A Shimmering Red Fish

by Youssef Fadel

  Clothes wet. Exhausted. Thoughts jumbled. Completely uncomfortable. As the sun came up, the mosque appeared loftier than it had before, even though it should have been the opposite. Was it destined to remain there forever? I studied it carefully as I sat by the roiling ocean, expecting to hear the cricket, but it didn’t let out a single chirp. Maybe later. Some fishermen began setting up their fishing rods on the beach. The workers who came back again with the National Department of Electricity employee weren’t stringing cables this time. Rather, they were hanging flags and multicolored lights, and setting up barriers. Red and green ribbons, too. New trucks began to appear. Fire trucks arrived to spray the ground and bulldozers came to tear down what remained of the workshops where unknown workers had lived and died. They had laid down their pieces of cardboard and lived on bread and tea. They left behind a bit of their sweat, their bodies, and their souls so that the edifice could rise up high. These workshops were no longer of any use. Moreover, they sullied the overall look of the place. I walked up to a fisherman to ask what was going on.

  “It’s the dedication.”

  “What dedication?”

  “The dedication of the mosque.”

  “When?”

  “Don’t know.”

  I climbed a hill and walked away. Our workshops were no longer of any use. I didn’t care one way or another that they were being destroyed. Same with the mosque, the minaret, and all the facilities that had been constructed around it. My only consolation, my biggest consolation, was the crack. It would remain there. No one would notice it, but it was there, somewhere on Father’s ceiling. Only I knew the secret that the mosque concealed—except for Father, of course. But Father was now sitting in his wheelchair. There was a crack in the mosque. Yes indeed. A crack the size of a finger. No one could see it, but it would continue to get bigger. I hoped it would continue to grow until the building crashed down without anyone knowing why.

  46

  So, the big toe on my right foot hurts. A pain I haven’t felt before. There isn’t the slightest hint of anything on the toe that might indicate what’s causing the pain. A pain like quicksilver that leaves the toe and then returns whenever it wants. It moves as it likes. It stays in the same spot for two full days only to suddenly move up to the ankle—two or three days for me to be able to say that I’ve become accustomed to it, or that it isn’t actually a pain at all, but rather a tight sock I forgot about on my foot. Then one morning, without warning, it shoots up to my left knee with a lightning-quick acrobatic flip—or to my joints, or my back—only to return to the left toe, depending on the time of day. At first, after Farah’s death, it didn’t move beyond this general area, and it showed up quite infrequently. Then it began to appear regularly. A reeling, chaotic pain, without any clear rhyme or reason. On the positive side, I discover with great joy that thanks to the pain in my toe, and how severe it is, I can overcome the other pains occupying my mind that would have been even worse. It gets so it becomes necessary to embrace the pain—whether it’s in my toe, or knee, or back—and to nourish and protect it like a small child if I want my other pains, the ones related to Farah’s death, to disappear. And so it goes, replacing one pain with another. Replacing one disappointment with another. A thought is emerging about a dear entity that had died. At the same time, the pain in my big toe on my right foot is waking up too, brandishing its deadly weapons, burning the image of a face lacerated by sulfuric acid into my memory, and then the pain leaps to my knee in a single jolt that feels like an electric shock. At that moment I clench my teeth in joy, or pain. Same thing. This grants me a bit of eventual comfort. It will last as long as it has to. I’m thankful for it. Grateful for the inner calm it grants me. Little Karima stands in front of Father. In her hands she has some cloth, some thread, and a few sticks, and she’s waiting for him to make her a butterfly that flies. But he’s busy. I sit on a crate that serves as a chair and watch what Father is doing. Two old men passing the time, observing each other’s pain. One man older than sixty, and the other almost twenty. I lift my foot when he lifts his. I grab my leg when he grabs his. I grimace when he does. When he’s not doing this, he passes his hand over a board and I pass my hand over the board facing it. We’re working. Father is restoring his chair and I’m making a chair similar to it. We sit in front of one another, entertaining ourselves with our old and new disabilities. We’re working without any help from anyone. We don’t need anyone’s help anymore. Our most recent invention, as Father calls it, depends on what remains of his old zeal. There’s a fat calf lowing outside the house. The two chairs are wide, too, so we can stretch out on them whenever we please. We no longer have any need for beds or bedrooms. There’s only one bedroom in the house, anyway, and Abdullah took it and gave the key to Khadija. Khadija has become his second wife. She stands behind us looking out the window and massaging her belly. Father and I are no longer interested in something so insignificant as a woman massaging her belly behind us. Everything comes in due time. We are no longer the normal human beings we once were. And no one in the house or outside it wants to understand such simple matters. The best way to pass the time with the least amount of possible trouble is to spend it at work, constructing long-lasting chairs, as long as the wood is good—pleasant-smelling cedar from the forests of Ifrane. With the texture, smell, and everything else wood needs to remain as fragrant as the day it was born. Nothing matures outside of work. With the passing of time, we’ll discover astonishing things. Father and I have hellish plans for the future. People are involved in something big, and right now they don’t want to understand this. One morning someone will understand this, and that’s the day someone will shoot himself.

