by Hassan Daoud
I had to keep a distance between them and me: the distance created by the empty seats in the bus or the space of the entire classroom. I had to sit at the very back of the classroom, my back to the wall, the students with their backs to me between myself and the teacher. At the very back of the class, in the last row and in the farthest seat. When the teacher pointed his finger in the air, asking himself which pupil he would single out, I would start playing the disappearing game. I’d shrink my sense of my own physical presence as much as I could, figuring that if he saw my reduced self he would pass right over it. I will not go back to school, I would say to my father after every occasion when I fell into their trap and found myself the butt of their stares. All it took was one of them saying something about me that he assumed only I would not understand. Or someone else imitating something about me behind my back, making all of them laugh and believing they were keeping the laughter among themselves. When I made a mistake writing two French words on the blackboard, the teacher asked me in front of all of them what kind of work I thought I could do if neglecting my homework got me expelled from school. He was about to go on, naming trades that required only hands and bodies, except that the students’ heavy silence made him hesitate.
Each time, I would tell my father that I was not going back to school. I will read books on my own, I said to him that last time, and then he did keep me at home. Those books: I brought them along with me to this home of ours in this building that rises like a short fat tower. I am still reading them. These are the same books, on the same shelves; after my father left his shop in the old city I added no more. Taking them down from where I had put them, and reading them, it is as if I’m repeating the same class every year and I am never promoted to the next grade.
Those books: we line them up along the high shelves in anticipation that their time will come—their time to be read. We store them away carefully like household provisions that we must conserve. They grow old where they sit on the shelf because their expiration date begins to approach from the moment they’re put up there. When we bring them down it’s as though we’re repeating ourselves, once again reading books we’ve already read and often disliked.
Those books: I had also begun to put them at a distance. Or perhaps they were putting me at a distance as they lay there on the table, open but face down. At night, as I lie sleepless in bed, the book on the table moves even farther away. The effort I calculate having to make to get up and go over to it is far more than the two or three steps separating the bed from the table. And by day I don’t need my books, since I am waiting for her. As soon as we stand up from the table after our midday meal, I start waiting for her. As soon as I wash my hands and then don’t know what to do next, I’m already waiting for her. My father tells me to take a break when he sees me coming out of my room so soon after going in. When he returns to the kitchen to stand next to my mother as she distributes the leftovers into their storage bowls and puts them away, I go to the window overlooking the sand track. It is two hours before she will appear. I know I won’t see her there now. And I know that I might not be successful at catching sight of her when she is at the very top of the road so that I can watch her walk the entire distance. I might not, even if I spend the entire time between now and then pacing along that window, which is half open, half closed.
I spend a little time after our meal moving between my tiny space at the end of the apartment, and the empty bedroom whose window looks out on the road below. I pace back and forth, covering the breadth of the apartment, and I am only a little cautious. My father and mother, I know, have gone beyond a light doze into their heavy afternoon sleep, and I am free as I move about the house. I don’t need to be more than minimally watchful where they are concerned. The sand track, warmed by the sun and dyed the intense yellow of sunshine, remains empty. Each time I glance out it is deserted. But she will come and I’ll be here, from the moment she turns off the crowded main street to walk the length of the track, dragging her feet, showing how tired she is. Even from this distance I’ll be able to see how her face is flushed and coated in a light sweat, which I see in my mind’s eye covering her shoulders and upper arms and moistening her underarms with a dewy touch. I imagine the moisture of her exertions dampening her feet that the sand heats up inside her shoes. She won’t remove her shoes until she’s inside, at home, sitting in a chair she finds comfortable. Still not in any hurry, she’ll take off her socks, white although soiled slightly from the dust and sand of the route she has to take. She’ll put up her feet to wiggle her toes, observing them as they move, bare, free, released from their long hours in the prison of socks and shoes.
VIII
AND THEN, AT THE OPPOSITE window that looks out over the long stretch of sand, I wait for her to enter her room, just as I waited, and will wait, for her to leave it. But I will not actually see any of these things I’m waiting for. She won’t come near the small area next to her window, since she has nothing to do in that space. I see no part of her entrance or exit, nothing of what she is doing in the meantime, but from the sounds she makes I’m able to make a very good guess. From the sound of her footfalls I can figure out which direction she has gone and where in the room she is right now. I can tell that she has pulled open one of the double doors to the wardrobe, and so I know she’ll pull out one of the drawers inside. I can even hear the soft thud of her book falling onto her mattress and the swish of her blouse as she lifts it off her body and hangs it on the wardrobe doorknob.
