Otared

by Mohammad Rabie

  Wreckage from the two cars scattered, the drivers got out, and each started blaming the other. The tomcat had disappeared completely. The garbage man peered over, but he couldn’t see it. Then he started crawling toward his little house, the blood running from his head and into his eyes.

  At night, Zahra began to talk to Insal in her childish voice, and he did his best to answer her questions. She constructed her sentences with difficulty and her tone of voice would lift at the end of each statement to lend it the stamp of inquiry. Zahra had learned to question—and at an age when other children asked questions of their fathers, she was asking hers of this stranger.

  So his wife Leila was gone, his stillborn child was as safe as could be, and Zahra’s father was dead. No one at home but Zahra and Insal, who stretched out on the bed and thought: I’ll adopt her. She’ll be my daughter, mine alone.

  Insal drifted away, gazing at Zahra’s sleeping face beside him, sketching out a happy future for them both, father and daughter; and maybe Leila would return or he’d convince her to come back and raise Zahra with him.

  In the morning, Insal woke to Zahra’s moans. He was lying down, and he sat up, and by the faint sunlight filtering between the shutter’s slats saw that something was wrong with her mouth. She was crying bitterly. He got up and switched on the light, then came back to bed to find that the skin on her face had spread and was growing over her lips. A strange, wrinkled skin. He saw Zahra’s skin creeping out from either side of her mouth and covering it, spreading out and covering the lips; sealing up the mouth.

  But what was happening wasn’t causing her pain. It only constricted her mouth. Her fingers felt an unfamiliar thickening when she tried touching her lips. Insal started to press down on the delicate membrane in an attempt to understand what had happened. The skin hadn’t spread over the lips as he’d assumed; the flesh was fusing. The two lips were slowly joining, the mouth’s muscles and internal tissues slowly cleaving together. Even as Insal was dressing, was counting his change, was getting ready to leave the house and take Zahra to the doctor, the mouth was joining up and the open hole growing smaller. It looked to Insal as though the mouth would close up completely in a matter of hours.

  He picked her up, her body tense and trembling, his hot with distress. Her face was damp with tears. Insal’s happy dreams fled away. Zahra might never be cured; maybe the doctor wouldn’t know what was wrong with her. Insal tried to remember if anyone had ever been afflicted with something like this. A disease he’d heard of, perhaps, that an acquaintance had had? He tried to recall if he’d ever seen something similar. He couldn’t think of anything. He signaled for a taxi and set off for the nearest hospital.

  All day long, Insal traipsed around the hospital carrying Zahra, from nurse to doctor, from bed to bed. They snipped away a small sample of the self-generating skin from over her lips and took some of her blood, and at least a dozen doctors examined her face—all of them silent, their expressions unmoved. What was happening was quite normal, Insal thought to himself. If everything that’s going on around us these days is normal, then what’s happening to Zahra is normal, too. This is no disease.

  At the end of the day, in the evening, they asked him to go with Zahra to a room. They would both stay there overnight.

  They had been feeding Zahra mashed food, which she very nearly refused to take, only her hunger prompting her to accept it. She hated it, particularly since she had to spoon it in through the small gap that remained of her mouth, chewing it a little, then swallowing. They gave her a sedative, and a few minutes later she surrendered to sleep.

  Insal slept fitfully. Every few minutes, he opened his eyes to peer into Zahra’s face and check that she was sleeping. Then he’d close his eyes once more and drift off. When he opened them and found her twisted over in the pose of someone lost in oblivion, he was reassured. At least she was feeling no pain now. She was deep asleep.

  The next morning, he saw that her mouth had closed completely. The little opening at its center had disappeared, her lips gone forever, and in the daylight that came in through the window Zahra began to mewl. The sound escaped her nose and Insal wondered if he was dreaming. He must be. He sprinted screaming from the room.

