Absent: A Novel

by Betool Khedairi

  We walk away from the Alwiya Club once Abu Ghayeb has identified the work site, the food source, and the enemy.

  I make friends with the sound of our refrigerator. Tchik—it switches itself off, tchok—it switches itself back on again. The properties of the dual metal piece in the fuse result in the disconnection. This is what we were told in our physics lessons. The metal expands thus disconnecting the generator in the fridge from the power supply. When it shrinks, the connection is restored. As for the little light that’s supposed to go on when the fridge door opens, it no longer works. At night, I sometimes have to use a candle to identify its meager contents.

  I no longer watch the tennis courts from the kitchen at night, and we no longer eat a heavy meal after sundown, the way we used to. My aunt justifies this by saying that a light supper promotes calm, light sleep during the night and a feeling of lightness the next day. She says nothing of the long hours in between! The fridge has become just another item of furniture: rarely used, but still a source of tedious noises.

  For my part, I could do with a light day tomorrow, in order to be able to face the physics teacher. I don’t like science subjects. I find it difficult to understand their logic. The physics teacher often chides me for failing to grasp the logic of things. Yet it’s she who doesn’t understand me. She explains the Archimedes theorem: when an object is immersed in a fluid it displaces the same volume of fluid as the volume of the object. They should also have the same mass. Her eyes settle intentionally on the angle of my mouth, as she says the word ‘displaced.’

  I look at her name, which she wears in yellow gold around her neck. Kurdish people love their gold jewelry. I read her name, Parween. I imagine her surname to be Parwana, the Persian word for propeller blade. A moment later I come up with the nickname “the family of electric fans.” In secret, I’ve got my revenge. Eureka!

  My refusal to comprehend any of the sciences has persisted throughout my years at secondary school. I have no difficulties with languages, social sciences, or the arts, but getting a passing grade in the other subjects is always a struggle. I can never understand why in geometry, the area of the triangle equals half the base multiplied by the height. I would prefer to draw a flower in the triangle or fill it up with a song.

  The only exception in the science subjects is biology. I am fascinated by the life of the amoeba, the movement of its pseudopods, and the growth of the fetus inside the womb. I will never be able to understand how to measure the speed of light, but I spend long sessions looking for living organisms under the microscope. The teacher used to pronounce it “micro-scooop.”

  I never join the other students as they scramble to book the magnifying instruments a week in advance. My instrument is different from everybody else’s. Basically, it is just a low glass table. I deposit all the insects and other creatures to be studied on it. I then lie down underneath it, placing my hands behind my head, and observe. From there, I scrutinize their movement and their behavior.

  At once, I become engrossed as I watch a pair of damp frogs attached to each other. The female frog blows into the ear of the male frog. Two lumps of meat, the color of mellowed seaweed, gambol above me on a transparent plane, sticking to each other in the emptiness of space.

  This is the only time I wish I were a frog.

  My aunt is busy tidying her new room. It’s a small space, more the size of a closet than a room, lying between the kitchen and the bathroom. In the Days of Plenty, it was used for food storage and was called “the weighing room.” Today she calls it “House of Buttons.” She removes some drawing materials and places them underneath the bed on Abu Ghayeb’s side. The wardrobe has now become hers alone, and the boxes filled with buttons colonize the shelves.

  She was upset yesterday when she heard about the attempted robbery at our neighbors’ house. She went over to visit them. I accompanied her to see if it was true what the other children in our vicinity were saying, that all the freckles on the woman’s face had disappeared completely. Her husband was still in prison, and her son had been buried with the chewing gum stuck in his windpipe. We found out later on that the thief had been after a Persian carpet he’d spotted when it was left out on their rooftop. He hadn’t known that it had just been washed and was waterlogged, making it too heavy for him to carry.

  My aunt ended her visit rapidly. On the way out, we came face-to-face with a young policeman who’d come to take the woman’s statement about the details of the attempted robbery. My aunt stood in the young man’s way. He was wearing a grim blue uniform, with a row of silver buttons running down its middle. The insignia of his police station was embossed on the buttons. My aunt gazed at the sight of the buttons like a drug addict. The stunned policeman couldn’t understand why she was staring at him. I could imagine her reaching out to his chest, plucking the buttons from his uniform and running back to the flat with them. She would place them in a see-through container, and stick a label on it that said POLICE.

  She asks me to help her clean her most prized possession, the sewing machine. I glimpse the word Singer as she wheels it past. We will polish it together. As she hands me the tin of polish, a tiny bead of oil drips from a small perforation in its eroded under-surface. I think it lands on a spider’s back as it makes a rapid escape from underneath the sewing machine.

  I say to her, “We’ve oiled that spider.”

  “Block off that small hole in the bottom of the tin with your finger. We don’t want to lose any more oil; it’s the last tin I have left. Are you sure it was a spider?”

  “I thought it was.”

