Otared

by Mohammad Rabie

  The man started rummaging through a little heap of garbage down a side street. The great pyramids were no good for picking. He did this every day, extracting whatever he could eat from the smaller piles. Whatever was not yet rotten—its stink gone and the mold just beginning to spread—he would eat before it turned completely, before it fell apart or changed color. He’d pick out an apple to sniff, to detect the underlying hint of mold before the rot claimed the whole fruit. If he saw a scrap of decomposing bread, a piece of fruit putrefying at the edges, he’d bite off the decayed part, spit it out, and eat the rest. The garbage man.

  The older girl mastered her natural delicacy and started picking through another pile. A minute in, she found a whole loaf, still fresh and supple. From his pile, the garbage man took a stale loaf, which he placed in his plastic bag to be sprinkled with water. Then the little girl found the remains of a chicken, white flesh still sticking to the breastbone. She lifted the morsel to show it to her older companion and they both smiled, but the garbage man could find nothing but his bone-dry bread. He watched them enviously, then realized that they were encroaching on his territory, that they would be sharing his pickings. Other stomachs would be digesting his food.

  He spoke harsh words to them and waved his arm angrily, but they didn’t flee. Moving quickly, the older girl picked up a stone from the ground and threw it at him. It missed his face and he advanced on them with his massive frame, striking the girl a single blow that laid her out unconscious. The little girl stared at her and didn’t understand.

  People were beside themselves with panic back then, making the rounds of the bakeries and markets while young men stood out in the street armed with staves, every man suspecting his neighbor, suspecting his brother, then embracing him once more, apologizing and confessing his error. The wound had opened, they were saying, and the pus was seeping out; they were in a time of trial by error, but were determined to see it through to the end. No going back today. No retreating whence we’ve come. We shall never be unjust again. And with every ignorant breath, their hope redoubled.

  Neither regret nor rage surfaced in the garbage man’s expression. His face was rigid. It hadn’t moved for years. Even when he begged for food, it didn’t shift. He would try instead to soften the tone of his voice, adding gentle groans and sighs, sometimes whistling, and these sound effects did indeed make him more appealing. The face, though, remained immobile.

  Many years back, the garbage man had lost the use of his right eye, and its white orb acted like a magnet on the eyes of others. The bread that was always in his hand—a whole loaf or scraps, the thing he found in greatest abundance and his most prized possession—made people, wretched as they were, contemplate his dreadful condition.

  The garbage man made sure to eat whatever he found on the spot. He’d eat fragments of fruit and vegetable peelings, would crunch bones between his back teeth and suck out the marrow he adored, however cold and stiff it was. But bread he treated differently. Bread he liked to keep with him, then search for a source of water to wet the loaf and eat it. He liked it soft. The garbage man kept a number of loaves stowed in his pocket, beneath his shirt, in the plastic bag by his bed; whenever he got hungry, he would take one out and start to chew it. The garbage man got hungry in his sleep. He’d wake, throat dry, down two swigs from the bottle at his side without sitting up, then take out a loaf, wet it with a few drops, tear at it until he was full, and go back to sleep. He always made sure the loaf and bottle were beside him before he slept.

  The garbage man was a repellent pest. He’d tour the buildings, whose occupants he knew by name, calling out to them and sticking honorifics before each one. If he didn’t know a name, he’d call, “Dear friend!” buttering up the people seated slumped in their apartments, and they’d throw down coins and scraps of bread. Others would stick their heads from windows and shout, “Go away!” The garbage man made a racket when he raised his voice, shouting out a different name every three seconds, and for anyone in earshot it was a nightmare. But this boisterous routine was only a fallback: the garbage man only begged for food when he could find nothing in the trash. The people here were stingy. They ate everything. They ate the flesh, and the skin, and the bones, the rind and core of their fruit. All he could find was onion skins and the soil-matted hanks of their roots. Onion skin scratched his throat when he swallowed it. And now the two girls had shown up. There was not enough bread to share.

