn to be rid of the sight of him. If I do that, I might as well shout out loud that I’m afraid. That I fear him and I’m hiding from him. Even when I turn off the light, keeping a surreptitious eye on him, I find him still there, looking in my direction, a wicked little smile lifting his heavy moustache. As if he can see me even when I’m hiding in here, in the dark.

  So how would you explain this? Would you shrug it off as nothing more than my mad ravings? Would you say it’s just the typical paranoia of a cokehead? Do you really believe I’m addicted? Because you thought I was admitting it when I gave in after you begged and begged me to stop ruining my health? It amazes me – my little doll! – to see how remote you can be from what goes on in real life. All right, fine, the cocaine isn’t ‘real life’. But these ready-made ideas you go on about! When you know nothing at all about what real people are doing, except what you pick up here and there. About how people should or should not live. About how things should or should not be.

  None of this would bother me much if only you hadn’t taken it so far. If only you didn’t swallow me up. Whenever I take a step back, you push forward to occupy the space I’ve left there. Even this furnished room: like you, I’ve begun to call it ‘the house’ or even ‘home’. But it’s just a miserable room in a block of flats where pimps rent space for the prostitutes who strut up and down the street below us. Fine, no problem – we’ll call it a ‘home’. Because, after all, these intentions you have, about lifting me up, out of the ranks of poor men – including the business of your ‘forgetting’ that money you left on the table – they’re good intentions, of course. Except that I’m not a poor man, I’m just broke. But my intelligence, as you say, is wealth! Fine, good. Then you come in lugging these cleaning liquids and disinfectants and various cloths and wipes and rags, and storage cartons and carrier bags and… Like the white tornado in the TV commercial, you go about sweeping and dusting and polishing and picking up, saying you want to make this pitiful room into a home.

  What?!

  And since you seem to be in a state of tornado-bliss that begs description, how can I object? There’s no law that says a liberated woman has to embrace filth and chaos, true enough. But you couldn’t help noticing that the clean sheets and the smells of Dettol and those other disinfectants had an effect on my performance. I couldn’t come as fast or as hard. So you pulled back from making further attacks on the tiny space into which I’ve crept as a refuge from the world. You promised to leave things alone, to let it all return to the state it was in before the tornado slammed down. But you didn’t even have to do that. I was beginning on my own to change the sheets and empty the kitchen sink and dust everything in sight whenever I expected you to show up. That’s how frightened I was of you! As if the only thing left undone was to clear a little alcove for our love child and begin assembling the stylish wood-framed baby bed we’d have picked out together from the Ikea catalogue!

  You are so distanced from ordinary life. So unconnected to it. One time you said – I think you were only half joking – that your period was late.

  What is it you want? Do you really want to be a mother?

  To be my mother?

  I’ve wondered what it is about this role that could possibly entice you. Is it your hormones, which rise into your head and fog your vision? Aren’t you supposed to be a civilized person who has control over her instincts? What about that cherished speech of yours on abused femininity? Was that just a trap you set to reassure me? Make up your mind, and then give me a chance to explain to you – maybe adding in a few details but not too many – where that rural train took me. What I mean by where is this: how was it that I forgot the woman who dumped me on that train, and forgot her so quickly? I must have done, because otherwise how could I have stayed on the train that was taking me somewhere far away and completely unknown? I forgot her immediately. And she forgot me too. She never came to see me, not even once. Maybe she thought it would help me immerse myself in my studies. The only thing her ignorance and backwardness left me with was the odour of boiled eggs and that dark, dark tunnel. If they had lined up a bunch of women in front of me and placed her among them, I wouldn’t have known her from the next one. That woman shattered my life and made me a fugitive in God’s wide world, in a world where everyone was a stranger. A world of strangers, exiles and orphans. I never heard even a hint that she made any attempt to find me.

  All that happened was that, when she died, one of my brothers found out my telephone number – I have no idea how. He said, ‘I am your brother So-and-So.’ I don’t even recall now which brother it was. Then he said, ‘Your mother has died.’ I think I remember responding automatically, ‘May your life be long’, or something suitable like that. And then, suddenly, I was furiously angry. Why did they even contact me? I asked myself. What did they think they were doing, phoning me, when they’d never bothered to do that before? Like, even just to ask how I was, for example.

