The Frightened Ones

by Dima Wannous

  I went into Naseem’s house. I turned on all the lights, even though it was morning, and went into the little kitchen, heated up some water and made a small pot of coffee. When I pulled back the curtains on an impulse, a single beam of light entered, just like in my dream. I sat in the sofa’s embrace, exactly where a few hours earlier, in my dream, I’d sat in Naseem’s embrace. I smoked a cigarette and drank my coffee very slowly. That languor made me feel yet again as if I didn’t exist, as if I had no control over myself. It was a sign. Had I taken half a tablet just now? At nine thirty in the morning? Wasn’t that rather early? Did time mean anything? I took out a tablet and broke it with my teeth so I could swallow half of it, or maybe a bit more than half. (Xanax wasn’t sold in pharmacies any more; it had become much harder to import things. Now pharmacies only stocked Pazolam, which had the same ingredients as Alprazolam, or Xanax, so the only difference between it and Xanax was that Pazolam tablets were round, not oval-shaped, and they were thicker and denser, so they weren’t easy to break by hand. Pazolam also took longer to dissolve. With Xanax, I could put a tablet under my tongue, let it soften, then swallow some water, and it would rush through my bloodstream and flow up to my brain. Not with Pazolam. This meant I had to wait longer for it to take effect.)

  I rested my head on the back of the sofa and closed my eyes. My longing for Naseem welled up; I felt my body hum with the desire to hold him and drink in his fresh, familiar scent. Then I got up and crept into his room. I opened the drawer and took out the photographs. I began ripping them up, one at a time, keeping only the women’s eyes. Then I threw out all the scraps, and took just the eyes home with me. It was the first piece of art I’d painted in years, though it was not a painting in the strict sense of the word. I pasted the eyes next to each other in a collage on the yellowing canvas, one eye emerging from another. I took a picture and texted it to Naseem. He opened it. He spent a long time looking at it. Then, silence.

  * * *

  —

  At my next appointment with Kamil, there were so many things I intended to tell him but didn’t. I wanted to tell him that there were no men in my life any more, just like Salma. My father died young, Fouad disappeared and Naseem left the country. I was left alone with my mother, just like Salma was left alone with hers. I wanted to ask him to open one of his chilled metal drawers and take out her file, and I wanted him to finish piecing me together again.

  I wanted to ask him why Salma was free, while I was still confined to his office, to my qualms and pain, to this overwhelming grief that sought shelter in my soul, and in which my soul in turn took refuge. What little detail enabled her to orbit the space of her problems without turning to Kamil and asking him to hold her hand as she crossed from one bank to the other? Like me, was she in love with an imaginary man?

  I didn’t say any of this to Kamil…but I did emerge from his office all in one piece. Quite literally. My hands didn’t feel separate from my body, and nor did my legs or my head or my hair. I was a single slab of being…so how could I walk? How could one piece of flesh move its feet or take a step? I don’t remember how I got home. I just remember feeling viciously hot, enough to scald the sun itself. I took a bag of ice and a bottle of water from the freezer, lay down on my bed and put the bottle between my legs and the bag on my head. I rocked with tears as they streamed from my eyes. I didn’t know whether I was shaking from the cold or from my tears…either way, it didn’t matter.

  I packed in a small bag everything I would need for two days. I told my mother that an art space in Beirut wanted to put on a show about Syria, and had invited me there to discuss the project and the possibility of me participating in a joint exhibition. My mother glanced at me without interest. “An exhibition about Syria?” she said sarcastically. I didn’t respond. What did she want? For me to pick up a weapon, go out into the streets and fight alongside the rest? And if I were killed, would my mother be able to handle losing her brother, husband, son—and daughter too? Was there room in her heart for more grief? I didn’t respond. I kissed her on the forehead and left.

  We passed through all the hastily erected checkpoints before the official border. I had my ID card, but didn’t need to show it. I used my passport, which had been issued in Damascus. My father had wanted to change the residence on our family’s official ID cards to Damascus, but it would have taken a miracle, given my mother’s feelings on the matter. She said she’d put up with enough of his cowardice; she had abandoned her family in Hama to run away with him and their children, and this was the last straw. She made him choose between a Damascus ID and his marriage. And so officially, we were still residents of Hama.

