by Hassan Daoud
It doesn’t amount to more than a few tattered paper bills, which I fold in half and put carefully, before leaving, in my pocket. On the way back my hand keeps dipping into my pocket to finger them every time I cross a street or switch the bag to my other shoulder. This is the only route I know, since nothing remains in my head of the circuitous paths that eventually led me to their office on the top floor, a single route I follow without glancing at the streets that branch off. These excursions with the black bag hanging heavily on my shoulder don’t increase my knowledge of what might be there in those side streets that I do not walk. It seems that every time I walk this street and this route I distance myself a little more from any need to know any others. Nothing is left in my head of the streets I turned into back then, streets I went into and then retraced after reaching the ends or sometimes just going halfway down, streets of different lengths, some split by intersections, streets scattered here and there along my route. There is only one street, one route, that I need, a single street that seems to me like the only one I can possibly walk, or as though behind the façades of buildings on both sides the ground slopes downward to nothing, dropping further than I can see. Nothing lies behind the shops and building façades to each side. There lies my way which—every time I am again walking it—feels as though I cut its path myself, and now I’m penetrating and laying it open again, so that every time I traverse it I’m like a train car moving along the one and only set of rails that it knows.
I slice through the same road on my return, my pocket harboring the thin wad of folded paper bills. Once at home, I will watch my mother wince at how meager that wad is. As she sees me give the bills, still folded, to my father, she’ll wonder out loud about whether I might shift to another sort of work or find another employer. I will be tired from all of the walking I’ve done and also from carrying my burden, which I will have set down; so I won’t answer her, to tell her that I do not know how to work at anything else. Just the thought of searching for another office from which to bring sets of identical papers to read multiplies my fatigue and irritation. Once again I would have to loop through unfamiliar streets until I might happen upon another route that I would find uniquely comfortable among the city’s new streets. I’m tired and I want to hurry into my room and change my clothes, which have grown heavy on my body, soiled by my long journey. The food is on the table, my father says to me. His eyes are open as wide as can be, as if he is gawking at an accident that has stunned him and he does not know how to react. The food is on the table, he says to me, but he doesn’t beckon me there; his hand remains still. Nor does he encourage me toward the table by starting toward it himself. The bills are still in his hand, still folded, and he’ll wait until he is alone, in his room with his money box, to begin staring at them as if he’s reading them. He will set them carefully in the chest, arranged according to their denomination, and then he’ll brush his hands together after returning the precious box to its place in the wardrobe. The food is on the table, he says to me when he returns and finds me changed into clothes I’m comfortable in. Now he does lead me by walking there himself, and once at the table he tests the warmth of the small casserole gingerly with his hand, as if he’s put himself back into a state of bewilderment that makes his eyes widen. It’s cool enough for my mother to handle; she takes the pan by its rim, with one hand, and carries it into the kitchen.
When she returns with it, now hot—she holds it with two hands this time—I think she’s disdainful of the simple task she’s done. She plunks the dish down carelessly on the table. She waits for my father to do what she hasn’t done. He takes the lid off the pan, and steam rises from the food. Shall I serve you? he asks me. Or he might simply bring the pan closer to me, with both of his hands. She has gone back to her room or to the kitchen to return something to its place. She will stay away like this, unconcerned about how tired I am from walking so many long stretches in town. She is still not here when I finish eating and get up to go to my room to rest. It might be that she’s allowing me the time I need to forget—myself—how tired I’ve become and how I must take that into account. As if she’s giving me the time I need—or giving herself the time she needs—before once again, as she readies herself to go downstairs, to where they live, she can feel that her little signal to me might work as well as it did before. She’ll give me the same studied but offhand glance that she follows immediately with a little nod of her head, slight but quick, as if she’s asking me whether I’m ready to go down there. What she’s asking is whether I am truly ready, or will I forsake her as I did before. Her careless little glance has taken on a kind of desperate offhandedness. She is trying to tell me that something between us has not changed. How she treated me would not change just because I was engaged in my work, which meant I left the house. Perhaps the minuscule amount of money I earn doesn’t even deserve so many hours spent outside the house. And neither does it qualify me as the man who works inside this house, where the only role she knows how to play is that of a heedless and indifferent inhabitant, a woman who knows only how to play.
XX
WHEN WE WENT IN TOGETHER, though each alone, to her room whose door had remained closed, I did not yet know the woman’s body. What I mean is that I had not looked at it sufficiently yet; all I had retained was the hue of her skin stretched over the flesh of her legs, and certain contours and curves that I could see when she had her back to me. We stood together in the room that the woman had darkened by closing the wooden shutters and lowering the curtains over them. Still, I could see her in the meager light that remained, just as she could see me, waiting as she was for us to begin that thing for which I imagine that she, like me, had made no preparation. On the dressing table with its expanse of mirror, which stood next to her, I could see little bottles of perfume lined up and looking as if they hadn’t been moved for a very long time. The bed was neatly made up, and its broad surface somehow gave the appearance that it had looked exactly like this through all the years she had lived.