  My sister Khadija is behind us looking out the window. Father and I are completely engrossed in serious work, whereas the others, all the others who don’t have any work at all, are amusing themselves outside the house, including Mother, even though she doesn’t like to have fun. Her hands are stained with dye. Instead of sewing, she’s mixing henna in a small container and dabbing it on the calf’s forehead. Farah isn’t with them. Rather, she’s at rest on the water’s surface. The waves are moving wisps of her hair to and fro in the timeless moonlight. The moon of that night. The pain in my knee awakens. Sharp. Painful. It becomes more acute the more the hair undulates on top of the water. I stop working. I gather up all of my other pains and stand smiling at the door. I scratch my left knee, happy with the twinge of pain on that side.

  I see them congregating in the street. Mother, Abdullah, Habiba, the neighbors, Karima, and the children—as many children as the street can absorb. My sister Khadija no longer suffers from her old ailments because Abdullah has added her to his first wife, without a wedding ceremony, just as Habiba had stipulated—no wedding, no joyful trilling, nothing of the sort; just the reciting of the Fatiha—putting an end to the fits Abdullah had devoted specifically to Khadija in his room. Also putting an end to the devilish sounds that used to make their way out from underneath the door. And Mother said, “Amen,” when she stopped menstruating. Now Khadija is content to massage her swollen belly while she chews on cloves and watches the calf. Abdullah has forgotten all about Habiba and her pregnancy. Whatever she gives birth to no longer matters to him, whether it’s a boy or a girl, a calf or a monkey. As for Khadija, this is her first child. She is in her third month, which is why she is forbidden to watch television—the third month being when creations take their final form, according to Abdullah. In the third month, the fetus might be male, then all of a sudden turn into a female, or vice versa. Or the fetus might be white, then turn black. The third month is the most dangerous month for a pregnant woman. He doesn’t want his future son looking like a monkey or a camel or one of those cursed creatures that constantly appear one after the other on the TV screen. May God curse it and those who broadcast such deformed images of human beings! And she is forbidden from seeing the calf, alive or dead. That’s why she’s inside, satisfied with looking at us through the window, che
wing on cloves. As for Habiba, she can approach the calf and grab it if she wishes. No one would keep her from doing so. And there’s also Kenza, Kika’s mother. She’s the one who bought the calf. Señora Kentha. That’s what they called her there. After five months in the strawberry fields of Spain, Kenza came back with this strange name, along with the white silk gloves that she never takes off. “Señora Kentha” because the Spanish pronounce the z as a th. My God! This in addition to the respect they showed her. The Spanish respect women. Everywhere. They call them “Señora.” And they didn’t respect her—Kenza—because of how beautiful her name sounded, or how her hands moved, or her silk gloves, or anything else. They respected her simply because she was a woman. On the train, on the subway, at the bus stop, and in the street. Even the Moroccan grocer would forget his Moroccanness when she came in, and called her Señora Kentha. Good lord! That was what she told us yesterday, adding, “In Spain the man opens the elevator door for the woman and says, ‘After you, Señora.’ Just like that. He says it from the heart. And he stands there holding the door until the lady goes in, closing the door politely behind her. Why does he do that, without even knowing her? Because he respects her. That’s why. It’s in the Spaniard’s nature. He respects women, and that’s that.” Whenever Kenza saw this behavior, she said, “My God!” She suddenly remembers that she hasn’t come to visit us to tell stories about how the Spanish act, but rather because Kika had threatened to slit her throat if she showed up at the door. She had given her passport, visa, and the money and papers she was carrying to Mother so Kika wouldn’t tear them up. The funny part of it is that Kika will always be a criminal, that she doesn’t know this, and that she has come for one purpose only, which is to be slaughtered by him. The proof is the calf. Even though she says she bought it to celebrate her return, she really bought it to atone for her sins. But she knows deep down that reconciliation is of no use to the criminal. Once a criminal always a criminal, and his hand might be gripping a knife handle right now. It might have been his hand that had thrown the sulfuric acid. The pain in my toe begins to swell. I suggest to my toe (and to my other body parts that are very likely to rise up and join in the band of pain) that we visit him, that we visit the criminal in his lair, just to see what’s going on. If we can figure out how to lure him forth, we might learn his dangerous secrets. And so, just like that, when my cranky body parts and I go in, we find Kika in his room, on the bed. Clothes are scattered all about (the clothes his mother had brought with her to bribe him with) and his legs are stretched out in front of him, covered by the long brown overcoat. Sitting like someone fully capable of burning girls’ faces. Next to him is a large knife, the kind of knife criminals use to slaughter their mothers who went to Spain on their children’s visas. I steal a glance at the knife in a way that won’t arouse his attention, and so as to not give him the impression that I have seen the knife, or that I am about to interrogate him about the sulfuric acid he had thrown at Farah’s face and parts of her body. I start to think about the most effective way to extract the information, similar to the method I could have used with Abdullah to find out about whether it was him who sold out my uncle (I had been on the verge of interrogating him so many times before retreating, knowing full well that he would deny any connection to what happened to my uncle). Who would admit to such heinous acts? Whether with criminals or snitches, it’s what Kika would probably say right now. With all murderers, you’ve got to be cunning, indirect. One needs to be very crafty and sneaky. For example, I could say to him, just like that, real casually, “You don’t smell anything?”

  He’d respond adamantly, “No. I don’t smell anything.”

  Then I’d home in on a more serious question. “My nose is picking up a smell like sulfuric acid. Or the smell of burnt flesh. Or something like that.” At that point I’d watch his face. A question like that, out of the blue, won’t allow him to remain frozen for long. It will force his face to betray what is going on inside his head; just as I could have done with Abdullah had I ambushed him in the same sudden way. “The smell of sulfuric acid, Kika. Do you know it? And that burning smell? When skin burns, smoke rises up and the smell of skin mixes with the smell of sulfur . . .” The pain, rather than remaining lodged in the toe, shoots to my joints, rendering my feet incapable of movement, preventing me from continuing with my scenarios because it has become unbearable. Besides, what is the use of posing questions he won’t answer? Just like all criminals. I limp out. Once a criminal, always a criminal. I limp partway across the street.

