Otared

by Mohammad Rabie

  The dogs gathered around the three bodies lying on the ground. Many pungent smells spread through the air: they didn’t need to sniff at the bodies. The reek excited them and, aroused and confused, they padded around the cramped shack. The smell of rage, of thick blood, of the semen of the man who was taking his final steps toward death, and the exceptionally powerful smell of the raped girl’s shit. She’d shat in the extremes of the final assault. And the smell of an emotion, too, one the dogs were encountering for the first time. It was something stronger than fright; a smell to stop the heart, to freeze it dead. The dogs barked, “This man is dead! This man is dead! There’s a girl! Dead, too! The little girl has died! They must both be buried!”

  The garbage man’s body was enormous, still hot and supple, wet with sweat, and spit, and sperm, sprawled out atop the older girl—of whom only a thin arm could be seen, stretched out on the floor by the man’s head. The knife had sunk into his neck. It had missed the spine, but its handle protruded plain to see, and behind the handle, the girl’s eyes, staring in terror at the dogs. In one corner was the little girl’s body: cold, sat upright in the fetal position, her head buried between her legs, tucked away as if trying to escape her surroundings. The older girl gave a soft moan, and coughed, and with everything she had, attempted to heave the man’s body off her. The dog man helped her. He rolled the corpse over onto the floor, and she stretched out beside it. Her shattered body, its many bloody wounds exposed to view : marks blue and red, a torn lip, one nipple missing and in its place a patch of blood-red flesh, blood pooling at the ear and congealing in her hair. A chaos of blood and semen, shit welling from between her thighs and spreading into a great stain that fouled the floor and the rest of her body. The dog man lifted the two corpses and placed them in his cart, then pushed it out of the shack. The dogs were barking: “She shall not die! This one will live! Two have died! Enough for now! They must be buried!”

  The dog man knew that the girl would live for many years, and that she would see much, much more; that what had happened here was just a small part of what was to happen to her; and that the radiant justice never erred, though it might seem that way. And then he shut the hovel’s door and hefted his cart, testing its weight and its wheels, making certain they were sound for the road ahead was long.

  He went to the sidewalk, pulling the bodies in his cart, the pack trotting all around him.

  Once home, Insal laid a sleeping Zahra down on the bed. He saw her face shining out from the edge of the blanket. She was wrapped up like a caterpillar in a cocoon awaiting its imminent transformation into a butterfly, but unlike the caterpillar she was closing in on herself. Insal thought to himself that her eyes would soon close as her mouth had done. Maybe this was a new disease that nobody knew about. Zahra looked like she had just come down with a fever. He wrapped her tight to protect her from gusts of cold air, then felt uneasy: this was a coffin, not a bath towel or a cocoon. He hastily opened the towel to leave her whole body exposed, to show her face. It had altered considerably. But Insal couldn’t say exactly what it was that had changed. Something was missing. Some imperceptible reordering had occurred. Then, at last, he saw it.

  Insal saw short, fine hairs on her cheek and others on the blanket, and when he shifted her body to one side he found more. He found a brown worm between her body and the blanket, trapped there beside her head. Had it come from the hospital? Had it dropped from a tree as he ran along with her in his arms? He peered at Zahra’s face, trying to understand what had happened.

  It was Zahra’s ear.

  He held the cup of the little ear between his fingers. It was a different shade of brown from the pale skin of Zahra’s face: shriveled, a little desiccated, and so light as to be weightless. It really did look like a worm in Insal’s palm, and when he examined the spot where it should be on Zahra’s head he saw a pinprick hole. An ear without a cup; an opening where the sound could enter. The cup had fallen off on the other side as well, and there the hole had healed, grown over with skin like the mouth before it.

  At last, he saw the reason for the face’s transformation: Zahra’s eyebrows were falling out. They were very sparse now and soon, it seemed, they would be gone completely. In the end, though, it didn’t matter. She’d lost her mouth and ears, and they surely mattered more.

