Voices of the Lost

by Hoda Barakat

  As it happened, not long after I met my beloved and began living with him, the symptoms began showing on him. He was no longer able to work. The owner of the fashion boutique where he had a job threw him out. We moved from our small flat to a single room. Then I moved from working in a sandwich shop where I made almost nothing, to a bar in a Jewish neighbourhood where a lot of gays lived. I didn’t feel any hesitancy about beginning to sell some of my evening hours to those who wanted a fly-by-night relationship. We needed the money badly. I didn’t feel any shame about working as a prostitute. But the treatment we were paying for didn’t yield results. My companion – my love – withered away in my hands, a little closer to death with every day that passed. All the care and attention I’d lavished on him weren’t any use at all.

  When he refused to be moved to the hospital, I had to wash him, to feed him, to find ways to relieve the pain in the pus-filled sores all over his skin that by then was practically just a membrane over his bones. I was like a devout nun bent prayerfully over his many wounds, every evening and every morning. I held him in my arms as though he were a child, and very carefully and softly I rubbed rosewater into his wasting body. I changed his dressings. Even without any adhesive, the new squares of gauze stuck to his skin. I changed the sheets and washed them. I ground and pulped whatever I could in the blender so that I could feed him before going down to dry the sheets in the communal laundry and then making the rounds to buy the supplies we needed. Until he asked me to stop. ‘Leave me alone,’ he said. ‘I’m asking you not to touch me, from now on.’ He began pushing my hands away, and he would no longer eat anything at all.

  Before long, when I finished work I avoided going up to our room. I would sit on the park bench in the street long enough to fall asleep. One very early morning, at sunrise, a policeman woke me up. He was very kind. ‘What’s going on, my son?’ My son, from a city policeman! I started crying as I got up and walked away.

  I left him to die alone. That is a fact no matter how much I try to disguise it by using other words. No matter how often I say that I was only complying with his request, indeed his orders; no matter how forcefully I insist that it was his right to refuse to be seen in that state, repulsive and disgusting; still, I left him to die on his own. What I told myself was: when death comes, he won’t need anyone there. He will be so weak that he will simply flicker out like a lightbulb. He will not need me when he is dead. He will not need anyone. He has been dying for a long time. And I must forget him, because otherwise I will die along with him.

  I got used to the street. The touch of other bodies was a solace I had been needing and searching for. Bodies alive with health and vigour, skin that did not ooze or know pain, unless it was the pain of pleasure.

  My strong attachment to lepers and cripples – by which I mean all those people who suffer the illnesses of unwanted solitude and loneliness – turned into a love, a passion and a way of life that nourished me. There are so many of them out there: people whom life has cast mercilessly out to the margins where no one can see them, into the wastelands of isolation, walled off by virtue of their invisibility. These people see no one and no one sees them. Any attempt to infiltrate the world beyond that wall ends in catastrophic, violent repulsion, like the meeting of two substances whose magnetic charges repel each other. Two worlds, completely cut off from each other, two languages whose codes are mutually undecipherable, unreadable in whichever direction you try to read them.

  We criss-crossed the streets of the city, sometimes stealing, more often begging, and though it’s easy to forget now, laughing and amusing ourselves too. Late in the evenings, I went with them to wherever it was they drank themselves to sleep: on the street corners, under bridges or in homeless shelters when the cold was at its worst. In one of those centres they examined us, and it turned out that I hadn’t been infected. I was very happy about that.

  Among the people I got to know was a guy who showed up from time to time to preach to us. But he wasn’t dull or irritating as priests usually are. He laughed and joked with us. He didn’t hold forth with grandiose words about fires or Hell or things like that. He called himself an evangelist, a Bible-person; that is, he wasn’t part of a church. He read the scriptures and learned what to do from the life of Jesus of Nazareth. We didn’t throw him out, not only because he told such entertaining stories, but also because he had connections to various organizations which meant he could bring us a few of the things we needed. Then one day he took me and a handful of the younger lads outside the city to a very nice-looking centre for immigrants. It was like a small hotel. That was where a doctor told me that one of my eyes was going completely blind and that we must take immediate action to treat the other one so that I wouldn’t lose both. He said it wasn’t anything I had done. It was bacteria spread by a particular species of mosquito that laid its eggs in human eyes. I was very upset and sad, but what could I do? Sad…and angry. Then I began focusing on my hopes to save my one good eye, and did everything the doctor instructed in his weekly visits.

  ‘Why?’ I asked the evangelist in one of our evening gatherings where we listened to him telling the stories of the Messiah. ‘Why did people – why did all the people – choose Barabbas when Pontius Pilate asked them whom he should free on Passover, Jesus of Nazareth or that thief, that highwayman?’ His response was so amusing that we laughed out loud. ‘Because the people are not always right.’ He was cheating, I told him, because the question really was: ‘Why did the people vote against Jesus? Why was it in their interest to do that? What was their motive?’ Someone else said, ‘Jesus already knew what was happening, and it was his decision to go to the cross himself.’ ‘But why?’ asked someone else. The first guy said, ‘That’s just the way it was.’ The evangelist chimed in: ‘To sacrifice himself for us, to die for our sakes.’ But we protested. ‘Then how come we’re still dying horrible, painful deaths, even though none of us has sinned?’ We went back to laughing and our usual loud bantering as he thought for a bit. And then he said, ‘It’s a parable. The Scriptures are all about parables and symbols. Do any of you know why the Messiah walked on water?’ ‘No,’ we said. ‘No, we don’t know.’ ‘So that the rest of us would attempt the impossible,’ he replied.

