Cockroach

by Rawi Hage

  Don’t you think he will be suspicious of me if I ask for the exchange?

  Yes, he will probably be suspicious of you as well.

  We need someone else with us. Give me two days, I said. I have someone in mind.

  The next day I made some sandwiches and went back to my sister’s store. She was surprised, but I told her that my mother had sent me with food. And then I walked over to the girl my sister had told me about and said, You must be Rima.

  The girl smiled and said, You must be the brother.

  My sister told me that you like your coffee in the afternoon to be medium strength.

  Your sister is right, Rima said.

  My sister is always right, I said. She thinks that you are very beautiful. And like I said, my sister is always right.

  The girl laughed.

  I smiled back at her and left the store.

  That evening I waited across the street from the store. I watched the old man pulling down the metal door while the girls stood chatting in front of it. Joseph said good night to them, and they all went their separate ways. I followed Rima. Then I darted down a side street and cut across it. I came out just as Rima was right at the corner across from me. I called her by name. She turned, surprised.

  I said, We meet again.

  Yes, we meet again.

  I chatted her up, and then I told her that I had been thinking about her.

  Rima blushed.

  I told her that tomorrow I would be at the falafel store at lunchtime.

  She nodded, and blushed again.

  I walked back to Abou-Roro’s alley that same night. I turned up the volume on his radio. And I said in his ear, Tomorrow at noon. How much should we stiff him for?

  A thousand dollars is good.

  Do you have it?

  I will get it tomorrow morning, he said.

  The next morning, Abou-Roro whistled from below my balcony. I put on my shoes and walked downtairs. He handed me a big bundle of lira.

  At noon, come to the falafel store, I told him. The girl sitting with me will be the one doing the transaction. When I give you the sign, rush back to the corner and wait for the Armenian’s son.

  At noon I met Rima. I paid for lunch. She was self-conscious and wore heavy makeup that day.

  Abou-Roro came in and sat at the table behind me.

  I talked to Rima and told her that I was leaving on a trip to Cyprus for a few days. And I needed to exchange some money with the Armenian. But, I said, he and I have had a quarrel. I explained to Rima that the Armenian’s rate was better than the bank’s. I could ask my sister to do the exchange, I said, but the Armenian knew her, and he would know that I had sent her. I asked Rima if she could do the exchange for me. She agreed; she was very willing. I pulled out the bundle and said, Just tell him that you need a thousand U.S. But Rima, I added as I laid my hand over her hand, with the money between our palms, please do not give him the money before you make sure you see the dollars in his hand first.

  She agreed.

  I gave Abou-Roro the signal and he zoomed away.

  I waited. I smoked. Fifteen minutes passed, and Rima came back. She was agitated and confused, and told me that someone had mugged the Armenian’s son. The kid had come back bleeding from his nose. She pulled out the bundle of lira from her purse and gave it back to me, apologizing.

  I assured her that it was okay, and I apologized for putting her in such a situation. I walked her back to the store. She pushed open the door, smiled at me, and thanked me for the lunch.

  When I came to this point in my story, I looked at Genevieve. She had a completely blank expression on her face.

  Doctor, I said, is our time up yet?

  She thought a little before she answered me. And then she said: No, we still have time. I have no other appointments until four. Why don’t you finish the story for me?

  It might take a while, I said.

  Yes, that’s okay. I want you to finish it for me.

  I can see that you’re thinking, doctor. I am curious to know what you are thinking. You are probably thinking about how I used that innocent girl, right, doctor?

  Go on with the story for now.

  No, I want to know what you are thinking.

  It is not important.

  Yes, it is. It seems like you are judging me.

  What I think is not important.

  Then why are we having this conversation, doctor?

  I will tell you what I am thinking after you tell me the whole story.

  I am not sure I want to, I said, stubbornly.

  Fine, Genevieve replied. You can leave, then.

  But I stayed. No, I said. I will tell you the whole story. And if you have nothing to say about it I will never come back here.

  Finish the story, and we’ll see.

  Fine, I will show you who I really am. And it is not pretty, doctor. It is not.

  And who do you think you are?

  You tell me, doctor. But first, here is the rest of the story, since you insist.

  Genevieve. You can still call me by my name.