  “I wonder what it is with spiders this week?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I went to Umm Mazin’s flat two days ago, and a woman with an unnatural fear of spiders came to her seeking treatment. We were unaware that some of the other women there had a grudge against her because she was the second wife of their friend’s husband. They took it upon themselves to harass her. One of them quipped, ‘My dear, I don’t know what’s wrong with me today. I’m in a spidery mood.’ Her friend then replied, ‘Don’t worry, Umm Mazin will give you a magical potion; fear, fear go away, this can’t be the spider’s day.’ Then a third woman joined the conversation saying, ‘I bought a bag of flour yesterday, and we were almost poisoned. It was past its expiry date and was full of spiders’ webs. In other words, the flour had ex-spi-dered!’”

  “What did Umm Mazin do?”

  “Nothing. She disregarded her coffee cup reading charge, as the woman then ran away crying.”

  I say to my aunt, “The sewing machine has some rust here and there.”

  She answers as if scolding me, “What do you expect? Where could I possibly get any spare parts for it? Everything around us is slowly disintegrating.”

  She then adds, “We’re living in an age where everything, even glass, gets rusty.”

  Neighing. Abu Ghayeb repositions a painting of horses. They react to the Allied attack, lining up behind each other with their backs to the east. Their bodies are striped barrels. It looks as if they’ve been saddled with a traditional local rug. They watch fearfully as shells tipped with depleted uranium are fired from American tanks. Their necks are sometimes blue, sometimes red; fresh blood and stale blood.

  The horses gallop in stillness; the beat of their hooves emerges from mouths aimlessly crying out in anger.

  Outside the painting, anger is forbidden. It is something I have never been entitled to. A minor deviation of the mouth inflicted by God is trivial in comparison to the fatal diseases inflicted by human beings. I must minimize my misfortune amidst the calamities surrounding us. The doctors explain that when the blood fails to reach a certain area of the brain, the result is a stroke. I was small at the time. I had a fever and then the stroke; a mini stroke. The blood failed to reach the left side of my brain, making my mouth deviate to the right.

  Suddenly the din of drumbeats and coarse singing descends upon the balcony. I look down onto the courtyard to find
its source. A scruffy pickup truck has pulled up outside the building. The local folk musicians are crammed together in the back, their hands beating out a rhythm on their soiled tambourines. They chant a refrain, “Magical snake with two heads, crawl into their pot…poison everyone in the house, but their son harm not….” A man hugs a bucket and dances around in the courtyard. He is calling out at the top of his voice, “Umm Mazin, how can we thank you, Umm Mazin?”

  I can’t believe it when I realize what is in the bucket. Worms!

  The musicians are relatives of the bewitched and poisoned man. Umm Mazin has treated him from afar—by correspondence. She advised them to take the ripened fruits from the mountain flowers, dry them, and then remove the seeds. The remains had to be ground up, mixed with honey, and then molded into circular pellets, the size of fava beans. The dose was two pellets for children and small adults, and four pellets for well-built adults. These had to be swallowed, not chewed, first thing in the morning. The result was a bucketful of diarrhea, complete with worms. This confirmed the efficacy of her potion, and satisfied the sufferer’s family.

  I imagine Umm Mazin on the floor above us, waving to them from her balcony; her image resembles Boris Yeltsin dipped in cocoa powder.

  During the week, my aunt observes progress in the tennis court. The earth is ploughed, flattened, and divided into rows. The hives are placed along the rows. Flowers favored by the bees, mainly sunflowers, are planted in beds alongside them. The road leading to the apiary is paved and extended to the storage area and the separation room. The equipment, the boxes, and the honey extraction implements needed can now be brought in on a wheelbarrow.

  To protect the bees from strong gusts, windbreakers are put up along the northern and western borders. It is for this reason that the tamarisk trees were planted. The next step is to provide water. Several small pools are constructed. They connect to each other by a network of pipes, and are furnished with wood and styrofoam floaters for the bees to settle on while they drink from the water.

  My aunt’s husband is a novice beekeeper; he has bought only thirty colonies, to try them out. He asks his wife to sew him a beekeeper’s outfit. He emphasizes that it has to be secure so that the bees can’t penetrate it. It has to allow him to work freely, and must consist of one lightly-colored unit. He then adds, “Without shoulder pads please.”

  After many days of preparation for the apiary, I sit down with Abu Ghayeb for an evening of relaxation. He has hurt his leg during the work. The wound has started healing, and itches intensely. He can’t touch it, but he proceeds to scratch the skin all around it with his expert scratcher’s hand that doesn’t let any of his fingers slip onto the gash. He says, “Keeping bees is going to help. Moderate exposure to sunlight is a form of therapy.”

  “While avoiding sunstroke.”

  “Yes, and bee stings.”

  He asks me, “Has your aunt finished sewing the protective outfit?”

  “Almost.”

  He sighs as he scratches himself. “I wish we could make protective outfits for the army. The Allies are using napalm to burn the soldiers.”

  “Is there no protection against it?”

  “How is that possible, Dalal? Modern napalm has been developed further and is now even more lethal. The material spreads over wide areas by using balls of flame. Temperatures can reach eight hundred degrees centigrade. The fires are almost impossible to put out, and the substance can’t be removed from human flesh.”

