Absent: A Novel

by Betool Khedairi

  We go past a shop that used to sell sweets. Sugar is scarce, so the shop has been converted into a dry cleaner’s. We are in a lane called Traders’ Alley. One night on this street, a group of merchants amazingly disappeared. They were accused of destroying the national economy by forming a price-controlling cartel for basic commodities like sugar and wheat flour. They were eventually pardoned, but by then it was too late. They had already been executed!

  At the entrance to a bank, employees are lining up, carrying stacks of cash known as the Swiss print. They have been ordered to exchange them for the newly released notes. Other employees are already leaving from the back door with shopping bags full of bundles of the locally produced notes. This new government cash reminds me of the paper money we used as children at the Alwiya Club. The one hundred fils piece was pink, and the fifty fils piece was green. We used to call it Monopoly money.

  A few moments later we pass a large hall that used to be an art gallery. Such an establishment is considered inappropriate in these times, and it has become a store that sells alarms and other security equipment. I don’t like the sounds that modern alarms make to scare away car thieves and house robbers. I call that shop “Shabateet’s” after the children’s “long breath” game where whoever was able to continue chanting “shabateeeet” for the longest time was the winner.

  We reach a small garden center hiding behind a half-deserted pharmacy. An agricultural engineer called Fathi comes out and greets Abu Ghayeb warmly. His speech is labored, his breathing rattles. I imagine his lungs are full of fine tubes passing solid oxygen instead of air. We sit down on low wooden seats amidst several plants.

  My aunt’s husband asks him, “Shall we start?”

  “Yes, by all means.”

  He calls out to his wife, asking her to serve us tea.

  “To start with, we have to understand the difference between the various types of bees. Yellow bees are found in the Mediterranean basin. They’re aggressive and have a tendency to swarm.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that the bees leave their colony to form a new one.”

  “So how do we get them back?”

  Fathi laughs, exhaling as though throwing his voice aloft, “Don’t rush brother, this is still our first session.”

  The tea arrives and he continues, “As for gray bees, their original habitats are in Eastern Europe. These are the Caucasian honeybees.”

  Abu Ghayeb is keen for more information. I observe the engineer’s wife decorating a giant candle for a local wedding. Shiny red ribbons wind themselves around the candle and converge into a ruffled skirt made of bright blue nylon.

  “The third type, the black bees, are found in Northwest Europe and North Africa.”

  “And which type would you recommend for me?”

  I leave my seat and approach his wife. Suddenly a small child runs out, holding his arm out in front of him as he chases a hen that scurries away. It looks as if the boy is trying to stick his finger into the bird’s bottom. His mother explains that he has been watching his father. They had a pair of delicate finches. The female was unable to lay her eggs, so Fathi helped her by gently introducing the tip of his finger into the bird’s bottom.

  Her son runs off. She continues, “We were so pleased with the eggs, but it turned out the birds were calcium deficient. They ended up eating their own eggs. The problem is, my son now thinks that putting his finger up the hen’s bottom will make her lay eggs straight away. He’d love to eat some eggs. It’s been a while since we’ve had any.”

  Her husband is still talking to Abu Ghayeb, “The breeds that have become popular recently are the Carniolan honeybees. The workers are strong and the queen is a vigorous egg layer.”

  The man coughs suddenly, and spits something out into a handkerchief he took out of his back pocket, “This breed is renowned for its minimal consumption of honey in the winter. They withstand the cold, and they won’t steal.”

  He returns his crumpled handkerchief to its place. Using his moist index finger, he points at Abu Ghayeb, saying in all seriousness, “They have a placid temperament. They only sting to defend their home.”

  I follow the child’s footprints in the dust. I find him peeing into a little hole in the ground. He doesn’t pay any attention to me and doesn’t appear embarrassed by my presence. He glances at me as he holds his little penis in his hand and says, “My mother says that I’ve drunk too much water today.”