  Two weeks passed, doctor, and then one day when I came into my parents’ home, I heard the cries of my sister’s baby. My sister saw me and quickly went into the bedroom and shut the door. But I had seen her clothes on the sofa. I pushed at the bedroom door and she tried to stop me from coming in, telling me that she was not decent, telling me not to come in. But I pushed open the door, and then I saw her bruised face. I pulled out my gun from under the mattress. She screamed and stood at the door, blocking my way. She screamed and followed me in her nightgown down the stairs, barefoot, begging behind me all the way down our street. Wailing, calling people to stop me. But I left her behind and I walked with the purposeful walk of an executioner, the walk of the vengeful. I walked, doctor, like a prince going to battle.

  The first place I went to was the gambling joint. But Tony was not there. I walked to his home. I knocked at the door, but no one answered. For hours I paced up and down at the entrance to his building. Finally I went up to the roof to scout for his droopy moustache and his Jeep. Then I went back to the gambling joint. There I walked back and forth again. I smoked and held on to my gun in the empty hallway between the dirty stairs. Then I left and banged on Abou-Roro’s door. I told him, I want you to find him.

  Calm down, Abou-Roro said. Calm down. That is not the way to do it. I will find out where he is for you. But do not do anything today. Just promise me. We’ll do him and get something out of it. Let’s go back to our plan, he said.

  I walked back to my parents’ home. When my sister saw me she attacked me with her fists and nails, she shouted and cried, she called me crazy, murderer. She took the baby and walked back to her home.

  The next morning, Abou-Roro whistled below my balcony and I went down to meet him. The man is at the gambling joint, he told me.

  When I tried to rush back up to get my gun, he grabbed me. Stop and listen to me. You kill him in front of everyone, his men will never forgive you. They will hunt you down like a dog. Think. He held my shoulders and shook me. Think. Just be calm. And be smart, like I always taught you. We can get some money. You can do what you have to do and go away.

  Go where?

  The world is big. You can’t just leave without money. I will get you a ticket and a fake visa, and then you can split. Just be smart. Is your sister working today?

  She is.

  Good. I will go to the joint and tell Tony that your girl at the store told me that she saw your sister with the old man. Just go quickly and get a car. Where is the baby?

  She left Mona this morning with my mother. My sister won’t go anywhere with us without her baby.

  Can you get it?

  Yes, I will tell my mother I am taking it for a stroll.

  Do that. I will wait for you to come down, and then I will leave. Take a taxi from here to the store to get your sister. I will walk back to the gambling joint to talk to Tony.

  I went upstairs. My mother
insisted on dressing Mona first. I did not protest because I did not want to seem like I was in too much of a hurry. But I managed to get the baby, and then I took the taxi. I asked the driver to wait. I went inside the store. Joseph Khoury was there, but when I asked Rima where my sister was, she told me my sister had had to go back home. Her husband had called her. I handed Rima the baby and ran through the streets. I went up the stairs to my sister’s home. The door to the apartment was open. When I entered, the first thing I saw was the broken mirror, then the brute’s eyes, red, and then I heard him breathing heavily, his hand on the dining table, his eyes looking at the floor. I recognized the shoes, then the open palm, then the exposed thighs.

  She is dead, he said.

  I pulled out my gun and stretched out my arm.

  Do it, he said, calmly breathing.

  I couldn’t pull the trigger. I couldn’t.

  I stopped speaking. At first Genevieve said nothing. Then she said, Did you regret it?

  Not pulling the trigger?

  Yes, she said.

  Not anymore.

  Do you regret anything?

  My greed. Greed, doctor. It is my greed that I regret. Humans are creatures of greed.

  Aren’t all creatures greedy? she said gently.

  No, doctor. Other creatures only take what they need. That is not greed.

  I stood up. I did not and could not cry. I walked out of Genevieve’s office without looking at her.

  LATER, I THOUGHT ABOUT how strange it was that a few years had passed since my sister’s death, and how strange it was to be lying in a distant land, half covered, half clothed, on familiar sheets and between dim walls. A hand stretched out and touched my shoulder and Shohreh asked me if I had ever killed someone.

  No, I said.

  Did you ever want to?

  Yes, but I hesitated when I had the chance.

