I would look at her. trying to decide whether she was a prophet or a devil. I couldn’t believe that misery never lost its way around the winding roads, disappeared into the valleys, or got caught on a cactus plant. When she tracked me down, she cursed, shouted, wept, mewed like a cat, howled like a dog, reinforcing this barrage of sounds with kicks to hotel room doors, my car, the woman’s car, hired cars. She had developed a huge voice with thick roots reaching deep inside her, and she seemed to use it to pick up a place and shake it, and shake the bed we were lying on. I would clench my fists in rage, resolved not to mend my ways, but to create a hideaway that nobody would be able to find. Nevertheless, charged up with anger and uncertainty, I would mount the woman as if she were a mare I had long been deprived of. She therefore became absolutely convinced that my desire for her was the result of a game being played by me and my wife, and that she had fallen into our trap; I left signs and markers for my wife on purpose—if not, how could I explain my short bursts of wild excitement after she had caught us, at a time when her desire had temporarily abandoned her? She tried to persuade me of the truth of her theory without success. Recalling conversations with my wife, I was sure that I had not left any signs, other than telling her that I had an inexplicable passion for this woman’s body that didn’t interfere with my love for her. I swore to my wife that I had never kissed the woman’s hand, nor held her gently in my arms, or passed my finger over her lips, and my conversations with her were limited to details about the color of flesh, pores, pubic hair, or expressions of purely physical ecstasy. My wife covered her ears at my declaration of love. She pulled her hair and slapped me and shook me, as if she hoped my heart would jump out into her hand.
After that she had cosmetic surgery to make her breasts the shape of brandy glasses. She did exercises religiously until her stomach was flat. She wore an endless variety of nightdresses which were made of such fine silk that they were almost illusory. She tried to establish a relationship with my genitals that had nothing to do with me. But they always became cerebral and refused to let her play with them, leaving the talking to me, so that I had to assure her as kindly as I could, and lightheartedly, to dispel her feelings of loneliness, that she had become a part of me.
Now the woman was trying to regain my interest, moving in a way that was unfamiliar to me, but which exuded desire, while I wondered why I had come here when we no longer had to hide. Why was the square where the hotel was situated called Place de la Catastrophe and what exactly was the disaster that had given it its name? It really didn’t go with the little houses there, in their tangle of tree branches and brightly colored climbing plants, or the washing spread out to dry on the balconies and the narrow bridge that linked the houses together.
I closed my eyes, urging myself to reach the end of the bridge, to remember what happened when I was inside her. But I couldn’t go any farther.
I felt as if there was somebody behind me, coming between me and her, distancing me from her hands clinging to my back. I looked around and the room was peaceful. I told myself I was imagining things and that this was the first time after …
But I heard a faint kicking, a feeble mewing. Anxiously, I turned around again, but when I saw that the urn on the dressing table was still I relaxed, determined to give my full attention to the woman, whose legs and arms continued to be wrapped tightly around me. However, the kicking grew stronger, the mewing louder and my car horn gave a shrill blast. I jumped to my feet in a panic. This must all be coming from the urn, my wife’s new home. She had insisted that she wanted to be cremated, not buried, when she died, and had begged me never to leave her alone. I had promised at the time, placating her, weeping at the pain which was eating away at her, that I would never leave her for a moment and would take her with me wherever I went. I saw the urn kick the table and was wary of the feet inside it. I heard the mewing and shrieking and was convinced the voice had put down its roots there, and when I involuntarily hid my face in my hands I was certain her eyes were watching too.
Living in an oil company compound in the middle of the desert, we needed to see a color that was different from the color of the sand, to touch something other than the layer of dust on everything, to enjoy a sound that wasn’t the wind, the air conditioner or the chatter of other children. One day our servant, Bus, brought us the thing we longed for without knowing it, or at least he brought it to my little brother. Although I was glad myself, I wondered if Bus’s plan was to find another way of being close to my brother, and I began to feel suspicious. His hands were all over him. touching his shoulders, his neck, his face and playing with his hair, and I thought of the Indian goddess with many hands. He wanted me to think he was being fatherly when he adjusted the towel around my brother’s waist, but watching him, I decided that he was keen to see him in his bathing trunks. He insisted on having my brother on his lap when he was showing him how to steer a bike or car. Sometimes he would tell him he had a present for him in the pocket of his apron and I would watch my little brother’s fingers reaching into the pocket in search of a bar of chocolate or a toy car.