  So anyway, our neighbor Kenza came back two days ago—with white gloves and this strange name—thinking about throwing a party to celebrate her return. Five months isn’t ten years, or even four. Her return was premature. Who misses a woman who’s been away for only five months, or longs for a profession no one cares to mention by name? She came back because of her son Kika. If it weren’t for the white gloves, the strange name, and her endless stories about the Andalusian fields, we would have said she had never left her house. But she came back. That was what was important. The banquet always comes when it should, no matter what. The tent was erected amid the rubble of our new street. The calf was here. He spent the night tied tightly with a thick rope to a metal pole. All we were missing was Kika, but Kika wasn’t even thinking about leaving his room. We had to listen to Kenza go on and on about the Spanish strawberry fields she had left behind for us to realize that she had come back on account of her son Kika. Why else would she come back at the height of the harvest season if not because of her son? No one knew what had come over him. She had come back at a bad time. That’s all there was to it. That’s the reason our neighbor didn’t announce it, although we all knew it as we listened to her tell about the vast fields, about the fruit that ripens in no time, about the work that begins at six in the morning and doesn’t end until the sun goes down, and about the calf tied up since yesterday to one of the extra metal bars left over from the construction. She herself didn’t know whether she was slaughtering it to celebrate her return or to make Kika feel better. The banquet always comes when it should, no matter what. The men in Kenza’s life came and went. Kenza had no man to buy her a celebratory sacrificial animal or offering. And Kika’s condition had changed. Father and I told her that our specialty was wood, not buying calves. We didn’t go with Abdullah to the market. Besides, we were busy with our new chairs. We had no time to waste. Two chairs unlike any chair humankind had ever known, and the likes of which would never be known again. The children spent the night offering the calf Abdullah had bought everything they could lay their hands on—bread, olives, mint, carrots, dry cookies. Karima gave it an orange, and stayed up all night waiting for it to eat it. When it finally did swallow it, she was sleeping in the street. She might have been dreaming that she had gotten her orange back and run away with it. The other children didn’t sleep. I came back from Kika’s room and found them waiting for the moment the calf’s blood would flow as Abdullah grabbed its modest horns and twisted its neck with a surprisingly quick move that the children didn’t expect. The calf’s eyes widened as it fell. The move was violent and sudden. The pain transformed into a prickly feeling in my ankles, like pinpricks on lacerated skin. The calf wasn’t expecting it either. It looked at the children with the same shock that was in their eyes. But where was Kika? Our neighbor Kenza said we wouldn’t slaughter the calf without Kika. Kika was in his room, and he wasn’t going to come out just because Señora Kentha wanted him to. The pain that was shooting back and forth between my ankle and my knee moved to my back. A child shouted toward the window, “Kika! Your mother’s telling you to come down to watch them slaughter the calf!” Kika wasn’t going to leave his room just because some kid was shouting. He had a big knife. He was waiting for his mother to show her face so he could slaughter her. The kids shouted, “Kika! Your mother’s telling you to come down to watch them slaughter the calf!” Kika wasn’t going to leave his room just because they were in the street shouting. He held the kni
fe upright, at the ready. Kenza turned toward the men leaning over the calf, intent on finishing it off. What would her son do in Spain even if he were to go? Would he work in the strawberry fields like she had? He wouldn’t be able to stand one day under the brain-frying Andalusian sun. And anyway, he can’t do manual labor. He’d never done anything with his hands except steal from God’s children. Would he be happy when his hands turned into something that looked like rotten tomatoes? When she took off the gloves and tossed them aside, I couldn’t make out the fingers. Swollen and red like little sausages. And the palms? They weren’t the same red as Andalusian strawberries. They were a rotten red, more like that of rotten eggplant. A dark, gloomy red. Depressing. Staining her hands and arms. Staining the road you take during the day, and staining your dreams at night. You wake up with the same rotten red color covering your eyes. It’s nothing more than the exhaustion that remains from the previous day. Kenza was the one who burst out crying. The little kids saw her crying and shouted again, “Kika! Your mother’s telling you to come down to watch them slaughter the calf!” Even if I had wanted to, I wouldn’t have been able to go back to his house because I would have fallen down in the middle of the street after two or three steps.