  This idea of walking on the water appealed to me. I looked at the people around me. They had all been rescued, pulled out of the seawater. They had lost their friends and family members to sinking boats. Maybe they should have tried walking on water. They didn’t, though, and this must have been due to a lack of faith or a shortcoming in the way they’d been raised. If we were really believers, we would have walked – without any boats, without the dangers and costs of those boats. I would have put on a pair of comfortable, roomy shoes and walked on the water all the way to Europe. Maybe even further. Hahaha! Or I would have tried to cross on a skateboard, since that’s a bit faster than walking. Maybe I would have stopped to have a pleasant picnic on the water – on the blue surface of the sea – followed by a nap. That would have renewed my strength to go on skating across.

  And then there was that little strip of cloth covering the crucified man’s lower body – why did it never fall off? I asked him this question just for a bit of a laugh. I knew that, back then, when a person was crucified he was left completely naked, to humiliate him. So I said, ‘They always crucified people stark naked, since the point was to shame them by uncovering their private parts. So why cover him?’ It’s all very well for paintings and icons and statues in churches to respect the feelings of worshippers and believers. After all, a believer is modest and bashful by nature, and wants to focus on what he’s at church for. But these days, they strip us naked for the most trivial procedures. Yallah, take off your clothes! Yallah, everything – take it off! Underpants, too? Yes! As if a person’s penis or belly button will reveal secrets if they search it. Anyway, no one’s embarrassed now when everything’s on show. They’re not embarrassed and neither are we.

  The evangelist fell back on his parables an
d his symbols, caught out by the question and unsure if it was asked in seriousness or jest. It all ended with us throwing him out of our gathering, because he couldn’t get into the spirit of our teasing. After that evening, I widened my circle of acquaintances. I began to enjoy hearing languages I didn’t know. When one of the other immigrants spoke to me in a foreign language I just nodded and smiled, not understanding a word.

  For some reason, many of them spoke to me often and for long periods of time. Probably because they knew I didn’t understand their languages. They talked to me without actually looking at me. Anyone who wanted to ensure I was taking in what they said would look straight at me and speak in English. Maybe they took me for a madman, or just slightly batty, because of my one-eyed gaze. Maybe that’s why, at night, they would start sobbing in my presence, and why they walked about stark naked in front of me, coming from their bath, without showing any sign of embarrassment.

  Then suddenly one morning, when we went out for our required exercise, we found the field around our centre choked with small tents of all colours, like wildflowers that had sprouted overnight amid the grass. Then came the buses packed with people – women and children. The buses disgorged everyone in an area fenced off with barbed wire. At the perimeter there were waves of police patrolling, addressing people through microphones and from behind plastic shields. They were tossing water bottles at them, and bundles of clothes. At one side of the field, TV vans were lined up. I felt dizzy. ‘It’s spoiled now,’ I told myself, and I left.

  I’m writing all of this, Father, to tell you that, like the others, I vote for Barabbas, the conscience of the people. And that now, finally, I acknowledge the czar’s power. I am homeless these days, just a vagrant with nowhere to go, who is sick and partly blind. I have no money, I have nowhere to sleep. I’m worn out. I want to come home.

  I still have my identity papers. If you agree to it, send me the money for a ticket, or send me a telegram c/o the post office at the airport, where I’ll post this letter. That’s where I’ll be, waiting for your answer.

  I hope you will answer quickly. Salaam.

  ‌Part Two

  Those Who are Searching

  Like a mad fool I rushed off to the airport, hoping to find him there.

  That man we’d come upon one day, the one whose horrible moustache we mocked, told me he had just seen him hailing a taxi. And that he’d had a large suitcase with him.

  I was immediately suspicious when this man claimed to be a relative, which is how he presented himself to me. He was too polite. He said he felt badly for me, because he had seen me on this street before, gazing long and hard up at that window as I walked by. Whatever – I didn’t think this was the moment to get into any of the details. Without delay, I flagged down a taxi. I went straight to the departure gates where flights to his country leave from. I waited for hours, like an idiot.

  Because…how could I have possibly found him? How could I have believed that impostor on the street? What did he have to gain by lying to me like that? People here are strange. The men are riddled with complexes. They’re sick.

  I would walk down his street, passing his home, more than once a week. Sometimes the light was on in his room, and then I would sit in the café opposite, with the prostitutes and the pimps, waiting for him to come down to buy something, or just to go for a walk, and then I would make something up. Well, hello, what a coincidence!

  Other times I kept watch, studying the curtains, looking for a woman’s shadow, one of his many lovers. My basic and most powerful motive was punishment. Getting my revenge. But I wanted to find the right way to do it. An instrument worthy of my hard anger. I needed to come up with a manner of revenge that would be truly painful for him, carving out a hole in his life that he would never be able to overlook, or fill.