I knew boys had to be careful as well as girls. The boys at school exchanged stories about “perversions” and repeated their parents’ warnings to watch out for strangers, but to be especially on their guard against the male servants who almost lived in the houses where they worked. Although I looked up what perversion meant in the dictionary, my mind registered the word differently after I had seen photos of two men embracing in a magazine my mother received by post at the beginning of every month. This magazine, which was as thick as a book, rarely contained pictures and when it did they were usually vague black-and-white drawings that didn’t mean a thing to me. I revealed my misgivings about Bus to my brother, who was five years younger than me, and fetched my mother’s magazine to help him understand. As I showed him the photos, I felt he wasn’t taking it in, and sure enough he said, “But Bus doesn’t look like either of those men.”
Bus was about my height, and very skinny, and if it hadn’t been for his wrinkled forehead and gold teeth, he would have looked younger than his years; the two men embracing, on the other hand, were handsome and as tall as bamboo plants, passionately intertwined. They were both dressed in formal suits and ties, like two presidents.
“They must be crying,” said my brother. “Maybe one of them’s mother died, or his dog.”
I sighed in exasperation and showed him another photo. Their faces were touching and they were looking into each other’s eyes with love and tenderness like a man and woman in a film.
“Do you see?” I egged him on, pointing at their faces. “Do you understand what I mean?”
But my brother’s eager answer fell on me like a cold shower. “Is it a doctor looking at someone’s eyes?”
I threw the magazine aside and pointed a warning finger at him, and told him that if Bus touched him on any part of his body, he would be in agony and might even die.
From that moment on my little brother went to great lengths to avoid Bus: he wouldn’t meet his eye and refused to stay alone in the same room as him, especially at night when our parents went to visit friends and Bus babysat for us. My little brother clung to my side while we watched television and ate our supper and when I went to the toilet he came too. This annoyed me as I couldn’t go with him there even if he turned his face away and looked at the door.
It never occurred to me to reveal my doubts to my mother, even before Bus arrived with the thing that changed our lives. He cut the potatoes in the shape of pears, was an expert at making birthday cakes, helped me color in maps, drew faces like a professional artist, embroidered cherries on my blouse, and besides, I knew how much my mother depended on him. She hardly did a thing in the house, and sat looking at books all day. How then could I ever have complained about him once he had brought the rabbit?
It was a white rabbit like a ball of wool. He built it a hutch and we played with it after school every day and put it back in the hutch before
we went to bed. It learned to bang against the door with its forelegs to make us open it. Being an intelligent rabbit, it knew that life was more interesting outside the cage than inside. We let it wander around the house and I followed it, picking up the black pearls it left behind so that my mother wouldn’t find them, and shooing it away from her plants. Once it was too quick for me and gobbled half a leaf. It became part of the family, until one evening Bus picked it up by the ears, despite my brother’s protests, and said he’d never in all his life seen a rabbit grow so fast, and praised us for our efforts. It was true that we’d stolen extra rations of carrots and lettuce for it behind my mother’s back. To our astonishment Bus dropped the rabbit into a basket with a lid that he usually kept fixed to the back of his bike, saying that he wanted to mate it with another rabbit. My brother let out a shriek, not understanding what Bus meant, but Bus immediately pulled out another, smaller rabbit from the basket. My brother only hesitated a few moments before transferring his affection from the old, familiar rabbit to the new, little one.
So it was that as one rabbit grew up Bus exchanged it for another, younger one. My brother got used to this process. Perhaps he even welcomed it, as all rabbits look alike and behave in the same way, from the quivering of their mouths and noses to the expressions in their eyes, but baby rabbits have a particular charm that is hard to resist.