  The doctors were very sorry. What was happening was most unusual, they informed him. They’d never seen it before. They knew that once human organs stopped moving they gradually died, the muscles withering and then disappearing altogether. Even before that happened, the limb was usually done for, incapable of functioning. Yet what was happening to Zahra was different: a film of tissue had grown to seal the space between her lips; the lips had melded together, and the mouth’s opening had vanished without cause or reason. But analysis of her blood and endocrine functions confirmed that Zahra was quite all right. She was in no real danger.

  There was a solution, one doctor said, but it was as unconventional as Zahra’s condition. A surgeon could open her lips, passing his scalpel down the old line of her mouth and forcing it apart, then suture the edges to stop the bleeding. A quick, effective, surgical solution—much better than hunting through books and trying to treat the condition with drugs.

  But Zahra was not his daughter, and he would have to hand her back to her people one day. His dreams were all forgotten now. She wasn’t going to live with him forever—she would never be his daughter. Insal wished it were so with all his heart, but he knew deep down that he was taking her as a replacement for his dead boy, and when he found her relatives they would never forgive him for acting on the doctor’s suggestion. Her father, unjustly killed and buried in a pauper’s grave, would not forgive him either. They would meet in the afterlife, unclothed, and the father would chastise him for what he had done: How dare you? How could you disfigure Zahra’s face? He would never forgive him and would demand that he be punished. Insal clung to hope—one day, he thought, she would return to normal. One day she would wake, her mouth parted in a beautiful smile, her lips whole, without the scalpel’s scars and the marks of the surgeon’s thread.

  Zahra submitted to everyone who milled around her. The doctors fetched a thin silicone tube. They carefully introduced one end of this into her nostril, pushing it a few centimeters in, and when it stopped as if encountering an obstruction they leaned her head back and gently resumed the attempt, persisting until they had passed it through her nose and down her gullet to her stomach. This was Zahra’s new mouth. They fetched a bowl of purée of indeterminate hue, and with a syringe began to squirt it slowly into the end of the tube. Zahra put up no resistance. She stopped crying. Something strange was inside her, a foreign body, and food was passing through it into her insides. Lots of people stood around her. The reek of illness. Its stench was everywhere here: the smell of a young man who’d passed away just a minute before; the smell of two more who’d burned to death; from the nurse who stood over her the smell of blood she’d come to know in recent days; sweat from the exhausted doctor who moved back and forth before her, his body numb from the powerful tranquilizers he took each day and without which he was unable to do his work.

  Then, as the purée slid through the tube into her belly, another fleeting smell filled the air, soothing her. A lovely sensation enveloped her as her stomach filled. The taste of what she’d eaten was gone, but the smell was there.

  The doctors, the nurse, and Insal departed, and Zahra remained behind on the bed. The end of the tube dangled from her nose, sealed by the nurse with a flexible, see-through cap so that nothing inside her would seep out, but the smell of illness continued to fill the room.

  Insal broke down before the doctor, told him he didn’t want to see her fed like that for the rest of her life; that he’d prefer for her to die than live like that; that it would mean constant torment for her and for him; that what was happening was rank injustice; that she had never done anything to deserve all this pain.

  The tranquilizers that flowed in the doctor’s veins left him feeling weightless, sure of himself and sure of his performance, and Ins
al’s pleas were absolutely standard. He’d heard them dozens of times before from patient’s relatives on the brink of nervous breakdown, and these were no different. The same words, the same pain, and the tranquilizers made it all ridiculous and repetitive. As the sentences followed one after the other, the doctor was thinking, Yep. . . Whatever. . . . Sure. . . Get to the point, please. . . . No cure. . . . No food other than by catheter. . . . It’s called a catheter, yes. . . . Forget a complete recovery. . . . Illness is sent to try us. . . . I know. . . . I know, I know. . . . Aren’t you going to shut up, friend . . . ? The girl’ll be dead in days. . . . Give me a break. . . .