And then the light switch—I hear its tiny click just as the light sails out her window and across the sand, making a long thin patch that is off-center from the light coming from my window. But that oblong of light creates no shadow of her on the sand, since she only moves around in the room’s inner half. It’s almost as if she believes that coming near the window means knowing that someone is surely standing there at the other edge of the sand and will see her. Or perhaps she stays in that part of the room because she’s in a hurry and wants to stay near the door. As for me, waiting overhead, I figure she does not even know I’m here. She doesn’t know about me. If she did know about me, she would not let these irritable phrases—these angry, sharp words—slip from her mouth. No, not if she knew I was here, immediately above her window. Not those words, which are very nearly swear words and which come out of her whenever something slows her down or she can’t find what she’s looking for. She does not know about me. The light in my room going out just now does not alert her to anything at all because a few moments ago, there in her room, she didn’t notice that my light was on. Or she didn’t realize the light up here had been turned on after it was off. She would have to be slower and more deliberate in her movements, she would need to be calmer, for her to be able to work her brain over a sound she hears or a light she sees. A person in as much of a hurry as she is—indeed, any person her age—does not take shadow created by light falling from the window above to mean that someone is there behind the window. Her head is not occupied with what she sees or hears, because it’s just following her body in its abrupt changes of course, as if a reverse current has suddenly charged through it and driven it back from the direction in which it was heading.
This body of hers: hardly has it come into the room before it goes out. Only a moment or two, no more; and in those moments it’s as if I’m actually seeing it, this body of hers. When the drawer opens I can practically see that form bending over it, and as the wardrobe door clicks firmly shut it’s as if I’m watching this body leaning forward ever so slightly to heave the door into place. I sit waiting for it, preparing myself to get up from my chair, to go over to the windowsill and hang my head and shoulders out if I sense that the charge governing it will send it over to where I can see it. Really see it.
That evening I realized it was going to happen. Every time she came into the room she spent more time in it than usual. Her steps were slow and few, and everything she touched or looked at stopped her. When she opened the wardrobe door and then I
heard no further sound, I said to myself, She is looking at herself in the mirror right now. Then I had the thought that perhaps she had begun revealing parts of herself to the mirror. This idea dawned on me when she nearly ran out of the room, or at least as far as the door, as if she were making certain no one had come anywhere near the door, which she had mistakenly left open. She would return, though. After all, she had not shut the wardrobe door, nor had she turned off the light. So I knew that she would return. And that it was going to happen. Leaning over my windowsill, angling my head and shoulders down, I would see her.
She did not stay long in the interior of the apartment where the sitting room was. When she was once again in the room, directly below me, she closed the door and went immediately back to the mirror. It must be a mirror that rose as high as the wardrobe door itself, so high that a person standing at it would be invisible to the emptiness there near the sweep of sand. She is concealed by the long slender rectangle formed by the closed door of the room and the wardrobe door opposite it, the two creating a sort of narrow hallway. Even I, watching and listening so attentively above, sensed that she was perfectly hidden there. Only my imagination could help me know what she was doing. For she had removed her body from the space commanded by her open window, from where she sent a part of it outward, carried by air and light, into the boundless emptiness that I share with her. All I could do was imagine her, try to fix her in a series of overlapping images that crowded in on each other only to erase one another as if, hidden there, she had severed every gesture, every sign or indication, by which I might have been able (just possibly) to reach her.
On that particular evening however, standing in front of the mirror would not be enough for her. It seemed as though something in her had awakened suddenly and—even in such a short interval—had transformed her. Hanging over the window ledge, I would wait for her to appear below me, to stand here where I can see, revealing now this part of her body and now that one to the outside where she knows there is no one. If this is what she is doing then it is a way of taking another step forward in accepting and responding to the abrupt change that has come over her.
