by Dima Wannous
ALSO BY DIMA WANNOUS
Details
The Chair
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
English translation copyright © 2020 by Elisabeth Jaquette
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in Beirut as Al khaifoun by Dar al-Adab, Lebanon, in 2017. Copyright © 2017 by Dima Wannous. This translation originally published in Great Britain by Harvill Secker, an imprint of Vintage Publishing, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., London, in 2020.
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Knopf, Borzoi Books and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Wannous, Dima, [date] author. | Jaquette, Elisabeth, translator.
Title: The frightened ones : a novel / Dima Wannous ; translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette.
Other titles: Khaifoun. English
Identifiers: LCCN 2019055958 (print) | LCCN 2019055959 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525655138 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525655145 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PJ7970.A58 K4813 2020 (print) | LCC PJ7970.A58 (ebook) | DDC 892.7/37—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019055958
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019055959
Ebook ISBN 9780525655145
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover images: (woman) Butsaya / iStock; (Syrian landscape) Vyacheslav Argenberg / Moment; both Getty Images
Cover design by Jenny Carrow
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Contents
Cover
Also by Dima Wannous
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
The Frightened Ones
A Note About the Author
For Ibrahim
Exactly fifteen years ago I was sitting in Kamil’s office.
(Kamil, are you reading this now? Does the number fifteen ring a bell? Fifteen years, Kamil—most people would say all these years. Though you, in my dreams, talk about just four and a half years as all these years…)
I was sitting in Kamil’s really tiny waiting room, which stretched and swelled to fit dozens of patients. A few people came for appointments they’d made weeks before, or even earlier, but most came from outside Damascus without having booked. They sat on chairs scattered around the room and spilled onto the narrow steps outside. I smoked and watched them. The secretary, Leila, who was unusually sweet, was reading some lectures she’d printed out, studying diligently for her exams. Every so often, she’d steal a glance at me and smile.
Leila. She probably had things on her mind, even while she was so kind to everyone: a person can be both troubled and sweet. She was young, working her way through college, supporting her family, which suffered like so many others. When Leila’s father died, her mother came down with all kinds of health problems. She’d been an active woman, and pretty, flitting through life with her svelte fifty-something body. Then her husband passed away and she began to suffer from high blood pressure, diabetes, kidney disease and hypothyroidism. She became a limp, bedridden thing. Leila’s divorcée sister and her two-year-old daughter lived with them; there was also a brother, but he had lost his mind years earlier.
What had happened was that at the age of twenty-one he fell in love with a student at the College of Fine Arts. (That’s where I’d studied too.) The girl he admired was the daughter of a low-ranking officer from the Mezzeh 86 neighbourhood. One day another boy, whose father was an intelligence officer, happened to see this same girl at college. Leila didn’t tell me which agency the father worked for, that part wasn’t important: the point was that the boy fell for her too, and wanted to take her on a date to his father’s “rest stop.” (That’s what kids of government officials call the gardens on the edge of Damascus reserved for high-ranking officers. Somewhere they can go in their free time, and spend days off with their families.) She turned him down: by this point she and Leila’s brother were dating. Then one morning Leila’s brother was kidnapped in the street. He disappeared for a whole week and returned an empty shell. “They hung him from his feet for days, left him upside down, until his mind poured out, to the last drop,” she told me. I remember the phrase too well. Leila told me all this one time when no one was in the waiting room except us. She said her brother came back without his mind. From then on, he shut himself in his room. He’d sit next to the open window, looking out onto the crowded street in Masaken Barzeh and yelling at people. “Have you seen Hafez al-Assad?” he’d ask them. “If you see him, tell him I won’t leave my room until he comes to visit in person.” No one paid any attention. Crazy. Lost his mind. He’d urinate out the window and point his penis directly at whoever was passing, oblivious to their insults or swearing.
Leila spent her days in that tiny waiting room, around people not dissimilar to her brother in one way or another. They had stories just as strange as his. She studied, scheduled appointments, drank Nescafé with milk and smoked voraciously. Then she went home to care for her weak, bedridden mother, her divorced only sister, her niece, and her brother, who was a prisoner to his room and his madness. I often watched Leila and considered her sweet disposition, which radiated from her eyes, despite everything around her. I imagined how hard it must be for someone to act as mother, father, doctor and husband, and keep it all together. You’d think that their expression would show the strain of what they have to carry, crushed one minute, resilient the next. That their eyes might glaze over callously, then glow with sudden tenderness. But not Leila.
I sat scanning each of the people in the waiting room. A young man in his early thirties arrived. Tall. Broad shoulders. Strong features, as if they’d been drawn or even sculpted on his face. Thick hair, jet black. He had a broad chest, and I envied him his ribcage, that it could expand to hold so much air. (I didn’t feel real jealousy then, not in that first brief encounter. That feeling wouldn’t come until we’d got to know each other better.) You see, I was desperately afraid of suffocating, terrified by the thought of the air around me running out. Unable to take in any more, I’d die of asphyxiation while this man watched and took deep breaths to fill his own lungs, which were more spacious than those of ordinary people. Our ribcages have atrophied. Even at their best, they arch no further than our stomachs.
