A Shimmering Red Fish

by Youssef Fadel

  II

  9

  The man who had been sitting in the chair for hours finally lifted his head. As he had been expecting, the bird’s note echoed across the wide-open space—tiii—as the sun’s first rays appeared. He turned. He could see it without having to turn around. It was there on the same post, on the edge of the dirt road. The man responded to it with a long tiiiiiii of his own. And as it did every morning, the bird repeated its note. It left the note ringing behind it as it flew away, echoing above the head of the man sitting in the chair. This was the moment when the day came to life. His wife’s mother opened the windows to air out the house. The smell of coffee wafted out in front of him and he breathed it in deeply. When he went back inside, his wife was pacing to ease her pain. Then she stopped and looked in the mirror. Without the mirror, she can’t see her belly. There were secrets inside her belly just as there are secrets at the bottom of the ocean. She thought about the new life growing inside her as if she could only measure how far along she was by looking in the mirror. Her damp, jet-black hair stuck to her forehead and fell over her shoulders, and her cheeks were red—not the red of blood, but the red of a woman who was just about to become a mother. Her breasts were swollen and warm. For the past few weeks she had been amazed that no milk was coming out of her breasts, swollen as they were. What prevented it from flowing? Her mother told her, “The milk doesn’t come before the child.” But the woman didn’t understand how it could be that the milk didn’t come before the child. The milk should come first. No one likes to go somewhere and not find food waiting for them. How can a child come into the world and not find its nourishment on the table waiting for it? Her mother moistened her chest with milk at night. Its rotten smell filled the room. Her chest was damp now and had large, nearly dry splotches on it. The woman thought the milk flow had burst forth during the night while she was sleeping, in preparation for feeding the newcomer. A captivating calm enveloped the woman as she studied her body part by part, acquainting herself with it, looking at the changes in her face, examining the splotches of milk that her mother had put on her chest during the night, saying, “It’s coming, it’s coming!” She held up her hand and weighed the amount of milk she believed she had collected, drop by drop, the result of all her thoughts, all her senses, her movements, and appeals day and night. Not to mention those of her mother over the course of many nights. Satisfied, she touched the generous, translucent white liquid on her dress, and said to her mother, “The milk always comes before the child, Mama.” And it would continue to flow to feed her newborn for a year or two until it got big and strong. Was she happy now that she was on the verge of something new, something she was now more clearly conscious of? Not something so abstract as a happy dream, or a multicolored rainbow dancing around inside her head, or a radiant star floating up in the sky illuminating her nights to come. Rather, a body with a real head and real hands swimming around in her belly; a body that would grow up enough to upset the calm of what remained of her days. She had enough time in front of her to experience all of this.

  For about two months now she had been complaining of chronic constipation. She was incredulous. “Two months?” The man replied, “Constipation is what women get, just like diarrhea is what men get.” She pointed to her belly. The man came closer and leaned in a little without touching the belly. She asked, “Do you hear it?” He continued to wonder what he was supposed to be hearing. She insisted, “Do you hear it?” Up until then, the man had no desire to hear anything, but she insisted. A small life was pulsing underneath, moving, growing little by little. How could he not hear it? Was this its leg? As if the fetus were a cat trapped inside a box. Separated from them by this patch of skin as thin as a piece of bread, so thin that the woman imagined the fetus’s leg might become visible to them at any moment. Then he passed his palm across her belly. The skin’s softness didn’t awaken any feeling in him. The belly was warm, and that was all. Maybe he was expecting more than this—more than the heat of the skin and that of the fetus hiding beneath it. He passed his hand over the small lump as if testing his sense of touch again. What was the fetus doing right now? It was playing. But how could fetuses play? No, it wasn’t playing. It was growing. It never stopped growing. The thought of not growing never occurred to it for even a moment. If only the man had just an hour without it being there so he could think. But that was no longer possible. The fetus wasn’t too concerned with what the man was thinking about. Then her mother appeared with a cup of coffee in her hand. Having her put it down seemed stupid to him, so he got up. The woman lay back down on the bed. The little mass growing inside her was what she possessed. It was palpable, definitive. There was no going back. No one could share this with her. This was what she had tried to show him when she recoiled from the sting of his cold hand and went back to bed. As soon as he left the room with the cup in his hand, he didn’t care anymore about the small fetus that was making his wife so happy. And the woman? A terrifying feeling that she could give birth at any moment had settled in. She didn’t want the man to see the child when it came out, the first treasure of hers that she would present to this world. He left her with her mother’s advice and sat back down in the chair as he placed the cup of coffee on the box. Her mother had been advising her to eat turtle meat so the baby would be born male. This too was of no concern to him, as if he weren’t awaiting an event that would likely change his life. About two months ago she had brought home a cage with a hoopoe in it because swallowing the raw heart of the hoopoe is supposed to make male babies more intelligent and she wanted her grandchild to be an intelligent male, not like the neighbors’ children who didn’t possess an iota of sense. This too didn’t concern him.

