It seemed to me that I had been lost in thought for quite some time as I sat beneath the workshop window. It was as if I had woken up from a nap. I got up on my knees, grabbed the edge of the window, and looked in. I felt like my brain had jumped out of my head, like someone who had thrown himself from a window without knowing what was out there. It had nothing to do even with that. It had to do with the suddenness with which it had happened. Farah was naked, standing in the middle of the room pouring water over her head as she sang. She moved slowly. As if she were pouring rays of the setting sun over her body. Before that, too many times to count, both awake and in my dreams, I had pictured naked bodies. The images had always seemed far away, not really there, like abstract images, like a dream someone else was having and telling to a third person; you listened comfortably, as if listening to a story about a deadly disease you wouldn’t be struck by, and then, lo and behold, you found yourself wandering into its furnace, caught in its inescapable web. Farah wasn’t as thin as I had imagined when I pictured her body underneath her clothes. Her slight chubbiness awoke a certain craving. The kind of embarrassing and captivating craving that makes the water of desire flood your entire being without you realizing it, without even being able to taste its sweetness until after the magic has passed. Her breasts were full. Just yesterday I had asked her, “Can I see your breasts?” and she had answered, “You’ll see them someday.” At the time I didn’t know that day was so close. They were pert and jutted out, and water dripped from her nipples. The translucent water fell over her belly like a small waterfall flowing over soft rocks. She had a good body, with full buttocks. The water stopped for a moment at the sloped knoll as if surveying the area that had all of a sudden appeared, then flowed over the pubic hair to fall, drop by drop, into a small pool that had formed around her small, calm, beautiful feet. For a brief moment, I imagined that she knew I was there, and that she had even thrown me a cunning, stolen, sideways glance; that every one of her movements was meant for me to see. Rather than pleasing me, however, this notion caused me to take a step back. Terrified. As if I had caught myself in the act. So, I went back to sitting and waiting. Waiting for her.
A light creak. It was her. She opened the workshop door and stood there, as if reading signs of her youthfulness on my face. It looked like she had just come out of the hammam rather than pouring a miserable bucket of water over her head. A halo of intoxicating steam danced around her face. Damp hairs were stuck to her forehead. Her dark eyes were even blacker, shinier, wider, brighter than they had been. Eyes that had been cleansed. There were droplets of water on her lower lip and the bottom of her chin. A bit of water still dripped onto her bare shoulders. Today’s dress was new to me. It had a wide, rounded neck. A blue-and-white-striped dress with sleeves that came down to the elbows. She stood there in her sailor’s uniform, smiling, ready, like the captain of a ship whose departure time had come. She leaned over. Her damp neck shone the whole time she spent tying her shoelaces. Then she reached her hand out toward mine. We walked in silence over ground that had just started to be covered by grass, not yet having come into full bloom even though we were well into spring. It spread out between us without us even noticing. The silence that wrapped itself around us was deafening, replacing the roar of the ocean that stretched out beside us. We took pleasure in what was being said about us. My hand got sweaty a number of times before we got to the lighthouse. More than once I thought about taking my hand from hers—if only for a minute, to wipe it off—but I didn’t want to let go of her hand, scared that she might run away. I didn’t know that we were heading toward the lighthouse until we had stopped at its base. The entire time we were walking, I remained preoccupied with the hand, with the meaning of the small, delicate hand nestled between my fingers like a bird in need of protection. I held onto it tightly. The heat of her hand flowed into mine for the first time, an actual heat moving into my hand, a migrating heat flowing into my arm and rising with my blood as it saw fit. This was no small thing. Sometimes I squeezed her fingers a little bit, and other times I relaxed my grip to see if she’d remove her fingers on her own. Farah’s hand fell into a rhythm with mine. A shaved-ice seller had parked his cart against the base of the lighthouse. Before walking up behind the guardian and his explanations, which had begun even before we could see him, I ordered three scoops of berry-flavored ice for her. My mouth watered as the taste of the berries flowed over my tongue. The vendor wielded the scoop in an exaggeratedly lewd manner that made him laugh, and made us laugh too. He winked. His rude behavior wouldn’t have made us laugh at other times.
