by Rawi Hage
Cockroach
RAWI HAGE
Copyright © 2008 Rawi Hage
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This edition published in 2011 by
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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Hage, Rawi
Cockroach / Rawi Hage.
eISBN 978-0-88784-850-6
I. Title.
PS8615.A355C62 2008 C813’.6 C2007-907558-4
Jacket Design: Bill Douglas at The Bang
We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.
For Ramzy, Jenny, and Nada, who bring me smiles; for my brothers; for Lisa, as once promised; for Madeleine, who loves the East; and for my exiled friends: may they go back.
What we call species are various degenerations of the same type.
— Isidore Saint-Hilaire,
Vie d’Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1847)
Then Satavaesa makes those waters flow down to the seven Karshvares of the earth, and when he has arrived down there, he stands, beautiful, spreading ease and joy on the fertile countries.
— Avesta, the ancient scriptures
of Zoroastrianism
I
I AM IN LOVE with Shohreh. But I don’t trust my emotions anymore. I’ve neither lived with a woman nor properly courted one. And I’ve often wondered about my need to seduce and possess every female of the species that comes my way.
When I see a woman, I feel my teeth getting thinner, longer, pointed. My back hunches and my forehead sprouts two antennae that sway in the air, flagging a need for attention. I want to crawl under the feet of the women I meet and admire from below their upright posture, their delicate ankles. I also feel repulsed — not embarrassed, but repulsed — by slimy feelings of cunning and need. It is a bizarre mix of emotions and instinct that comes over me, compelling me to approach these women like a hunchback in the presence of schoolgirls.
Perhaps it’s time to see my therapist again, because lately this feeling has been weighing on me. Although that same urge has started to act upon me in the shrink’s presence. Recently, when I saw her laughing with one of her co-workers, I realized that she is also a woman, and when she asked me to re-enact my urges, I put my hand on her knee while she was sitting across from me. She changed the subject and, calmly, with a compassionate face, brushed my hand away, pushed her seat back, and said: Okay, let’s talk about your suicide.
Last week I confessed to her that I used to be more courageous, more carefree, and even, one might add, more violent. But here in this northern land no one gives you an excuse to hit, rob, or shoot, or even to shout from across the balcony, to curse your neighbours’ mothers and threaten their kids.
When I said that to the therapist, she told me that I have a lot of hidden anger. So when she left the room for a moment, I opened her purse and stole her lipstick, and when she returned I continued my tale of growing up somewhere else. She would interrupt me with questions such as: And how do you feel about that? Tell me more. She mostly listened and took notes, and it wasn’t in a fancy room with a massive cherrywood and leather couch either (or with a globe of an ancient admiral’s map, for that matter). No, we sat across from each other in a small office, in a public health clinic, only a tiny round table between us.
I am not sure why I told her all about my relations with women. I had tried many times to tell her that my suicide attempt was only my way of trying to escape the permanence of the sun. With frankness, and using my limited psychological knowledge and powers of articulation, I tried to explain to her that I had attempted suicide out of a kind of curiosity, or maybe as a challenge to nature, to the cosmos itself, to the recurring light. I felt oppressed by it all. The question of existence consumed me.
The therapist annoyed me with her laconic behaviour. She brought on a feeling of violence within me that I hadn’t experienced since I left my homeland. She did not understand. For her, everything was about my relations with women, but for me, everything was about defying the oppressive power in the world that I can neither participate in nor control. And the question that I hated most — and it came up when she was frustrated with me for not talking enough — was when she leaned over the table and said, without expression: What do you expect from our meeting?
I burst out: I am forced to be here by the court! I prefer not to be here, but when I was spotted hanging from a rope around a tree branch, some jogger in spandex ran over and called the park police. Two of those mounted police came galloping to the rescue on the backs of their magnificent horses. All I noticed at the time was the horses. I thought the horses could be the answer to my technical problem. I mean, if I rode on the back of one of those beasts, I could reach a higher, sturdier branch, secure the rope to it, and let the horse run free from underneath me. Instead I was handcuffed and taken for, as they put it, assessment.
