The Others

by Siba al-Harez

  The bus was late, and I did not stumble on an empty seat. A group of the girls who would fill the bus to bursting stood in front of the door waiting for the official in charge of transport, aiming to get him to provide another bus for them. I was not in the mood to make my way through the usual clamor: We’ve tried such and such a bus, no … that bus, then … try such and such a bus … I kept to my squashed position just inside the bus, on the first step, and I tried to sit on the step. The rain whipped the bus’s door violently. It was such a hard rain that it did not even slide down the huge glass window in front, but pinged back instantaneously, as if it were intent on continually assaulting my memory by means of its presence, angry at my ability to ignore it.

  As soon as the bus emptied of some students at the first stop, I took the seat that one of them had vacated, the seat closest to the door. I gripped the metal column and let my head drop to rest on my hand. With the tremors of the bus as it rumbled along, my soul shook violently, up and down, while I kept swallowing it with the air, letting no sound escape.

  I was completely wet, the water still coming off my hair and clothes, and the cold was biting me. A hand—I don’t know from what hell it came or from what heaven—left its warmth on my hand, pulling away only after a full minute—I think it must have been a whole minute—without my sensing anything at all. It was not curiosity about the hand that compelled me to lift my head and look through the window, but rather the fact that I had not counted the number of times the bus had stopped and so I did not know where I was and how many stops remained before my own. It was the stop where Dai always got out. I saw her unrolling her light blue abaya bag over her head, making it into an umbrella.

  10

  Describing “that inscrutable lad” in her famous song from the film Watch out for Zuzu, Suad Husni chants,

  Bless his heart, that inscrutable lad

  Masks his face behind glasses when he’s sad …

  This is exactly what the dead do: they mask themselves in their absences. They convert to a shadow that, concealed as it is, shows its reflection baldly in all the twists and turns our lives take. In the first days of mourning, the women, as they came to console and mourn with my mother, would say to her, Be patient, desire is long lived. Now I understand what they meant. I figured that time repairs the breaches in us, not because we forget but rather because, as our lives regain their earlier movement, we get beyond the defeat that absence brings. But the passing days proved it otherwise. Hassan was as much here with us as was his absence, which was always here. Could there be a more bewildering equation?

  Hassan curtains himself in his absence so that his presence will better encompass and surround my life. Here he is, going halves with me in all my problems and the choices I have to make, my daily apprehensions, my frail accomplishments and my painful falls. Often I used to see him conversing with himself, or talking to the mirror, the balustrade, his car key, the newspaper. When I teased him about it, he would say, There’s someone there who hears! Was Hassan conversing with his absent ones, exactly in the way that he is now my absent one and I talk to him? I hold whole discussions with him. I debate him and I wrangle with him. I whet my abortive philosophy on his words and I pass on silly trivialities and repetitive scenes. I tell him the latest news; I try concealing everything heart-wrenching from him, but I fail. I let him in on secrets that are scandalous, and that he absolutely must not reveal to my mother. Sometimes I want to tell him a new joke, but before long, I realize inside of myself that this was his role to play, and his absence does not give me the right to steal his roles away from him.

  So long ago, back in the days when, standing on tiptoe, I could not even make myself come up to his shoulders, I took from his bookshelves a book called Our Philosophy by the martyr Muhammad Baqir as-Sadr. It had a blue leatherette cover and the fact that it was cool to the touch even at the height of summer was what made my fingers pull it off the shelf and take it from his library. He did not say that I would not understand it, that perhaps I would need two more years or even three, plus ten additional centimeters, that there were other books there more appropriate to my small brain. He smiled slightly and said, Tomorrow, I want you to come and discuss what you read, do you understand? I answered with a broader smile: Ayy. As I read, I stammered over certain words that were not in my vocabulary, and I would stop at particular sentences for days on end to absorb what they said. It took me seven months to finish that book, including two hours each week during which he explained to me whatever was too complicated for me to puzzle out. He was fairly exasperated with me for forcing myself unthinkingly into a silly competition that I did not need. Finally I gave the book back to him with a sure look of victory and a stinging question: Do you see me? Look how much bigger I’m getting! Fondly, he stroked my cheek a little. He and my mother were alike in the way they would stroke my cheek, with their long and slender fingers. You scare a guy! he said. I answered him with the very newest thing I had learned in English—Sort of—even though I was not certain that this was the right expression to use.