  Without lips or ears, and with her two eyebrows disappearing, Zahra was slowly but surely losing her face. Nothing left but the nose and eyes, and he now knew she’d soon lose those, too. Insal didn’t know how he knew it, nor did he understand why this was happening. When he stared at her eyes, he saw the two orbs swiveling beneath her lids. It was a sign of light sleep, this slight flickering, and soon Zahra would wake.

  If Zahra had been able to speak, she would have said, “I can’t hear! I can’t hear!” but the look of panic in her eyes was unmistakable. Insal understood that she’d registered that her hearing and her ears were gone.

  Zahra began to mewl. Yesterday, she had been completely silent. Despite the long hours spent in the hospital’s corridors, the sedatives she’d taken had seemed to work and she hadn’t cried once. Now she wept, but the sound came soft and low as it passed through throat, and skull, and flesh, and bone. She tried stretching her mouth wide to scream, but the formation of flesh and skin prevented her. She could see Insal moving his mouth to talk to her, but couldn’t hear his voice at all. She heard only her voice, a muffled buzzing from within. Like a mewing: waves of sound that rose and fell with every breath. She exhaled through her nose, and a whistling accompanied the mews.

  Insal peeled a banana and mashed it with a spoon, then slowly stirred in a little milk and introduced the mixture into the large syringe.

  Zahra tried removing the tube from her nose and felt it hanging there, motionless. When Insal prevented her she cried, mewed, and on seeing the syringe in Insal’s hand, she became afraid and mewed harder and harder, and then when Insal made to take hold of the tube, she snatched it from his hand with uncharacteristic roughness. She didn’t understand what was happening, though she wasn’t in pain and the silence that enveloped her might even be called agreeable. But she was afraid.

  Gently, Insal took the tube. He freed it from her quivering fist, and began to pat her back and hug her. Then he described an expression of cartoonish excitement on his face. He lifted his brows and opened his mouth in astonishment. He looked at the syringe filled with food and licked his lips. He plugged the nozzle into the end of the tube, got ready to push, then slowly squeezed out the food. Zahra enjoyed the sensation of the food sliding down into her stomach. She could feel the tube passing it through her body. She could see Insal’s hand gently depressing the plunger and the thick paste sliding into the tube. This was eating, she recalled.

  When her stomach was full, she relaxed. She calmed down. She was sated. Zahra smiled, a smile without lips or teeth.

  A little later Insal signaled to her to try it for herself. He left her to peel the banana. He helped her to mash it with the spoon. Zahra forgot herself and raised the spoon to where her mouth had been, but it bumped against skin. Her eyes smiled and she tipped her head back. Then she started pressing the spoon into the remaining chunk of banana and deliberately letting the loose piece slip away, as though it were sliding around the bowl out of control: press after press until the chunk flew from the bowl and her eyes smiled all the more. Insal filled the syringe with the paste, attached it to the tube, and guided Zahra’s little hand onto the plunger. She took it and began to feed herself, with the clumsiness of a child learning to eat for the first time.

  Zahra now had a way of feeding herself without mouth, or teeth, or tongue. She would never taste food again. Instead, it would travel straight from syringe to stomach. She would smell it, though; its odor would reach her as other smells did, and soon Insal would teach her how to introduce the thin tube into her nose, then how to pass it through the little nostril, then how to lean her head back to get it past the kink in her nasal cavity, then how to gently push it on
its way so as not to damage the soft tissue inside, then to see how the passage was easier after that, with no further obstacles or kinks, until the red mark halfway down the tube had reached her nose. Only then would the end of the tube be in her stomach. Insal was sure she’d learn how to eat by herself. This was the first day, the first step, on the path of learning.

  By noon, Zahra was finally awake, Insal asleep beside her after the many exhausting hours of the previous day. She left him and began roaming around the locked apartment.

  She took Leila’s little mirror and stared at her face. Peered at her shut mouth. Turned her head to better see the ears. Their absence baffled her, maybe more so than her missing mouth. She hadn’t spoken much, she didn’t know many words, and had had to think for several seconds while she put her sentences together, but she had been able to hear without any effort at all—and today the sounds were gone, and nothing remained but the smells that surrounded her.

