by Dima Wannous
Wouldn’t you think your story—my story—would be the last thing to make me feel I actually exist? When I read about you, I saw my feet walking to and from Kamil’s office. I saw my persistent anxiety and dread. I found a sense of loneliness and of relinquishing everything beyond myself. Is there any sense in us meeting each other? Wouldn’t that be like keeping a journal—the very thing Kamil advised me not to do?
If we do meet, it will be a dark and desolate act, a moment to recall our whole lives, yours and mine. I’ll look into your eyes and see my own. I’ll glimpse all the memories I still dream of giving up. I’ll look into your fear, and see Naseem and his manuscript. I’ll split a Xanax with you, and I won’t ask how overwhelmed you feel, so as not to overwhelm you more. And you won’t ask me. You won’t be able to ask questions; fear gnaws deep into your soul and paralyses you. Do I carry you in my heart, will I carry you back to the city you love? Can I take you to Kamil, whom you don’t dare call? Should I have brought your file with me from his frigid filing cabinet, as cold as a mortuary freezer? Or would mine have been enough for you to understand the fear that pours from my eyes? Do we share the same file? Should I tell you that Naseem didn’t write you an obituary, or that he did, and that he gave it to you, and that you buried it in the dirt like I did?
* * *
—
We agreed to meet that evening at a coffee shop in Achrafieh. I told her that I was a Syrian painter in town from Damascus, that I’d written a novel and wanted her help finding a publisher. I intended to give her this novel as it stood, except for the ending, which I hadn’t written yet. Time unspooled slowly. What would I do with my full heart and weary body? I looked in the square mirror across from the bed, and saw my run-down reflection. As much as I pitied the woman in the mirror, I missed her too. I wanted to bring her back, hold her tight against me and keep her for ever.
I remember now that every morning when Naseem woke up, he sat on the edge of the bed and then slowly got up, walked towards the mirror with anxiety-tinged steps, stood in front of it and looked at his reflection. He told me that every morning he feared not finding himself in the mirror. He imagined standing there, looking at the smooth, cold surface and seeing nothing but emptiness. Once, he fell asleep on the living-room sofa to avoid facing the mirror when morning came. He told me how terrified he was when he woke up the next morning, lying on his back with his right leg bent at the knee and his left foot raised, supported by the wall next to the sofa. Everything seemed mixed up. What was supporting what? Was the wall supporting his foot, or was his foot supporting the wall? Fear set in and he began to sweat, pressing his foot against the wall, afraid that if he gave up it would collapse on top of him. I forget if this was a dream he told me, or if this really happened.
I got dressed. Tied back my long hair. Beirut’s humidity made me feel heavier, as if I’d gained weight. I searched through my things to be sure I hadn’t forgotten my pack of cigarettes, bottle of Xanax or the novel. I stepped into the small, suffocating elevator and took it down to the lobby. I asked the man at reception how to get to Achrafieh, and decided to call a taxi. I waited a few minutes and then went outside, got into a sleek car and told the driver the name of the café. There wasn’t as much traffic as when I had first arrived. Car horns were no longer blaring…but I took half a tablet anyway to calm down. The driver stopped in the middle of Sassine Square and pointed his finger towards the coffee shop.
I got out of the car, feeling flustered and slightly dizzy. I walked slowly to postpone the moment of approaching the mirror—a mirror that would be neither smooth nor cold. I walked closer. Closer. The hands on my watch pointed to 7:30. The coffee shop faced the street and didn’t seem crowded. I saw a young woman in her thirties sitting by herself. Her hair looked as if she had tied it up in a rush; there were a few loose strands. She gazed out into the street at cars and people walking by, and there was something like indifference in her eyes. She held a cigarette and was sipping a glass of white wine, or so it looked from far away. Was white wine her Xanax? Was her glass of wine like my half tablet, like the one I’d swallowed a few seconds earlier? Or did she not need it? Were we not reflections of each other in this way? I walked closer. Now she could see me. I stopped on the pavement with my purse in my hand, not looking directly at her so she wouldn’t think that it was me. That I was her. That I was the one who called her today and asked to meet.
We were separated by such a short distance that her anxiety easily reached me. I didn’t see it in her face, which had sharply etched features; it simmered in her eyes, I saw it swell, cascade at her feet and flow towards me. I wasn’t sure whether her anxiety was what made me anxious too, because usually other people’s composure is what heightens my anxiety. (Whenever I have a panic attack, I’m terrified by others’ calm indifference. But nor am I comforted by their concern, or by their blank stares, eyes swimming with ignorance of what pains me. There’s a thin line between indifference and anxiety, a tight rhythm. I need a precise kind of concern to calm me down. Few people can walk that line, few can throw me that line when I am adrift.)
