by Hassan Daoud
XXVI
WHEN THE WINDOW PANELS OPENED at that late hour of the night, causing a screech that didn’t come to an end even when the window was entirely open, I did not know if by doing this she was summoning me to come near or to arise from my sleep if I happened to be in bed. She was standing there in the light that poured from her room as if the late hour made it brighter and stronger. Her sleeplessness had gotten her out of bed and here she was below me, the signs of her struggle with it intact. Her nightgown was crumpled and damp with her sweat, slipping slightly off her shoulder, which I could see as far as her upper arm. Her hair, which she had kept tied back, made an unusually wide puffy halo around her face, which was usually covered by it and which I had not yet seen plainly, always having to look from above. She had not been summoning me by opening the window and letting the screech of it reverberate, I thought. I even thought for a moment that in opening the window as she had, she showed that she was still immersed in her fury and oblivious of anything else. As if this—her ire—is the moment when she is serious, is the truth of her. As if standing there for me, earlier, had been just a game or a pastime, and this moment, now, was not the time for any of that.
But I do not have to withdraw, retreating into my room. This time of night is one she does not know; she doesn’t know how to be at this late hour. Indeed, it won’t be long before she realizes she’s afraid of it. And then she’ll look to where I stand overhead. I need not retreat inside and distance myself from this moment of her anger. I ought to stay standing here. For this is my hour, this hour in which she awoke, and so I must remain here where I stand, for at this hour I can do what I cannot do at other times. The emptiness and the silence that extend across the sand are at their strongest—now, in this hour of her sleeplessness. There is nothing but me here, close by, as close as any two people with a wall between them can be; and there is no one here but me.
This is my time, in which I know how to be. I will not withdraw, retreating inside, and I won’t bring my head back or move to the side of the window. I will stay as I am, waiting for her to raise her head toward me, which will happen once her thoughts set her down where she is used to me standing, here above. I will remain where I am and as I am, looking at her howsoever I like, to let her know, when she turns to me, that I have been here looking at her like this the whole time. I won’t flinch when it looks as though I’m stealing a furtive look at her bare shoulder where, even at this distance that lies between us, I can see the gossamer blonde hairs, as if the falling beams of light have magnified them. It won’t be long before she raises her head toward me. There are not many things in front of or around her that would excite her gaze. I know that very very soon indeed this is what she will do and that she will not return to her room before she does it. This hour in which she has awoken is mine. That is, I know what will happen in it. This hour is my time. And as I wait for her to turn toward me I will be calm, fully and happily engrossed in staring at her bare shoulder and her feet, shoeless on the tile floor and bare, her big toes visible, held slightly apart from her other toes and from the two red patches that her slippers conceal but also create, where they press in on her feet.
She was leaning her elbows on the windowsill when she lifted her head to see if I was there. She did it with a sudden movement, just like that, as if in response to a sound escaping that would alert her to me. She saw me there, framed by the strong beam of light coming from her room, my head and body straining forward. I expect she even saw my eyes gleaming in the light as I looked at her or toward where her eyes moved once they had shifted from me. I was very quiet and calm, in possession of myself, of my standing here and looking, leaving to her to decide what to do in the circumstances. Perhaps she understood that this time she must do something different, and so she did not look away immediately. As she gazed at me she was thinking about what she’d do next. But that didn’t last long: only moments, and then she stepped inside. But she withdrew slowly, deliberately, as if demanding time before responding to an urgent call coming from the other end of the room.