  After just a few months on the job, the doctor had become certain that everything happening around him was utterly meaningless, that he must not allow himself to be affected by the death of a patient; he might even take pleasure in the death of one of the long-term inmates—the sufferer relieved of his cares, the relatives relieved, the doctor too. Some cases were terminal, and he had to go to extraordinary lengths to treat them. This girl, for instance—her case was far from usual, the first recorded case in history, it seemed, and yet it was up to him to deal with her.

  People were being killed out there. Dozens a day, he’d heard. They were truly at peace: no more suffering for them. The doctor reflected that nothing they would encounter in hell could be worse than what they’d seen on earth. And then, on top of it all, along comes this man and his daughter to waste his time and the hospital’s. A simple calculation told him that the girl had just days to live. She would be unable to survive for long fed through a silicone tube. Soon she’d be needing solids. Her poor mental state would affect her physical health. Perhaps she’d get an infection from the tube that sat inside her. Then he thought of his alternative solution, not to relieve the girl’s suffering, but so that he might be shot of her and her father. He would get a surgeon to open the mouth. A mutilation, no two ways about it, but she would at least eat normally. Her lips would never be the same again, though, and maybe they had even turned into tissue of a different kind.

  At the end of the day, following an intensive examination, one of the surgeons decided that he would perform the operation the next day. Cost no object, he said: he’d do it for free because it was an exceptional case. Insal wouldn’t pay a penny.

  Insal agreed.

  They lay together on the bed, waiting for tomorrow. In the darkness, Zahra passed her palm over his face. She felt his mouth and nose, brushed his closed eyes, and touched his eyebrows, reached out and pinched the lobe of his left ear before returning to his mouth and nose. Her father’s smell had receded in her memory, and that of Insal was carving out a place for itself inside her.

  This permanently fearful man, this man in pain, this man loves me and does not know me. I can smell his love but his fear upsets me. Don’t be afraid. You know, fear is not for grown-ups, fear is for us little ones alone, and when I grow up I shall not be afraid. I shall no longer know the smell of my own fear.

  Asleep, Insal saw that he had become a volcano, a volcano called Krakatoa. He was walking across a vast expanse floored with glowing white tiles, and on all sides thin iron columns rose into the air. Krakatoa was walking between the thin columns and not understanding what they were, and after a while he came across Zahra, who had turned into a naked wooden doll. All her joints seemed to be made of cheap wood and her hair was synthetic, but the face was hers. There was this metal rod sticking out of her, a kind of tail, which emitted sounds whenever she moved, like vast machines turning over in a factory. The doll was wandering all here and there between the thin columns, gazing over at Krakatoa for moments at a time, then averting her face and drifting away again. And every time she moved, her metal tail would thrash with its sound of vast machinery.

  Krakatoa saw a thin whip in the doll’s hand, and then he saw her cracking the whip over her head, striking at something he couldn’t see, something above the columns. He decided to find out what was up there, and calmly and slowly he rose up, flew up, until he saw that the columns were the legs of many beds with white quilts and coverlets laid out over them. He saw that the beds were scattered around at random, and that was why their legs had seemed like a forest of thin trunks.

  On the beds, men lay on their backs—and the doll’s whip floated out over them, then down in quick, short strokes. And then other whips rose up to strike at other men, and when Krakatoa drew near to one and peered at him, he saw that the man was missing a face, missing the skin on his face, and he knew that someone had peeled the skin off all these faces with surgical precision. The face had been cut from hairline to chin, and from ear to ear, then lifted away to leave the head faceless. The delicate muscles showed bloody, the teeth white and lipless, and eyes stared upward without lids, their gaze unwavering despite the stinging whip.

  Krakatoa started screaming at the wooden doll: “Enough, Leila! Zahra, enough!” And why Krakatoa was calling her Leila when he knew she was Zahra, he couldn’t say.

  Then he knew that those stretched out were dead, and that even so the wooden doll was tormenting them. The doll was tormenting the dead.