It wasn’t her anxiety that made me anxious, but the resemblance between our anxieties did make me stop. I stood in confusion at the edge of the pavement, catching my breath. Her anxiety was equal to mine, equivalent; it had the same look and smell. As if my own wasn’t enough, I saw it before me and experienced it twice: once in my soul and once before my eyes. I felt it moan in my chest and watched it grow. It filled all my senses and then became weightless.
I wanted to close my eyes and leave, but I didn’t know where to go. The need to flee rushed over me again, and I missed my father. I realised there was no one who could make me feel safe. My father was dead, Fouad had disappeared and Naseem had emigrated. I had no one left but my mother. I asked myself whether these men actually made me feel safer, or whether I imagined it. They had all disappeared suddenly. If my mother had been the one to disappear, would I instead have thought it was she who made me feel secure? Had I invented my anxiety? Or had I simply grown accustomed to it, from my very first breath? I could hardly think. I didn’t know how much time had passed since Salma and I were supposed to have met. I saw her look at her phone, and imagined her checking the hour. I didn’t sense that my lateness was what was making her anxious. A pervasive anxiety flowed through her body; it moved her heavy hands and drooping shoulders. A shadow was cast over her languid frame. That shadow’s name was fear.
I stood there contemplating her, wondering whether my anxiety was a reflection of hers or vice versa, unable to take a single step past a line I’d drawn for myself at the edge of the pavement in the middle of Sassine Square. I felt sorry for her. She seemed lonely. And at that exact moment I was making her lonelier. But despite feeling bad for her, I also felt a desire to intensify her loneliness, for just a day. I thought about Kamil; if he were there, he would say, “You’re only making yourself lonelier, not her. She’s sitting in a coffee shop she probably knows, in a city where she’s lived for four and a half years, waiting for someone she doesn’t know, serenely smoking and sipping a glass of white wine. While you’re standing there: a stranger, on a strange pavement, in a strange neighbourhood, in a city you don’t know, as befits someone who wants to make another person feel more alone! Yes, you’re the one who’s alone here. All you have is the space your body takes up.”
I once told Kamil that I didn’t understand my anxiety or my fear of fear. He asked me if I wanted to banish my fear for good. “If I gave you a tablet to rid yourself of fear, would you take it?” I said yes. Kamil smiled, shook his head and clucked his tongue. He said that in one way or another, fear protected me. Fear wasn’t just a defence mechanism I’d devised in order to survive in a place where I’d never felt I belonged. He said it urged me to live. If it wasn’t for fear, I would have lost my impetus for life. I didn’t understand. How could fear be my will to live?
Then he asked about
my father. “Was he overprotective of you?” I took a deep breath. I turned a specific memory over in my hands, one that felt both far away and imminently present. He wasn’t overprotective, I said. He watched over me. He thought he was far enough that I wouldn’t notice, but I noticed him clearly. He watched me while I ate. Sat next to me. He opened his mouth in the air when I opened mine, closed it over an imaginary bite of food and chewed the air while I chewed my food. I hadn’t stolen Salma’s story in this, of course not. That’s what my father did too. If Salma was her father’s shadow, then my father was mine. He followed me through the house, in and out of every room, as if we were out for a stroll. He helped me with my homework. Worried when I was ill or came down with a fever. He never missed story time before bed. Kamil smiled. “And then what happened?” He wasn’t really waiting for an answer. “He died,” I replied, and then said nothing after that. I didn’t understand. Kamil raised his thick eyebrows. “He died…and there’s no one to watch over you any more. Is that what you’re doing now? Are you taking on the task of watching over yourself, so that you can live?”
Yes. Practically all I do is watch over myself. I start the moment I open my eyes in the morning, by counting my breaths and monitoring my inhalations and exhalations. I feel sweat spread across my skin and take note of how cold it is, to distinguish between a panic attack and a heart attack. I hold a fingertip to the large vein in my neck to count my heartbeat. I perceive my interior as if it were the exterior, clearly visible. I sense every organ, one by one: stomach, intestines, oesophagus, larynx, lungs, bladder, liver. I feel faint movements inside me, and steel myself. I’m concerned about fear, and my excruciating efforts to examine my depths, to perceive the imperceptible. Breathing should be an unconscious act, and I’ve turned it into a conscious one, something I consciously observe and regulate.
* * *
I don’t know what came over me! I started walking in the opposite direction. I rushed away from Salma like someone running from danger, from something in pursuit, like in the dream where the waves of the sea were chasing me and I was driving the car with myself, both of us ascending a hill towards a house perched at the top. Was that my dream or Salma’s? I couldn’t remember any more. I rushed away, towards nowhere. No home to return to now, no Naseem or Fouad or Father.
