A Shimmering Red Fish

by Youssef Fadel

  “And when is he coming back?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he won’t come back, because he isn’t a carpenter anymore.”

  I see that my words have a negative effect on him, and if I were to continue to sing this tune, maybe he would pull his beard out, or perhaps (seeing as he has no beard) he would rend his clothes. I tell him that he has opened an office for motor-vehicle customs clearance in Agadir, that he is now working in the import-export business. My father is no longer a carpenter. “You didn’t know? He only deals with foreign countries now.”

  The employee takes a piece of paper out of his pocket and, with a shaking hand, begins to record all the ridiculous things that come out of my mouth. “He exports animal feed to Turkey and Japan. He has contracted with the Turks to make ceilings of glass for them, but he’d prefer to be Japanese, so he went to apply for Japanese citizenship.” Then I see him tear up the piece of paper and walk away until he is swallowed up by the fog that brought him.

  25

  Two days ago, we were about to take my sister Khadija to the mental hospital. By the time afternoon rolled around, she was still the same as she had been. The rain hissed lightly on the windows, like a soothing piece of music being played far away. A rain that couldn’t be seen from this side of the glass, with no clear sign that it was falling. You could only imagine it. If not for its rhythmic hiss and slight tapping on the glass from time to time, you wouldn’t know it was raining at all. We were waiting for the car to come. The damp flagstones of the street were also awaiting its arrival. Abdullah didn’t go get the car because he was no longer meddling in our affairs, and we weren’t asking anything of him anymore, either. We left him in his corner to make up for all the prayers he’d missed. Habiba was no longer menstruating because she was pregnant. Happy in her second month. The baby was going to be a boy to compensate for his brothers who died. That’s why Habiba was chewing on clove leaves. From now until the birth, a large cooking pot with no bottom would sit next to her for the newborn baby to pass through as soon as it was born, before they wash it, so it can be freed from the clutches of the djinn Oum al-Subyan. Mother was the one who went out to call for the car because my sister, Khadija, was sick. Very sick. She had colored pens she used to draw her desires all over her skin, as if on a piece of leather she found on the road. She drew maps of desires which she had left behind in the house of her husband Omar, or Hassan, or Hussein. “Are we going to take Auntie to the hospital?” Karima asked as she gathered up pieces of cloth scattered around Mother and her sewing machine, throwing them in front of me so I could make a small doll that looked like her. It wouldn’t look like her with all these different-colored scraps of cloth. She insisted that the doll have blond hair even though Karima wasn’t blond. After she said this, I began to picture the car that would take Khadija away. It would look like the ones used for transporting dead bodies, with the same white color and green lettering.