  I didn’t show my ID. I looked directly at the officer as he stared at my passport for a long time. He flipped through it from right to left, and then back again. I don’t know what he was looking for; I didn’t have any visas, and with the exception of a few old stamps from trips to Beirut, the pages weren’t marked. There were four of us in the shared taxi and he tossed our passports back at us all: a woman in her sixties, her twenty-something daughter, a young man in his thirties and me.

  It had been gravely silent the whole way from Damascus to the Lebanese border, but as soon as we crossed, conversation filled the little car. We were like statues that had just gained the ability to speak. The old woman peppered me with questions about why I was visiting Beirut, where I lived in Damascus and current affairs. The man in his thirties sat next to the driver and joined the conversation too, commenting about his job in Beirut as a construction worker, and how he still couldn’t bring his wife and kids to Lebanon. At one point the woman, who was veiled, said that she’d advised her daughter to stop wearing a headscarf. There were hardly any men in Damascus any more, she said; even clothing shops and corner stores were run by women.

  We arrived at one in the afternoon. I hadn’t been to Beirut in years. I asked the driver to take me to a hotel on Hamra Street, somewhere cheap but clean. The traffic was suffocating, and I had taken half a tablet before we reached the Syrian–Lebanese border. I took the other half as we descended the winding road, when Beirut appeared in the distance, draped in twilight and cloaked in mist, as if it were a dream, or as if I were. I felt fairly calm, despite the traffic and honking.

  The driver parked near the entrance of a dreary-looking hotel, and told me it was clean and cheap. I got out of the car and entered with steady steps, arriving to meet myself. A young man greeted me and asked for my passport. He showed me the first floor, where breakfast was served, and told me it started at six and ended at ten. He said that if I had any guests, they’d be required to show their ID for security purposes. He pointed out an old, dimly lit elevator. As the elevator rose, my heart began to gallop in my chest. I went up to my room on the third floor. Small, white walls, a balcony facing another building. Thick, heavy curtains were draped across the windows and balcony door, concealing the residents across the road from view. I went to the little bathroom and began filling the tub with warm water. I undressed and tossed my clothes aside, stepped in and let the water rise until it covered my shoulders and lapped at my chin. I let my body go limp. Being submerged up to my neck made me feel as though I couldn’t breathe, so I eased myself gently up. I moved my hands around under the water, playing with the sense of space. Then I cried and cried.

  I don’t know how, but in that rare moment of relaxation, in a bathtub in a cheap, strange hotel in the middle of Beirut’s crowded Hamra Street, my father appeared. Where did he come from, to gaze down at me so tenderly? I longed for another moment with him. Love filled each cell of my body, blossoming from every pore opening in the warm salty water. Maybe after advertising their proximity to the sea, hotels in Beirut felt obliged to fill their tanks with salt water? My father gazed down at me sitting submerged up to my chest. A desire raced through me to hug him, bury myself in his chest, return to him. This last part—the need to return—surprised me, as if he, and not my mother, ha
d carried me inside him for nine whole months. As if I were still there, curled up in solitude. I missed going back to him and hiding within him; I don’t know where exactly, but in him, inside him. Couldn’t I sense his interior from the outside? Why not? I could hardly think of him without the need to feel his internal life.

  He loved me. He really did. Of course, I know that every father loves his daughter, but he loved me more than average. My mother always said that from the time she was pregnant with Fouad, he had been waiting for me to be born. He’d wanted a daughter to name Suleima. My mother used to tease me, saying he would have been waiting for me even if she’d been pregnant dozens of times; even if she’d given birth to other daughters, he would still have been waiting for me! I didn’t understand how he could have been waiting for someone he didn’t know. He must have wanted a daughter, any daughter. My mother would look up, let out a sigh and say, with a degree of annoyance, “No…no…he was your guardian. Yours.” I sensed a grudge behind her words. As if I were part of her long-standing disappointment in him. As if I had been his accomplice in the “bitter times” she’d lived through with him.