Tell me about your childhood, the shrink asked me.
In my youth I was an insect.
What kind of insect? she asked.
A cockroach, I said.
Why?
Because my sister made me one.
What did your sister do?
Come, my sister said to me. Let’s play. And she lifted her skirt, laid the back of my head between her legs, raised her heels in the air, and swayed her legs over me slowly. Look, open your eyes, she said, and she touched me. This is your face, those are your teeth, and my legs are your long, long whiskers. We laughed, and crawled below the sheets, and nibbled on each other’s faces. Let’s block the light, she said. Let’s seal that quilt to the bed, tight, so there won’t be any light. Let’s play underground.
Interesting, the therapist said. I think we could explore more of these stories. Next week?
Next week, I said, and rose up on my heels and walked past the clinic’s walls and down the stairs and out into the cold, bright city.
WHEN I GOT HOME, I saw that my sink was filled with dishes, a hybrid collection of neon-coloured dollar-store cups mixed with flower-patterned plates, stacked beneath a large spaghetti pot, all unwashed. Before I could reach for my deadly slipper, the cockroaches that lived with me squeezed themselves down the drain and ran for their lives.
I was hungry. And I had little money left. So it was time to find the Iranian musician by the name of Reza who owed me forty dollars. I was determined to collect and I was losing my patience with that bastard. I was even contemplating breaking his santour if he did not pay me back soon. He hung out in the Artista Café, the one at the corner. It is open twenty-four hours a day, and for twenty-four hours it collects smoke pumped out by the lungs of fresh immigrants lingering on plastic chairs, elbows drilling the round tables, hands flagging their complaints, tobacco-stained fingers summoning the waiters, their matches, like Indian signals, ablaze under hairy noses, and their stupefied faces exhaling cigarette fumes with the intensity of Spanish bulls on a last charge towards a dancing red cloth.
I ran downstairs to look for the b
astard at the café, and god behold! Two Jehovah’s Witness ladies flashed their Caribbean smiles and obstructed my flight with towering feathery straw hats that pasted a coconut shade onto the gritty steps of the crumbling building where I live. Are you interested in the world? they asked me. And before I had a chance to reply, one of the ladies, the one in the long quilted coat, slapped me with an apocalyptic prophecy: Are you aware of the hole in the ozone above us?
Ozone? I asked.
Yes, ozone. It is the atmospheric layer that protects us from the burning rays of the sun. There is a hole in it as we speak, and it is expanding, and soon we shall all fry. Only the cockroaches shall survive to rule the earth. But do not despair, young man, because you will redeem yourself today if you buy this magazine — I happen to have a few copies in my hand here — and attend Bible gatherings at our Kingdom Hall. And afterwards, my handsome fellow, you can go down to the basement and listen to the leader (with a cookie and a Styrofoam cup in hand) and he will tell you that transfusions (be they administered through a syringe, a medical doctor, or perverted sex) are a mortal sin. Then and only then will you have a chance. Repent! the woman shouted as she opened the Bible to a marked page. She read, The words of the Lord my son: Therefore will I also deal in fury: mine eye shall not spare, neither will I pity: and though they cry in mine ears with loud voice, yet will I not hear them. Buy this magazine (the word of the Lord included), my son. Read it and repent!
How much? I asked, as I liberated my pocket from the sinful weight of a few round coins sealed with idolatrous images of ducks, geese, bears, and magisterial heads. They were all I had.
Give me those coins and pray, because then, and only then, you will have the chance to be beamed up by Jesus our saviour, and while you are ascending towards the heavens, you can take a peek down at those neighbours of yours who just slammed their door in our faces. You can watch them fry like dumplings in a wok, and I assure you that our Lord will be indifferent to their plight, their sufferings, their loud cries of agony and regret and pain — yes, pain! And may God save us from such harrowing pain.
