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Even if there had been enough light, I wouldn’t have been able to see her. Minutes passed. Hours passed. An eternity passed. Right now, I didn’t dare turn toward where Farah was lying—not how she was a little while before, but in a way that was new to her and to me. And even if I did turn, I’d wonder what this indistinguishable pile was inside the workshop. Was it a net left here by one of the fishermen? It couldn’t be Farah, in any case. Farah? Who is this poor girl you speak of? Farah? Is that the name of a flower or a garden? I forget. I feign ignorance. But unintentionally. I don’t understand anything about corpses. Just as I don’t understand anything about crimes; in the moments that preceded this one I wouldn’t have imagined that this could really have occurred, that Farah could have died. It wasn’t yet time to picture it. I grabbed the candle and left the workshop. Barefoot, I headed toward the ocean, my shadow wobbling before me, as if going back to look for her again in the waves. I didn’t know whether I was gaining time or wasting it! Farah didn’t go up into the sky. She was still in the workshop. I needed to think about her. My throat was dry and seawater wouldn’t do any good. I went back and sat on the doorstep, leaving my shadow to dance around between us. I forgot about the water. A cricket that had been chirping next to me fell silent. The mosque in front of me was cloaked in darkness. A deep hatred rose up inside me, making my blood boil, hissing and twisting its tongue like a snake. I hoped the building would collapse. The mosque was the reason for all of this. Or the ceiling. What need do people have for mosques? When we were young we used to see them performing the holiday Eid prayer out in the open. Thousands of people. Clean, happy, with no ceiling blocking the sky. There’s nothing better than praying under the sun, or in the rain, or under the clouds. Even if walls are absolutely necessary, what use is the ceiling? The ceiling is the basis for this whole disaster. I hoped to wake up in the morning and see that it had collapsed, to see that the ocean had swallowed it up during the night, or that it had been struck by an earthquake. One stone on top of another. If God could see that the mosque was built with the money of the poor and the unfortunate, why didn’t He send a fierce wind like the ones He had sent before? I’d wait until morning to see whether God had heard my prayer. I was sure that the sun would not rise over the mosque again. Before the break of dawn, each and every stone of it will have crumbled. The continuous plunder will have gone on long enough for the Lord of Heaven and Earth to justify demolishing the structure, or at least for my uncle Mustafa to find solace. The same went for those who had fallen from the top of the minaret, or been crushed by bulldozers. I was also thinking about the way Farah left this world. Was it because of pain or pleasure or fear? Was it as a result of the burns or the agony, or was it because of the songs she never got to sing? Then, before everything else, I needed to think about our current situation—the corpse and me in the workshop and this night. In life there are these unfortunate times when nothing you think about leads to anything. Once, Kika and I found a dead bird on the sidewalk. It might have died just moments before—the warmth of life still moved the feathers on its white belly. We were young, and it was useless for us to think about finding a way to bury it. There’s no place in this city where you can bury birds. I told Kika that we’d look for a park. But there are no parks where you can bury birds. Kika kept it in his pocket. At his house we lit the fire, grilled the bird, and ate it. Should I eat Farah? That would take some time. This was one of a number of possibilities. I’d start with the fingers. I’d bite into them to whet my appetite, as if they were licorice sticks. Farah’s thin, translucent fingers. Then the arms, followed by the legs. I’d leave the rest for a midnight feast. At dawn I’d donate the innards to the seagulls because they were poor like me, and they had young ones that needed their mother’s milk. Other similarly foggy and distorted thoughts came to me. For example, I imagined she was breathing and merely in a temporary slumber. I didn’t go in to verify this. I thought about her breathing because I couldn’t see her. Or I imagined she was crying, recalling a little bit of her short past. Heartbroken or remorseful. More seriously, I thought about the seagull that would come and take her away, because Farah had become light, and she’d become even lighter once she’d gotten rid of her bad luck. And it wouldn’t come alone, this determined and hoped-for seagull. It would come with its flock, which had been fattening up over time. All of those that I’d fed since we began work on the mosque. What are seagulls good for? Especially the black ones whose peace-loving natures abandoned them, after which they began to eat cadavers. A ridiculous idea, of course, although I did turn to see if the window was open.
Then there was the matter of digging the grave. A grave to preserve the workshop’s memory. It was imperative to think about digging the grave when dealing with hiding dead bodies. The easiest thing to do would be to leave it outside to decompose, like people used to do in ancient times, before graves, shrouds, witnesses, and the prayers that followed came about. I set these meaningless thoughts aside. Right now, I needed a pickax and a shovel. I got up and went back inside. Preparing the modest spot that would provide Farah’s shelter wouldn’t take too long. I tossed a piece of wood aside and began to dig under the moonlight that streamed in through the window and settled on her waxen face. Her face had been pulsing with life just a few hours before. Not a life as it should have been—without wounds or burns or setbacks—but life nonetheless. What had happened? I stopped digging. I walked closer to examine her. There might still be a spark of life smoldering inside her. She looked like someone sleeping. At rest. She’ll get up. She was at peace. No nightmare disturbing her temporary slumber. She really needed the rest and was going to get up in a little bit. I placed my hand on her forehead and it seemed to me that there was still life pulsing under her skin. I called into her ear, “Farah . . . Farah,” and waited for her to jump to her feet, laughing, making fun of me and my fears. I just needed to be sure. I stepped back and turned the pickax over in my hand a few times, to give hope enough time to settle in beside us. And then, in a moment of distraction, I saw her eyelid flutter. I walked back up to her and saw that she was breathing. I put my hand on her nose. I grabbed her by the hand and put my head down on her chest. “Farah . . . Farah.” I heard a sound next to me. Was it her voice? I got up. A humming coming from inside. Then I saw that it was coming from outside, from the ocean or from inside the mosque, as if people had come specifically to see the crime with their own eyes. Wherever there’s a body . . . I walked to the window and looked out. I couldn’t see the faces in the darkness. Faces enjoy sneaking around, hiding themselves in the dark, licking their lips excitedly. I wiped the sweat from my forehead and prepared to get back to work. I removed some dirt with the shovel and got back to digging. Seven months of working here, and for the first time I was seeing the dirt of our workshop close up. As I brought the pickax down to the ground, I saw that we’d built the workshop on top of stone. Wherever I aimed the pickax, the only sound I heard was the resounding din of metal, sparks flying as it struck the rock. It was because we were so close to the shore. I tossed the pickax aside and sat down, not knowing what I had expected!