  Insal passed the garbage man. He was moving along, swaying ecstatically. “Dear friend! A fine day to you!” he called out. Just that, mechanically repeated five or six times. Insal ignored him and noticed the two girls crying on a sidewalk nearby. The older girl had come to and was weeping softly, and the little girl wept to see her cry.

  Insal thought to himself that killing these girls, and Zahra, and the garbage man would not make the world a better place, but it would bring relief to many.

  Completely out of the blue, the garbage man strode up to the girl he’d slapped and began patting her shoulder. She was too weak to resist.

  The garbage man wasted no time. He took the girls back to the place where he slept, his little home beneath the overpass. In a spacious, low-roofed area under the on-ramp, the garbage man had erected cracked wooden boards, making walls to shelter him from the wind—a cramped space hidden behind a heap of black trash bags, which protected him from the prying eyes of passersby and the police. He lay down. Four square meters. The space contained a small pillow, newspapers piled everywhere, and a small, colorless mattress. There was a powerful stench of rot, the sound of cars overhead on the overpass, and from beneath his fetid body, the moans of the older girl. The garbage man had never slept with a child before. Had never experienced such softness and delicacy. He wasn’t accustomed to have the woman under him give such gentle, muffled sobs.

  The older girl was weeping bitterly. The pain was unendurable, but she didn’t cry out, just moaned, afraid of waking her little sister, who lay asleep in one corner of the tiny hut. The garbage man thought: If she didn’t want me, she’d fight back. She’d scratch my face and hit me, but she wants it. And when he lifted his face and gazed into hers, her tears and fearful expression amazed him. He slowed, then stopped, watching the calm come to her face, then resumed his thrusting with sudden violence, reveling in the pain and muffled cries. Eagerly, he carried on.

  Outside, people were caught up in the world’s illusion. They were being killed in every street and alley, and the snipers were working diligently at their task. Insal was lying in bed, trying to sleep, but he would only manage a single hour before dawn came.

  Zahra was yet to adjust to the apartment. Her frequent weeping made Leila tense, but there was nothing for it but to put up with the fatherless girl. And slowly she recovered from her illness, an illness that had muted the shock of her father’s disappearance and the sudden materialization of this family she knew nothing about.

  Leila created her own torment. She pursued the visions that had begun the first time that she’d seen Zahra. She imagined her own child living far away from her in an orphanage, her boy amid a mob of street kids, the most handsome and polite. Then out on the street: trotting barefoot with torn clothes, clutching a plastic bag, and inhaling the viscous glue within. Or living with a relative who persecuted and terrorized him, who spread a sheet on the bare ground for his bed, who got angry at him, say, and made him sleep without any supper. All these tragic fates had passed through her mind before her child ever came into the world. There, in her womb, the fetus hung suspended between life and death. A new soul was taking shape, awaiting the perfect moment to occupy the tiny body and settle there until it saw the light.

  And Leila was constantly afraid. For Insal, searching the hospital morgues for the body of a man he didn’t know and had never seen before; and of him, of his ongoing neglect, his perpetual abstraction, forever distracted from her by things that were quite unimportant (even the search for the body didn’t matter), though the situation didn’t
allow her to object. And for the girl, too, who asked tearfully after her absent father. She had no idea how to rid herself of these fears.

  Zahra was moving about the house, chattering to herself and her missing father as she went, describing what she saw and repeating his name over and over, telling him about the size of the chair, the color of the curtain, the unforgiving hardness of the door. She inspected the carpet, lay down, and sank into sleep.

  Zahra hated the smell of the apartment, and Insal’s smell, and Leila’s. But the smell of Leila’s unborn child was nice. Zahra liked it a lot.

  Leila had received her husband frantically when he had returned. She had asked him about his trip to the hospital, about what he’d seen there and about Zahra’s father. Had he found him?

  Insal had been in no condition to confront Leila with everything he’d witnessed, and nor, for that matter had Leila been in any state to listen to descriptions of corpses, but she had to know about Zahra’s coming trip to the morgue. He had given an abbreviated version of what had happened and had tried explaining how important it was that Zahra come with him. He had predicted that Leila would take fright at his words, so her response was unexpected when it came.