  I smile. The hen makes its escape through a small gap in the wooden fence. The boy turns around to face me once again, saying as he points to his little member, “My father’s also got one, just like this, but bigger.”

  I can think of nothing to say other than, “Is that so?”

  He replies matter-of-factly as he tucks it away inside the fly of his dirty trousers, “Yes, but my Daddy’s has lots of eyelashes on it.”

  I retrace my footsteps. When the engineer goes on too long about different types of bees, I imagine the little cotton crocodile embroidered on Abu Ghayeb’s shirt starting to yawn.

  Eventually, they shake hands, “Thank you for the information. I’ll come back to see you once again in the near future.”

  I look around me. Outside, the sun licks the walls of the houses. Russet tongues slither through the black-and-white lines of the pedestrian crossings, fading from frequent use. It’s many years since they were last repainted.

  The eucalyptus trees that my aunt’s husband calls “sticks of dust,” as in the local dialect, cast their shadows across the sign that reads BUDS OF THE REVOLUTION NURSERY SCHOOL. I recall my schooldays when, at nursery school, we were taught to recite, “I am an Arab soldier…I hold my rifle in my hand…I’ll use it to protect my land…bang, bang, bang.”

  Later, during my days at primary school, the children would arrive in the morning wearing their ordinary clothes, and leave in the afternoon wearing the uniform of the Vanguards. The uniform was a military style khaki suit with a map of the Arab world imprinted on the jacket, the trousers, and the hat. Every Thursday we attended the flag-raising ceremony and shouted in unison, “Palestine is an Arab state; it must be freed.” Our teachers always reminded us that training with the Vanguards would make us more intelligent, especially if we also spent more time playing chess.

  In our teenage years, we had to join the National Union of Students. There we were told that our aims were “Unity, Freedom, and Socialism,” and that we had to strive for “One unified Arab nation…with an eternal message.” That would prepare us to join the ranks of the Arab Baath Socialist Party when we grew up, provided that the party members were assured that we merited that honor. We had to attend the meetings unfailingly, maintain secrecy, and learn the president’s quotes by heart. We also had to study the articles of the Seventh National Congress in order to be considered grown men and women, who would become worthy citizens in our society.

  I preferred the Guides. Their uniforms were blue. And an unpleasant boy called Abbas couldn’t follow me there. I had to flee from him at Vanguard training. He followed me around wherever I went and made fun of my mouth. I was unable to escape his cruelty so I decided that he would be Ibn Firnas.

  I imagined him to be the character portrayed in the statue of Abbas Ibn Firnas that’d been erected on the road to the airport. It depicts a young boy, standing on a tall platform, preparing to take off. His wings are made of wax and feathers. He is about to fly and hover high above the earth. But the sun will melt his wings and he’ll fall into the parking lot leading to the suburb of al-Shurta and I’ll be rid of him forever.

  That was my reverie when I stretched out on the back seat of Abu Ghayeb’s car as we returned from the airport at the end of one of his trips abroad. I amused myself by counting the number of lampposts from the arrivals lounge all the way to Jadiriya Bridge. As I stretched out onto my back on the backseat, I remembered my math teacher. She was always telling me, “Dalal, if you don’t pay attention, I’ll hang you from the ceiling fan.”
I imagined myself dangling upside down reading the mathematical equation on the blackboard (A–B). In the car, in the backseat, I realized that everything could be seen upside down, except the sky.

  Many years later I understood that people who were hung from fans by their feet were being tortured to extract their confessions.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A CRISIS RESULTS in compromises. This is what I learned from our visit to see Fathi, the agricultural engineer. My aunt’s husband is going to buy a swarm of bees. He’s going to start beekeeping so that we can survive on the income from the honey they produce. But how will he come up with the cash for this project? It is obviously from the money that has been set aside to reconstruct my mouth. The U.S. dollars that were supposed to pay for the plastic surgery to realign my face have become the family’s only savings.