  I still don’t truly understand what she meant by the phrase. I never saw him shout at her, begrudge her for snapping at him, get annoyed or complain…quite the contrary. I was impressed by his ability to bear her ever-present resentment, which steadily built to the point of shouted abuse. The most he ever reacted was by slipping away from the house to his clinic or a coffee shop. I never even heard him sigh or roll his eyes in front of her. He respected and loved her. He was aware of her anger, and absorbed her pain for her brother and family. He always praised her in front of their friends, and I once heard him tell them how he envied her rare courage and clear perspective. He said he would have been lost without those traits. I didn’t understand what she meant by “bitter times” or her “tormented life” with him, as she described it on countless occasions.

  (I miss him now more than I ever did before. Every time I think of Naseem, I miss him more. The more present Naseem feels, the further Baba recedes.)

  My father wasn’t handsome when I was a child, but he suddenly became handsome around the time I turned twenty. Of course, it wasn’t that straightforward. He hadn’t been handsome insofar as I hadn’t paid attention to his looks. My mother dominated our view, my brother’s and mine, always hovering around our father, so she was all we noticed. Fouad and I paid attention to her slender body, her lissomness, her fine posture and how effortlessly she held her head high, as if she had been born that way. We noticed her grace, and the brand-name clothes she bought from a high-end shop in Damascus that sold European imports. We paid attention to her leather shoes dyed in fashionable colours, and the short skirts that revealed her slender, stockinged legs.

  We never noticed any details about my father, his clothing or shoes…until one day I discovered that he was handsome. He had attractive, sharply defined features. His eyes held a gentle magnanimity, as if his pupils were swimming in a still, calm lake. His hair was thick and soft, far from the style of the fifties or sixties. His clothing was youthful and sharp. He had a slender, almost svelte body. I realised that his allure was buried deep, under layers of worry as dense as bedrock. Yes. His charm wasn’t forced, or even readily visible. It took effort to reveal this side of him, and my father didn’t possess the strength to show himself as he was, not in the slightest, only how my mother wanted him to be.

  When I realised this, I felt something like hatred towards her. I felt as if she’d kept me away from his real self, as if she’d squandered years in which I could have ladled him up, gulped him down and filled myself with him. I wouldn’t have been left to love someone I could only imagine; my memory wouldn’t need to borrow from others his features, the way he smelled, and the feel of his skin and bones beneath my fingers, in order to love him. I would have been able to release myself to a man whose every scent I knew, whose voice, whether timid or brave, was familiar. My mother kept me from him, and from having my fill of him.

  This didn’t mean I was left empty. He constantly brushed the walls of my soul, precisely because he was gone. Like my body was doing right now in this foreign bathtub. I submerged myself completely, and then all I had to do was lift my head and neck out of the water to feel him touching my shoulders. I don’t know if I’m explaining this well. To miss my father, and to lament not having my fill of him, meant I missed myself in a way. In losing my father, I’d lost a piece of myself, for ever.

  I sat in that little bathroom and cried and cried. I felt so lonely that I could hardly breathe, and the water started to feel like it was scalding my skin. I didn’t know whether it was the salinity or sense of loss that burned. I got out of the tub and wrapped a towel around my body, then lit a cigarette and lay down on the narrow bed. I opened my purse and took out a small notebook.

  I picked up the telephone receiver and dialled the numbers, just as Leila had written them a few days before. A man answered; from his voice it sounded like he was brushing fifty. I asked to speak with Salma. My heart was beating so intently it nearly leaped out of my ribcage. (Whenever my heart knocks in my chest like that and pounds with such determination, it feels like it is rising in my throat, about to choke me.) I would not forget the seconds that divided the man’s voice calling Salma and her picking up the phone. Time moved slowly, as if this was eternity. Suddenly my fingers felt heavy, and the phone became a boulder in my hands, so arduous to hold up and press to my ear. I started swinging my feet in the air, to check whether time was progressing at its usual pace, not any slower. I moved them quickly and then became confused that they were going faster than my sense of time. My doubts about the nature of time intensified when I dropped the receiver, jumped out of bed to turn on the air conditioning, lowered the temperature to 16 degrees Celsius and got back onto the bed. I gripped a cigarette between the fingers of my left hand and held the phone in my right. Either time really was moving slowly around me, or it was flowing slowly on the other bank, the one where Salma stood, and flowing past my own hands and feet at its usual speed.