As she stepped back she went on looking at me, as if to tell me to wait here for her return. She did not do anything once she had gone in; she didn’t go any farther than the door of her room. All she did by going inside was interrupt the moment we were in, ending it so we could begin a new moment. She did not even comb or pat her hair that fluffed around her face like a big circle. She didn’t put on her slippers to cover her bare feet. And as soon as she came back to the window she had her head raised toward me to see me there, where I had brought my head and body even further forward outside the window, but without looking uncomfortable or distressed by this seemingly awkward position. This time she hadn’t come to the window to look outside at the night sky and the sand, but rather to stare at some point in the window frame in front of her. Standing at an angle not facing directly outside, resting her arm along the length of the windowsill, she looked as though she was preparing for a long stay and positioning herself so she could look at me without having to twist around or to the side. This way I could see the front of her—chest and belly and all the way down to her feet. Likewise she could look at me merely by raising her eyes, but I was sure she wouldn’t do more than that until I took the next step. And I must do it quickly, while she is standing there like that, preparing for me. She won’t go any further or add anything new until I begin; it’s as if she changed position in order to see what I would do in response. Now, while she’s looking out at the vistas framed by the open window, tipping her head slightly upward so I can see it haloed by the circle of her hair, I must say something. I must say something she will hear. For the next step—the one I must take—cannot be anything else. I must say something she will hear. When I say it I will be performing the first obvious, unmistakable act, the kind it is difficult to extract oneself from—unlike a simple, brief glance—because its nature is deliberate. The words I must say as the first and undeniable step which—after I have said them—might reveal another truth about all of these glances and the repeated moments spent standing behind the window. The words, when I say them, will not allow subterfuges or evasion because the moment they are uttered they’ll produce an immediate and unalterable effect. And afterwards, after I say them, she cannot go on standing there exactly as she does now. The voice she hears addressing her might surprise her into anger, and she might slam the windows shut with quick and furious hands. There is nothing certain about her glances, whether the quick looks or the slower gazes. Nothing sure in the way she stands and leans like that out of the window, which brings her body closer to me. If this happens it will be like a series of images in quick succession that one’s fancies and suspicions string together, only to chase them away or to erase them altogether. That is something else I must put an end to, by speaking. By saying the words I have readied myself to say, not only waiting to say them but also to hear them myself, coming out hoarse, constricted, sounding peculiar as if they have emerged from a throat that belongs to someone other than me. But I must say them and I must do so quickly, for by now she may have reached the very end of this interlude when she stands here below me. I must say them, now, before some movement of hers indicates she is about to go. Now, before I let that moment go, before the moment comes when her patience is exhausted, now . . . I must . . . now. . . .
I’ve been waiting for you. I knew you would get up out of bed.
She did not lift her eyes to me until after the sounds—all of them—had floated down to settle around her below, hoarse and shaky, as if before arriving they had crossed a long patch of rough ground. My hesitation and clumsy bashfulness must have slowed their descent, for even I heard my voice only as it arrived, or as she heard it—I seemed to hear it long after I actually said it. But those words of mine did arrive, all of them, to settle over her like something heavy that kept her eyes—now turned this way—fixed on me, seeking an explanation and asking a more open question at the same time. When she jerked her head to signal that she
did not understand, I knew she was doing it to keep the awkwardness of the situation on my shoulders alone. She would require another onslaught to move her another step forward. This, also, I must do.
I knew you would get out of bed, would leave your tossing and turning. I waited for you so you wouldn’t be alone.
XXVII
DESPITE THE MANY YEARS THAT have passed, they still haven’t erected anything I can actually see from our house, such that I could say to my father: Now they have begun. But they are building something there. In the mornings, before fatigue caught up with him and made him drowsy, he would say to me in a tone that conveyed both a question and an answer, not to mention a complaint: They are still at the same point there . . . everything is still where it was? He had stopped telling me I must go there to see what they were doing. Now, and over the past stretch of time, he has altered how he says this, so as not to appear quite so insistent, since that annoyed me. Instead, he would say to me, If one were to go there he would see it with his own eyes. Or he might remark that it was likely, now, that they were putting down the foundations of buildings, all of them at one go, but he figured you could only really see this at close range. But now he had stopped saying these things to me using any of his circuitous routes. He also simply stopped the wave of questions that, like his earlier ones, could have been voiced had his boredom and weariness not silenced him. Only two or three times did he say to me, revealing the wrath that accompanied him constantly in his silence: But they must leave marks on the ground! That way they would know how the streets were placed, so they would know how to cut them again. This he stopped repeating before he reached the point where he no longer cared; for to say it again, he would have to also tell me to go there to see whether they had done any of this at all.
He stopped telling me to go there. He knew that time would not last long enough to allow him to see anything finished, even if they were to announce today that they had begun pouring the foundations. He could no longer bear the waiting, either. For years he had waited, and he felt he had been abandoned again and again, his hopes forsaken over and over. Instead of demanding that I go down there he had begun to say to me—in the period before this final silence of his—that I should go over here. He meant the new city and he indicated it by retracting his hand slightly and redirecting it toward where the new city would lie, behind him. He wanted me to go there so that I would get to know the people whom—he would always add—I could not afford not to meet. I would understand that he had in mind those who worked arranging matters that people could not arrange for themselves.
In the first months following our move, when he would go around in the new city getting acquainted with what was there, none of the men he knew had died yet, obliging family and friends to organize a funeral. Making his circuits, he never saw even a patch of ground which—he could be reassured—would be left empty for those who would die here before they could return to the old city. He wanted me to go and meet these people, to find out where they were and to see the cemetery, so I would know where it was. You must go! he would say to me, showing his irritated impatience that most of the time lay just below the surface, irritation at how I satisfied myself with that single route I took carrying the pages I had finished matching up. In his anger he seemed to be hastening my going there, for perhaps what he was anticipating would take us by surprise. Perhaps, especially if he remained this upset, it would come quicker, shortening the life allotted to him by fate.