She looked confused standing there, placing her hand awkwardly on the table next to her, not knowing what else to do with it. I remained standing just inside the closed door; and from there, I sensed that she was more confused than I was. Perhaps she was expecting me to make the first move. I could barely keep an abashed smile from curving my lips as it occurred to me that we were helpless without my mother. But that thought was quickly followed by the realization that in days past she had not been hinting to me alone: she must have been goading the woman, as she had me. She really ought to be with us, I thought, here in the room. She ought to stay close, with us, until we’re in a state where we no longer need her.
But the woman took on the burden of making the first step, moving away from the mirror and going over to the bed, where she sat perched on the edge. Looking over at me from there, her gaze seemed feeble and tired and afraid of what we might do in the closed room. I didn’t need to speculate much to know that my mother—who had gone up to our apartment on the pretext that she had work to do there—had come back. To be here, primarily, but also to safeguard the place from the possibility that the girl might return unexpectedly. When the woman gave me that long look from where she sat on the edge of her bed, it was as if she was imploring that we finish that thing we were to do, not begin it. I had to take the next step: to approach the bed, coming close enough that one of us would inevitably touch the other, a hand dropping and brushing against the other body. I was the one to do it. I took hold of her black hair, which was cut just shorter than shoulder length, and drew her head toward my face as I kept my gaze on her.
She staggered and nearly fell back onto the bed, but she righted herself, standing up to face me. When she turned away slightly and a little after that, lifted her arms behind her head, I did not know whether I should help her by undoing the fastener at the back of her dress. I didn’t know whether I ought to go on looking at her as she unzipped it, her body opening out beneath it, where I could see how her bra straps ha
d engraved deep lines from which the flesh bulged on either side. But as she fluttered her hands and then stretched them around behind her to lift her dress over her head, I jerked my face the other way, as if I didn’t want to seem to be stealing furtive looks at what was being revealed in front of me. She took a step back, and it occurred to me that I should follow her example, beginning with my shirt, turning away so that she couldn’t see me as I did what I was doing. After my shirt there was still my other shirt, the white cotton undershirt which, as I stood there holding onto it because I didn’t know where to put it, seemed to me as shameful as it was shaming, leaving my body naked now, fully revealed.
As for her, although I was turned the other way I could tell that she had finished taking off her clothes and had lain down on the bed, covering herself with the sheet. She was waiting for me there. I didn’t know whether her eyes were turned my way. The picture I had in my mind of my own body was of a sickly white mass that had never been exposed to view, and as for my large belly, whose roundness began high on my chest, I felt that I should avoid revealing it. Lowering my trousers, I saw the error I’d fallen into by taking off my shirt too far from the bed, but it didn’t annoy me too much, since I could go on gripping a bit of my clothing, concealing my belly with it and not letting go of anything until I was there, like her, under the bedcovers.
When I turned to walk toward the other side of the bed, the empty side, I saw that she had brought the comforter up to her chin so that it covered her entire body. She wasn’t looking in my direction. It was as if she wanted to stay hidden there, under the thick white duvet, her face visible only so she could keep her eyes open as if on guard, stationed over her concealed body. Seeing her tug the heavy bedcovers as high as she could, I recognized that it was best for me to do the same. I lay down on the empty half of the bed, keeping only my head uncovered. The sheet on the bed, like the fabric of the duvet, felt cold to the touch, and as I inserted my body between the layers of fabric I felt that now I had truly begun what I had come to do. Never before had I slept on a bed that was not mine; the smell of the fabric—the cocoon I had dropped myself into—seemed familiar. But it was an intimacy that belonged to others.
I could not go on lying there motionless, my eyes staring straight up at the ceiling, which separated this room from my mother’s room. I would not stay in this position trying to imagine where and how to begin. The woman lying next to me, I thought, with the comforter held taut beneath her arms to hide her body beneath it, ought not to be so timid and embarrassed, since she must have done this many times. Wasn’t it up to her to do something, to begin somehow? As for me, whatever I did first, I figured I need not do it with my hand. No, my small and not very powerful hand would not be what I would start with. If I raised it to her cheek first, or perhaps to her lips, it would be like exhibiting it to her. She would really see it as it is, small and incomplete and feeble. Or its smallness would be accented if I steered it toward a place that seemed to match it in size, her nipple for instance, which I had not yet seen.