I kissed the Jehovah’s Witness ladies’ hands. I asked them to have mercy on me in that sizzling day to come. Dying from fire is a terrible thing. If I had to choose, I would certainly want something less painful, quicker, maybe even more poetic — like hanging from a willow tree or taking a bullet in the head or falling into a senseless eternal slumber accompanied by the aroma of a leaky gas stove.
I left the ladies and ran down to the Artista Café on St-Laurent, still hoping to find Reza in a circle of smoke and welfare recipients and coffee breath. As my feet trudged the wet ground and I felt the shivery cold, I cursed my luck. I cursed the plane that had brought me to this harsh terrain. I peered down the street and hesitantly walked east, avoiding every patch of slush and trying to ignore the sounds of friction as car wheels split the snow, sounds that bounced into my ears, constant reminders of the falling flakes that gather and accumulate quietly, diligently, claiming every car windshield, every hat, every garbage can, every eyelid, every roof and mountain. And how about those menacing armies of heavy boots, my friend, encasing people’s feet, and the silenced ears, plugged with wool and headbands, and the floating coats passing by in ghostly shapes, hiding faces, pursed lips, austere hands? Goddamn it! Not even a nod in this cold place, not even a timid wave, not a smile from below red, sniffing, blowing noses. All these buried heads above necks strangled in synthetic scarves. It made me nervous, and I asked myself, Where am I? And what am I doing here? How did I end up trapped in a constantly shivering carcass, walking in a frozen city with wet cotton falling on me all the time? And on top of it all, I am hungry, impoverished, and have no one, no one . . . Fucking ice, one slip of the mind and you might end up immersing your foot in one of those treacherous cold pools that wait for your steps with the patience of sailors’ wives, with the mockery of swamp monsters. You can curse all you wish, but still you have to endure freezing toes, and the squelch of wet socks, and the slime of midwives’ hands, and fathoms of coats that pass you on the streets and open and close, fluttering and bloated like sails blown towards a promised land.
I am doomed!
When I entered the café, I peeled myself out from under layers of hats, gloves, and scarves, liberated myself from zippers and buttons, and endured the painful tearing Velcro that hissed like a prehistoric reptile, that split and separated like people’s lives, like exiles falling into cracks that give birth and lead to death under digging shovels that sound just like the friction of car wheels wedging snow around my mortal parts.
I spotted Professor Youssef sitting alone at his usual table. That lazy, pretentious, Algerian pseudo-French intellectual always dresses up in gabardine suits with the same thin tie that had its glory in the seventies. He hides behind his sixties-era eyeglasses and emulates French thinkers by smoking his pipe in dimly lit spots. He sits all day in that café and talks about révolution et littérature.
I asked the professor if he had seen Reza, the Iranian musician, but he did not respond. He just gave me his arrogant smile.
I knew it, I knew it! The professor wants to shower me with his existentialist questions. The bastard plays Socrates every chance he gets. He has always treated the rest of us like Athenian pupils lounging on the steps of the agora, and he never answers a question. He imagines he is a pseudo-socialist Berber journalist, but he is nothing but a latent clergyman, always answering a question with another question.
Is it a yes or a no? C’est urgent, I shrilled at him, intending to interrupt his epistemological plot.
Non! J’ai pas vu ton ami. The professor pasted on his sardonic smile again, puffed his pipe, and changed the position of his legs. He leaned his body into the back of the chair and looked at me with an intellectual’s air of dismissal, as if I were a peasant, unworthy of the myopic thickness of his glasses. He does not trust me. He smells me through his pipe’s brume. I know he suspects me of stealing his last tobacco bag, which I did. But he cannot prove it. Now whenever I approach him, he acts as if he is repositioning himself in his chair in order to say something valuable and profound, but I can see him through his pipe’s smog, gathering his belongings closer to his body, hugging his bag like a refugee on a crowded boat.