Spring had come and the heat was still bearable. We moved the rabbit hutch out onto the roof, and as we climbed the steps to see it the following morning my brother predicted that the rabbit would be gone.
We had been made to move it, as my mother began to find the smell of rabbits in the hall and kitchen unbearable. She had never let us put it in the garden from the beginning, claiming that she had heard or read that the smell attracted snakes and scorpions.
My brother asked once again if snakes could climb vertically and I assured him that they couldn’t and we finally reached the roof terrace. To my surprise, he had guessed right and the rabbit was nowhere to be seen. We stood looking around us uncertainly, until we noticed some movement in a pile of leaves and an old pullover that I’d left up there ages before. It was the withdrawn rabbit, which had never let us play with it like the other rabbits. I managed to separate it from the little creatures it was protecting with its fur. They looked like mice or rats. We picked them up and hurried to show them to Bus, who told us angrily that they’d all die if we separated them from their mother so early on. Sure enough, they all died even though we put them in a cardboard box in the living room with a glass of hot water beside them to give them warmth. When Bus wanted to take them away, we were convinced he wouldn’t bury them but would just throw them out with the garbage. So we waited until my father came home from work and took us to bury them outside the compound, where they wouldn’t attract snakes to the house, to keep my mother quiet.
As I scrabbled in the sand, I was filled with a kind of happiness, as if I were at the seaside and all that was missing was the sound of the waves breaking on the shore, and the smell of the ocean. It was early evening and from where we were the compound looked like a green dot on a brown paper bag.
We stopped ourselves from picking up the black rabbit and made do with watching its stomach swell. Whenever my brother complained to me, I encouraged him by reminding him of the baby rabbits that would soon be born. Then we discussed whether Bus was going to let us have them all. But he left us one rabbit only, which soon died. We blamed him, claiming that the rabbit had died of grief because it was separated from its brothers and sisters. But Bus laughed scornfully and told us that feeding it parsley and coriander was what had killed it. He promised to bring us another rabbit the next morning.
My brother, pacified, nodded and went out to play, but a few minutes later he rushed back in to tell me that the neighbor’s children had a peacock and a bird like a parrot with an electronic voice. I went outside, holding his hand, to ask the children how the peacock and the parrot had got here, and they swore that their servant, Kameel, had brought them from his country.
The compound children had begun to raise young rabbits like us, and their servants, like Bus, would exchange them for younger ones when they grew up. I thought of the canary in a cage that we had seen sitting on the conveyor belt at the airport. The people waiting for their luggage had laughed out loud at the sight of the canary among the suitcases, apparently enjoying the occasion.
One of the children said that peacocks spread their tails out like fans.
“So what, if we can’t even see our peacock yet,” said another.
I asked him what he meant and they all chorused back at me, “Kameel always forgets to bring it from his room, even though we remind him every day.”
“He must be lying,” I said. “Bus used to tell my brother that in his country there were TV sets as big as whole rooms.”
I decided to take them to the servants’ quarters at the far end of the compound. “Why don’t we go and find out the truth?” I said.
The children reacted enthusiastically to my suggestion and rushed off like gazelles to ask their parents.
Perhaps they were slow to come back, or was that just how it seemed to me? I took my brother’s hand and began running in the direction of the servants’ rooms. As I ran, I wondered why I was more anxious than them to see the peacock, or else to find out that the servant had been lying. Why hadn’t I grown up yet? I was interested in the rabbits and everything else that filled the days of the younger children, so much so that my mother had told me reprovingly that my brother was more mature than me: this was when I put war paint on the children’s faces with felt-tipped pens and it took two days of rubbing with soap and face cream to get it off.
I used to enjoy playing with them, and it made me laugh when they laughed. I was also their leader, teaching them to do dangerous things and suggesting roles for them to act. My cousin, who had stayed in Lebanon and was the same age as me, wrote me letters about boys and makeup and rock singers.