  Tell me about it. But wait, let me turn off the light first.

  And the closet looked like the bogeyman, the dresser talked to me, a coat hanger waved its short arms when I said, I never killed anyone. But I did cause the death of my sister.

  Shohreh lifted her head, and despite the dark shapes in the room I saw her eyes blink at me.

  How?

  I told her the full story. I told her about Abou-Roro. About Tony. About my sister’s death.

  And the baby? she asked. What happened to the baby?

  First she moved between my mother’s house and Tony’s parents’ house. Then I heard that Tony got married again and took her away from us.

  And he got away with it, just like that?

  Yes, all he had to say was that my sister had had an affair. It was the war and he knew all the militiamen.

  People should pay the price for their crimes.

  Sometimes they don’t, I said. They just don’t.

  People should pay the price, just pay the price, Shohreh said, and dropped her head on her pillow, and the bed bounced, and the bogeyman moved and the dresser sailed away like a gondola pushed by the coat hanger, singing through arches over the sewage.

  Why were you so upset at the restaurant last week? I asked Shohreh. And who is the man who upset you?

  It is someone who should also pay the price for his crimes.

  To whom? Why?

  To society, to individuals, for chance, for revenge. What does it matter?

  And the individual is you?

  I need some water, she said. Do you want a glass of water?

  No.

  Shohreh went to fetch the water, but she took so long that I got out of bed and followed her to the kitchen. The house was cold and I was half-naked. She was smoking, and she gave me a puff from her cigarette. She crushed it before it was done. Then she held my hand for the first time and walked me back to bed. Come, she said, it is cold. What was your sister’s name?

  Souad, I said.

  Was she pretty?

  Yes, very.

  Older?

  Yes.

  For a long time after . . . after what happened to me, said Shohreh, I did not think that I would be able to touch another man. In Iran I got myself a woman as a lover, an older woman. After I was jailed and tortured, men all looked like beasts to me. Are you shocked?

  No, not at all. Nothing about humans shocks me. But then, I am only half human, I said.

  Half human. She laughed. What is your other half? She burst into a louder laugh. A fish? Are you a fish?

  No. A cockroach.

  Cockroach, she laughed again, and jumped up and put the lights on. She flipped back the bedcover and ran her hands over my thighs, my chest, all the way up my head, caressing my hair.

  I do not see anything unusual about you, she said. You look perfectly human to me. Do me a favour next time you choose to be something. Be a tiger, or a pony. Why do you choose to be such a despicable creature?

  I never wanted to, it just happened. I think the species chose me, I said.

  Freak. You are a silly freak. Okay, cockroach, I need a favour from you. She turned serious. When that man comes again to the restaurant, I want you to call me. Actually, could you find out where he lives?

  No. I am not doing anything unless you tell me why.

  She paused, and then she stood up and went to the bathroom. I waited for her in bed. I heard her pulling down her underwear, crouching like a female cat, spraying like water guns. I imagined the little pool of water slowly turning yellow. She did not flush. She shut the lid on the seat because at this hour, in this stretch of wooden houses, everything can be heard. Wood is a conductor of voices and steps; wood is hospitable and considerate to insects, oblivious to water, and a support for mattresses.

  Shohreh returned to bed, drank from her glass, offered me some water, then lit another cigarette, blew smoke in the air, and said: He was my jailer in Iran. I took part in the student movement during the early days of the revolution and got arrested. This man you saw eating at the restaurant, he raped me, many times. He was my jailer. I was put in a small room. I was alone for months and months. I was barely eighteen when they came to our house and said to my mother that they needed me to go with them for questioning. Just normal procedure, they assured her. They even told her that they would bring me back in a few hours. Three years passed and I was still there, in a cell as big as a coffin. I was not allowed to speak, to cry, or even to breathe. And then they tried to indoctrinate me into their fanatic religious world. A TV played twenty-four hours a day behind the backs of all of us in our little cells. We could not see it, we could only hear the voice talking about God all day and all night. I blocked it out during the first few months. Then the words started to ring in my ears like noises or music. At times I wanted to laugh at how certain words were pronounced, how the voices thickened to give listeners a clue that an important person or figure was being mentioned. Then I started to escape into my head, and my mind drifted and I recalled the faces of my family — my little brother, my mother, my cousins. Sometimes I struggled to remember their names. Then I started to look at my space like a universe — every detail of the walls, my feet, my arms. Once a fly landed on my hand, and I sat and watched it sucking my blood, I watched it gorging on my vein and its belly inflating like a balloon. I did not stop it. This is life, I thought to myself, spilling blood is part of it, and just before it flew, I hit it, I crushed it, and watched the blood, my blood, splatter on my hand.

