The Others

by Siba al-Harez

  Stacked with dishes, the kitchen sink did not look inviting, so I turned toward the bathroom, opened the door, and saw Dai standing there with her friend who wore gray glasses and whose name I had not been able to remember and then had not thought to ask. The two of them were standing exactly in the same pose that she and I had assumed in front of the basin that morning. She was staring at their reflections in the mirror. Her arms encircled her friend’s waist and stretched toward the sink: she was rubbing her palms together beneath the flow of the water. She rested her chin—or more precisely her lips—on her friend’s shoulder. There was nothing in this picture that I did not know. I swung the door shut. The whole thing took no more than half a second but it dug itself deeply into my head, etching caustic furrows and filthy oaths at Dai’s expense, yielding imagined scenes whose beginnings I knew but whose endings I did not fathom.

  Once everyone had finished eating, we headed like one large wave to the water as if we were fly-by-night waifs who hardly ever got the chance to relax and have fun in nice surroundings. The air was electric: laughter and splashing, little tricks and transient touches. And I was fully charged, the tension flooding through me, too strong to dam up. Even the water could not drink it out of me. I had never before attended a gathering like this and so I had no idea what might happen. My expectations were flung as wide open as could be, although so far, I had seen nothing more than a surreptitious kiss, and even that I had witnessed accidentally.

  By prior agreement, Dai was to show absolutely no signs of physical attraction to me. I could not be sure of Dai, though. I had no confidence that she would stick to her word, especially since this was her chance to parade her skills—and she loved to be the one on the dais, immobilized by applause from all sides. More important right now, though, was the doubled sense of revenge she bore toward me. It wasn’t only that I had cut my hair without her permission. I had forgotten her ring. I had taken it off to do my ablutions before prayer, I insisted. And then I had left it on the basin in my bathroom. She saw through my lie, I was sure of it.

  Now I felt sick with disgust at Dai, and if she got near me, it would just work up the demons in my blood. I grabbed my first opportunity to get away. In the pool, on my back, every time I closed my eyes I could sense the pool roofing about to collapse onto me: it would only take a second to squash me flat as the floor. And then, the moment my eyes opened in fright to stare at the ceiling, I would feel overwhelmed by how very far away it was, imposingly high above me, and how I was so very alone far below, deafened and silenced by the clamor around me, just all alone, so completely isolated. It was only my sense of hearing that let me know where I was and where I was heading, and all I could hang onto was intuition in figuring out whether I had reached the edge of the pool and should push off in the opposite direction.

  I closed my eyes, struggling hard to get the better of my sense of falling, of collapse, of my body bruised and crushed. I imagined myself as a mote that the current was pulling into the depths. And then I was swelling up like a kernel of popcorn and blocking the opening of the pool’s drain, and this way, the water could not swallow me.

  Dai took me by surprise, laying her hand on me and whispering, The honey—where’d it go? Her morning kiss and her sweetness now were gestures that made my heart tickle, so rarely did Dai act like this with me. She pushed her fingernail into my palm and scratched, lightly, and then, pointing to the visible red line that her nail had left behind, said, Look, your skin has drunk its fill of water and now it’s really soft and fine.

  She drew me with her—we sat on the edge of the pool. She didn’t leave any space between us, and her hand went around my middle. We were whispering because anything anyone said, next to the pool, produced an echo. She asked me whether this excursion we had planned was to my liking. And did the girls please me, and the lunch, and the swimming pool? I was answering, yes, yes, and then, it was sudden, she moved away from me, far enough so that she could look into my eyes, and so my fingers went caressing the dimples in her cheeks, which is what I always do when I’m longing for her. She backed off and said, And me?

  You what?

  Do I please you?

  Oh yes, always!

  Always always?

  Sometimes not.

  Then she was right there again, very close beside me, exactly like in those moments when she is about to take my ear between her lips, and she delivered me the shock which I did not take in.

  I love you.

  After five months, the total sum of my acquaintance with her, our relationship had begun to take on its own character, with the kind of struggle only intense closeness creates, the summits of longing, the particular stupidities unique to us, the ferocity of it, and the way it could shake my life to the core and completely alter the person I was. Throughout the whole of this time, we had never once said to each other, I love you. I can almost, almost believe that it was never there in any of the plans or expectations that either of us had; it was so not there that I would not have dared to put it on the list of possibilities that I was hoping or waiting for. It was, simply put, the thing that could not be said, and likely, it was the dreaded phrase desired by no one. From the start, talking about our feelings was not in the picture. And only now do I realize that we actually said very little to one another. Considering how long I had known Dai, there was a lot that I did not know about her. About the human being in her, about her dreams and hopes and fears, the projects she would have in mind, her desires and her past. Right from the start, it had been the body that had steered our relationship, and the body remained alone under the spotlight, unaccompanied by any supporting actors.

  So I smiled.

  That grin was utterly the stupidest reaction I could have come up with when faced with an I love you that arrived like a belated award of merit. I needed to rework my response very fast, and so I hauled her away from the swimming pool. I did not wait for us to be alone somewhere empty and enclosed, though. I pushed her back against the wall, exactly as she does each time I visit her. At the door to her room, she blocked me so that I couldn’t move. Then I caught her lips, breaking up a half sentence she was about to finish, my head going round and round as we fell dizzily into a prolonged kiss. A very long kiss.