  When the hen was ailing, my mother cared for it, carrying it around all day long to keep it out of range of the roosters’ pecking. She fed it grain from her own hand, and she didn’t leave it on its own until it had made a full recovery. She said prayers for the ewe that had a hard time giving birth, staying close and stroking its neck, singing to it, and then trilling with loud joy when she could see the baby lamb moving in the placenta. She used to sob at the sound of the lambs bleating when they were newly weaned from their mother’s milk. All of those creatures – but not me. There were days on end when she didn’t even look in my direction. She would tip hot water over my head and then scream at me when I wailed. Me – I was no use. I couldn’t give her anything. No eggs, no milk, no meat. I was nothing but an empty belly beneath a wide-open mouth. And then she got rid of me, sending me away to a place she didn’t know anything about.


  So. She was dead. There was no longer any space for manoeuvre – no room for revenge, no chance to settle the accounts once and for all. No reason to go back there, which in any case had happened only in my darkest fantasies. In those nightmares I watched myself working out a simple way to tell her how all the oxytocin cells in my brain had flickered out. I would explain to her that, here, the doctors call this brain matter ‘the bonding molecule’, since she had some respect for book-learning and science. I would tell her that in my brain, which supposedly was a cut above my brothers’ brains, there were regions an X-ray would show as a void, completely extinguished, no longer reachable by any electron charges or rays. These are precisely the regions of the brain that manage depression, fear, violence and feelings of abandonment.

  I read in some book that mother animals eat their male young out of sheer attachment. I read about how a mother swallows her infant son, returning him to her womb, because she knows the infant male will always be wretched unless he’s with her. She returns him to the place of ultimate contentment, which no other state of bliss can ever resemble. She, whose organs are nourished only by her baby’s masculine self, will make her sacrificial offering upon his beloved corpse. There it is, the love that devours even corpses.

  As for me, my mother dumped me on the country train as though I were a sack of rubbish. That’s why, at first, I accepted your little sport, those sudden intervals when you played at being a mother-in-miniature whose milk I could breathe in as I tried to become a true male. I tried hard, and I went on trying, but it was just not possible. I was like a person who keeps on walking straight ahead even when he can see the cliff edge and the chasm beyond it opening out clearly in front of him. It got to the point where I couldn’t come close to your breasts without thinking immediately of milk, and I was afraid, if I squeezed them, of white drops running onto my hands and the rancid smell that stream of white liquid would leave on me.

  But it was when I caught the smell of garlic in this ‘home’ that I decided you really had gone too far, and you had to be stopped. That we needed a thorough stock-taking. For you to fry eggs or open a tin of sardines, fine. But garlic? Garlic means cooking. It means: I’m here and I’m staying, and there is no convincing response to that. Who can stand up to a woman who is ready to kiss a mouth reeking of garlic? A woman who embraces a man’s most odious smells, and is happy to wash his undergarments or his smelly socks? Who defies a mother knowing full well that she means to consume him?

  I think… I think the time has come when I have to speak to this man who hasn’t stopped looking in my direction. Maybe we can come to an understanding. I’ll tell him something like this: Look. Frankly speaking, I love women. What I mean is: I only love women. But I don’t have anything against homosexuals; in fact, I have some dear friends among the

  If I find him willing to listen, I’ll explain to him, calmly and gently, how I’m finding this really annoying – his watching me like this. How it is beginning to feel very, very annoying. I’ll tell him that I could decide, however, that there’s really no need to go to the police and inform them about the

  I won’t do it. I read in some book that there are homos whose lusts, if they’re bottled up, can turn into criminal acts of extreme violence. Because those types can’t control their urges. There’s no limit to their sadism. Not even murder satisfies their sick inclinations. Many of them become serial killers. True, I read this in one of those cheap books that are pulped and sold by the kilo, but who knows. Who knows? The truth is, I’m afraid of my own shadow.

  I’ll wait. Maybe he’ll get bored and just stop.

  I wanted to ask you something. How can you take this overwhelming passion so lightly? This rare passion, the desire – my wanting sex with you over and over, tens of times, hundreds. Don’t you sense that? How my chest feels like it is about to burst open and my heartbeat is going wild and I think I am suffocating? How I’ve submitted to all the moves of your body like a servant obeying his master, or maybe even a slave? How I kiss you from your toes all the way up to the ends of every lock of hair? How I study the length and breadth of your radiant skin, until I’ve committed to memory the location and the exact colour of the tiniest beauty mark so that I can see it perfectly with my eyes shut? How could you think it was somehow lacking, this passion? It’s tragic. Yes, this really is a tragedy, because it is all I have to offer. A pure and overwhelming desire, full and complete and perfect. A desire that lacks nothing.

  It’s you who have taken away the perfection of my desire. You reduced its value with your incessant questions about ‘guarantees’ and ‘sell-by dates’ and so forth. How much longer are you going to…?