  I never drew my nourishment from Egyptian culture as so many others did. When I was little, I did not follow the evening serials on the Egyptian TV channel, nor the Ramadan Riddles that the Egyptian stars Nelly and Sharihan performed, nor the puppets Buji and Tamtam. Omar Sharif’s looks did not leave me a wreck, nor did I fall in love with the dreamy romantic voice of the famous Egyptian singer Abd al-Halim Hafiz. I was not corrupted by famous comedies of stage and screen like The School for Troublemakers and The Kids Grew Up. I had no idea what Café Fishawi was, or where the Cairo neighborhood of Hilmiyya could be found, even though I saw them in films made from the novels of Naguib Mahfouz. I didn’t read loads of romantic novels by Yusuf al-Sibai or stories by Yusuf Idris and Naguib Mahfouz and Tawfiq al-Hakim—that famous Egyptian trio of mid-twentieth century writers. It was only very late in the game that I even heard of something called Arab nationalism and of individuals named Sadat and Nasser and Heikal and Sayyid Qutb, or a group called the Muslim Brotherhood, not to mention The Project of Arab Unity and the Camp David Accords.

  This was a culture that I always viewed with a certain amount of skepticism and suspicion. I saw it as the culture of the generation before me, who in any case had gone right into their elder roles, playing paternalistic games with my generation, confronting me from a position of studied superiority. It was a generation of people who, at the age of sixteen, hung pictures of the “Cinderella of the Arab screen,” as-Sindarella, Suad Husni, on the walls of their rooms and plastered them to their closet doors. They lived their stories of first love to the voice of Abd al-Halim, and they participated in the events of Muharram 1400. They had witnessed close up Qatif’s transformation from its rural youth and its blue attire—the blue, blue sea that its pearl-divers frequented—into a quasi-city whose watery margins they were gobbling up, and thence into a network of pavements edged in yellow and black, asphalt streets, armored houses, and wells in which the water, if not the oil, had dried up.

  What inscribed my childhood and animated my early teen-agerhood was the channel coming out of Dhahran, run by the businessmen at Aramco. My personality was sculpted, and the sphere of my attention defined, by a channel actually named Dhahran. It had American basketball, slow and boring golf reportage, and tennis matches—yaaah! Tennis! Wimbledon championships, the good-looking blond Boris Becker, and the inscrutable Pete Sampras. Matches held on grass courts and others on courts composed of finely ground red sand. And bananas. Back then, I did not understand. Why bananas, specifically? Films were another story. There was the solitary Rain Man Dustin Hoffman with his unparalleled athletic abilities. Edward Scissorhands Johnny Depp, that wicked Johnny Depp, with his sharp-cutting fingers of flashing silver metal, a machine with the power to love. Scent of a Woman and Al Pacino, always stirring up chaos, shouting, “I am in the dark!” These were part of an era that no one but my generation could properly experience. And then, on the pretext of cost control expe
nses—that is what they said—Dhahran was dropped from the list of available channels. It was an atrocious loss, certainly not compensated for by my ability to beam in Channel 55 from Bahrain or Channel 33 from the Emirates.

  The Cinderella of the Arab screen is one of those images that always accompanies Hassan in my memory. Hiba loved her, too, and put her at the very top of her list of favorites, memorized her songs and knew her films, recorded haphazardly on videotapes. And then there were the poems of Salah Jahin, the popular Egyptian vernacular poet, which Hiba recited, chanting them in imitation of Suad Husni’s style, her Egyptian pronunciation, and the tone of her voice with its tremors and the shroud of tears it seemed to carry. I heard her singing them and I memorized them from her. I remember once, Hassan had just bought new sunglasses, and he began to act up and swagger like a pampered young guy, acting the way he always did whenever he bought something that he really liked. So I began to chant to him.