  I told myself that suddenly jumping for once over my red line—after I had just squandered an entire morning sketching out that line with her and convincing her that it was necessary—would not mean permanently violating it. One kiss would not kill me. Anyway, what I was getting in return from her was greater than any loss I could possibly have. I wasn’t intending anything more than a kiss that would barely nibble her lips. But my gratitude and the way she melted like sugar in my mouth hadn’t together pushed me far beyond. Swallowed up in her, I was brought back into the world only by the exclamation My eyes! uttered in a clammy voice carried along on footsteps that had just gone by on the way to the pool. I heard a low murmuring and then an explosion of laughter.

  My face must have gone completely crimson. Opposite me, Dai was totally flustered, I could tell. My reckonings had not been at all misplaced. Dai felt proud of me but she was not interested in showing her pride at my expense. That was an enormous distinction. Of course, I could not overlook the satisfaction she took in herself. She was the one who taught me how to draw on my own store of cunning, after all, not to mention how to pass my clever observations to others without having to snap my fingers to get their attention, and ruining the effect.

  I hate performing roles for free, though. That is what I had not given any thought to, when it came to kissing Dai, which was what put me directly under the hot spotlight of curiosity. It wasn’t the kiss; it was me as a new arrival, an unanticipated and unknown element. It was my being fresh and untried; it was also that I was off limits. And the kiss which could have easily been taken for insolent behavior or a cheap attempt to get some attention was taken instead as a first step toward getting inside the mystery of me and undoing my own reticence. Then I thought, It may wel
l be that everything Dai has told me about this world of hers is a pure lie, and if so, I have fallen into the trap made up of her lies, I have crashed through unwritten boundaries, and concocted unacceptable roles, but all without any understanding of what I was doing.

  Dareen winked at me from behind her friend’s shoulder. She stood up from the poolside and asked who wanted to help her out in the kitchen. No one responded, and then I caught on to the little conspiracy in which she was including me and I volunteered. I weighed up the two sides of the balance in a matter of seconds. Yes, there was no doubt that I would stir up Dai’s anger and jealousy; but I would get to know Dareen and her way of thinking, at least a little. It was well worth the attempt and it also meant I would buy some time away from any attention I might be getting, especially if it was clouded by greediness or envy or mannered behavior toward me. I would remove myself too, I hoped, from any disgust anyone might be feeling at my bad behavior.

  When I got up from where Dai and I sat and turned my back to her, she pinched my bottom. I all but turned and slapped her. With a single stupid and mean move, she had just blasted apart all that had happened the moment before. She had crushed my desire to love her, torpedoed the pure memory of that I love you instant, done away with the flash of absolute contentment granted me by that moment between us. What I felt was something that went far beyond anger and disgust and nausea and feelings of inadequacy or lowness. What I felt eclipsed anything bad I had ever felt toward Dai in the past. What I felt exceeded my powers of explanation and my ability to respond. And so I did not turn in the direction of that pinch; I did not slap her, I did not spit at her or kick her or push her into the water and force her head beneath the surface until she drowned. These images went through my head, but that is as far as it went.

  I asked Dareen’s leave to give me some time to dry off and change my clothes, and she said she would do the same. I went into one of the bathroom cubicles adjoining the pool. I squatted, letting the heaviness of my body slump over my feet. I was a pair of legs pressed together, arms encircling them, my bowed head above. Like a clock pendulum, my body swung back and forth, back and forth.

  In the film Seven, as Kevin Spacey is arranging murders that echo the seven deadly sins, he strips off the skin on his fingertips to rid himself of fingerprints. Without knowing for certain whether or not it was even painful, now I saw this as a truly appropriate punishment for Dai. More than a punishment: the only hell I could find that was truly worthy of her. I would skin those two hands that had moved across my body, strip her fingerprints from her, strip away the possibility of solidity, of always being there; strip away that soiling presence. Strip away any possibility of her passing across me, which meant the possibility of her very existence. I would banish her from me. If I did this, I would be free of her. If only I could do this.

  I followed Dareen into the kitchen. We stood side by side in front of the basin and I began to wash the dishes in soapy water while she rinsed them. I don’t know exactly how we began talking. What I do know is that we were in high spirits. She was telling me about yesterday’s dreams, a mixture of fantasia and legend and action films. She had an appealing way of pronouncing her words; her s seemed always on the point of timid flight and her r sort of slithered across her tongue. She left a second’s silence after every sentence that deserved reflection, and then resumed with a little Naam, naam—Yes, oh yes—before she went on to the next thought. What also truly struck me was how vivid the scenery of her memory was. As she spoke, I seemed to have a movie opening before me, a film that offered me the entire stretch between her eyes and the very limits of human vision. It ushered me into the magical captivity of her remarkable screen, to the point where I was practically reacting to everything exactly as she had done, even though it was she, and not me, who had seen those images.