I turned away from the professor, thinking that I would like to choke Reza, the Middle Eastern hunchback, with the strings of his own musical instrument. He owed me, and I was in need. He always managed to extract money from me, one way or another. He either gave me long monologues about Persia and the greatness of its history, or he re-enacted the tears of his mother, whom he will never see again before she dies because, as he claims, he is an unfortunate exile. But I know that all Reza cares about is numbing his lips and face. He is always sniffing, and if it’s not because of a cold, it is because of an allergy, and if it is not because of allergy, it is because of a natural impulse to powder his nose with “the white Colombian,” as he puts it. But there was nothing I could do now except dress again in my armour against the cold and go back to my room and wait for Reza to call.
At home I lay in bed, reached for my smokes, and then for no reason became alarmed, or maybe melancholic. This feeling was not paranoia, as the therapist wrote in her stupid notes (notes that I had managed to steal); it was just my need again to hide from the sun and not see anyone. It was the necessity I felt to strip the world from everything around me and exist underneath it all, without objects, people, light, or sound. It was my need to unfold an eternal blanket that would cover everything, seal the sky and my window, and turn the world into an insect’s play.
A FEW HOURS LATER, in the early evening, I decided to pay Reza a visit at his home. I walked through the cold to his house, rang the bell, and waited. Matild, a French beauty of a waitress and Reza’s roommate, opened the door. As soon as she saw me, she tried to slam the door in my face.
I put my foot in the corner of the door frame and whispered tenderly: I am worried about Reza.
Alors, appelle la police, quoi, bof. Ah moi, alors, je ne veux pas me mêler de cette affaire. He did not pay his share of the rent last mooonth. J’en ai marre là de vous deux.
Can I come in? I said.
I told you, he eeezzz not herrrreh.
I just want to take a look at his room, I said.
Mais non là, tu exagères.
Please, I begged. And I showed Matild what my droopy, bashful eyes were capable of.
You can only go in hiz rrrroom, she said. No kitchen, and no toilet-paper stealing, d’accord? When you worked with me at the restaurant zerre, everyone was saying that it was you who was stealing the toilet paperzzzz, and they all look at me bad because I was the one who recommended you forrr zee job.
I watched Matild’s firm ass bounce towards the kitchen. I shrunk into myself and hunched my neck into my shoulders, and my teeth felt as if they were growing points as I stared at her magnificent, majestic, royal French derrière — studied it, surveyed it, assessed it, and savoured it to the last swing. She was still in her nightgown, which ended right above her thighs. And she was barefoot!
I sighed. Still hunched, I scratched my legs against each other. Then, with the desperation of the displaced, the stateless, the miserable and stranded in corridors of bureaucracy and immigration, I turned and fled to Reza’s room.
His room smelled of old socks and a troupe of enslaved chain-smokers. It had barely any light, but still I recognized the old black and white TV that he had inherited from his friend Hisham, a Persian computer programmer who had moved to the United States because, as he said, there is more money there and no future in Canada — too many taxes. At least, that is how the empty-headed technocrat of an arriviste put it to me the night I was introduced to him at an Iranian party. The party was full of Iranian exiles — runaway artists, displaced poets, leftist hash-rollers, and ex-revolutionaries turned taxi drivers. That was also the night I met Shohreh. Oh, beautiful Shohreh! She drove me crazy, gave me an instant hit of metamorphosis that made me start gnawing on paper dishes, licking plastic utensils, getting lost inside potato-chip bags (bags that crunched with the sound of breaking ice and snapping branches). She was dancing with a skinny, black-clad Iranian gay man named Farhoud. He danced and rubbed himself against her firm body. Like him, Shohreh was dressed in a tight black outfit, and her chest was bouncing in time to the peculiar, menacing cries of a cheap immigrant’s stereo. When the music stopped for a moment, I trailed behind her in the crowded hallway and followed her to the kitchen. I made my way through plates, forks, and finger food until finally, as she dipped a slice of cucumber in white sauce thick as a quagmire, I made my move. I want to steal you from your boyfriend the dancer, I said.