Suddenly I missed my mother. What was she doing? I wondered. Why hadn’t I called her to let her know I was all right? Maybe I had assumed she wouldn’t worry, or that she’d forgotten I’d gone to Beirut. Or that she wouldn’t notice I was gone, immersed in her book, on page 24. It didn’t matter. I missed her, and felt the desire to bury myself in the arms of the woman who had grown old in an instant, who thought she had lost her memory and mind. I walked quickly, and all the vitriol I’d felt that day vanished when I thought about her. (Or maybe it simply receded into itself, and could still stick its head out at any time?) At that precise moment, I felt that only my mother could soothe me and absorb the emptiness I felt when these men to whom I had belonged were gone. I walked until I was overcome by exhaustion, and then I stopped a taxi and went back to the hotel. It was just after 8:30 p.m. I packed my little bag with the few things I’d brought. I made sure I wasn’t forgetting anything, and then decided to go straight back to Damascus.
I didn’t want to wake up in this strange city; I didn’t want to fall asleep far from my mother, my balcony and my little olive tree. I didn’t want to fall asleep in a city my father hadn’t died in, where my brother hadn’t been abducted. Naseem’s home was back in Damascus. I didn’t have a home. But something was waiting for me there, and nothing was left for me here.
My mother was asleep in her bed. I kissed her. She opened her eyes. She wasn’t startled by being woken by her daughter after midnight. Her daughter who had travelled to Beirut, intending to stay for several nights. My mother was her usual self: I didn’t understand from where her deep sense of calm sprang. I told her I was home, and going to sleep. She smiled and shut her eyes, reassured. I slipped into bed.
I thought about telling her that I’d come home missing her more than ever. I also thought about killing her that night, the way Naseem had done. In this version I didn’t ring the doorbell, so as not to wake her. I opened the door slowly and crept in on tiptoe, carrying my small bag so it wouldn’t make a sound dragging on the tiles. I saw her sitting on the red sofa, reading. I went up to her. Her head was drooping and her body looked rigid. I shook her gently, but she didn’t respond. I bent down to see her face. Her eyes were closed. A faint smile was traced across her mouth.
“Mama,” I called, the way Salma’s mother had called her mother on that last farewell to her childhood home.
My mother didn’t respond. I wrapped my arms around her, hugging her. Hadn’t I come back from Beirut with an urgent need to embrace her? No: for her to hug me, not the other way around. How could she die and leave me, alone amid so much loss and grief? My body rocked with sobs, a moan of pain escaped my mouth and my eyes were wet with tears. I felt lost in our little living room, suddenly transformed into a vast, borderless land. What could be harder than living without borders? Without a roof or walls? Anguished and abandoned, I wasn’t strong enough to stand. How could I bury her myself? Where would I get the strength to live without her certainty about Fouad’s fate? How could the days go on without page 24?
And then…I did none of this. I didn’t have the energy to keep imagining such an awful situation. Didn’t have enough air to survive without my fear of losing her. If she died, that fear would vanish too. And I would have no true fear with which to defend myself.
* * *
—
I woke to my mother’s scream reverberating through every corner of the house. I got out of bed, terrified, and I swear my heart was beating so hard I could see my chest swell and recede, just as happened to Naseem when he slapped his face. I overcame my short, shallow breathing and ran. My mother was in the bathroom, screaming and wailing. I opened the door and found her standing with hands pressed to her cheeks, in a state of shock and fear. She saw me, and pointed to a hose next to the squat toilet. My mother had insisted that the guest bathroom should have a squat toilet, so she could use it too; she hated the idea of us sitting on a European-style toilet, and the traces of our bodies mixing with those of guests. The white hose had turned into meat! It was a deep blood-red, so fresh it glistened. I tried to scream too, but my voice was trapped in my throat and chest. I tried and tried, but no sound emerged. I stretched my mouth as wide as I could, trying to let out a scream, but my voice hung there suspended, whipping in my throat, lashing me.
When I opened my eyes, I found my hand wrapped around my throat, sweat streaming from my body and my heart galloping. I took a breath to be sure I was able to scream and that I had my own voice, separate from my mother’s. I got out of bed. It was quarter to seven. As I walked down the corridor I was suddenly overcome by loneliness. I could see my mother sipping her coffee, her book on the table in front of her. She noticed me. Turned halfway. Smiled at me. “Coffee, sweetheart? It’s hot.” And as for me…the smell of meat filled my nose; it rose up from my stomach and left a sharp, rusty taste behind. I smiled at her, and headed to the kitchen, taking care not to glance towards the guest bathroom, where the hose of living flesh was hanging.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dima Wannous is a Syrian writer and translator who studied French literature at Damascus University and the Sorbonne. The Frightened Ones is her first work to be published in English. She is also the author of a short-story collection, Details (2007), and of the novel The Chair (2008). She was named as one of the “Beirut 39,” a group of top Arab writers under the age of forty.
What’s next on
your reading list?
Discover your next
great read!
Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.
Sign up now.
Dima Wannous, The Frightened Ones