It would be better to wash her in seawater so the salt could treat the wounds as she went on her way, so she’d arrive in Heaven as her Lord created her on the first day, healthy and whole. Two buckets of saltwater. It would please Him to see His creation returned to Him as He had given her to us, in full health and in all her beauty. These thoughts refreshed me and removed any distress on my gloomy face. And the shroud? Was a coffin really necessary? No. She’d go in her purple-flowered dress, and I thought that, this time, the flowers wouldn’t be drooping down. I gathered the wood panels for a coffin that would fit her, all the panels that Farah had drawn her cats and flowers on. They were her panels and they’d go with her. No need to add any other drawings. The drawings that I knew, and Father knew, and Suleiman knew, were only good for ceilings. Ceilings of a certain type. Ceilings that resulted in Father falling from the top of a l
adder, that resulted in Suleiman coming back without a head, that resulted in a wicked hand pouring sulfuric acid on Farah’s face in front of the lighthouse door. Anguish returned to dominate my thoughts, and with it the cricket started chirping again. This time it was bloodcurdling. It was only a cricket, smaller than a cocoa bean, yet it made my hair stand on end. With its vast range, its chirping tonight was enough to awaken those deep in slumber. I stopped what I was doing. This cricket was chirping deliberately with all its strength to alert people walking by. Workers returning home from the weaving shops. Or fishermen out at sea, preoccupied with migrating fish, not having even the slightest notion about Farah. Or those who were sleeping. This damned cricket could even wake the dead in their graves. Could it awaken Farah? Better to put out the candle, because even if this insect didn’t shut up, no one would imagine that a person would dig in the dark. It was just a cricket singing in anticipation of summer grapes. And, in anticipation of summer, I went out without a candle, shovel in hand, determined to finish it off. One blow and I’d crush it like any other disgusting cricket. Baf! Just one blow. I stood defiantly in the dark, waiting for its final chirp, the shovel at the ready above my head. It was silent. Just as obstinate. Just as defiant. We could have remained like that until Judgment Day. The cricket had all the time in the world, and could remain silent for an entire year. I went back to work, determined to finish before it chirped again. The second time, I went out with the candle in one hand and the shovel in the other. On tiptoe, inching my way toward it. The chirping didn’t stop because the sound was coming from inside the workshop. I didn’t make the slightest noise. No sound whatsoever. Not a peep. I tiptoed toward the irritating source. Then I saw it—black, shiny, small—on top of her chest. Like one of her flowers. It wasn’t hopping, either. Rather, it was walking, matching the rhythm of my steps, as if imitating my walk, my every move, as cognizant of my presence as I was of its. Or as if both of us together knew how far this charade could go. We approached one another. When it stopped on her face, all I wanted was for it to get off her body and settle on a piece of wood, or a paint can, or under any rock it chose, promising not to hurt it as long as it moved away a little from the body. The truth of the matter is that a damn cricket will always be a damn cricket. They’ll never care what we say or think about them. It continued to creep along slowly, very slowly. Then it disappeared up her nose. Silently. Without a chirp. As if it had entered its house. As if it had found the place it was looking for.
The night might have been over—most of it having moved over to the other side of the earth—when I left the workshop with the coffin on my shoulder, the shovel on top of it. The first signs of the dawning day spread out above me with a sad orange color. As I headed down toward the beach, I was still thinking about whether I should dig a hole in the sand or whether I should let the ocean take care of that. The water was somewhere between high and low tide. I didn’t know whether it was coming in or going out. I put the coffin on a rock. On either side of it were blue triangles Farah had painted. And yellow leaves. And what looked like green English ivy winding its way up the wood. The coffin had all the paintings Farah had done on it. And the cricket? It was inside the coffin. Inside Farah. Its chirping might start up again in a little bit, and no one would know where it was coming from. As for the cats, with their eyes that looked like white moons, they were facing inward toward Farah. That way when she woke from her slumber she’d see them, her red cats, and she’d know that she was still close to us, and it would be as if she’d never left. I wasn’t able to finish digging because the water came up on us suddenly and began to lap at the sides of the rock where I had placed Farah. I picked up the coffin again and went into the water. When I felt it at my waist, I placed the coffin on its surface, but didn’t dare let go of it. I remained standing there, waiting for something to happen—for the cricket to sing, for example. I waited but didn’t hear it. Then I smiled and pushed the coffin out into the water.
A Shimmering Red Fish Page 35