  Zahra’s eyes were almost closed over. Her lashes had all dropped out. Her upper lids sagged and she couldn’t lift them. She couldn’t open her eyes to their full extent today. She laid her forefinger on the mirror, traced over her nose and eyes, pointed to her mouth, trying to speak, but there were no words, just a honk from her nose, a snort to signal her contentment.

  Insal awoke and sat up in bed. He watched Zahra, not moving so that she wouldn’t see he was awake, and noticed the lashes spilled on the pillow. He picked her up, and stared into her eyes. He saw the eyelids drooping, slowly readying themselves to fuse.

  Zahra would go blind—Insal knew that now for a certainty—yet he would go on teaching her to eat by herself, and then he would teach her how to read. He’d need a specialist for that, to teach her Braille and the use of hole-punched pages that Zahra could touch with her fingertips.

  Her lids fused slowly before his eyes. Slowly, slowly, over the course of the next two hours, her field of vision narrowed, and she began to cry softly. This was the last time the tears would be able to run down her cheeks. The lids would instead become pouches for her tears.

  All day, Zahra ran her hands over Insal’s face—when he fed her, when he undressed and bathed her, when he laid her down next to him at night.

  Insal had convinced himself that there was some reason for what was happening to Zahra. This was no torment, as he’d first thought, and gradually he arrived at his own private understanding: it was to isolate her from everything that was taking place. Zahra would grow and age detached from her surroundings. She would never see or hear a thing. She’d never get involved in human relationships at all. Thus she would remain, and he would look after her.

  Early in the morning, the pair took the metro to the Qasr al-Aini hospital. A call had come inviting Insal to go. He knew that no one would be able to help Zahra. The doctors at the hospital would be unable to treat her. They’d check and recheck her without the slightest hope of a cure: this wasn’t a disease to be dosed and dismissed. Even so, he wrapped her in a blanket to protect her from the cold and held her in his arms as he sat in his seat on the train.

  The smell of hope mixed with that of fear: they were created together. Zahra was well acquainted with the smell of fear. Her father had been afraid most of the time, only at ease when he held her. But the smell of hope was new, and it was strong here in the carriage—many hopeful people got on and got off, leaving it hanging in the air. It didn’t fade easily, but rather filled the space, infecting the other passengers, who sketched out a bright future for themselves in their minds, who hoped for a better life: a happy marriage in the not too distant future; a beautiful young son who’d grow into a successful man. They wished to kill the fear that worried at their souls as they walked the streets. They would replace it with a successful nation that would astound the world. The hopeful ones imagined that they were writing history; the illusion of history possessed them in the same way that it possessed the mad, and in the end they would vie with lunatics for a place in history—the things they had done would be passed on and taught to their children and grandchildren.

  For others, though, the fear grew. They assumed that there was no escape, no way to walk without the possibility of terror waiting at every bend in the road, and so they walked hardly at all, fleeing the long, high road for shorter, less troublesome paths. Their fathers had taught them that the equal distribution of injustice lay at the very pinnacle of Mount Justice, that peak they’d never scale, would never reach, though they trudged forward for the rest of their lives. And those who’d not been taught to sway with the wind by their fathers took their lessons from the storm’s blasts: they avoided them as much as possible, but the storms came anyway and came hard, outpacing their attempts to flee. No choice but to bend when the storm came. When it caught them, they had to give in, and then they might emerge, minutes or years later, and the fearful among them would have no conception of what kind of future lay in wait—unable to draw themselves a path, for they’d never seen a path before. People here were born afraid, lived afraid, and died in terror, and hope only appeared toward the end. That was how it was. The equal distribution of injustice is the very pinnacle of justice, but there is another form of divine justice: no injustice at all—and better yet, the presence of mercy. Even those who had strayed from the path, who had deliberately done wrong and sunk themselves in darkness, assumed that mercy would save them. Not in this world, though, not in this time of ours, but in the one to come.

