A Shimmering Red Fish

by Youssef Fadel

  V

  30

  The man sitting in the wicker chair brushing the ground impatiently with his feet and listening to the strange roar doesn’t notice the two o’clock train until after it has passed. He continues to follow the sound of dogs barking in the distance until midafternoon, with a feeling somewhere between optimism and pessimism that renews itself with each passing moment. According to the level of their excitement, he can tell how close to or far away from their prey they are. They might have found them by now, or will before too long, depending on how deep their grudge is. Depends on how vicious the dogs on their trail are. The man is preoccupied. Not by his wife, who is bearing the agony of childbirth in silence so as not to annoy the judge. Not because he hasn’t yet come up with the joke or the entertaining and appropriate story that he will tell the judge, since the judge loves bawdy stories. In fact, the man has confidence in himself in this regard, and in his newfound ability to come up with jokes the judge will love. These stories have started to come easily to him ever since he first met the judge. They’d come to him without even having to think about it. The judge sure does love vulgar stories. These stories don’t get him going on regular days, in court, for example, or at the Judges’ Club. But they do excite him when he’s with Najat. Really, he’s more excited by Najat’s reaction to them. It amuses him to see her cheeks blush, and her forehead start to sweat. The man’s thoughts are jumbled, though, because he’s thinking about the two lovers and the mistake they made that had led to their discovery. Perhaps they hadn’t been careful enough. Or perhaps they hadn’t made any mistake at all. The smell of desire is strong. The body isn’t strong enough to bear it or hide it. If it doesn’t come out of your mouth, it’ll come out of your eyes or your pores, sometimes from every pore in your skin. He follows their perilous journey. They climb mountain paths or crouch inside caves. The dogs’ barking is his guide, as is the particular quality of barking. Sometimes there’s a long, mournful howl and other times a sharp, broken, vicious growl. Sometimes it fades off in this direction until it just about disappears and the man thinks they’ve been saved, only for the barking to rise up again from another direction. He listens for what they might be saying too. What could two fleeing lovers possibly be talking about? They blame one another. They blame their luck that betrayed them. They express a little regret. One of them strengthens the resolve of the other as they look to tomorrow with greater optimism, and then they put their heads on each other’s shoulders, comforting each another as they hum a sad song the woman had heard when she was a little girl playing in front of her house in a distant village. The judge isn’t thinking about them or about the dirty stories that haven’t yet come to the man, because at that moment the man hears the judge ask him if he has prepared the fire.

  The judge’s car is large. An American car. An Oldsmobile. It’s like a closet. It has everything a judge and his lover need to pass a pleasant Sunday afternoon. There is meat and the cookware to cook the meat. There are drinks and glasses to pour the drinks into. There’s charcoal too. The man takes out two sacks of charcoal and arranges it in the grill. His movements are mechanical and clumsy because he’s thinking about the two lovers. He pours a little oil onto a piece of cloth and lights the fire. He wipes his hands as he watches the flame exuberantly consume the cloth. Tongues of flame trace the shapes of upright fingers—dancing or praying for rain. Then horses crane their necks, running from the flames of hell, rising to the sky. And what is the judge doing right then? What is he doing while he waits for the charcoal to light and the bolting fire horses to die down in the grill? He has disappeared into the house while the man is occupied with preparing the fire. The house is his house. The beds are his beds, as are the covers, towels, water, and soap. He has withdrawn to one of the bedrooms with his lover. The judge respects the family. He doesn’t want to annoy the woman, who is on the verge of giving birth. That’s why he chooses another room. Usually the judge and his lover, Najat, sleep in the bed of the man and his wife during the late afternoon. The judge respects the man too. Rather than use an izar cloth he wipes his cum on the bills he finds distributed among his many pockets. This is really what happens, because the man often finds the bills underneath the bed. Bills that are wet from the judge’s semen, but they’re enough to cover three days’ expenses. He wipes them off, folds them, and puts them in the armoire, because whether or not there is semen on them, he can always use the cash. The man goes back to the car and removes a leg of lamb wrapped in a piece of cloth that’s stained with the color and smell of meat. He sits at the table and cuts it, loading the aluminum skewers with small pieces of flesh. The judge doesn’t eat lamb because of the cholesterol. However, Sunday is an exception because he’s with Najat. The man hears the lovers laugh through an open window. Women can feel joy at a single tiny word, even if it’s meaningless. He wonders how men manage to snatch women’s minds so easily. Two words are enough to tear down the defenses that have been erected since the day they were born. They remain preoccupied with these defenses and the man who will destroy them, because they’ve been preoccupied with men since they were born. As soon as women reach fifteen years of age their bodies change. Another soul inhabits their wombs. Their wombs are afflicted by something akin to a fever. They lose their appetite for sleep and food. At this age, another craving inhabits them. They smell men everywhere. They see them in every shape and form. They can smell them whenever they get even remotely close. They smell men whether they’re nearby or far away. Even before they can be seen. They smell men even when they’re not there at all. Just like what happened with my sister Khadija.