by Hassan Daoud
From the window of the empty bedroom I see them coming back. They spent exactly the same amount of time there as they do every time. They did not lose their way or follow a different route that would take them somewhere new. They go to one and the same place, every time they go out. They do not change their route, because if they did, they would have to label what they do as a bit of play, just something to pass the time.
XXVIII
THE SMALL TRUCK ADVANCING SLOWLY and precariously up the sand track might have been a fugitive that happened to swerve off course and come here. No truck or car had traversed the sand track since the two old people on the ground floor left with all of their belongings. The feet tamping down the track in their rare journeys back and forth didn’t harden it or even make it level. The truck swayed constantly as it approached, and then swung around with a screech. When it stopped and backed up to align its rear end with the wide main entryway, the sound it made seemed excessive for this little maneuver. From the window where I stood I saw the top of the cab and the empty truck bed behind it. There was no one in the building except me, no one to look out his window in annoyance, no one who might need to pass through the entryway that the truck had blocked. The two women had gone out to the new city as usual and would not return before their usual time, which I knew was just before the return from school of the one they would be waiting for after their own return. As for my father, he would remain sitting where he always sat, keeping his back to the sand track despite the loud screech that he must have heard. Nor, a few moments later, would he turn his face in the direction of the front door where the two men appear, turning without delay into my room. I lead the way, and then I stand nearby while they take the books down from their shelves.
They take these old books that I have neglected, leaving the dust to cover the edges of the pages and other exposed surfaces. The dust mixes with grains of sand that whip in when the breeze comes up, and which I used to remove whenever it occurred to me to take down some books from where they sat. I did that just for the sake of running my eyes over them, one book and then another, that’s all, just like my father did with his money, counting and rearranging it. Lately I had neglected them as they sat there on the shelves. Even the two men, who were surely not so concerned about dust, stepped closer to the open window so that when they blew off a layer of dust it would fly outside. Or they slapped the heavy old book covers and flaps to remove the sticky specks that they couldn’t blow away. Only then, once they thought the book wouldn’t soil the hands of whoever would be picking it up next, they added it to those they had already piled on the table. Standing near them, or between them, I saw myself taking down books just as they did, an armful at a time, beginning at one end of a shelf and looking only at how dusty or how thick a book was. I was just like them now, or almost. Whenever I happened to see the title of one of these books, perhaps one lying atop the pile, which they had not stopped adding to even though it had begun to sway, I paused only momentarily, remembering my father as he presented it to me, his face still sweaty from walking quickly, as he always did. It was nothing more than an ephemeral image in my head, in which I saw myself sitting on that chair, there in my father’s shop, turning the book over in my hands and sniffing the fragrance of ink and paper. Or I remembered picking it up where it lay open, face down on the low table in the hallway between the doors in our old home. But such memories didn’t hold me for long. These were nothing but insubstantial wafts of memory that passed rapidly as one of the two men covered the book with another book placed on top of it, or when one of them reached to remove a clutch of books from the very highest shelf that they had not yet finished emptying.
As the pile of books grew higher, it seemed to me that I was tucking these flashes of memory in among them, sending them along—with the books—to the truck. Ever since I had begun working on the identical sets of pages, I had gotten into the habit of sitting at the table so that all the books were at my back—these old books that as I read them did not equip me with anything but their decrepitude. The books, all of them! I said to the two men as they paused under the shelves asking where they were to start. All of the books, I said: all of those old books, which (now I can see, as I see myself reading them in the narrow hallway between the doors) made me into the image of a boy who had already grown old and decrepit. The surface of the table was completely covered now with books they had removed from the two highest shelves where, now that they were emptied, I could see the wall, darkened and dingy from its long concealment. My mother used to say that staying among books would make me ill because she imagined my body would be desiccated by their constant company. The books, all of them . . . which now, after dusting them off, the men had begun to pile on the bed. Those books that they won’t carry downstairs until all of them are off their shelves and piled in batches on the table, floor and bed.
I leave the room as they’re taking down the last books. I leave so they can move among the piles they’ve made. Waiting behind the door, I keep my head filled with the image of the wall, but without the dark color framed by the shelves that make it even darker. I think about how it might be possible to rid the wall of that stain of darker color if a broom or a big towel were taken to it. The shelves as well, I said to the men as they clapped their hands together to rid them of the last particles of dust sticking there. The shelves, and the desk, I said. They could take the shelves down as easily as they had removed the books from them.
XXIX
NOW THE ROOM HAS GROWN large and weightless, released from the possessions that had burdened it. The men moved the table I kept for working on the pages to the corner behind the door. My bed remained as it had been, at the center of the room, but it was no longer hemmed in. The room had become light. Emptied of books and shelves, the wall had gone back to its original pale color, which had required only a bit of sweeping. The two men had done that as well before they went away.