  A foolish assumption, thought one of those who knew. He was sitting at one end of the carriage, watching the happy discussions. He almost wept at their foolishness. How could they not see what was happening? How was it not one of them had looked closely at what had been happening all these years and centuries? These ones were yet to realize that they were in hell. These ones would be tormented by hope. And, as occasionally happened with those who knew, the sight of Zahra and Insal swamped the man with grief: the girl wrapped in her blanket and seated on Insal’s lap, her face shielded from view, and then Insal moving to make space for a man to sit beside him, and the blanket slipping from Zahra’s face, the absence of her features plain to see. The one who knew told himself that this was what hurt him most: the children being tormented. He knew that they didn’t realize what was happening, and that their torment was a torment, too, to those around them. One that might intensify until their relatives grew to hate them, while their horror prevented them from seeing what was really taking place. For some—the children, say—the torment might be lessened. They might go deaf and not suffer what the rest could hear, or go blind and be spared the sight of what went on around them. Or they might be paralyzed and unable to feel anything at all. All these things were a lessening of the torment. Madness was a complete deliverance, a way out of hell—although no one truly left. The mad remained here: instruments of torture turned on others.

  The one who knew told himself that any relief granted those in torment was a further torment to those around them; a limitless pain wrung them. Aren’t I being slowly slain by this deformed child and her father, almost dead from grief? And toward the end, the adults realize that the child is unaware of what’s happening—will never be in torment—and they recant, and beseech, and beg that their torment be lessened, knowing at last that they are the ones being tormented. Yet even so, the one who knew reflected sorrowfully, even so, they do not understand this hell they’re in. They do not understand that just a few short years separate them from this hell coming to an end—just so that a fresh hell might begin.

  The morgue attendant had assumed that once he knew he was in hell he would not be tormented. Torment, he’d told himself, was to remain in hell without knowing it, hooked on hope of a better life soon to come, or clutching to the promise of heaven in the next. When you knew where you were, the torment came to a stop: however much you were tormented, it would have no effect. But now he was caught in a vicious circle of suffering, no different from the ignorant. He sat, facing the morgue door, and reflecting that the ignorant might even b
e better off.

  The sound of distant footsteps reached him. He waited for the newcomer, and turned his gaze to the far end of the corridor where the hospital’s main hall met the passageway leading to the morgue. He trembled in an excess of apprehension. The newcomer brought good tidings, that much was certain, but not for the attendant. Good for others, good for someone else. Insal approached, carrying Zahra, almost nothing of her visible beneath the blanket, and suddenly the sound of his footsteps ceased; the quaking of the attendant’s body blotted out all other sounds.

  Insal explained what had happened as Zahra sat on his lap, her head against his chest. He could feel her breathing, calm and regular. The attendant heard him out and said nothing. As Insal went on, the attendant became confused, astonished that all this could have happened. What good could he do now? How could he help Insal? He could guide the seeker to what he sought—he was a caretaker of bodies and corpses, a custodian of those who had died. As for the living, he had nothing to do with them.

  Zahra’s breathing grew disrupted. Was that a cough? She rubbed her face, and the cover finally slipped from her face to reveal her features: scarred skin in place of lips, eyes with lashless lids slowly sealing up but still just open, surrounded by secretions like thick tears. The attendant noticed fine, discarded lashes on the blanket.

  The attendant had seen many things in his life. He had been able to understand everything going on around him. He would take pleasure in penetrating the secret of the torment that hid behind the loud laughter, grins, and shy glances. The sheer variety of what befell people left him in awe, and when he saw what was happening to Zahra he was amazed. This torment was pure and direct, uncomplicated by trickery. He asked for the wisdom and knowledge to do what was required of him.

  The attendant ran his thumb over what had once been Zahra’s lips, evening out the wrinkled skin, smoothing it as a baker smooths his dough. The skin where her ears had been was soft beneath his fingers. He stopped up the remaining right-hand hole and smoothed the skin on the left, then he pinched the lids of her right eye shut between forefinger and thumb, and ran the ball of his thumb along the empty line of lashes. The lids fused completely, with no holes or cracks through which the pupil could be seen, and no line now to differentiate one lid from the other.