  Your words to him, they glow,

  But he answers you just so

  Bless his heart, that inscrutable lad

  Masks his face behind glasses if he’s sad

  And how does he live?

  He’s just that way, that’s the way he is

  And how does he shout?

  He’s just that way, that’s the way he is

  And how does he pass you?

  He’s just that way

  And he stops and he says,

  I’m that one, I am,

  I’m that guy, I’m that beau,

  On this block in this town

  I’m the tallest lad!

  Hiba disappeared. To be more accurate, I made her disappear. My choice. Sometimes it is useful to be proactive in organizing your pain, to cut it short rather than letting it remain a stagnant vessel for more pain from others. Hiba was going to disappear in any case, and all I was doing was hastening the appointed time for her disappearance. The Cinderella of the Arab screen had an appointed time, too: she committed suicide, or illness killed her, or fame did it, or her girlfriend, or Jahin’s passing, or the Egyptian Secret Service, or the British police. She died. But Hassan’s memory does not die.

  Hassan’s leaving is the very peak of what I am capable of enduring. It is the high ceiling of pain beneath which all else is indifferent. His leaving is pain, bereavement, the ache of missing someone, rejection, emotional breakdown, the fissuring of the soul, the body’s deterioration and collapse, the reign of absence that you cannot shake, the curse of fear, the savagery of the death endured by the bereaved who is sadly left behind. Death makes everything else an everyday mundane triviality, and makes me look at life with disdain. How can I take life seriously? I funnel half of my questions into a single answer, which is itself a question: So what does it mean in the end, anyway? What does it mean in the end for Hiba to disappear? What does it mean in the end for Dai to say goodbye? What does it mean in the end that I sin? What does it mean in the end that I fail the school year? What does it mean in the end that the winter is cold? What does it mean in the end that Umar’s phone is off? What does it mean in the end? It doesn’t mean a thing, it doesn’t mean anything at all. Life means nothing, my questions mean nothing. Life is itself the nothingness of my convictions, the nullity of my stances, the nonexistence of my existence, the nonexistence of all the others. Everything in its reality is the nonbeing of a being who has faded away. The remains, left to be sensed by him or by the others, are merely the traces of an old fever whose core was afflicted by frostbite.

  A third window—but Umar’s phone shuts it in my face, just when I am in urgent need of using his presence to charge my spent battery. Moments like these take me back to the same old notions. How very exhausting the act (and the fact) of love really is, in whatever shape it comes and under whichever category it is lodged. What factories human relationships are for producing energy, or for depleting it. Need consumes me, though I despise giving in to my needs. I do have that complex—believing that if I could tame my needs and regulate them appropriately, and control their income and outflow, I would be able to manage life without anyone. On my own, in solitude, sufficient unto myself.

  My longing to be independent established itself very early, as early as my first attempts to put on my socks by myself, tie my shoelaces, and sleep without my mother crooning nearby. I splattered my face with food rather than eating with her help, and I stung my eyes with shampoo as I avoided her bathroom supervision. I was always poised to work harder and to repeat my attempts time and time again without her extending a hand to me or guiding me into a particular way of doing things. My illness, too, buttressed my fear of collapse, of reversion to the uncertain steps of a toddler, of my body sinking under someone else’s sway. Old age scares me, too. I am afraid of suddenly having to face paralysis or senility, and being forced to have my needs met and my body cared for by someone whose duty it would become, someone other than me. I pray to God constantly that I may die before I see this dreaded fantasy of mine come true.

  The time for retreat had passed. It was too late, also, for Umar to answer me. I had made a tape of Kazim’s song, “I Am Afraid it Will Rain and You Won’t Be with Me.” On it I wrote, Have I really and truly lost you? I stuffed it into Dai’s abaya bag. One try will not cause any harm, I convinced myself. I did not know which song I should choose. When it came to knowledge of Fairuz, I was still in first grade, as Dai always said to make fun of me; and Dai loved Kazim. Not to mention that we always listened to foreign songs, even in languages of which we didn’t understand a single word. Our tastes merged only in that we despised rock ’n’ roll songs, even if they were by U2. I preferred pop, while she really liked rap and was always listening to Eminem. She laughed when we discussed his dirty pantomimes.