  The only miracle he was waiting for was for Farah to appear. The only miracle he was still waiting for—even after the ambulance disappeared, even after the square emptied out, and even after that as he sat in the doorway of the workshop—was that she would appear from behind the mosque or coming up from the beach. Nothing of the sort happened. Farah was languishing in some hospital; a stranger in a hospital the location of which he didn’t know, nor how to get there. He spent a long time searching for her in broad streets and narrow streets, in twisting alleyways and obscure administrative offices, unable to hold onto a thought or recognize a road, preferring to continue the search before the trail went cold, before regaining his composure and seeing that there was no use in rushing. Then he saw that the time for searching had passed and realized that finding her was becoming less and less likely. He ran after traces of her as they moved from one clinic to a larger clinic, from one hospital to another, before the thought faded away. Finally, he came across an ambulance driver in the neighborhood prefecture office who alerted him to her presence in such and such large public hospital located behind the church (not in any other hospital), in such and such wing that takes in burn victims (not in any other wing). The driver couldn’t keep from asking, “Where do you know her from? Is she your sister? Your niece?”

  The faces were covered in bandages, nothing showing except for the eyes and mouth. Seeing them didn’t help him at all. Three small, round holes were all that connected these faces to life. Other faces were completely covered. Then there were the bodies hidden behind curtains. How could he possibly find a young woman named Farah among these ghosts? The place had no faces. No bodies. The smells weren’t human smells. The only visitors were sitting in silence, as if at a funeral. With no smell, they gave the impression that the place was filled with temporary, transient beings laid out in these rooms to rest for a little while before continuing on their journey. Silent pain was the worst. Closer to death than pain that announced itself. It was always there. The visitors sat in silence. As if the time for painful crying and wailing had passed. They were all preparing for the funeral, getting used to the idea of it. The overall impression was that of death. What oozed from the faces and walls and floated in the air in the rooms and danced through the hallways was death, or some notion of death,
more present there than anything else. Resigned. Resigned because they were helpless. How could he find a young woman among them who went by a name no one knew?

  “Her name?”

  “Farah.”

  “We don’t have anyone here with that name.”

  “She came in this morning.”

  “Lots of people came in this morning. Where do you know her from?” Then a measured silence.

  At the front door and the reception desk, the same question: “Where do you know her from?” Followed by the same silence. In the rooms and hallways. In all the places that hinted at some form of life. Inside him there was a heavier silence he didn’t know how to express. A nurse took him by the hand and led him to one of the rooms, but even in this room, though his intellect told him that it was the right room, he didn’t recognize Farah. He stood at the door staring at her face, scrutinizing her. There was no trace of the happy times he had spent with her. He tried to recognize her underneath the bandages, with the swelling on her neck, and bruises and bloody wounds on her arms. She looked like the many drowning victims he had seen in the hallway, or in other rooms throughout the burn-victim unit. He had looked at all of them, one after the other, pursued by the moans of victims caught in buildings that collapsed all the time, until he finally found her in the last room at the end of the hall, just when he thought he’d never find her. She was lying without a cover on a bed splattered with spots of dried blood. Her thin body wasn’t covered by anything. She was wearing clothes he had never seen on her before. He didn’t recognize her. He didn’t recognize her hair. It was as if it had grown longer. Her jet-black hair fanned out over the pillow. Her face was different from the face that had shone with vitality in the workshop just a few days before. The calm happiness that it had radiated was gone. Her face was covered in bandages. Her lips were split, bruised, spotted with dried blood. There was a black swelling around her eyes and a blueness on what he could see of her cheeks. Blood stuck to her black hair and forehead, which had still-fresh burns on it. Above her forehead a strange-looking indentation had formed, and there was another blue one above her arms. Was this enough for him to recognize her? Her small body was shaking like a dying bird. Her shoulder blades were more prominent than they had been. Her hands were the same white color and they shook lightly. The burns hadn’t disfigured them too much. Was she going to get up in a little bit? He didn’t recognize her long fingers. The fingers were clasped peacefully on her belly. He especially didn’t recognize her toes, or was it that they would never again have the same effect on him? The small, perfectly arranged toes that had been so filled with life, with Farah’s joy. On the bed across from hers was another girl the same age. She looked like her. She was also sleeping. She had the same spots on her face, the same fever that made her lips tremble, even while she was sleeping. The two of them were sleeping. Two orphaned children forgotten by a tribe that had gotten through the ordeal and moved on. All the patients looked like one another. The room was bare. No comfort. No visitors. No flowers on the bedside table. The walls were green, the color of death. The patients’ rooms also looked like one another. He remained standing in the doorway for a while, and when he walked toward the bed—he might not have needed to right then—he did so to reassure himself that this wasn’t Farah.