  The information congeals in my head. I make my way to my room. I lie back on my bed, with my socks on, thinking. My bedcover loses its softness and starts to feel like the dry hairy surface of a coconut shell. The electricity is cut off. I imagine the darkness filling the void inside my shoes.

  I must sleep. Tomorrow I have an appointment with Uncle Sami.

  I ask him, “Who’s Umm Raid?”

  “She was my late wife.”

  “My condolences for your loss.”

  “Thank you for your sympathy.”

  “Where’s Raid?”

  “He’s joined his mother.”

  “I’m sorry. I offer you my condolences once again.”

  “Thank you.”

  He doesn’t appear troubled by my questioning.

  “Is this her diary?”

  “Yes. I determined that I would continue writing in her diaries and document all the events of the economic blockade the way she did. She used to while away her time writing down the day’s events, and would conclude with her favorite refrain, ‘Holy Virgin, you know these truths.’”

  “What happened?”

  “When they bombed the headquarters of the secret police, one of the missiles landed on the artist Layla’s house and she was killed. They found the bodies of my wife and our son under the debris from their walls. She’d gone to visit someone in that area; it was as simple as that.”

  The words “as simple as that” ring in my ears. I ask him, “Is it true that her house was targeted intentionally?”

  “Why?”

  “We heard she was the one who made the mosaic of President Bush that was laid down at the entrance to the Rasheed Hotel which is used by a large number of foreign delegations, so they all tread on his face whenever they go in or out of the building.”

  “I don’t know how much truth there is in those tales.”

  He then continues, “My wife documented the daily events of her life in her own words; I do it using images.”

  “Was she a journalist?”

  He answers in a cynical tone, “No. She was an ordinary housewife. She spent her days raising her son, documenting her fears on paper, and attending to the needs of her husband, the renowned photographer.”

  He gazes for a while. “Dalal, I used to regard myself as such an important person.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I considered myself the master of the universe through my art. I truly believed that I was ‘special’ because of my camera, the tool that never lies. That was until I started reading my wife’s diaries.”

  I notice how big his ears are. They quiver as he speaks, “Isn’t it strange, dear neighbor? When I still had my sight, I used to think that my eyes could see what the others failed to perceive.”

  He shakes his head, “It was my arrogance that was my downfall. I thought I was the only one who possessed the truth, in my little box that recorded the moment without any falsity.”

  He wipes his short white beard. “My problem was that, as the saying goes, I used to carry the ladder sideways. I was mistaken when I thought I’d achieved perfection through my art. I became pretentious and considered myself superior to the rest of humanity, and in particular, to my wife. I didn’t realize that until it was too late.”

  “You mean, when she died, God rest her soul?”

  “And after I lost my sight.”

  Then he adds, “I was a photographer for many years, yet I was unable to see what I can see today!”

  I don’t wish to interrupt him as he continues, “The vision is converted from the outside to the inside.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I used to see what was happening around me, and I’d rush to record it with my camera. Now, I only see what’s happening inside me. I’m now closer to myself, and I’ve come to understand it. In the past, I’d gauge myself by the level of my professional success, but it’s only when I looked inside that I realized that people have colors. These colors are like a magnetic halo. They appear around the person’s body, and envelop us wherever we go. Some people can sense them and see them, whereas others are oblivious to their presence.”

  “Why did you ask me to come and visit you, Uncle?”

  He disappears for a few moments into the room next door. He returns with a small tape recorder.

  “Because you’re a sensitive individual. A deprived individual possesses this sensitivity.”

  He gave me the tape recorder and asks me to press the button. His voice emanates from the small loudspeaker, �
�How can people die smiling? Cluster bombs have rained down on the soldiers. They endured hours in a human meat grinder. In the morning, large areas in the south became giant scrap yards containing the remains of military and civilian vehicles. They were destroyed, blown up, and reduced to tangled masses of metal fibers. Some of the drivers were burned where they sat. One of them was turned into charcoal in an instant. All that remained were his teeth that smiled out to the camera.”

  He asks me to switch off the tape, his true voice blending with its recorded version. “This is how I write. I record what I wish to say, then I ask someone to transcribe it for me from the tape into the notebook. I usually contact the teacher who lives on the first floor. He helps me out in exchange for a small fee.”

  He goes out to the room next door once again and comes back with a small cloth bag.

  “Are you willing to become my scribe?”

  “You mean, will I be your hand-writer?”

  His beard laughs with him. I ask, “In exchange for a small fee?”

  He replies as he opens the bag, “No. In exchange for this.”

  He takes an old black camera out of the bag and caresses it like a lover.

  “I can’t take it from you, Uncle.”

  “You wouldn’t be taking it away. You’d be using it to learn.”

  Before I can object, he sits me down in front of him, “You’ll capture life as you see it; not the way other people see it, or would wish you to see it.”

  He raises his arm. “Your first lesson: never take a picture unless you’re satisfied with the view. With one press of the button, you’ll freeze a moment of life forever. You must be completely satisfied with it before you freeze it for eternity.”