  We awoke. When I say we awoke I mean it literally. We woke up from the bewitching trance of words, from the honey sweetness of dreams, to an electric shock that flew from her bare forearm to mine. We both caught our breath and stared, blinded by this touch, our senses, our breathing, stolen away. Staring through the window at some distant point, she whispered, I want to kiss you. I did not say a word. She took my hand, pulled me to a door that opened into a little room off the kitchen and slammed the door behind us, and suddenly we were in an intense kiss, our hands moving freely beyond our control, our breaths short and sharp. I kissed her and kissed her and kissed her, and I moved downward to her neck and then to her chest. I was in such frenzy that I could not be sure which one of us had asked and which one had given. She followed my lead, her body yielding, and the way she responded to my crazed kisses ground my nerves to nothing. She was so delicious that I didn’t take my lips away until I had used up every bit of air that I had stored away. Yikhrab baytik!Jnnantiini! I said in a sloppy voice. Go to hell! You’ve made me crazy! She laughed, the sound of it like a hot lick across me, pumping into my blood an unstoppably willful desire for more madness.

  What spoiled our moment was an uproar outside. Dareen put her hand over my mouth and plastered her cheek to mine as she listened hard to the screaming. From the smell of the place, its stagnant feel and the dust, I figured that we were in a storage room: in the past five minutes, I had not noticed the surroundings. It was very small, so cramped that when Dareen had rushed onto me my back had crunched up against the metal shelves. I did up the buttons I had opened down her blouse, straightened my own blouse and patted at my hair, and then kissed her instead of saying thank you. She went out ahead of me. After making sure that no one was in the kitchen, she called me to come out. She laughed once more and it made me want her all over again.

  Haifaa and Ashwaq are fighting.

  About what?

  They’re always like that. Give them a few minutes and they’ll calm down.

  We went back to the sink. I noticed the barely perceptible love bite I had left above her breast. I told her to button her blouse over it and she said she didn’t care; her friend didn’t say no to things like this. Basically, their relationship was falling apart, and anyway, from the beginning it had been an open relationship. She had not made that rule, and it wasn’t the way she had wanted things to be, so now let her friend swallow the results of her own decisions. She let me know that, starting right now, she intended to see their relationship off to its final resting place. For the first time, I was hearing expressions like this: open relationship. And I suddenly understood why Dai had been treating me as if I were a child who had not learned her lessons yet, and she was the one who had taken on the task of teaching me!

  Dai will kill me! I said.

  Dareen’s face took on a different expression, shaded with regret.

  It wasn’t your fault, I added.

  Do you regret it?

  No way!

  Her face lit up again.

  The shouting faded away gradually until all was quiet. She grabbed me mischievously and said, Come on. We tiptoed toward the room bordering the kitchen and pressed our ears against the door. We heard the sounds of crying, excuses and pleas, breaths sliced short by longing. We went back to our tasks in the kitchen. We got the dessert ready to go, served it onto plates and carried them on two trays to the sitting room where we had eaten our meal. She let everyone know that dessert was ready.

  We all re-gathered. As Haifaa and Ashwaq showed their faces, Dareen and I both giggled, though we swallowed our laughter as quickly as we could. Dai had sat down beside me. She began to grill me about every moment I had spent in Dareen’s company. I answered her casually, with no show of concern, hoping to put her off track. Her finicky questions made me want to scream: the only thing she neglected to ask was the color of the sponge I had used to wash the dishes, and since she didn’t ask me about that I told her voluntarily. Dareen broke into our conversation with wicked smoothness, demanding my phone number. I began repeating the numbers but she was scrabbling around in her bag. She looked up at me and said, I don’t have any paper, and then got to her fe
et very quickly, before she could be waylaid by some offer of a piece or two of paper. She sat down squarely in front of us, leaning against Dai’s legs and putting her left hand in my lap. She handed me her pen so that I could write my number directly onto her skin. I could feel a coming storm: Dai would explode in anger at the very moment I would erupt in malicious satisfaction and Dareen would blow up in ecstasy.

  As evening came, after prayer time, Husna brought out a massive tape recorder. She plugged it in, turned out the light, and tried out several tapes. I couldn’t make out what they were; I must not have heard any of them before. Almost everyone stood up and readied themselves to dance, swaying and bending as though they had to warm up their hips and heat up their appetites. This was surely a recurring ritual, I thought, but it was one in which I had no experience. At first it all looked quite abstract, but the dance steps quickly assumed a more shocking definition.

  Just then, I had an image in my mind of Umar saying,Here’s all you have to do—just let your spirit go, and free your body. Or maybe it was the opposite, I’m not sure. Crazy Umar finds a philosophy for everything that makes whatever it is simple. I would never know whether these ideas were the product of original thinking, or mostly a matter of words carefully crafted in advance, or whether he was just making it up as he went along according to the needs of the moment. Or was this philosophy of his a truth bestowed on everyone, like the aphorisms of the famous medieval writer al-Jahiz, which people might encounter anytime? But since I am not someone who is particularly interested in staring at the middle of the road as she walks along, I don’t stumble over meaningful and awesome notions such as this.