  But no mother carrying her child inside her can ever be wholly sad.

  That night Leila embraced Zahra as the child slept—there was no avoiding it—and the smell of her alarm trickled into the girl’s nostrils. At the very same instant, the same alarm made its way to the fetus resting inside her. Zahra sensed the grief in the two bodies and woke up. Leila hugged her.

  Insal lay motionless. He had not told Leila about what had happened to him: running from the sniper’s bullets, the people swarming around him, wandering the street for an hour through a maze of ricocheting rounds. He had not told her about the morgue attendant and the bodies.

  On his return to the apartment, weighed down by his body, Insal had walked straight to the bedroom, surrounded by a halo of odors, a vast number sufficient to confuse anybody—so what chance had little Zahra to tell them all apart? The smells of the corpses’ indifference, of their joy at deliverance and their regret at departure, then smells from all the people Insal had touched that day: panic, hope, and fear. Smells that Zahra had never come across before, that she’d never inhaled. But one in particular stood out. The smell of a stranger, perhaps? No, this was the scent of someone she knew well, of someone Insal had met. Very familiar but somehow changed.

  Zahra had been between sleep and wakefulness when she heard Insal come home. She could make out a lot of talk, but didn’t understand what he meant by the words ‘morgue’ or ‘hospital’ and didn’t grasp that she would be accompanying him tomorrow to see what was in that morgue. Perhaps if she’d understood what Insal was saying, she would have known that her search would one day be over.

  Now Leila slept, pressing Zahra to her, her little face to her chest, her feet tucked between the older woman’s thighs. That night, Leila held two souls. Insal, meanwhile, could not sleep, and gazed at Leila’s face and at Zahra’s body, her head flipping from side to side every few minutes.

  Late into the night, Zahra’s hand touched his cheek. She felt the short, groomed hair of his beard against her palm. She was half-asleep but let her hand run over his cheeks, and eyes, and nose, then did it a second time, and a third, brushing over every inch of his face. Then at last she surrendered, and her arm flopped to her side.

  *

  Battles raged outside. Many were killed and a great number were wounded, most of whom died shortly afterward. Anyone abroad in any of the public squares would have seen one or more bodies lying on the ground, patches of dried blood beneath them—and had he tried to move them, or even paused beside them, he would have been killed on the spot. The dead were traps.

  The dogs roamed everywhere, muzzles raised to the wind, searching for the scent of the dead. When one of them caught a trace of it nearby, he would track it until he reached the body, then howl—calling his pack and the dog man, who came along, pulling his gray cart, to lay the body inside it with the others—and then move off, answering another howl that rang from the next street along.

  4

  ONE OF THE DOGS FOUND ANOTHER body beneath a tree. He sniffed it thoroughly and barked loudly until four more dogs arrived, which sniffed the body with him and barked to mark that the body was theirs. “A dead man!” they barked. “Another one dead! The man has died! He’s dead! He must be buried!” Then the pack’s howl went up, “Dead! Dead! Dead!” until their master hurried up, pulling his wooden cart.

  The dog man searched long and hard for an ID card, for anything that might give a name, but he found nothing. Many in this country had no ID; many were too low down the scale to own one; many had lost theirs on purpose (their names a stain on their characters, marked down on the list of bad boys—the list that leaves you in a permanent sweat, wary and on the lookout); many had no interest in the whole affair: documentation, registering, the state, paperwork. He was one of them. This was a body that gave off the stink of bitterness, and the dogs snuffled and sampled a smell they hadn’t encountered for a long time. This was a man who had died overwhelmed by grief—and what was more, a body with no identity or features, a body with a shattered head, skull fragments mixed with flesh, nose now far away from the eyes, and eyes only identifiable by the bright white that stood out against the flesh and blood around them. The blood ran gleaming over the eyeballs, which were whole and undamaged, spared the mutilation that marked the face. What saddened the dog man deeply was the dusty scalp. To the dog man, this was evidence of suffering. The coats of the dogs and cats that lay dead in the street, or abandoned to the maggots in the trash, were like this: stiff with dirt and filth. This man had died, and his body had been dragged along the ground, and now his hair was filthy. He was missing and his people would never find him.