The guardian was still providing commentary, but I could only hear the most obvious parts of what he said. “The French built this lighthouse in 1916.” He had no teeth and his coveralls were blackened from going up and down the stairs so much, and from the amount of talking that had flowed over them. “This glass is the same glass they’d brought with them that first day.” I listened, but didn’t really hear what he was saying, preferring to stand and take in this wide-open expanse laid out before me for the first time. I’d rather think about Farah in her absence. She was waiting at the bottom of the lighthouse. Maybe she was waiting for me to look down at her. What was I doing here? The sun was a red ball suspended over the edge of the water. There were ships that looked like small cities anchored on the horizon. The purple twilight colored the water and sand. Things looked different from up here—different colors and different sizes. The Royal Navy building, the insane asylum, and the Auxiliary Forces’ barracks had all acquired the same unreal color, as had the green bay that separated the mosque from the lighthouse. The girls boisterously swimming there splashed each other with purple water. Their laughter was purple. From this height, the world looked thrilling. I searched down below for the blue-and-white-striped dress. I looked for Farah so I could use my hand to explain what I was unable to with words. Using my fingers, I told her that, for the first time, I was seeing the brown backs of seagulls rather than their white bellies. I explained to her how happy I was as I watched the seagulls flying below me rather than up above, small, the wind practically sweeping them away by their wings. But it was difficult to see because of how high I was and how strong the wind was knocking against the door, not to mention the echo of the guardian’s constant prattle. I walked around the mirrors, but I didn’t see Farah. Then I saw the shaved-ice vendor’s cart. I remembered the colored scoops drawn on a piece of wood on the side of the cart and their vivid colors. Their flavors were also drawn there—lemon, berry, and apricot. It was as if I were sensing something before it happened when I looked down to the foot of the lighthouse, or more specifically, when I saw people rushing toward her. I felt the sudden danger before that moment when Farah screamed—a long, painful scream. It went on for a while longer, during which I couldn’t see her at the base of the lighthouse. Then I saw her raising her hand to me, or to the sky. Her hand had been in mine just a short while before. She was spinning around in circles, reeling like a drunk. She turned and turned as if she’d been blinded. She turned, disappeared, then reappeared. I heard her scream despite the glass barrier—or I imagined I could hear it—before it got lost in the tumult and the more thunderous screaming that occurred inside me. Getting down took a few minutes. People had gathered around her. I began to walk around the growing crowd, not knowing what to think. They came from every direction, out of nowhere. Women who had been swimming, and teenage boys. Nothing had brought them together before. They began to cluster, suddenly united, forming a fraternal group, coming to a mutual understanding around a calamity they didn’t yet understand, partners in something that had yet to be defined. They were brought together by an anonymous roar let out by unknown mouths. I could see the men and their mysterious dance. With difficulty I cut a path between them. Finally, I was looking at Farah, lying unconscious at the base of the lighthouse. Looking at her burned face and neck, and at the police officer asking what happened. A young man had thrown sulfuric acid on her and ran off this
way. Or had he gone that way? No one knew where he had come from or where he had gone. Then the police officer asked who among us knew the girl. I tried to respond to his question. My mouth opened but no sound came out. The policeman studied our faces. “Who knows this girl?” My old fear returned, after having thought that I had put it behind me when we stole the copper pipes, or when I met Rihane. I wasn’t sure whether to say something. Standing in front of Farah, who was lying there unconscious with her burned face and arms. The threatening voice of the policeman. The ambulance that came to a stop without turning off its siren. A man leaned over her and covered her bare knees. Then a young woman came and threw a clean towel that had just been on the sand over her face. The insistent questioning of the policeman—“Who knows this girl?” Then the ambulance door closed, and Farah disappeared. As if there was nothing more to be said. As if her disappearance from the scene absolved me of any need to answer. For a moment, I wasn’t concerned with the ambulance as it drove off, or with its siren gradually fading away, or with the crowd that was beginning to leave to attend to other matters. I remained standing in the same spot, as if still checking on things. I took a few steps back and reconstructed the scene from the time I was looking down from the top of the lighthouse to see if there might have been something wrong with what I had seen, to determine that, in fact, what had happened didn’t have anything to do with Farah. I could see her going up halfway, then laughing as she went back down. With the flavored ice in her hand or without it. I imagined another girl had been taken away by the ambulance. As for Farah, she was still walking down the lighthouse steps, and she’d appear at any moment, sucking on her little flavored scoops of shaved ice. I continued to look for her after the ambulance had left, after the cars that had been blocking the street were gone. Could she be hiding among the fruit- and ice-vendors’ carts? I kept looking for her after the passersby had all dispersed, still believing that a miracle could happen. As if maybe Farah had been held back in front of the lighthouse door because she had been listening to the guard’s chitchat. Maybe she had gone down to the beach, and now she was lying on the sand, and in a little while her voice would surprise me.
If only I were a tree towering over the world
And our only neighbors were the sky and the horizon
Besides them, there’s no one . . .
The berry-flavored ice having melted and dripped down onto her hand as she waited for me to show up and surprise her.