I felt happy, as if I was setting off on an adventure, when the stars came close to the earth and the houses thinned out. The sun was red and almost sinking into the sand, and the twilight turned violet and orange and then gray. I had an idea about the sort of places the compound’s servants lived in, because I had always thought of the compound as being like a factory and the servants as the machinery that made it run. They lived near a small mosque whose walls were covered in blue mosaic tiles.
The sense of being my own mistress and having my brother under my control was short-lived as he began lagging behind and complaining that he was tired. When I offered to carry him he confessed that he was scared more than tired; I wondered why, as it never got properly dark in the desert. I looked around for a stone or a stick to defend him with. Everything was still: the gardens were semi-arid and the sloping ground around us was bare except for some fanlike shrubs and a little plant that wilted and surrendered to me, roots and all, the minute I touched it. I gave up the idea of finding a stick or a stone and asked my brother what he was afraid of.
“Bus,” he replied.
“Sweetheart,” I said, bending down to him. I took him in my arms but changed my mind rapidly when I found how heavy he was, and put him down again.
“Don’t be scared. Bus is still in our house. And anyway, you can’t be scared when I’m with you!”
I was sorry I had made him frightened of Bus. It reminded me of my grandmother telling me stories about the ghoul to frighten me into being good.
“Why didn’t we wait for the others?” he asked. “Why don’t we go back and get them?”
“If we go by ourselves, we can see the peacock before they do, and maybe take the bird with the electronic voice,” I answered.
“Steal it?”
“Maybe.”
I couldn’t imagine that there was a peacock or a bird like a parrot in those wooden huts; however, I wanted to escape from the house and also prove that the servant had lied. Darkness enveloped us suddenly, as I had taken
a short cut off the main road; then it was gone again as we walked along another road with houses and streetlights on either side.
My brother no longer clung to me. We got nearer and smelled cooking and then heard children talking in a foreign language, and I was sure that they must be the servants’ children visiting for the holidays. I had once heard Bus saying that he would have liked to send for his children if the fares hadn’t been so high. Hearing other children made us feel easier, but then a man came out of the wooden huts and noticed us and stopped and stared and my heart beat faster again. I knew I must ask him where Bus lived, or Kameel, in the strongest voice I could manage. He indicated the last hut. I thanked him loudly and he went on staring at me. He started to move. Was he going to follow us? My brother was clinging to me so tightly now that I could hardly walk. I realized our parents had been right to be worried: here I was rushing into the trap, and I only understood how terrified my brother was of Bus now that I felt the same way about this man.
A horrible smell distracted my attention, then a washing line strung between the building and the streetlight. We had to duck our heads down under the washing to get to the house the man had indicated. I thought the compound’s sewage pipes must come out here. The washing flapped noisily against the back of my head. It seemed strange. They must have used a powder that made their clothes dry hard and stiff in the sun. The smell grew stronger and the washing was all the same shape, like babies’ sleeping suits. A light came on in one of the rooms. The washing blazed into life in front of me and I screamed. Then my brother screamed. We both noticed at the same time that the washing hanging out to dry was rabbits, still with their heads and ears on. Rabbit skins, black, white, spotted, small, large. Their dried-up legs were bumping painfully against our faces. There was one rabbit hanging there that looked as if someone had outlined its eyes in black kohl. We used to call her Cleopatra. We took to our heels. There were so many of them. The smell was suffocating. We used to hug them, bury our faces in their fur and give them rides in my brother’s car, and now we were running away from them. They followed us with their dead, carrot-colored eyes. Their perpetual movement, their different colors had staved off the monotony of the desert for us, and yet now we could have been escaping from a forest fire. We flew along the asphalt road shrieking. When the houses and gardens of the compound came in sight we cried louder, hoping that somebody would come out to ask what was wrong, so that we could describe the horrors we had seen. But music, the smell of food, the murmuring of voices was all that came out of these peaceful houses.
I Sweep the Sun Off Rooftops Page 7