Cockroach

by Rawi Hage

  I will! I will! I shouted, and I mimed Reza’s reaction upon hearing all about it. I stood up and did his baffled eyebrows, his itching armpits, and his squeaky voice like a mouse in a trap. Shohreh laughed again.

  I took her home, showed her my tiny place, and we both removed our shoes and hunted cockroaches down the sink, swimming and sliding in mildew, and slapping them with the heels of our shoes, and I told her how, when Jesus comes and kills all us sinners and beams up the faithful towards his immaculate kingdom, only those insects will survive. They shall inherit the earth, I said. The two ladies with the hats assured me of it. This made Shohreh enraged by the unfairness of it all. It reminded her of how her country had also been left to the cockroaches, and this inspired her to pound and kill more of those eternal minuscule beasts as if they were the cause of her lost life, her imprisonment, her executed uncle, her tortured friends, her own exile. These are the filth of the land, she shouted as she pounded away. They should be eradicated!

  Then we rolled in dirt and made love in dirt until dirt became our emblem, our flag to pledge allegiance to, and we got drunk and composed new anthems with groans and the heavy exhaling and inhaling of breath. Yes, baby, yes, slap away! escaped our throats, and between every scream Shohreh reminded me to take notes and tell Reza how she welcomed me in her mouth, how she closed her eyes and glutted herself on me with the appetite of a clergyman, how naked we were as we danced. My underwear! I almost forgot! she shouted. Make sure you describe it to that musician: its colours, the sturdy thong that stretches like one of his strings and vibrates with sublime acoustics that resonate inside my chamber. Tell him how I undressed you, and how I sucked on your nipples like grapes, and how warm, gummy drips crept down my thighs like lava. Here, lie down so I can take hold of you and print it all in your psyche so you will remember it for the rest of your life. Let’s rush and do it before those crawling creatures surface again and forbid me from showing my hair, from holding my lover’s arm in public, from singing on the roof a lullaby to my sleeping nephew, from dipping my naked youth in clear rivers, from savouring with my lips my grand-mother’s Shiraz. Do not forget anything, tell him all about it. Maybe I should leave you with a scar. Hand me that knife so I can cut your arm, so I can suck some of your burgundy blood and mix it with wine, so I can stomp on the heart of that melody to the rhythm of villagers stomping in forgotten pools of grapes and tears.

  A WEEK LATER, I found Reza at last. He was walking down the street, sniffing left and right for a filling tune or an inspiring meal. I ran towards him and grabbed his hand and pulled on one of his fingers, and before he had a chance to pull it away I said, I am hungry as well, you drooling beast. And one day I will snap your finger and let you pluck those strings with your yellow teeth.

  Reza shouted at this, warning me never to touch his fingers again. He lifted them up against the cold and stuck his thumb towards the sky and pointed and shouted at me, If you touch them again, I will take you back to your goat dunes!

  Then we walked along the street together and ended up at my place. I made some tea and asked him for my money. He promised and whined and puffed cigarettes and had the gall to ask me for food. And so, filled with revenge and spite, I told him about my tryst with Shohreh.

  That made him furious. He accused me of going behind his back. He said that I was not his friend. Then he smiled and charged me with fabricating lies. If you talk like that, he said, you will ruin the girl’s reputation. A good Iranian woman like Shohreh would never do that kind of thing.

  I ran to my closet and pulled out her underwear. Smell it, I said. Smell! It is still warm, sizzling. Hot! I added. It smells like her. Here, bring your fat nose closer.

  Disgusting liar, Reza shouted, and tossed the underwear out of my hand.

  I threw myself onto my bed and flipped the pillow over. Here, I shouted back. That long, black, straight hair could only have come from a Persian princess. Reza turned red with rage and stood up and left, calling me a liar and a looooney.