  I could not satisfy my thirst. In the last few weeks, his window was always dark. I asked his neighbour, the plump prostitute whom I guessed he frequented, and she said she hadn’t seen him for a while.

  This man was a truly harmful being. Causing pain was in his nature. He was broke and had nothing to lose. He was arrogant and full of himself; he was backward in his ideas and pretentious in his claims, violent with people but always quick to break into tears. As soon as he reckoned I had fallen for him – fallen in love or at least fallen into his bed – the torment began. What he inflicted on me was planned out and methodical. By torturing me, he was trying, most likely, to make me more attached to him, more dependent. That was his sick logic.

  In the end I loathed him, and I found all his complexes and problems repulsive. It seems they were all products of a miserable childhood in an ailing country, things he’d carried with him his whole life. His loneliness, the desolation that was primed to play on my sense of sympathy, became an instrument of relentless torment boring into my head. I never saw him in the company of even one friend, never saw him with a relative, and as far as I could tell, he’d never had a lover who stayed with him for more than a week.

  Resentment, hatred and some lingering sympathy – together they drove out the all-consuming passion that destroyed years of my life. A combination of anger and pity filled the space my passion had occupied, and then the pity vanished. Revenge was all I could think about. That is what would bring me back to life. The life he had denied me. It would bring me back to men. To love, to sex. I felt as though he had squeezed out all the juices of my soul, that I could never again feel attractive, never again be someone a man might desire. How could that man want me so madly and then, the very same evening, shed me so completely? I would tell myself that it was because he loved me so intensely that he wanted to put me to the test like this. He wanted to make me his patient Job, to treat me as the Lord treated Job, out of His abiding love. He singled out Job to reward him for the goodness of his heart. God said to Job: You are the one, the only one, to deserve everything that I will do to you. I choose you, in your purity, singling you out from all of humanity, for a special, limitless torment. But you will be free! You are not bound by the wager I have made on your love for Me. I will leave it to you to choose whether or not the bet is lost. However, the story will never be over unless and until I win the bet… Ah, the wisdom of proverbs, legends and fables, the stories we tell.

  He chose me, in my purity, for his torture. Other women he had been with he abandoned, allowing them to go away whole, in peace, with a fond farewell, probably expressing some humility and gratitude. Except me…except me. It is almost as though he had to keep bringing me back, as if he were sentenced or condemned to retrieve me from wherever I had managed to flee – if I managed it, that is. He would search high and low for me, bringing me back only to fling me further away.

  What obsesses me now is my stupidity. Why did I keep going back to him, and how could I have been led on so blindly by his promise to keep me and take care of me, to make amends, compensating me for my strong powers of endurance, my ability to hide the ulcerations in my heart, my failure to make him take responsibility for my affliction, my illness. Because it got to the point where I became as sick as he was, and it was the same kind of sick. It was too much, I couldn’t bear it. The route I had to take to get to him was now so terrible, so ugly, that I no longer wanted to arrive. I no longer wanted his passion. I no longer wanted Job’s prophesying. All I wanted was to wallow in my own open wounds, and I didn’t want to see them close up. Sickened as I was, I could control my passion for him. And as long as I knew him, the passion consumed me; it didn’t leave me any room for healing – nothing to give me the strength to reject this sickness.

  He disappeared. I had believed that love made all masks fall, that love was the truth, as they taught me through the words of the Messiah. But it seems to me now that one enormous mask covers the body of the world; or that the world is only a massive accumulation of masks over masks, with nothing beneath them in the end. And that I am blind.

  I sit down in an out-of-the-way bank of seats to hide the streaks of tears on my face from pass
ers-by. But what I want to do is to scream at them. What is the problem? What’s the matter with my crying? Why should there be anything strange about it? Aren’t airports places made for saying goodbye? For tears?

  I blow my nose and take a deep breath. If my father were alive, I would have gone to him. My father was the only man anywhere to whom I could have asked my questions: where did that man disappear to? How could he leave me without a word? What did he want from me?

  What did he want?

  Father, help me. Were his loneliness and alienation my doing? What did I not attempt for his sake? Why did my heart attach itself so strongly to him? Alone, and knowing he was far away, sometimes, suddenly, I have felt his head next to mine. In the bus, for instance. Then I’d start shivering and it would always end in a bout of tears. Why? Why have I found myself fixating on some man, any man, who looks just slightly like him from the back, and then following him for hours when I know perfectly well that it isn’t him there ahead of me? Did he ever love me, for even a day? A moment? In the café, in the street, in his bed? Is it just that I reminded him of some woman he did love, and he saw her in me? Or was I like his mother, whom I imagine he really did despise, so deeply that he never allowed even one question on anything that was remotely connected to her?

  But mightn’t his disappearance be against his will? Did he have enemies I didn’t know existed? It seems very unlikely that he would have returned to his country without saying a single word about it, not ever, even as a remote possibility. Especially once he was working on getting back his passport. That’s what I believe. Because, in the end, we had become friends. Or at least we would have…