This is what I want and do not want at the same time. I would love to see the bare skin of her shoulders as close as this but I am not happy with the thought that she is exposing herself bare-shouldered to the wide-open space beyond the windows as if to challenge someone out there to see her. Nor do I like the idea of her standing hidden behind the wardrobe mirror, where only she can see herself and where, I imagine, some internal urge is locked in a quarrel with some other instinct, one part of her trying to entice the other out of its accustomed state. This is what I do not want because it causes her to know her body. I want her body to stay small and childlike, unconscious of itself, knocking into everything around it haphazardly the way a child’s body does, as when she walks in the morning to the end of the sand track. I love to see her then, her heavy school bag swaying, striking her between the shoulders so that she jerks forward, still grumbling because someone woke her up from a deep sleep. I desperately want to be the one—the only one—who will bring something unchildlike from her body, a body that returns sweaty and exhausted from school. I want her to be ignorant of her body, unaware of its forces. Only then—and if there were to happen between us what normally happens between neighbors who have lived near each other for a long time—can I put my hand on her arm and invite her to come in. Then my hand could go to her face, wiping off a muddy or oily splotch left by the school bus, and she would believe the only reason I touched her was to wipe away the dirty spot. I would see her bare feet as she padded through the house, with me there, nearby, so close I can muse about reaching out a hand and touching those little feet, just like that, naturally, as if I’m brushing off the dust that clings to them. Maybe I could reach out and catch hold of one foot, from the inside, from that inner arch that slopes down to the bottom of her foot. If the people sitting with us were to leave, if she were the only one still there, alone, sitting with me, that is what I would do.
On this particular evening as I lean against the window ledge and hang down over it, I know that she will come close to where I can see her and not just the shadow of her. She will come so near that she’ll be exactly beneath me, I know it. She’ll stand in front of the open square of the window, poised there exactly as she stood in front of the mirror. She will think she’s risking nothing. She’s only offering what was in the mirror to onlookers she creates in her mind. That’s what she will do. The same way she stood before the mirror, that’s how she will stand now, but in front of that open square of the window. And so from where I am, immediately overhead, I will see her; when she comes over here I will see her and she’ll be just as she was there, showing her self to herself in the mirror.
Behind me, the light in my room is out. There is no light to create a shadow of me across the sand that lies so close beneath us. I can wait like this for hours, assured that no one sees me or knows that I’m here. But I will not need to wait very long. Although she has come away from where she stood, there below, she has left the wardrobe door open. Did she go over to her bed, perhaps? Or maybe she walked toward a table that I haven’t realized was there, near the bed. And then . . . but here she is now, coming back this way: something has moved in the light descending from her room. It’s not her shadow; it’s merely the phantom image of her movement inside the room.
She will come.
She has come closer; she has walked toward the window. What was a formless movement playing on the sand, a flickering of the light, is now a real and solid image. She is coming, now; her shadow arrives. In the instant when her shadow becomes complete out on the sand she appears behind it; and I, in that selfsame moment, have prepared myself to see her appear, fully and truly appear. Her golden hair is combed and wound in the way of older women. Farther down, below her neck whose nakedness seems (from the back) so elongated, she wears nothing but a child’s sleeveless cotton undershirt that reveals the rounding of her small breasts, not yet fully developed. She wears a shirt worn not to be seen but only to lie beneath other clothes. And the breasts beneath it—these small breasts that I want only to pass my hands over, for desire has not yet reached them, has not arrived to touch them. Yes, this is what I want: I am he who desires the body whom desire has not yet caught.
IX
I CAN TELL BY LOOKING into my father’s eyes how weak his vision has become. My father’s eyes: or rather, what I see is the filmy layer that has smeared across the pupils, and which at first had looked like a thinly delicate transparent nylon skin. But it was visible even then; and I would always imagine a skilled hand treating it by peeling it carefully off the surface of the eye. I was still in school then. I would speculate that through his eyes all objects were seen as if behind a wafer-thin, watery screen. As time went on—for the film over his eyes first appeared when he still had the shop—the screen grew dirty. The nylon skin went grayish as if (it appeared to me) it had thickened and grown slightly heavier and rougher. My father’s gaze from behind it seemed changed—even imprisoned—by it; a gaze strangled, like a lung barely able to breathe because there is too little air outside.
By looking into those eyes I could register the degree to which his eyesight had left him. Some time after we moved to this place of ours my father began to expand the circle in the air inside of which he set his shop; then he would let his finger drop to the point he judged as the center of the circle. Is that where our shop is? he would ask, making it sound like an earnest question, even if he didn’t seem to care much about what the response would be. The colossus of dust rising from a felled building would not be visible to him until it was very high, and then it would appear to him suddenly as a dirty cloud in the intensely blue sky.
Where have they gotten to now? he would ask, getting me to describe for him what I could see of their work down there. When I answered that they were working at the lowest edge on the eastern side of the city he would start naming names, some o
f which I didn’t know. You mean Bukhari Rise, he would say, identifying the spot I had described. Or are they in the Mansions Quarter? He wanted to sound as though he knew every inch of that territory. So, what are they working at down there? he would ask me—yet again. I would have to tell him what the bulldozers and trucks I could see were doing, where they were stopping before they converged into one mass, performing some task that I could not make out.