  I STILL HAD NO MONEY, and therefore I had no food. When one is hungry, one should steal. That’s what Abou-Roro the thief, our neighbour back home, used to tell me. He taught me the trade. I am not sure how he became so good at it. He was the son of a shoemaker and his father had a tiny place between two old buildings, just big enough for the metal last, a hammer, a few leather pieces, glue, and the tiny nails he stored in his mouth. As a kid, I looked up to Abou-Roro. I watched him filling his fists with pistachios when the grocer was grinding the coffee. I watched him slip lettuce inside his jacket and cheat little kids on the street out of their marble balls and allowances. I admired him even though I knew he was a coward. He always avoided direct confrontation. During the war, he befriended a few militiamen for protection. He did them favours, washed their cars, cleaned their rifles, fetched them food. The bastard had a square head, flat feet, and googly eyes. He looked like a mini-Frankenstein, but he could detect power and kneel to the powerful. When the port went ablaze during the war, he took me down to the burning warehouses. We crossed under the snipers’ bullets, through the fire. We entered the warehouses and reached for the merchandise, the mountains of boxes and goods waiting to be transported to the Saudis. We shredded through them with our claws and knives. There were boxes of soap, flashlights, perfumes, cloth, boxes of lighters, but we took only the cameras and ran back through whizzing bullets. We sold everything, and Abou-Roro always stiffed me out of my share. He took the biggest piece and threw me the crumbs.

  Talking about crumbs, a nice sandwich would do me fine, I thought. Perhaps I could go to a restaurant nearby, enter it, and sweep up the little pieces of bread and other leftovers on the tablecloth, and then follow the trail of crumbs to the counter next to the kitchen and help myself to some of the warmth released from the toaster. But I know how hard it is to steal food in restaurants. Restaurants have many barriers you must cross before reaching the fridge or the salad counter. There is the manager and the maître d’, and then the waiter and the cook and his helpers. And let’s not forget the variety of knives that can be pulled out and waved around to protect the food from the looting of man, to protect the chicken legs and sizzling, juicy stuffed ducks. Just imagine, I laughed, a stuffed duck à l’orange! And I laughed again as I went downstairs and out onto the street and entered the closest available food source.

  I greeted the Korean grocer at the counter and went straight to the beer fridge. I picked up a few bottles and put them on the counter. Then I pointed to a package of cigarettes behind her back and confused the lady by shifting my pointing finger, telling her left, down, and up all at the same time. As she looked for the package like a distracted dog, I leaned on the beer bottles, pushing them together to make loud noises, and simultaneously attacked the chocolate bars below the counter with my other hand. When she finally laid the package of cigarettes on the counter and started to ring the cash machine, I asked her if I could pay tomorrow. She stopped, grabbed the bottles and the cigarettes, and shouted, You pay noweh! You pay noweh! CASHEH! CASHEH! NOWEH. I cursed her and left the store with the chocolate bars in my pocket. I walked around the corner and into a back alley near an Indian restaurant.

  It was freezing cold. But chocolate does taste better when it’s cold. A chocolate connoisseur knows that chocolate at a certain temperature, exposed to the air to breathe, makes for a refined experience. I peeled the plastic delicately from the top of the bar. Then I opened it completely, threw away the paper, held the bar with two delicate fingers, and watched the freezing air do its work. I shifted my two fingers, making sure that the whole bar was exposed to the cold temperature. I started nibbling the middle, holding the bar like a harmonica. But one must take care to nibble the bar, not blow on it (I let the city wind do that).

  When I felt that the temperature was getting too low for the ingredients, I moved towards the exhaust of air that was coming out of the back of the Indian restaurant’s kitchen. Now the experience would drastically change, not without some ris
k, of course. I held the open belly of the bar high up towards the steam, like an offering, and counted to ten. A chocolate bar masala, I called it. An exquisite delight direct from the Orient, it was!

  No one should suffer in hunger, I thought as I nibbled. Though, to be frank, I only loved those who suffer. I loved Shohreh because she suffered. She had come to see me a couple of times now, and on one of the nights she brought a bottle of wine. She was happy, flirtatious. Short skirt. Low-cut blouse. Pulled-back hair. Red lips. She wanted to drink. She wanted to dance before I laid my hands on her. She asked me to play French songs. I turned the dial on the radio looking for songs. Leave that song on, she ordered me, and pulled my hand, leading me away from the window. Her arms around my waist, she said to me, Relax. I will lead.