I didn’t particularly notice his muscles that day, how firm, sinuous and prominent they were. (When he flexed, you could see that he was obsessed with each one individually, that he’d worked to develop each muscle in isolation. That first day, most of this remained hidden under his heavy winter clothes.) But at one point he rolled up his sleeves and bared his forearms, and when I glanced down at them, they were so solid. I’m crazy about the area between the wrist and the elbow. That short stretch of skin sends me somewhere so expansive there’s always enough space, and enough oxygen. I’m enamoured of bones. Especially a body with prominent bones. I’m never drawn to people whose bones are hidden beneath soft flesh: I hunt for bulges on hands, wrists and throats, the base of the neck, the collarbone—the collarbone? How can such an unwieldy word invoke such a warm, tender spot?
When he sat down and bared his forearms I saw the contours of his wrist bones, under soft skin lightly covered with black hair. I dropped my gaze to his fee
t. Jeans, hitched up a bit because he’d crossed one leg over the other. Between the top of one trainer and the bottom of his jeans another bone budded. There was no clear or rational explanation for my obsession with bones. (I didn’t tell Kamil that I love bones more than anything else.)
This man and all his bones sat in a metal chair covered with cheap brown leather. I looked at him. He didn’t notice me. To be fair, he didn’t seem to notice anyone. He lit a cigarette and went to ash it on the ground; Leila glanced at him, surprised.
“There’s an ashtray on the table in front of you,” she said softly, cutting through the reverie he was drowning in. (Thoughts as deep as the sea, the sea I later learned he feared.)
His eyes widened but he didn’t apologise. He just looked to the left, at the chipped ashtray, and stubbed out his cigarette, ignoring the ashes he’d purposefully let fall. He didn’t bend down to clean the floor but behaved as if he were on the street or in the park, where sooner or later a breeze would come to do the job. As if Leila weren’t there. He didn’t seem to consider that she’d be the one to sweep up his mess a few minutes later.
I went in for my appointment with Kamil. The whole time I spoke with him, it felt as if the man in the waiting room were listening to my life flowing out onto the pages of the little notebook on Kamil’s desk, where he recorded his incomprehensible symbols. I felt a heavy sadness that day. I’d planned to tell Kamil about a strange dream from the night before, but I changed my mind. (Was the stranger with prominent bones, sitting on the other side of the thin wooden door, the reason why?) I didn’t tell Kamil that in my dream I’d been sitting on the roof of an old low building in Damascus. The moon was full. I sat on the edge, and wasn’t worried about falling. I looked at the moon and was glad it was full, which surprised me, because I don’t usually like the full moon. I don’t like things that are round, finished or whole. I like things lacking: absence makes me feel complete. But that night, in my dream, I was glad about the full harvest moon, round as a piece of flatbread. It was whole, my soul was whole; the moon felt like a mirror, reflecting how full and complete I am. (I usually punish myself obsessively for mistakes I may or may not have made, blame myself for things that are wrong with the world, hold myself partially responsible. Maybe just because I exist? Does my simple presence in this strange time make me responsible for some of its catastrophes?) Then, suddenly, in my dream, my heart dropped. Why would it not? The moon fell to the earth and I felt my heart tumble down with it. The loss was painful. Palpable. I saw a VW Beetle driving through the sky. Without the moon, the night was so dark. A man was at the wheel, and his wife was sitting next to him. I didn’t know for sure she was his wife, but the resignation on her face made me think so. Do all married people look so resigned? The man driving his car through the sky was in his sixties, and his wife was about the same. But I didn’t tell Kamil about my dream. I fumbled and lost the desire to speak. Kamil pressed me, questioned me, tried to tease words from my mouth, and all the while I thought about the man sitting outside. As I left Kamil’s office, I looked the man in the eye. He was lost in thought. He looked at me, but absently, as if he saw the waiting-room door open and close but not anyone walking through it.
Several weeks after that brief encounter, I saw him in the waiting room again. His appointment was right before mine. When he left, I went in. After I was done, I said goodbye to Leila and went down the long narrow staircase. I was surprised to see him sitting on the front step of the building. As I passed, I said hello. He looked at me with that same vague expression.
“I’ve been waiting for you for fifty minutes,” he said. “Do you want to get a cup of coffee?”
I nodded.
We walked together, in no particular direction and without saying a word, all the way to Hamra Street, then to Shalaan, and then to the Cham Palace Hotel, where he paused and entered without asking if I would rather go there or somewhere else. I followed him in. He chose the table next to the window, and I sat down across from him.
He called the waiter over and said without hesitation, “Bring me a beer—an Almaza, really cold.” He didn’t ask what I wanted to drink.
The waiter glanced at me expectantly. “A cup of coffee,” I said.
The man hadn’t looked at me yet: he’d been busy staring at people walking by outside. I felt uneasy. What am I doing here with this strange man with prominent bones? I wondered. I didn’t even know his name and it felt strange to ask. How had I agreed to go out with a man whose name I didn’t know? He hadn’t asked mine either—maybe he didn’t care.