  She sat down next to me on the bus going home. She had gotten on the bus after me. Lifting her face veil, she began staring around at everyone until she came upon me. She edged over to where I sat and asked, Is that seat saved for somebody? I picked up my bag and answered, No, please sit down. We did not say a single word the whole way.

  Did I say, The act of love is exhausting? Then what about the act of desire! An eye to the window and an eye on Dai, and I was split between two opposing longings: one, that the bus would swallow us up into a trip that would never end, where we would have no chance of arriving, even late; or, that the bus would fling me out exactly at my front door. I craved the possibility of our bodies touching, of her fingertip engraving something onto the palm of my hand, either by pure coincidence or intentionally. My nerves would come apart completely, my neuro fluids would zoom around erratically in all directions if even a touch as slight as that were to happen.

  The bus arrived at her stop. She tugged me by the hand. She was already half standing up.

  Get out with me?

  But …

  Yallah, come on!—for my sake?

  What about my mother?

  Give her a phone call later on. Hurry up, the driver is going to scold me and we’ll miss the stop, too.

  I do not know which of us was more insane. I felt acutely shy and embarrassed as soon as I entered her house and her mother greeted me with a dazzling show of welcome. I claimed (lying, and giving Dai some fierce winks all the while surreptitiously so she wouldn’t expose me) that I was fasting. I did not want to crowd them at lunch. It had not been arranged in advance, and Dai’s mother had not prepared for a guest who—according to customary hospitality—would be expected to take half of what was on the table while the rest of the family filled up on half a plateful and on watching the guest eat. Her mother responded, If the noon call to prayer had not already sounded, I would have absolutely insisted that you eat! I answered shyly, Khairha bi-ghairha. Another time, I hope.

  I called my mother to tell her without giving it much thought, even though I knew that she was seriously dubious about Dai. But it was my mother’s usual way to not demand any explanations from me as long as I was outside the house and as long as I called and could tell her that I was
with someone she knew. My mother has that nice quality that makes her sensitive to the limits her children set. Motivated by her self-respecting desire to preserve her children’s images in their friends’ eyes, she does not overstep those limits. Or perhaps it is her certainty about having implanted a dignified pride successfully in her children’s blood.

  Shall I say that the hearts of mothers are testimonies, the places where revelation descends, where inspiration is heard? Are they the voice of God in one of its most brilliant earthly manifestations? I had explained the rapid acceleration in my relationship with Dai to my mother by saying that it was a good fate that Allah had willed for me. Was it not splendid that I had found a friend into whose soul I could melt so easily and fluidly, as if I were a stream of water, and she, a delta? A friend who clapped her hand over my fears and stood with me on firm ground?

  Even an attempt to explain our contradictory and difficult relationship is beyond me. How can safety or security come from someone whose ability to harm you is a fact that you know well? Since you do understand it, does this mean you prepare yourself thoroughly for it? You know it is coming and you are ready for it, but still, will it not be a shock when it hits you? Does putting yourself as close as this to the source of your harm while somehow retaining your sense of reassurance mean that you are comforted or immunized by knowing from where the weapon will be pointed, when the blow hits the vast body of your aching squarely in the gut?

  If only we arrived at birth accompanied by an illustrated guide that we could open and read. If only it would tell us what we need. How do you operate us? How do you shut us off? How do you recharge us? What are the best ways to employ us, to maximize our functioning, and what are the best ways to maintain us so we won’t go bad? If it were possible to have such a thing, I would be grabbing the user’s guide to me and comparing it to Dai’s. Then I would understand something about the enormous hollow that she seemed to have filled in me, even as she opened up an aureole of fear. She stopped the irksome ringing that seemed deeply, permanently etched in my ears, resounding as soon as I tried to exchange hellos or handshakes with anyone. My anxiety would immediately tell me that I was in an unsafe situation, and it would push me to withdraw, to retreat far to the rear, inside the cavity of my heart, after closing my outside doors upon me. What was it that Dai did, what extraordinary miraculous thing did she do, to get me to rely on her enough to smother the frenzy in my blood and the promptings of extreme fright?