  Shohreh paused. Then she asked, Would you kill your brother-in-law if you had the chance to do it again?

  I stayed silent. I did not know. What if I could not pull the trigger again? What if I turned and left again? What if I walked away and grew a beard and stayed silent for years and disappeared, took a plane, left and never came back?

  Shohreh said, You understand why I think about killing?

  Yes.

  Why do you say yes?

  I just understand because I wanted to kill someone myself.

  My torturer and your brother-in-law are the same kind.

  You and my
sister are the same kind.

  Will you help me? Shohreh asked again.

  Yes.

  Majeed is useless, she said. He gives up on everything. He is content with so little of life. He wants to expose that man to the media, he said. How naive! Bring him to justice. Can you imagine? What would that do? How could we prove what he did after all these years? And did you see his big car and all those men around him? He obviously has money. He has power. He probably has some kind of diplomatic immunity. He is connected here. I saw the car plate. I need a gun. Can you get me a gun?

  Yes.

  When?

  Soon.

  How much? I will pay for it.

  No need. I will get it, I said.

  Shohreh smiled, kissed my forehead, took a long look at me. Then we lay on our backs and we both looked up and pretended to fall sleep under the wooden ceiling and above the mattress, enveloped by smoke and the haze of our breathing.

  AROUND FOUR IN THE MORNING, Shohreh woke me up. Could you take a taxi back home? I need to be alone, she said. I will pay for it. I am sorry, I am so sorry. I need to be alone, she whispered, and she cried and turned her head away because she couldn’t face my sleepy eyes, my thick eyebrows, my flat nose, my uncombed hair, my sealed lips, my interrupted nightmares.

  I went to the bathroom. In the bowl there was one small piece of toilet paper that had floated and marinated all night in Shohreh’s yellow piss. I stood above it and aimed at it. I made holes in its middle and drove it down to drown, and then I flushed, making sure that the whole building would hear it in their dreams like apocalyptic rain.

  I put on my clothes. Shohreh kept apologizing. She gave me my woollen hat and helped me with my jacket and walked me to the door, touching my back. I walked home. I wanted to walk. I refused to take a cab. I wanted to walk and hear crushing sounds under my feet again. Night is the only time when one can impose one’s own sound on the world. In the absence of wolves’ howls, hyenas’ laughs, nightbirds’ songs, and a full moon, it was up to a human to make noises, to fill the void.

  But the snow was soft. My steps were muffled. It was quiet, so quiet that I felt as if I did not walk but instead crawled in silence. The snow covered everything and I walked above cotton, on silent carpets, on beach sand. Softness is temporary and deceiving. It gently receives you and gently expels you. I saw no one, no one. No being at all, not even a rabbit, not even the trace of a cougar, crow, or deer, nothing in this northern terrain. I thought: I will tell every tourist I encounter, every sister who has ever received a postcard, that nothing here exists; there is no queen, there are no seals, no dancing bears, moose, cabins, high trees, bonfires. Descriptions of these are all a ploy, an illusion, a conspiracy. There is nothing but that which freezes, and the only way to escape it is to dig deep holes, dig and sail under it. There, my friend, you can encounter rivers of steam, tropical paradises with noisy crickets, crocodiles, muddy rivers, green fungus arching like wallpaper over trees, and expert scuba-diving rats, and troops of roaches receiving signals, conspiring to take over the world. All that exists, all that will ever exist, shall pass through this passageway under the ice, the dead corpses when they turn to dust, the big happy meals, the wine, the tears, the dead plants, the quiet settling storms, the ink of written words, all that falls from above, all that ascends, all that is killed, beaten, misused, abused, all that have legs, all that crawl, all that is erected, all that climbs, flies, sits, wears glasses, laughs, dances, and smokes, all shall disappear into the underground like a broken cloud.