  Salih, the cistern guard, carried a hunting rifle on his shoulder. He walked between the train tracks. He crossed the tracks and walked down the hill, and his shadow and that of his rifle, which for a few moments had broken the calm line of the horizon, disappeared. He crossed the dirt path that ran alongside the railroad tracks. He had come to ask about his daughter and her mother. The man came outside with another cup of coffee and stood across from the door, giving the impression that he wasn’t ready to talk yet today. The cistern guard sat down on the box. He didn’t talk about his daughter. He was preoccupied with the rabbit that had crossed the river. It wasn’t normal for this land to shelter rabbits. The guard had been preoccupied with the rabbit since dawn, but the man who had been sitting there since before dawn hadn’t seen any rabbits cross the river. When the man was ready to think about rabbits, the guard had changed the subject to thieves who had shown up again, and when the man was ready to think about thieves, the guard had gotten up and walked into the field that had been invaded by weeds. He walked with heavy steps. After each step he would stop to closely examine the ground. He leaned over the dirt, picked up a handful, and sniffed it. He crumbled it and let it flow through his fingers like water. The man sitting in the chair watched all of this and didn’t think it had anything to do with a rabbit. The guard took a few more steps, performing the same meticulous task over and over. The cistern guard owned sheep and cows. When thieves began swarming around his flock and those of the neighbors, he bought a rifle and began to sleep among his animals, and when he laid his head down on it, the new rifle smell brought dreams that he was firing at the thieves. For the first time, today at dawn, he had seen a rabbit dashing across the empty land. Perhaps it was the rifle propping up his head that had seen the rabbit. Why would a rabbit leave its hole unless it was running away from thieves? Thieves don’t steal rabbits. They steal entire herds of cattle. Rabbits are rabbits, and the only thing we understand for sure is that rabbits run when they smell humans. The guard came back and opened his hand in front of the man—sure of himself, of the truth of what was in his palm, completely convinced—saying they were rabbit droppings, as if these small, round balls were the smoking gun that proved thieves had been there. He sat down again on the box. He grabbed the rifle between his legs and leaned on it like a cane, looking toward the horizon, which was blazing. Whatever the case might be with the rabbits, the thieves had shown up again. He heard that two days before they had stolen a full herd of cattle. He was the cistern guard and not a farmer. He needed a full night’s sleep. These thieves didn’t understand such things. This whole time, the man thought about how he didn’t have anything to steal, neither cows nor rams. He had a ewe once that had died during the last drought, and that was it.

  Two pigeons flew low past them, practically right above their heads. They were in a hurry, unconcerned with what was going on inside the guard’s head, unconcerned with whether he was standing or sitting, unconcerned with the man and the son he was waiting for. The only thing that concerned them was discussing the day’s sustenance. No one passed by on the road. In fact, there was no road at all other than the train tracks. And the only train wouldn’t pass by until two in the afternoon, empty as it headed toward the southern mines. There was no shepherd driving his flock to the fields whose grass has dried up because of the rain that didn’t fall. Would it rain now that it was May? It was enough for Salih to say, “The sky’s blue.” The fields had dried up. No harvesting machines would come here this year. Work wouldn’t go on as it had before. Instead of spreading fertilizer, planting seeds, and preparing the soil for the coming season, all he’d be able to do was gather up the dried crops and store them for the cold days to come. As for the other train, the one loaded with fertilizer, it had passed by at two in the morning. At two in the morning the man was asleep.

  10

  The Mailbox