  Ever since she came back home, she’d been asking from her bedroom about her bed and whether it had arrived yet. No, not yet. She complained about the pain in her head. Would it hurt less if she got her bed back? Whenever she put her head down on her pillow, she remembered the missing bed. Her weakened body relaxed to the rhythm of this absence. Then the pain moved to her stomach, and from her stomach to her knees. Sometimes she couldn’t stand. A mental shock had transformed Khadija. “Is Auntie going to die?” asked Karima as she listened to her singing in the next room. We no longer recognized her either. For days after she came back, she sat behind the sewing machine. Mother wasn’t expecting any help from her because she had returned with her old depression. The machine turned all day long without any cloth in it, as if she were stitching the emptiness going around inside her head. Sitting in front of the sewing machine but not paying attention, as if she had lost all connection to what once connected her to it. She didn’t utter a word, and when she did open her mouth, it was to ask whether her bed had arrived. She didn’t respond to anyone. She only spoke at night, when the lights had been put out and we were asleep. Then the sewing machine went silent, and Mother said that maybe her condition had improved. Yes, my sister forgot all about the machine, but instead she had become obsessed with her body. She spent an inordinate amount of time washing and brushing her hair. Then, to dry her body off, she spent even more time walking around the house wrapped in a single towel that barely covered her. Her hair would still be wet. Droplets of water would fall onto her bare shoulders. The white towel came to her knees. A thin line of water still flowed over her thighs. Mother, who only had her worries to lean on, wiped away tears we couldn’t see. She had aged since her white hair appeared this morning. Habiba sprinkled salt around her belly to ward off the evil eye. Abdullah hung Quranic verses over the windows and doors to keep the Angel of Death from getting too close to the house. He told her that the embryo is formed according to how the man wants it to. If he gives his wife something soft to eat, she’ll bear him a daughter, and if he gives her something hard, she’ll bear a son. All of this so he didn’t have to turn toward where Khadija, damp and practically naked, walked by. (I wondered how Abdullah avoided stealing a glance at Khadija’s body while passing so close to it!) Then she began to scent her body with every perfume she could lay her hands on. She’d mix her perfumes with water when the bottles were nearly done. Or fill them with orange blossom water when they were empty, or saffron, or lavender if she could find it. Then, in the end, with plain water. No rose or orange blossom or lavender. The house was filled with all sorts of strange smells that surrounded and moved with her like a cloud. Mother said that we would take her to the venerable saint Sidi Wafi. I didn’t know where this saint’s tomb was, but according to Mother, he treats these sorts of illnesses because he isn’t human. There is a group of djinns under his command that specialize in treating all sorts of diseases. Then Khadija’s condition got worse, and she started saying that her body was coming apart. Her limbs were coming off, leaving her. She would stick her legs out in front of her for hours. Or, with her colored pens, she would draw lines on her body between the limbs that had gone and those waiting their turn to go. And when she got up, she moved around the house carefully so as to keep her body parts from falling off onto the tiles in front of us. She walked haltingly like an old lady. Then we got too embarrassed to look at her for very long, and that was when Mother said that we’d take her to the mental hospital. I didn’t agree with this suggestion because patients in hospitals—when they weren’t tied up with heavy chains, their faces hidden under hair resembling halfah grass, filthy, their clothes torn and their fingernails looking like eagles’ talons—wandered the hospital corridors begging for alms. Women were strewn like corpses under beds in dark, gloomy rooms. I knew all of this to be true, even though I’d never visited a mental hospital before.

  Until today, when she tore up her shirt, she had only asked about one thing—her bed. I didn’t have a clear picture of what was going to happen to my sister when Mother left the house this morning, nor when she came back and sat behind her machine as if she hadn’t gone anywhere, as if she weren’t waiting for anyone to come; sitting in front of the silent sewing machine with her forearms leaning on it, her head resting on her forearms. The rain tapped monotonously. The afternoon sauntered along even more monotonously, calmly marching toward its conclusion, moving forward with the same stifling monotony as if it were not moving at all. After Mother came back she was grave, absent. Was she thinking about her family that was breaking apart? When the car finally stopped in front of the door, I thought that maybe she was feeling some regret because she was about to send her daughter off to the mental hospital, and that she was rethinking her decision. I saw the black cloth that covered her head, and the white hair that spilled out from beneath the cloth. I hadn’t noticed before that Mother had grown old. She lifted her head slowly, as if she had heard what I was thinking. She was wearing glasses. I hadn’t noticed before that she had started wearing glasses. I saw Mother’s head turn, and
at the same time saw my sister Khadija. She came out of her room no longer wrapped in her white towel. She was wearing a pale shirt and had her colored pens in her hand. With the same hesitant gait, she walked by without seeing us, and disappeared behind the bathroom door. Karima handed me a piece of red cloth and told me that this was the hair she wanted for her doll.