  Krakatoa wanted to understand what he was. He knew that he was a famous volcano. Many years before, he had exploded in a mighty eruption, the sound of which could be heard far away. But he thought that there must have been some kind of mistake, that he wasn’t Krakatoa. That he was something else. Then, in the far, far distance, he spied a mirror, so he flew toward it to look into it and to know what he was.

  The sound of the vast machines swelled and the whip strokes gathered in intensity, while the men stayed as they were, lying on their backs, and as Insal drew near to the mirror the sound of the machines increased greatly in volume, and Insal awoke.

  It was dawn. In the dark, Insal wrapped Zahra’s body in a blanket and took her away. He knew that hospital security would try to stop him, and when he got to the entrance he sprinted out and away from the guard, who chased after him for a few yards and then fell back.

  He wouldn’t leave Zahra with the doctors to be opened up by knives. He ran, picturing the scalpel passing smoothly over skin and making a small opening—a little bleeding—and then the wound closing up a second later despite the efforts of the doctor, who, amazed, reopens it again, only for it to close once more, obstinate and unrelenting. Zahra would stay dumb forever, would never speak or eat, would take her food from a tube through her nose.

  Insal dashed on, Zahra in his arms, and when he grew tired, he walked. No one was about. People were fed up with chasing gangsters and standing guard over their buildings, and the streets stood empty with only a few exceptions: those returning from the square with a blend of hope and fear—and, somewhere not far off, the dog man, hard at work, gathering bodies into his cart as he did each day, while his dogs combed the neighborhood in search of more.

  3

  THE GARBAGE MAN RAPED THE girl as violently as he was able. It hurt her, and the pain grew and spread, accompanied by tearing flesh and flowing blood. There had been many rapists before the garbage man, but none had been quite like him. She tried to get free, but he held her to the ground and went on with what he was doing, the blood from his wounds covering his face and covering her. The bleeding had almost stopped.

  Around the little house, the dogs had gathered, watching what was happening through the gaps between the wooden boards with lifeless eyes and mouths held shut, their silence undisturbed but for the garbage man’s mutterings and groans, and the girl’s repeated, rising cries. And when the stink of blood and shit was suddenly and unmistakably present, the dogs’ ears pricked up and a nervous thrill ran through the pack, transmitted to the dog man who stood behind them. He stood at a distance of two meters from the garbage man’s shack. He could see nothing through the narrow cracks, but he knew what was going on—had known it long before it happened—and now he knew that human tissues had just ripped apart; that a heart was thumping out of control, about to stop; that moments earlier the younger girl who lay beside th
e two entwined bodies had died of fear. And, as was his wont, he stood there, waiting.

  All he could see were the planks stacked carelessly beneath the on-ramp and the sparse light behind them filtering through the cracks, and when the garbage man was done, and his body was slumped in absolute surrender atop that of the girl, and his limbs had begun to relax in readiness for what was to come, the dog man approached the flimsy door on one side of the little house and opened it to see the garbage man lying there, unresisting. The garbage man raised his head and stared into the dog man’s face with lost eyes, then signaled for him to come closer.

  The garbage man couldn’t move. The girl was pushing up beneath him, his huge body crushing her ribs. The dog man stood next to him and tried to shift him off her, but the garbage man struck him a glancing blow. His words scarcely audible, he said, “There’s a knife in the corner. Fetch it.” The dog man searched for the knife and found it. He handed it to the garbage man. The garbage man’s arm could only move slowly; he couldn’t even grip the knife properly. He held the handle and brought the blade to his bloody mouth, then clamped his lips down onto it. He closed his eyes, tickling the blade with his tongue, then he stopped and said, “The steel’s so cold.”

  He tried to cut his own throat, but the blunted blade in his weak grip couldn’t pierce the skin. With a great effort, he held the knife upright, resting on the ground beside the girl’s neck, and laid his throat against the pointed tip. He looked one last time into her eyes, then leaned into the blade. Blood gushed out.