  The equation is clear; my mouth in return for our survival.

  In spite of her husband’s warnings, my aunt takes me with her to visit Umm Mazin. Entering, we find a group of women sitting in semidarkness. They look like an X-ray image. Their upper halves have the indistinct shape of females, their lower halves have the feet of wild birds. On a side table, there is a handwritten sign that reads, “Please do not bring men with you or boys over the age of seven.”

  Umm Mazin is dealing with a complaining woman whose husband is no longer having sexual intercourse with her. She asks her if her husband suffers from any illness, “Does your husband have diabetes or heart disease? How old is he? Was he active when he was younger?”

  She assesses his frame of mind, his age, and their financial status. When she is convinced that there’s no illness, and everything is normal, she declares, as if she’s announcing the winning prize in a competition, “Therefore logic indicates that it’s seduction, pure and simple. You must have a specific defect, which is why another woman has seduced him and he’s left your home.”

  The woman collapses in a heap when this conclusion is pronounced. Umm Mazin, reassures her that a solution is available, “I advise you to burn a handful of peppers in a saucepan with some oil and recite your husband’s name out loud. You must burn the peppers until they’re dry. The peppers will burn away at his heart, and he’ll develop a prickly yearning for you and a desire to come back. Eventually, he’ll declare his love for you within two days.”

  An elderly woman is listening intently. Umm Mazin surprises her, “What about you? What’s your problem? You appear anxious.”

  “I too want my husband to do it with me more often.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Sixty.”

  “And how old is your husband?”

  “He is sixty-five.”

  “And how often does he have sexual intercourse with you?”

  “Once a week.”

  Umm Mazin taps one palm of her hand with the other and says, “That’s a blessing. You must thank God who created you for this grace, and not be so greedy. As the saying goes, ‘If your friends are sweet, don’t eat them all up.’ Have a safe journey home, and you can pay Badriya on your way out.”

  The old woman doesn’t object. She is probably trying to remember the recipe for the burning peppers that was given to the woman who preceded her.

  Beside me is a young woman immersed in a newspaper. I inch my way closer so that I can share the news without disturbing her. She isn’t annoyed; on the contrary, she opens up her paper to help me see. I delve into its pages gratefully. “When the city of Basra was bombed in the early days of the conflict, a large number of people died underneath the rubble of their homes. Many inhabitants choked to death in the thick toxic fumes. The cloud of pollutants covered an area of 1.5 square miles annihilating all plant and animal life beneath it. It eventually seeped through into the underground wells of drinking water.”

  Umm Mazin lifts up one of her clients’ cups and addresses the woman who had been drinking from it, “In here, I can see two windows, and fear.”

  “Yes, they must be my husband’s glasses. He’s so weirdly attached to them; he even wears them when he sleeps.”

  Umm Mazin’s reading slows down as if interrupted by a comma in the coffee cup. She makes her apologies, saying her energy levels are dropping and nibbles on a Marie biscuit. She munches on the rest of the biscuit pausing for a full stop. She then carries on, “Your husband is afraid of evil spirits.”

  “He sleeps in them, washes with them on, doesn’t even take them off when we’re having sex. You may not believe this, but on our wedding night, he told me that it would be grounds for divorce if I lost his glasses.”

  Umm Mazin gets up to go to the toilet. Her fat belly bulges out from underneath her dishdasha and the biscuit crumbs roll down over its curvature. For a moment, I think I can hear the sound of their impact as they land on the ground. She treads on them as she returns to her seat and resumes her analysis. “Your husband believes that a cloud of evil follows him around wherever he goes. He believes that his glasses give him greater weight and prevent him from floating up and becoming part of that interminable haze. That’s why he wears them twenty-four hours a day.”

  “What can I do?”

  “Go to Badriya, she’ll give you a potion to banish his delusion. When your husband drinks his tea, does the steam not rise from the cup and condense onto his glasses? Is that what usually happens?”

  “That’s it exactly.”