42
Suleiman
It won’t do you any good now to chew on your fingers or pull your hair out, because the head has been thrown to the other end of the wooden box. Do you still love wood as much as you used to? And the color of wood? And the smell of wood? Or have you come to hate it forever? From the outside of the box, rather than smelling like the forest, the wood smells like a perfume shop—a combination of rosewater, cloves, and preservatives so you won’t decompose too quickly. I’m not sure what it smells like from the inside. Would you like to put your head back where it belongs? I’ll think about it. The box arrived at six, from a country without forests. It arrived as expected, firmly locked. Four people came in a light black truck, put the box down on the doorstep, wondered what time it was and whether there was a place nearby that served coffee, and left. It might have been six in the morning since they were asking about breakfast. Right then, it had occurred to me to whisper to them to tilt the box a little bit so as to roll the head close to where it should be rather than leave you in the ridiculous spot you’re in right now. Then I reconsidered. Why shouldn’t the head be down by the feet? Why are you insisting on putting the head back where it should be? It doesn’t matter anymore. Just as it doesn’t matter anymore whether time moves forward or backward. It doesn’t matter anymore whether it’s night or day. This is one of the good things about the hereafter. You’re no longer faced with a day on which you need to wonder whether the sun deserves to rise, or whether the earth is rotating in the opposite direction to what you had thought. Your whole life, you’d imagined day to be nothing more than a veiled night. So, the door will open and the family will look down humbly at the box. It will be five rather than seven o’clock, then it will be tomorrow rather than yesterday. And so it has been from the very first drop, from the very beginning. The mother’s uterus takes back its egg, and the father’s penis takes back its drop of semen. And everything goes back to point zero. And we will have rested for eternity. You wonder why the door hasn’t been opened yet. I’m not responsible for the arbitrary ways in which people behave. They’re consulting with one another. The entire family, except for Outhman, is here behind the door. They’re inside asking one another whether they should accept your corpse prior to knowing who they’re going to demand compensation from. The Makhzen? The airline company? The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia? The man who cut your head off in a fit of anger? Or everyone? They’re deep in discussion. I was about to ask whether there had been a lot of rain in recent days. They’d find the question humorous because they’ll think that the little girl, Karima, was the one who asked it, and they’ll continue to discuss the fortune you’re bringing them with your death. Corpses are valuable too, especially when they’ve come from Saudi Arabia. Ha! This country exports oil and corpses. What do you think? And while we’re at it, I’ll tell you that Abdullah is the one leading the campaign for demanding compensation. Look at him coming out all angry, just as I said. The family will follow him. First Father in his chair, then the rest of them. Here they are, lining up in front of the box. In front of you. Do you know what Father is doing right now? He’s leaning on the box. His nose is what’s passing over you right now. His nose has always preceded his hands because he is partial to the smell of wood. The wood is smooth and clean. The smell, although nice, is not the smell of any wood he knows. It isn’t the smell of cedar or cypress or juniper. Then come the hands. Father’s hands are rough. You recognize them without even seeing them. He passes his hands over the polished box with a sound like rusted metal. You hear his rough hands passing over and you wonder whether he’ll lift the box up and drag it inside in order to put the head back where it belongs. But his hands have lost their strength. Didn’t you know that? When you left him in the forest, when you ran off to the Gulf and left him with his wood and his project, you knew he was depending on you. Does blood run from its own? Now what do you say? Was going to the Gulf a good idea? In any case, all your father possesses are his two hands, but they’ll never be what they once were. Your poor father is finished and cannot carry you himself. Until now, it’s been enough for him to sniff like a rabbit, and he’s not yet ready to go further than that. And what about the others? Are they ready to cry? That’s what you’re supposed to do at times like these. I’ll let you know if a tear falls on your box without you hearing it. The placement of the head, tossed as it is between your feet, doesn’t help you hear as well as you should. Just as you can’t see the other faces peering at you. And you won’t hear their crying either. I’ll inform you of all the details if there are any details worth hearing about. Except for your sister Habiba, I don’t hear any crying. She’s crying, though. She always used to cry. Khadija? She’s busy with the tiny life moving around inside her belly. And Mother? You recognized her from the smell of milk that never left her breast. When she looked down, the smell of milk came close and filled your nostrils. Will her milk fall onto the box and flood you with its warmth? Shall I ask her to pull the box and lift one end so the head will go back to where it belongs? It’s noon now, and the situation remains the same. They’re refusing to accept the box, not knowing what’s inside it. Your stubborn head rolling around at the bottom of the box is angry because of this situation. Because of all situations and decisions and thoughts and counter-thoughts. There’s no such thing as a sound or an unsound thought. All thoughts are correct and incorrect at the same time.
The trip began with some idea in Father’s head about a wood deal. Before noon, you two had arrived in a small city called Khemisset. “This isn�
��t the road to Azrou,” you said to him as you watched him steer the truck off the road and follow a number of dirt paths. You were hoping to get to Azrou before late afternoon so you could pick up your load of wood and get back home. Father said, “We’re buying the wood on the black market.” He was happy. He hadn’t struck such a significant deal in a long time. This scheme would generate enough profit to more than meet the needs of your family. Father was more enthusiastic than you’d ever seen him as he talked about how the dome would be made of cedar and pine. The cedar was no longer that far away. In the forests of Ifrane, which were getting close, the smells of the scented wood wafted toward you, even entering the truck’s cab. That was why Father was driving the truck so recklessly. When the truck tilted to the side, you muttered to yourself that he had been blinded by his own zeal. Then, when he parked it in front of the isolated one-story house, you thought for a moment that he was waiting for the guide. Then you thought otherwise because it seemed unrealistic considering the glint in his eyes as he stepped out of the truck and disappeared into that isolated one-story house.
A Shimmering Red Fish Page 32