  The dog man decided to bury him where he lay. He couldn’t move the corpse of a man whose face was mincemeat; bits were sure to fall off into the bottom of the cart or onto the road, and one of the stray dogs might gnaw at him when the dog man wasn’t looking. Gazing sadly at the dusty hair, he took a small comb from his pocket, gently patted the scalp, then ran his hand over the head, flicking away specks of dirt, and began to comb. He would not be buried with unkempt hair.

  The dogs dug a small hole next to the tree, then backed away a little and started tearing at the roots that snaked out underground until they had made space enough for the body, and then they resumed their digging: they dug and dug. The dog man had finished combing the corpse and brushing off all the dirt that clung to it. He lifted the body, climbed down into the hole, and laid it out on the earth, then he got out and waited by the graveside while the dogs heaped the earth back in.

  This was just one of thousands whose fathers and mothers would suffer torment in the years ahead, would live on false hope, would be tormented by the waiting. They would hang photographs of the missing son or brother on the walls of their apartment, would place them at their building’s entrance or in their cars, would tuck them beneath their clothes or in their bags. Some would die of grief while they slept, and some would die more gradually—would gradually lose the ability to move or talk, then beg off food altogether and slowly expire. One and all, they were worse off than the dead, no doubt about it. Those left behind would be quite certain that the son or brother had died, but they would be kept awake at night by their ignorance of where he’d been buried, their suspicion that he wouldn’t have been interred as he should be, without the rites of washing and being laid out in a casket. When it occurred to them that he had been buried far from his family, alone in a grave with no one to keep him company, they’d panic. Slowly but surely some would go mad, imagining that their son, their brother, might not have been buried at all, but left out in the open to be eaten by the kites and dogs. They would come to believe that abominable men had killed him, and butchered him, and sold him as cheap meat to fools. They would swear off meat, picturing every joint as a cut of the so
n or brother. My son was not buried in the soil, he was buried in bellies. People killed him and ate him. And with time, many more would go mad, slowly but surely, those who had never before tasted loss. “Martyrs?” they would say. “My ass! That’s enough from you. They died and we’ll never know who killed them. They’re not martyrs. Deserters die in war as well. They flee in the face of the enemy and they’re not martyrs.” There would be others, equally extreme, on the other side: “They are the slain,” they’d say, “not true martyrs. Martyrs aren’t shot down from rooftops. They would lose their claim to vengeance. There can be no vengeance for martyrs. No, they were killed and we know who killed them. We saw who killed them.” Father and brother would go mad, slowly but surely. Their loss would remain, throttling all subsequent desires and dreams, and they would think: Why did this happen? Where do we go now? What path do we take?

  The dog man stood among his dogs. For the first time in years, his eyes filled with tears. This was too much. This was a torment he hadn’t seen before, a grief before which he could only concede defeat, a fear worse than any he’d ever witnessed. Even the dog man felt this fear, for all that he knew everything, or thought he did.

  He had to move now. There was still much work to be done. He must hunt out the bodies that lay everywhere. The road ahead was long, and bodies beyond number were falling still. His mission was no easier. At last, he moved off with his dogs.

  Years from this day, the dead man’s father would lie dead himself, and this body would have been drenched with water many times and dissolved completely, and the tree which sheltered the body all that time would have forgotten the roots that had been severed to make way for the grave, would have watched as the body disintegrated and grew smaller day by day, would have sympathized with humans, and their puny, fleeting bodies, and the torment of their souls. The mutilated skull and combed hair would remain beneath the ground as witnesses to the terror of his death and the delicacy of his burial. Years later, his brother might pass this tree one night and drunkenly piss against its trunk.