  “Then you must add the potion to his tea. It’ll rise with the steam and settle on his glasses. That way the spell will work. His fears will soon calm down.”

  A woman heading toward Umm Mazin attracts my attention. Her armpit has been eroded by an extensive fungal infection. The woman is illiterate, and unknowingly sprayed wood polish onto her armpit thinking it was a deodorant. One puff burnt away her skin. She is followed by another woman who has come to Umm Mazin because she is losing her hair.

  Umm Mazin says to her, “My dear, your hair is falling from the inside, not on the outside.”

  The woman becomes animated as she replies, “No, Umm Mazin, I swear to God, it’s only the hair on my head that’s falling out.”

  Umm Mazin tut-tuts with impatience. “No, no, what I meant was that this is due to emotional distress.”

  Her energy level drops again. Badriya brings her a sweet from the kitchen then asks the two women to follow her. Umm Mazin tosses the colored sweet into her mouth. It catches the edge of the largest of her teeth. The noise of the impact sounds painful. The rest of her mouth, however, ensnares the sweet with no difficulty. She sucks on it without bringing her lips together. She mutters underneath her breath, “She can’t read, she can’t write, and she uses a deodorant spray!”

  It feels to me like the amount of oxygen in the room is decreasing. I pray silently that Abu Ghayeb won’t get back to the flat before us; but my aunt insists on lingering in order to offer her services to Umm Mazin. She wants to send some of her clients for Umm Mazin to treat. I never thought she’d taken my suggestion seriously; yet here we are. Everybody is looking for possible means to earn a living. Does my aunt really think that Umm Mazin will pay her commission for every coffee cup she reads? I expect she will probably thank her, and offer her a modest discount on future readings, nothing more.

  The bulky woman on my left looks so tough. I imagine that if I shouted at her, the sound would bounce back as a harsh echo. Her hands look as though they are cast out of wet, heavy mud. Badriya keeps coming in and out, twirling amongst us like a sandstorm. She continuously hums an old television soap powder commercial, “Your pants, Abu Zaid, will only be cleaner with Tide.”

  The curtains remain drawn; this gaggle of women smell like fermented Italian cheese. The scene transforms itself into a roll of photographic film that has yet to be developed.

  Back at the flat, Abu Ghayeb explains to me, “In order to appreciate it; you must live within the painting. Don’t merely look at it.”

  I stand in front of a painting of a naked woman the hue of drunken seagulls. Her entire body is drawn in the
style of a Moroccan tattoo. She’s wearing bead necklaces around a neck that bears no head. A man stands behind her. His head stretches out to gaze inside her severed neck. But nothing active seems to be happening in the painting. Whereas a lot of things have started to happen in our building since Umm Mazin moved in.

  With the worsening of the economic situation, the flat residents have tended to venture out less often, but for some reason, their movement between the different floors has increased.

  The Alwiya Club is deteriorating. The number of paid-up club members has dwindled to the extent that it has become doubtful whether any of the cultural and social activities will continue. They closed down the swimming pool when the weeds started growing in the cracks as a result of persistent neglect.

  A short while later, the club’s administration announces that it is prepared to rent out the unused areas at the back to anyone who wants to use the facilities, provided no construction or excavation work is involved. This is Abu Ghayeb’s opportunity. He can rent one of the tennis courts. Behind the first tennis court is a grove of palm trees with ripe dates hanging down beneath the palm fronds.

  The second tennis court has already been rented out to a government department.

  As we wait to cross the road, a large loaded truck goes past. A sign on its side says HIGHLY FLAMMABLE. At the back, another sign reads, BLESSED AND PROTECTED BY THE BRAVE AND HOLY MAN OF DUJAIL. Abu Ghayeb doesn’t notice. He thinks of nothing but his honeybees. When my aunt asked him yesterday why he didn’t sell his huge collection of paintings, he replied, “What madman would spend his money on works of art at a time like this?”