  Salma? Can you hear me? I’m at a hotel, I forget its name, halfway down Hamra Street, halfway down the street that runs from you to me. I’m standing on the edge as usual; I don’t dare delve into the depths of things, I prefer the edges. Where I can be poised to escape. When I try to fall asleep in a big bed, I can’t even shut my eyes, so I choose a spot closest to the edge. Falling off in the night is less frightening than being in the middle. At the theatre or cinema, I choose the seat next to the aisle; I don’t like the front row because the doors lead directly there. When I’m in the car, I sit next to the window, so I can open it easily and stick my head out to breathe. I always drive close to the hard shoulder, so that I can pull over whenever I want and get away. In recent years when I’ve needed petrol, I’ve asked our neighbour’s son to take my car and fill it up, because of the queues at the petrol stations, long lines of stopped cars stuck one behind another, impossible to leave. What else? I hate snow because it hinders my movement, it makes it hard to get away…just like you at Dahr al-Baydar, when you were all snowed in and terrified you would die en masse. Six years ago, the streets in Damascus were closed due to snow, do you remember? I remember it so clearly; how I drew the curtains in my room, turned out the lights, took a Xanax and hid under the covers, waiting for the snow to melt and the roads to open. I never lock the toilet door in restaurants or coffee shops. I keep a tight grip on the door handle so no one opens it, but I don’t dare lock it, fearing I won’t be able to open it again. Two months ago the electricity cut out, as usual, but this time I was in the elevator, and I banged on the door so hard I bloodied my hands. I was so afraid that no one would hear me and I’d die in that little box no bigger than a coffin. And now I’m talking to you, while sitting on the edge of the bed, in a room where the door isn’t locked, where a little window looks out onto the street, which isn’t blocked off, with just a thin
towel wrapped around my body, cold air blowing out of the air conditioner, hitting my skin, dulling my pulse, yet even with all that, I’m not sure I could escape whenever I want.

  Is that your voice? Do its reverberations make me feel more confined? Is it because you’re waiting for me to respond? About who I am? I have learned that a person is more than her name, or the place she was born, or the family she belongs to. A person is her memory, all of it; how can I show you that? Where do I start? Putting dates in order and processing feelings aren’t things that come easily to me. Can you still hear me? I’m Suleima. Who are you? When I’m at home and have a panic attack, I rush to my room like a madwoman, stand in front of the floor-length mirror and stare at my face. I look into my reflected eyes. I let my eyes brush across my mirror-mouth, and pass my fingers over the cold surface; I touch my nose and my cheeks, but don’t feel anything on my face! It makes me afraid. That’s me in the mirror, but I don’t feel it. If I press a finger to my cheek in the mirror, there’s no indentation. Fear dissipates gradually. I stare at myself as I appear on that smoothest surface. I use all my strength to make sure that I’m standing there, breathing. If I can see myself, it means I’m still alive.

  Me, someone who fell in love with a man she invented and can no longer find. How do we come up with these dreams, and how can we lose them in the blink of an eye, sometimes without even realising? Is reality crueller than fantasy? Naseem conquered my fantasy of him, and then woke me up again. “People are sleeping. If they died, they would realise it.” If I died, I don’t know if I would realise it. I’m sick with doubt about whether I really exist, or whether I simply invented myself, just like I invented Naseem and maybe even you too. This has nothing to do with the deaths that Naseem planned out for us, the ones he carefully devised down to the last detail, from cause and manner of death to the funeral, the mourners, the myrtle and the acrid smell that accompanies the procession on one’s final journey.