I knew it was my duty to handle many tasks as we waited for it to happen, things beyond simply going there to make their acquaintance. The money in the little chest had dwindled so far—very few paper bills remained inside—that it was no longer worth hiding the box or keeping a watchful eye on it. The meager sums I gleaned from collating the piles of paper wouldn’t cover the cost of a shroud, let alone a grave. Even before I got that far, I was worried that merely going to those people and getting to know them would cost me something, perhaps more than the chest held now. Even just going to them—since I would have to try out new routes and spend more time out of the house—might require money. You must go to see them, he began repeating, but his intonation suggested that he was asking me whether I had gone already, or even that he rejected the very thought that I might not have gone yet. The filmy layer that had transformed his eyesight had thickened even more; only two tiny pinpoints remained uncovered, like slits that each faced in different directions, fleeing from each other. Looking at me he would tilt his head to try to align the images he saw in one eye with those in the other. Not only (I thought) did he see me as if I were covered by a filmy substance or enveloped in a fog but also, he saw only a tiny patch of me through these pinholes.
It was not the waning of his eyesight I was seeing: it was his death. That is what I saw in his eyes, and it crept forward noticeably day by day. Since I knew he was watching it as closely as I was, and that he knew what it meant as well as I did, I could see that he was putting me in a position to say to him, Tomorrow I will go. I said it just like that, without any further explanation, as if we had already agreed on what it meant and what we would do. Tomorrow I will go, I said to him, as if to reassure him that we would get through this task without any anxiety. After I said it, he turned his face away toward the breeze coming from below. He seemed to need a moment by himself to swallow this unnamed thing we had now agreed to take care of. In streets I do not know, I will have to search for places I don’t even know how to recognize. These were not simply the shops and offices of people who arrange the personal affairs of other people; they were other places still, different ones, places he might be able to name for me, those which I imagined sold or rented what was needed to prepare the dead. But the little chest did not contain money enough to allow me to prepare for this, to make ready what we would need.
Over there, I would also have to search for shops where they bought old items. From the collections in the shops I might be able to tell what I could sell from among our belongings and furnishings. Rather, I could see what things I should sell first, since in times to come I would be selling other things. I knew now that the first to go would be my father’s bed, his wardrobe, and whatever was left of his personal effects. But for the moment I would go to see what they were buying, there in the shops that I did not know how to find or to recognize when I found them. When I returned from this errand, I would have to handle things on my own because my father would not even pay attention to where the commotion was coming from, made by the men who would shift around the big pieces of furniture and take some of them away. My mother would not be here, and when she did come back she might do no more than look hard at the spaces now emptied of her things, shaking her head sarcastically as she went into the kitchen or to her room to get whatever she had come for. She no longer had any interest in what happened here. She might even enjoy seeing belongings removed from where they had always been. It might relieve her to see that we were taking measures in the house without her, and she might relish seeing the appearance of the house change with the removal of his things. She would probably think it was the perfect opportunity for a certain resident to relinquish her accustomed role. As it was now, she no longer did anything for us before going out, except her scant cooking, and all that meant was adding another ingredient to the pan. Leaving the kitchen, she left the double doors open wide as if to say that this completed her work. As if to remind us that she was doing this work for us, for me and my father. She would no longer eat what she cooked here. The two of them, she and the woman, ate something else. Cooking it, they were entertaining themselves as if preparing food for their outing. From the window of the empty bedroom I watch the two of them walking down the sand track, for now their excursions involve going to the new city. I see them from the back as they walk. They do not talk and they look to me as though they are headed to some place where they’re expected. From that distance I can see the woman’s legs, skin containing their flesh and flattening it out delicately. I begin following
the white skin of her legs to the places in her body that her clothing hides. Or her body is revealed to me in the movement of her buttocks as each one lifts in turn. Every time I see her walking I begin to imagine or remember her body, which I know, still naked, for her clothing does not succeed in covering it: naked and white, smooth but erupting and billowing in places, since her plumpness is not distributed evenly.
Her clothes don’t cover her when I watch her, just as her gait along the sand track does not erase her image, silent on the bed, mute as if from embarrassment and pain together. I see them leaving, she and my mother, and I cannot believe that over there in the new city they’ll be content to sit silently, doing nothing. Since they’re not talking to each other they look as if they’re intent on hurrying to something that awaits them. I think it’s likely that my mother, whose wide shoulders remain steady and her head high as she walks, succeeded in finding someone for the woman with whom—on his bed there in the new city—she duplicates the painful embarrassed silence that I know. And no doubt my mother will be hovering there, as she did here, her heavy body pacing outside the room with the closed door as if she has something to occupy her other than simply waiting.