  It’s just an exam that never ends, isn’t it, and you want me to fail. So, at that point, I’m going to give answers, because your insistence pushes me to it, but they’re answers you don’t want to hear. If that happens, and my answers really aren’t the ones you want to hear, don’t object! Here is what I say: that naturally – little by little and simply because this is the way things happen – we will find ourselves increasingly bored and irritated every time we’re together. In other words, things will begin to take their natural course. They’re already taking their natural course, I’ll say. Eventually I’ll go back to staring at other women’s thighs and breasts, and I’ll stop paying attention to your pleasant chitchat and your breasts, as near as they are. And when I say this to you, you just accept it! You fall for it, almost right away. That’s why I have to keep pushing you into a corner, as far as I can make you go. I do it elaborately, I overdo it, so that maybe, just maybe, you’ll protest, show some irritation, maybe even give a light rebuke. Next come my outright lies and inventions. Like telling you I can’t see you for days ahead, or perhaps for weeks, because I’m…well, I’m busy. With what? With whom? But you won’t even ask.

  The next time I see you, after we’ve been out of touch for a bit, I’m startled to realize that the lies I’ve been telling are turning into the truth! It really is possible to live without you. I mean, these are the laws of nature after all. I haven’t actually made anything up, and I didn’t do anything to make this happen. Then, when I see you passing on the street, going the other way, home to your place, I might take a deep breath once you’re behind me. I’ll feel fine. I’ll tell myself I’m not going to be jerked around by a woman I’ve been on top of. I’ll turn up my jacket collar and keep walking briskly and lightly, in high spirits. A pretty girl, that one. A pleasant and fun girl, we had some nice times together.

  Or. I might turn up my jacket collar and try to breathe deeply, but my sobs defeat me. I’ll choke on my tears and shout, in Arabic so that no one can understand me, ‘She would have got bored anyway. She would have got tired of me for sure, because there’s nothing in me to keep a woman interested. That’s why she got into that game, and she made me get into it too, that game of cooking, and turning the room into home. It’s the law of nature, she was going to leave me anyway. And I couldn’t have stood that.’

  I feel so sad, really sad, as I’m writing to you about all of this – my indecision, my ups and downs between the relief of shrugging you off and the tragedy of losing you, the two of us a failure together.

  But…but how can this man have the strength to stand out there in the cold all this time? Or does he go inside and shut the balcony door behind him whenever I move out of his sight? As if he can appear, through a wizard’s magic, when I turn on the light or open the curtain, and only then. He looks a little bit like that nasty man we came upon one day in the supermarket in the city centre. You commented at the time on how ugly you found his bushy moustache, and his insolent stares and…and then I couldn’t help displaying you as if you were my ‘booty’, goods I owned, as dictated by the language of testosterone. You know, sometimes your good looks play against you. They rouse my animal instincts: my horns come out, my hooves paw at the ground and as the cloud of dust rises, I snort into it. Just because I show all this jealousy doesn’t mean I’m in love wi
th you. It’s a thing between males, competition over the size of one’s balls, and it has nothing to do with the particular female who happens to be standing in this territory occupied by two random males. It is in my genes. Given my struggle with the world, the whole world, I have no intention of fighting my own genes too.

  Why am I at war with the whole world? I don’t know. Ask the world! Maybe it’s because of the feeling I always have that I’m in the middle of combat but I don’t have any weapons at all. And every time I venture out of my hiding place, I come back covered with bruises and wounds. It’s not that I’m particularly peaceful, and it’s not that I’m surrendering, it’s just that I can’t find any means of arming myself. The real disaster is my weak constitution. I don’t dare strike anyone. So that’s it. I’m weak, and I’m a coward, and that doubles the rage I feel when I look at myself.

  You complain sometimes about my aggressive behaviour, especially since you can’t find any reason for it. You question me about the motivations for my anger, not because you want to ease it away through your love for me – all we have to do is to slip between the sheets for my anger to leave me – but because you are nosy, and you’re working on your tactics, ready for a new attack.

  Do you remember the first time I saw you?

  You reminded me of actresses from the 1940s. That’s what I told you. What I meant by it, of course, was that I found you gorgeous. When you didn’t respond, not even with a smile, I told myself you had won the first round and you would pay a high price for it. Ever since you first came into my bed, and every time I came out of you, I would take a deep breath and gather my forces, with all the effort this took, to play the role I had decided on for myself. Caressing your hair, I would ask, ‘Was it good?’ In other words, did our little ‘turn’ bring you pleasure? Is that how you like it? As if I were the plumber who asks the lady of the house whether the job he’s just finished suits her taste.