He lit a cigarette. He had an odd way of smoking. He took a deep drag, exhaled a breath of smoke, and then sucked it in again. I stared at the smoke he was breathing out and in: he didn’t lose a single puff. He seemed confident in his solid, firm body, as if he were dense and filled with his self, the way I felt in the dream I hadn’t mentioned to Kamil. I wondered why he was seeing Kamil. Was it to build this self-confidence? Had Kamil made him the person he was now? He raised his glass to his lips and drank with an air of purpose. This made him seem even more confident. I sipped my lukewarm coffee; the taste made me queasy. I felt tension rise to my head. Cold sweat beaded my face. My heartbeat began its dreaded gallop, pounding my chest, through my veins, up my neck; I snapped open my purse and began searching frantically for the bottle of Xanax. I broke off half a tablet and placed it under my tongue, the way Kamil had advised me to do when I had intense flashes of anxiety. The tablet, or rather half of it, dissolved and I took a sip of water.
The man whose name I still didn’t know noticed what I was doing. He saw me frantically reach into my purse, pull out a bottle, swallow half a tablet of something he didn’t recognise and take a sip of water. He looked at me. He fixed his gaze on me with his usual calm, though back then, fifteen years ago, I wasn’t used to his composure. His expression didn’t change at all. It didn’t contract or expand; he wasn’t surprised, or curious about my sudden panic. That made the half a Xanax work faster. (When I feel like that, questions only increase my unease: having to explain, to justify, to respond, feels absurd and further heightens my anxiety.) The man downed the last drop of beer and asked for the check, paid the bill and abruptly stood.
“Thanks for coming out with me,” he said. “I’m sure we’ll see each other again. Glad to have met you.”
And then he left, as if he’d never been there at all. I wondered why he was sure we’d see each other again. What made him so certain? And he was glad to have met me! Could he really say we’d met? We hadn’t even spoken. He drank his beer and I sipped my warmish, nauseating coffee, and then he went. Did he mean we’d sit together again, drinking beer and coffee? Did he miss having someone next to him while he finished a beer?
A few weeks later, it did all happen again. I left Kamil’s office and found the man sitting on the front steps, smoking. “Coffee?” he asked. I thought about how he’d invited me for a cup of coffee and then ordered a beer. He’d abridged his invitation this time, an enquiry with a question mark suspended in the air. I could see it flying around his head, attached to a string of letters jumbled on top of each other, obscuring one another. I nodded, agreeing reluctantly, and started walking; he followed me. Almost immediately I stopped.
“I don’t like the café at the Cham Palace Hotel,” I told him.
“Where would you rather go?” he asked.
“The Marmar,” I said swiftly.
He turned to me without missing a beat and before I could even begin to back-pedal he said, “OK.”
I don’t know why I suggested a bar. Was it to be clear from the start? Was it because he had invited me for coffee again, even though he planned on ordering beer? The Marmar was no place for a coffee.
So there we were, standing on the kerb in front of Kamil’s office. It was a little after seven. Women wandered past with children in tow, and street vendors spread their Chinese wares down the lo
ng pavement in al-Jisr al-Abyad. The commotion made me anxious and I hurried to stop a taxi. There was a lot of traffic, so I walked a few metres in search of an empty cab while he waited. Several minutes passed before we found one. I got in the back seat and he climbed in next to me: I thought that was weird. (Usually, men sit up front, next to the driver. For him to sit in the back, with me, was something most taxi drivers frown at. They take it as an insult to their masculinity, or at the very least they see it as a slight to the passenger’s masculinity for him to sit in the back next to a woman.) Neither of us moved so I told the driver, “Bab Touma, please,” and the man whose name I still didn’t know slipped his hand into mine. He held my hand and gazed out the window, disinterestedly, not even caring to look into my eyes. All I could think of was how much I liked his hands. His lovely fingers were holding mine, and I tried not to ruin the moment but surrendered my hand to his; he grasped it firmly, so it wouldn’t slip away. His hand was warm. Mine was cold, making his seem even warmer by comparison. Was his heart cold? (My mother always says, “Cold hands, warm heart.” I’ve never heard her say the reverse.)
I didn’t tell Leila that we went out several times. I don’t think he told her either; he didn’t have a good relationship with her in any case, not since he had ashed his cigarette on the floor. He never asked me why I was seeing Kamil. And I didn’t ask him. We went out once a month at first, then every two weeks, and eventually not a week went by without us meeting up at least once. I learned his name: Naseem. I found out he was a writer too. I searched all the bookshops I knew and even the ones I didn’t for the books he’d written, but I couldn’t find a single one. Even the keenest booksellers hadn’t heard of him, and in those days you couldn’t search for something on Google. Our lives were closed; it was incredibly boring. I told Naseem I couldn’t find any of his books, and he smiled. (It wasn’t easy to make him smile, not at all: his lips parted with effort, self-consciously, and he didn’t relax until he’d closed them.) Later, I found out that his books were published under a pseudonym.