The room has become weightless, and in it, I am airy and clean and new as well, like a light reflected by a gleaming metallic surface. Like the light flowing from the lamp hanging from the high ceiling to brighten the room cleanly and evenly, for there are no books to darken or obstruct it. There is no longer anything in the room to weigh me down, tugging one side of me toward it when I am standing still or moving around, pulling part of me away from the rest. Now I can leave or enter the room without feeling the slow heaviness of what I had always thought of as a vast and decisive threshold separating going out from coming in. As I stand behind the window looking toward the one I see below me or waiting for her to come, I sense the open space at my back stretching out far behind me. Not just the room; it’s the entire house, and now I leave my door open. I feel it all behind me, open to me, now that it has been emptied by my mother’s departure, and my father is always seated in the same place out there on the balcony, huddled against the railing.
Now I can do as she does when she stands for a time at the window and then goes away for a spell to the roomy interior where she moves around. I am no longer simply waiting there in the one spot where I stand, but rather it’s as if—walking as she does through the rooms—I’m following her, tracing her footsteps exactly along the squares of tile just above her head. When the two women have gone out, or on the occasions when they are late to return, I think about how we—the two of us, she and I—are free together in these two wide-open spaces, one directly above the other. Stepping exactly as I think she has just stepped, I feel I have come very near to her, my body has grown so close to hers that both take the same step on the same square of tile at the same time.
It is her bare feet that take these steps—feet sticky with sweat from her shoes so that every time she tries to lift them from the shiny, polished tile it’s more like she’s sliding than stepping. So it’s the sound of the tacky soles of her feet parting slowly from the tile that rises to me, though I can barely hear it. As I follow that whispery sound I know it will take me, after making its wandering circuit, to the wind
ow, where she’ll be peering out with her body leaning forward so that her face is lifted toward mine. I will have arrived just as she does, and I will have turned my face downward. We are alone, like this, in the two homes that sit one atop the other. We move exactly as we please in each and then we turn to the pair of open windows. I see her when I get there, turning her face toward me, just as I can see—if I lean my body some distance outside the window—her bare feet and legs emerging thinly from the anklebones and rising to where they will finally become rounded. They have changed, or at least they have made strides toward this change whose completion I think they have not yet reached. I see her face near to me and I imagine that it, too, will likely undergo that change which, as fast-paced as it is—altering now one part of her and now another—seems to veer unpredictably in a new direction from one day to the next. Or the process of change is particularly strong one day and something in her changes visibly, but it slows the next day and she looks more the way she did before. Sometimes I see it happening in her eyes: looking at me, they appear to have hardened, become more merciless; or they seem to be scrutinizing what they stare at more closely.
And I know that this look will not remain there, for these constant alterations will return her gaze—after the wave settles into calm—to the hesitant, waiting look that her eyes held before. Or when, like her, I retreat from the window and begin, like her, to wander through the rooms, I return her to her earlier self in which the raw wind of change has brought no more than tiny ripples of newness as yet. I imagine her feet falling small and fresh onto the tiles, still showing the delicate swelling that covers the ligaments. But I know, as I imagine her this way, that she has already changed, not only from what my eyes can take in but also from what is being brought forth inside of her, where I cannot see. But in fact I see both at once, for her eyes would not have hardened like this or grown more penetrating, holding fast onto the object at which they stare, if it were not for the whirling buffets of wind whose hot gusts rise from beneath those eyes, disturbing and ruffling them. When the hot wind calms, settling into stillness, it leaves traces that will not go away. The fuzz above her upper lip will not disappear now that it has formed into a downy moustache. Her face, molded and fired by the blasts of wind, will retain something of their heat after the calm descends. I must hurry. It’s not enough that I stand at the window leaning toward her while she looks up at me, or that I circle with her among the rooms, listening intently for her movements through them. I must hurry, for in just a little while the change will take her away from what she is now and steer her toward how she must behave with the new appetite she has developed. It will teach her how to hide these yearnings away so that she can reveal them when she feels the time has come. I must hurry. I must take that great step, there in her home when it’s empty, or here in our home that my father and mother have emptied, each in their own way. Or even on the stairs, in the space that keeps us apart. In the darkened space whose only light is that which filters in from outside. It will be empty as well; we won’t need to watch out for anyone coming, except from one direction: when the two women return, ascending from their walk and making noise that we’ll hear for some moments before they draw near.
I must hurry to get there ahead of a new way of being that waits for her, and that I know she’ll inevitably reach. When she gets there, she will not be satisfied with hiding her desire in order to act on it when she wishes. No: when she gets there, and when I see her going out onto the sand track, it will be as if she’s hiding something in her gait, something that takes her to a place that offers her no rest, there in the new city.