  I am not used to happy women. I am not used to slow dancing. When I dance, I fly and stomp. I go around in circles; my head rises like that of an ancient fighter. I shake the ground and the underground. In the presence of a sad, slow song I brood and let my long eyelashes reach to the floor. When my sister used to dance she would wrap a scarf around her waist, make me sit on the bed and watch her shaking her hips, barefoot. Once there was a song on the radio that she liked, and she stormed into our room and in the little space that was available between the beds she danced. That was when I realized how grown-up she was, how pretty and how attractive she had become. It saddened me, but also in my confusion and in her presence I felt an embarrassing erection. After that day, and I do not know why, we fought over everything: the bathroom, the water, the radio knob; at night we were quiet, and our fantasies collided on the bedroom wall.

  I have had many lovers in my life. But what man has not? Mine all suffered, but what woman has not? Frankly, like I said, I do not feel comfortable with happy women, those who are obsessed with what my shrink calls intimacy. You have an intimacy problem, Genevieve had said, in one of her rare assessments of me.

  Intimacy, I exclaimed. What intimacy? I do not understand you.

  Like expressing love.

  How? For whom?

  Like saying something nice to a woman, or bringing her flowers.

  So the day before our next meeting I stole some flowers and brought them to her.

  She did not know how to react. She was uncomfortable. She laid the flowers on the table, without saying a word.

  I stole them, I said.

  You stole them?

  Yes, I stole them for you.

  That is interesting, she said, dismissing the act of theft and changing the subject: Do you want to tell me more about your childhood today? If we do not move forward, if we do not improve, I might have to recommend that you go back to the institution. Frankly, you do not give me much choice with your silence. I have a responsibility towards the taxpayers.

  Tax prayers? I asked.

  No taxpayers, people who actually pay taxes. Some of us do.

  So, I will tell her stories, if that is what she wants. It’s better than going back to the madhouse and watching robotic people move between iron beds, pacing the floor, lost between the borders of barbed wired on the windows and the hollow hallways, drooling, laughing, crying, and exchanging life stories with their own private audience. I would look at those people and see them watching their own little stages. Some of the performances, I thought, were genuine, spontaneous, and exquisite. Abstract, even a little esoteric, but nevertheless worth a peek. And frankly, I wouldn’t mind seeing again that beautiful lady with green eyes who came for a few days. God, she was so pretty, even when she took off her clothes and ran naked through the room, leaking fluid down to her ankles and through her lovely toes, screaming at the top of her lungs, Freedom! Freedom! I followed her and then I lost her. Like a trapper, I tracked the little patches of urine that had gathered, like islands, on the hospital floor.

  What do you want to hear? I asked my shrink.

  Let’s talk about your mother, she said.

  My mother dragged my sister by the hair off our balcony and told her to stop parading her legs in front of the men down the street. Those low-life men leaned on parked cars, smoked, and laughed loudly. They obsessively cleaned and waxed their cars, and like a horny pack of wild dogs they smelled my sister’s wetness and pointed at her breasts from behind their erect car hoods.

  My sister was beautiful. I used to peek through the bathroom window and watch her in front of the mirror, playing with her wet hair, kissing the towels and brushing them across her face. She would put her hands under her breasts and twirl around. Holding her hairbrush to her face, she would sing to a large audience who came from all over the world to hear her tender voice, oblivious to her topless chest, her naked shoulders, because she, naturally, enchanted them with her graceful moves, her sparkling eyes, and her profound, sentimental voice. She was so enchanting that no clergy cared to object, no man in her presence had indecent thoughts about her, and no woman in the audience was jealous of her firm breasts, her generous, curly pubic hair, her long, wavy locks that covered her buttocks, her radish-coloured nipples. Not even my father cared that his daughter was naked on a stage — he knew that what was important was that she could sing, that she was respected, that she would never be preyed upon by some military man who would deflower her, eject sperm into her belly to inflate her uterus, swell her ankles, fill her bosom with milk.