She was completely naked beneath the comforter. I did not yet know her body, I thought. All I had preserved in my memory was the delicate skin across her legs, its fine, soft white hue captured by the light layer of fat beneath. I had not come to know her body yet. Before beginning I must expose it, look at it—all of it, lying flat and then standing upright, front and back, and from both sides. I would have to do that for the sake of distancing the woman slightly, pushing her far enough away from that image of her sitting with my mother or talking to her as the two of them sat together in their clothes that looked so similar on their bodies. But first I must do something to begin: let it be something beneath the comforter. My feet did not suffer from smallness or swelling. My legs were extended straight; now I raised my feet and brought them to the delicate pale skin that I did know, that white glow that rose from the soft fat collected beneath. I moved my foot and touched her skin, rubbing against it from high to low, and then repeated it in a single stroke that massaged the lower legs together. This is what I knew of her body. I knew what my feet were touching when they moved across the surface of her legs, held tightly together, and then up the sides of them. When she closed her eyes I withdrew my hand from beneath the covers so she would sense what I was about to do. I raised the comforter off her body. First to appear was her belly, white and slack and rounded as it sloped to either side. And then her chest: released from their prison, her breasts had spilled to either side; the circle of the nipple nearest me was broad and dark, protruding lightly from the flesh beneath. I did not need to start with my hand, cupping the nipple and what lay beneath. She might think that if this hand was tiny, then so was everything else about me. I need not start with my hand. It was no longer enough to bring my body close to her and press against her; I must turn toward her now as well. And then I would lift myself over her, beginning by kissing her, there on her mouth and around her mouth.
But while I was getting myself ready to actually do these things she turned toward me and put her hand on my body, just below my belly. And now she pressed her palm into me while bringing it close to the heart of the matter: to the core of what we would do. She closed her eyes, not from embarrassment at what she was doing but for the sake of capturing what she was about to feel, bringing it inside herself and keeping it there.
We were naked on the bed, visible to anyone who might be peeping through some tiny hole or spying from a place we couldn’t see. The heavy coverlet beneath which we had concealed ourselves was now jumbled into a heap and sliding down to the bottom of the bed where my feet were. We were naked and visible to anyone who might spy on us. I didn’t need to verify the presence of my mother, waiting in the sitting room, perhaps moving among its chairs. She was there; perhaps she would get to her feet every few minutes to stand behind our closed door trying hard to listen. Before I lifted myself off my side of the bed to get atop the woman next to me I must see her body, all of it, from there, where her legs are splayed wide apart as if waiting, or as if making space for that thing that will come forth from here where I am, at her feet, passing upward between her thighs to reach their furthermost, innermost point. I wasn’t much preoccupied or bothered that the spying eyes were likely to be in place, staring. What those eyes would see was exactly what they would be imagining anyway, and what they already knew. The woman still had her eyes closed, and it looked as though whatever she was doing or receiving, she was sending straight to her dreams or somewhere inside herself, to hold it there. She gave no appearance of wanting to change position, stretched full length and spreading her legs, leaving only her hands free to touch me. When I put my hand out to the margin of her body and then to its center, doing the same thing, she let out a series of little sighs that I could see as much as hear, as though they were emerging from her absence itself, slightly rough and dry, completely unrelated to her voice.
She no longer flexed or moved her body, having turned toward me and then flipped over onto her back. It was as if, having spread her legs apart, she needed to do no more; she was offering what lay at the very end, that uppermost place that she had opened even as she seemed to guard it inside of her, while I remained at the outer limit. In this position, which she apparently wished to be her final one, and which she would not alter, I would not be able to make her curve toward me or to make any part of her move. I could not do anything but climb on top of her, advancing upward from her open legs. When I raised myself to her, my hands gripping what encircled the part of her she had opened, it seemed the only effect was to make her more rigid, more distracted with whatever was going on inside of her. Only her one hand that had reached for me remained against my body, clutching me. And when her hand came back to my sex, it seemed she would keep a firm grip on it, too, keeping me from moving closer to her, halting me where I crouched above her. Like the little groans she let escape that were so unlike her usual voice, the grip she held on me seemed to have issued from some obstinate fantasy in her head that became conc
entrated into a single, fixed and unchangeable image. Taking hold of me that way, and not budging from her own stiff position, she seemed to want to arrest my motions, keeping me frozen, hunched above her in a kneeling position with my hands clutching at what surrounded her sex. I even thought that the most she must want was exactly this; she would reach the summit of her pleasure that she could only find deep inside, on her own. To extract myself from this predicament she had created, and wanted, I had to enter her open sex. To touch the rim of it, first, with my tiny hand; and I wondered whether, in her state of absence—or trance—she would sense it as small, or sense it not at all, as it came into her, the size of a small child’s hand. I didn’t know whether she might be conjuring images in her head of what she felt, as if she were actually watching my hand rather than simply feeling it—perhaps—as it moved, hardly any bigger than her open sex. When I began to move my hand as if I was seeking out my path, I knew that I was beginning to awaken something inside of her, something happening in that closed space inside. She let out more sounds and gripped my sex hard. When she moved her legs further apart, opening her eyes a little as she did so, I understood that she wanted me to be right on top of her now and penetrate her. Indeed, the way she tightened her grip on me, down there, said it; she pulled me toward her, dragging me with her forceful hold.