XXX
THE BODY I SAW AND knew naked: these clothes have not succeeded in covering it up, nor has the passage of time been able to erase it since it appeared to me naked, that one time. Each time I see the woman going out, she and my mother, walking along the sand track, her bare skin is revealed to me beneath her clothes. And as she moves I can see how her buttocks rise, one and then the other, naked, and I assume that with every motion the whole side of her body lifts too. Whenever I imagine that, I feel in complete sympathy with the woman who seemed as if she couldn’t manage her body very well on her own. Next to her on the track was always my mother, shoulders broad, walking with nothing in her body moving but her legs. They didn’t talk, she and the woman, as they went, nor did one of them ever turn to the other, as if they were going not for the sake of amusing themselves but to accomplish something they knew, in a place they knew. Reaching the end of the sand track, they never turned around to glance at what they were leaving behind. The woman walking next to my mother, silent and obedient, has no fear of being out late, leaving her daughter alone in the house. They believe, she and my mother, that the building is protected by its isolation and the open stretch of sand surrounding it. Inside, there is no one but me and my father, and neither of us, as the woman and my mother both see it, can do any harm or cause any fright.
Or, watching the two of them walking, I would wonder whether they might have something in common to do there in the place they’ve made their destination, but I don’t know what share in it each one has. The time the woman spends in bed in the room behind the closed door will see my mother simply waiting behind that door, just as it was that time when I was in there with the woman, behind the closed door to her room. I do not know what my mother’s aim is in going with her, in going together to wherever it is they go. As for the woman, I don’t suppose that she is doing what she does because she desires or has chosen it. They have this something to do in common, but I don’t know what share each one has in it. When I see them returning late it occurs to me that one of them is giving pleasure to the other when both bow to a single longing, normally felt by one woman. It occurs to me also that they do the same thing when they sit for hours silently in their outings to the edge of the sand.
They go out every day, leaving the two homes behind them. Since these days they’re usually late in returning, they must be spending considerable time getting to know places they’ll turn to if they tire of the place they go to now. When my mother leaves, as when she returns, I have begun to imagine that my father, despite the state of oblivion that possesses him most of the day, has retained a blazing hot crater in his head, no bigger than a fingertip but glowing red hot, still aflame amidst the ashes accumulating around it. He has done this as if he knows that her leaving us—which began when he was still capable of hearing and seeing—has gone to extremes now. He has surely kept that reddened pit glowing like a tip of hot iron, and whenever I see him sitting out there, head dropped to his chest as he naps, I think that what I’ve imagined inside his head, flaming and alive, does not help him, but rather intensifies his fatigue. This is because he cannot put it out at will. When I awaken him to eat, carrying his plate out to where he’s sitting, I sense that something inside him has not allowed him to take a truly restful doze. Despite that, I feel I should go on waking him, even just to see him raise his head slowly and move his tongue around to moisten the dryness in his throat. Here’s the food, I come out to tell him, once and then again. Here is the food, I say to him, to let him know where to look for the plate. Here—this is the spoon, I say, so that he will put his hand out in my direction to take it. I start talking to him, trying to get him to wake up enough to eat. I try for a state of alertness that will not suddenly reverse and return him to his napping. Eat, Papa, I say to him. He lowers the spoon to the plate of food that I have to steady, lest it slip from the tray and fall to the floor.
He won’t eat much anyway. Three or four attempts, tiny bites, and then he stops, leaving the spoon on the plate where he has set it down. Before I lift the tray from him I say, just as I do every time: You haven’t eaten anything today, you must eat. But I know that he doesn’t need any more than the portion he took. His body does not need more than that, since he does nothing and no part of his body moves. I can see that even his breathing is minimal, as slight as the food he swallows; as soon as he’s done eating he r
eturns to his napping, and to that blazing crater that makes him ache even when he is asleep.
For we have left him here all alone where he sits, at the balcony railing near the air that descends to the old city, bringing him with it. We left him there alone, my mother by distancing herself more every day until now she is almost never here, and I by standing at the window or pacing through our rooms readying myself to go back to the window. In the hours when I work on the pages I find myself more aware of his presence, and I am more attentive; I get up whenever I’ve finished three pages, or maybe four, to look in on him and then to ask him, Do you want anything, Papa? Can I do anything for you? On days when I go out to submit the piles of paper I have finished matching up, I put the water bottle on the balcony wall and I move his cup closer to him after filling it with water so that at least it will be easy for him to take his first sips. He may not need any more, since his constant dozing leaves him unaware of how dry his throat is. Do you want anything before I go? I ask him, so that he can tell me if he wants me to help him with his bodily needs, or if he wants to do it himself but while I am still here and can wait for him. I figure that before I leave I must prepare him for a half day on his own, during which I’ll be imagining him—over that stretch of time—as he slides farther and farther down in his chair until he is all but falling on the floor as he naps. I begin to walk faster along this route I know so well. To banish from my mind the way I must look—my fast walk which is more like hopping, and I know I look to others as if I’m about to stumble and fall—I think about finding him fallen, having toppled onto his face, but then I think that thanks to my hurrying, I will surely catch him in time.