  But one of those men often stood below our balcony, dressed in his military uniform and boots. He carried a gun, and I could see him looking our way, smiling at my sister, stepping on the gas to make his sports car roar and fume. In return, my sister played with her hair, and on her way to the store she swung her hips, stopping in the middle of the street to look back in the direction of our balcony before walking towards the store again. The man with the sports car followed her. In the store he stood close to her and her timid smile, smelling her soapy hands and her hair ointment, examining the lines of the blade on her shaved legs. He pulled some change from his pocket and paid for the bag of goods in her hand. She hesitated and refused at first, but he insisted, calling her Madame. So my sister accepted his money, and he followed her home, inside our building and up the stairs, talking to her about beaches and fast cars. He asked her name and offered her a cigarette. She, beaming like headlights, agreed to meet him again, in secret, below the stairs, above the roofs, on a moon with little alleys. And eventually, when she ran out of excuses to go down to the street for fresh air, to meet her girlfriend, to buy sugar, to chase the cats in heat in the middle of the night, she eloped with the military man. He picked her up one night and drove straight to the priest. The priest refused to marry them; the girl is underage, he said. The man pulled out his gun and threatened the priest, made him sign the paper, and drove my sister back to his mother’s house. There, after he finished his drink, he deflowered her, and when she asked for money to buy food he beat her.

  And how do you feel about that? the shrink interrupted me.

  I wanted to kill him, but I was young and he was older and stronger. Once, my mother sent me to my sister’s house with some food. When my sister saw me, tears fell onto her cheeks, cheeks that, I noticed, had become round and fat like her belly that was inflated with a child. Her legs to her ankles looked straight as cylinders, she walked slowly with her hand against her back, and she did the dishes as she offered me coffee. Then we sat at the table, and she gazed in my eyes, caressed my hair, cried, and asked me about my father who did not come to see her, my mother who was mad at her, and the neighbours who talked behind her back. I stayed late to scoop her tears and watch her fingers floating towards my face. I closed my eyes and listened to the child in her belly. I was about to leave when we heard a Jeep stop outside, and doors slamming shut, and boots ascending the stairs.

  My husband is here, my sister said, and she pulled her hand away from my hair and rolled her eyes. She rushed to set the table, tossing plates like a poker player tosses cards, throwing forks and knives in the air like a circus magician, lighting fires like a primitive in a cave, and sweeping
onion-tears from her eyes.

  The man was welcoming to me. When he saw me, he shouted, Ahlan be ibn alaam (welcome to the brother-in-law). He patted my shoulder and offered me cigarettes. We ate on the balcony and he poured whisky for both of us, and called my sister to bring more ice, cucumbers, and fresh almonds. When my sister told him that she did not have all this, he cursed her. He cursed womankind, and the hour when he had kidnapped her, and the priest who let him marry her.

  How did you react? the shrink asked.

  I did not say a thing. I kept silent. I should have said something. But I did not.

  Why?

  Because my sister looked at me. I knew that look: she was telling me not to say a word, not to interfere. I wanted to leave, but the man grabbed me. He persuaded me to stay. He wanted someone to drink with. He insisted. In the end, he even ordered me to stay. He cursed God and swore at the angels. We poured whisky while my sister cooked in the kitchen. Then, after many drinks, he pulled out his gun and started shooting in the air. None of the neighbours complained or stuck their heads out their windows or went into the street in their slippers and cotton pyjamas to look for cadavers or moaning men. There, everyone is used to gunshots. Shooting in the air is a public statement, a celebration of birth, a farewell to the dead, and private words with the gods.

  Here, my brother-in-law said. Shoot the fucking passing angels. Here. He changed the gun’s magazine and handed it to me. Wait, he said. Let me crank it for you.