  The street’s cobblestones weren’t wet anymore because the car from the mental hospital had arrived and now covered them completely. Its whiteness covered them up. White, but without the green lettering I’d been expecting. The two men at the open door wavered between waiting and entering. They were both extremely tall and thin. One of them was wearing a white lab coat and the other a black suit. They were both wearing knee-high boots, ridiculously high. Karima left the cloth in my hand and rushed toward the two men, laughing at them before asking about the car. “Did it come to take Auntie to the hospital?” They didn’t respond. They came in now and stood scowling in the entryway. Their faces were old. They didn’t betray a specific age, as if they had been born with these wrinkled expressions. The one in the black suit leaned a little to one side as he walked, but his limp was otherwise unnoticeable. His eyes were blackened with kohl. The walls of our house were bare. They passed their eyes over the walls as if expecting my sister to burst out from one of them. No, Khadija was hiding behind this door right here. They came into the middle of the foyer. Into our midst. We all looked at one another, and then at the closed door. I pictured my sister behind it. I pictured her decorating her body with her colored pens. Then I pictured her gathering up her scattered body parts. I didn’t know what the two men were picturing. Maybe they weren’t picturing anything at all. They were waiting for Khadija to come out of the bathroom so they could take her to the mental hospital, as Mother said. Now she was holding back real tears. Karima walked up to Mother. “I wanna go with Auntie. I wanna go with Auntie.” Habiba scolded her and she quieted down. There was no movement from behind the door, nor was there any sound to disturb the rain’s hissing. Outside, some windows closed and others opened as if to set the oppressive, monotonous rhythm. Some women stood in the doorway looking in at us. Habiba shooed them away with her hand as if they were chickens. The women disappeared from the doorway, but their feet were still visible from behind the car. Karima now clung to the pants of the man with the black suit. “I wanna ride in the car! I wanna ride in the car!” She ran up to the car door and opened it.

  Then we heard the creaking of the bathroom door. The creaking went on for a little bit and stopped. We stood there peering into the dark emptiness that the creaking had left behind. She came out naked as the day she was born, her torn-up shirt dragging behind her, her body inscribed with every color—circles and lines in red, green, and blue—as if she had stolen one of Father’s secrets. Her breasts shone dirty white in the middle of all of this, like two lamps she had forgotten about and left lit. Her black hair flowed down onto her adorned shoulders. We stood there dumbfounded. She asked the two men standing in the foyer whether they had brought her bed. Abdullah pulled her by the arm before she could take another step, pushed her into his room, and locked the door behind them. All eyes continued to stare, fixed on the cloud of smells, colors, and questions that Khadija had left behind.

  We all stood there like strangers. After a few minutes, Khadija’s voice rose up from Abdullah’s room, first a soft moan, then a yell that sounded like laughter, neither soft nor loud. The men were no longer in a hurry. We heard the sound of the wooden bed creaking. The men were no longer in any hurry at all. It was absolutely silent. There was no movement in the foyer, a suspended stillness—like a rope that had temporarily broken, that only needed another laugh for its two ends to join back together. But this laugh that sounds more like a scream never came. We could only hear it in our heads. Other, incomplete, images float around our house. The moaning inside the room started up again, rising and falling, yet remaining constant, interrupted periodically by broken whispers. Following this, there was a single laugh, loud, like a cry for help. What was happening to my sister in Abdullah’s room? Mother got up, hands on her knees for support, as she muttered, “Good lord!” The bedroom door opened and Khadija appeared wrapped in a black selham. Nothing of her could be seen. The black selham passed before us, went into its room, and locked the door behind it. Mother clapped her hands as if to say to us that today’s party was over. The cloth that Karima had given me was still in my hand, and the blond doll Karima was waiting for had been born disfigured—two sticks forming a cross and wrapped around them were the gathered pieces of cloth. We had no time to worry about that now. The one wearing the black suit took out a small notebook and went over it one last time with his kohl-painted eyes, as if he were concluding one of the chapters in our family’s story. He passed the notebook to his companion, who gave it a passing glance, then walked toward Mother. I rushed over and signed on some lines that no one read. Everyone was in a hurry. Waiting to get our house back. The rain tapping on the windows continued with the same indifference. And us? Embarrassed. Demoralized. Destroyed. Happy in the end, or with what seemed to be the end.