She’d lived through every one of those moments – and many others as well – alone, without there being anyone nearby to talk to about them. She hadn’t wanted anyone to tell her that what she felt was good or bad. She’d wanted to be heard, but she’d never been able to get the words to come out. It terrified her to think of anyone – anyone at all – knowing of the turmoil she experienced in the face of her feelings and the vulnerability they left in their wake. Consequently, she’d resisted to the point where she was convinced that she didn’t need to tell anyone what was going on inside her.
She was disconcerted when he asked her, ‘Are you looking in my eyes to see whether I’m sincere?’
She felt the blood rushing hot to her face and her ears. It always upset her for her agitation to announce itself so rudely. She’d often wished she knew how to put on a poker face.
‘It seems I’ve laid something heavy on you. You don’t have to do anything but be yourself, Leen. I have a lot of things I’d like to say to you before you say yes or . . . no.’
She only smiled lest the situation turn into a dramatic scene. When she told him about this later, he laughed, and said he hadn’t noticed. She found it fascinating to observe his nervousness, his little gestures, his way of pronouncing words, and the way he would alternately look at her and away from her.
‘Please say whatever’s on your mind,’ she replied calmly.
‘Thank you.’
She felt a slight pang inside when she heard him say, ‘Thank you.’ She didn’t want him to feel indebted to her. She thought they should be equals from the start. There shouldn’t be one party that gave and the other that felt indebted. She believed he was entitled to have her hear and understand what he had to say.
So she said abruptly, ‘Don’t thank me. I haven’t said my piece yet. Later you might regret having thanked me!’
He went pale for a moment. But then he smiled, saying, ‘Ever since I met you I’ve known you were a rare bird.’
Smiling back, she said, ‘I can’t stay long. But I’ll be expecting a call from you.’
She got up and walked away, leaving him at the table in the coffee shop on the ground floor of the Sheraton without turning to look back. As she made her way to the front entrance she heard the sound of her footsteps on the marble corridor. She thought she was dreaming, that she hadn’t met him, and that he hadn’t said what he had said. But the scent of his tobacco and his cologne filled her nostrils and followed her all the way to the car.
He loves me!
She was encompassed by a worrisome silence, and the steeds of fear went galloping furiously through her deepest parts. She wasn’t afraid of love but, rather, of herself. She knew she wouldn’t be content to love him in the torpid shadow of the hypocrisy and incongruity that enveloped life around her. Time after time she’d tried to escape from them, and from the seething indignation she met with because she didn’t accept without question what other people considered right, even though she had never once attempted to change their lives. No, she’d never made any idealistic attempt to change life. All she’d done was try to escape with all that she herself believed in. And now her escape was leading her to her death. Her relationship with Malek would expose the imperfection of life beneath her country’s sky. It would tear the lustrous, silken fabric in which this putrid life had enrobed itself. And no one would forgive her. From the moment when she bade Malek farewell that day, she had realized that if she proceeded along love’s rugged path, she would have to pay the price twice: once because she’d rent the veil, and once because she was a woman.
11 p.m., her room
When her father had come to the hospital that dawn, he hadn’t said anything in particular. He had remained silent the entire time. Once or twice she’d caught glimpses of him squeezing the edge of his chair and trying to avoid looking her in the eye. She hadn’t said anything, since she didn’t suppose words would be of any help to him, but for his sake she had resisted falling apart. That was the least she could do, she thought. Then she realized that she loved her father not simply because he was her father, but because he loved her in this different sort of way, and because he didn’t just claim to understand, but lived that understanding. It pained her to think that for days now, her father had been the victim of a bitter struggle between his love for her and what her brother Hashem had done.
Her father had come in to check on her twice since her return from the hospital. The first time, he had come cautiously up to the bed, hoping she would be asleep. As soon as he saw the light stealing in through the window reflected in her open eyes, he bowed his head, then left the room without saying anything.
‘Dad,’ she said, ‘don’t be sad. I won’t lose my mind, and I won’t die.’
But he had quietly pulled the door shut without hearing what she said. Fifteen minutes later he came back, so she closed her eyes on his account so that he would calm down somewhat and go to sleep. As soon as she heard the sound of the door closing behind him, she opened her eyes to the semi-darkness. Then she turned on a lamp to the right of her bed, whispering, ‘Isn’t there hope?’
Why didn’t she sleep? How long had it been since she had slept?
‘O God of the heavens, sleep, a little sleep . . .’
She laid her head on the pillow and began pondering the shadow her body cast on the wall in front of her, certain that she wouldn’t go to sleep. She thought about the fact that Malek might have woken up, but with her far away from him. He might have been alarmed by the room’s blue beds and walls. Everything in his room was blue: the walls, the blankets, the pillows, even the sky peeking in through the windowpane. Blue, blue, blue. Death is blue. The cloth that had been draped over the coffin they’d shipped her grandmother’s body in from Jeddah, where she had died, to Medina many years earlier had been blue. When, after her grandmother’s body had been removed for burial, the coffin had been opened for the last time, it had been empty like a blue, cloudless sky. She’d found out that when people die, they turn blue, then dry up. She closed her eyes, but she saw Malek alone, shrouded in blueness and hooked up to machines and tubes, and it pained her to think that he’d always been weary and alone.
Sighing dejectedly, she gazed at the color of the designs on her cotton shirt in the yellow light emanating from the lamp. She remembered the color of Malek’s body in the same type of light, and the memory broke her heart. She could have scratched the color a bit, causing the layer of gold underneath it to glitter under that same light. It was a gold that had been smelted by untold interwoven sorrows, then forged and cast into a big, compassionate heart. How could she have failed to say such words to him before? How could she have failed to tell him about all her troubled little thoughts? She remembered his smile. She shut her eyes tightly. But how could she escape from what was there deep inside her? All the tricks she resorted to in an effort to flee led to the same deep pit, and she was afraid of what was inside it. She was afraid to look down into it and see the solitary, savage little girl concealed there. Malek had been capable of taming that little girl. And now she could almost see her – the little girl – becoming agitated in the darkness: blind, unkempt, fearful, wild.
Never for a moment had it occurred to her that things would turn out the way they had. But now she understood that her life had changed once and for all. She wished she could open her eyes and find herself napping on a chair in the semi-darkness, with a television screen in front of her flashing the images of WMD inspectors in Baghdad driving their white Land Cruisers from building to building, of Palestinian martyrs being escorted to their graves to the sound of ululations and loud shouts of ‘Allahu akbar! God is greatest!’, and of George W. Bush inciting the civilized world against the ‘axis of evil’. But that wasn’t possible anymore. Everything that was past had been her own protracted dream. And now she’d woken up to the ugliness of people and things around her.
As she looked into Malek’s face that evening, she knew she was trying not to cry, because if she di
d, she wouldn’t be able to stop, and crying would take everything out of her. She also didn’t want to cry because he might open his eyes all of a sudden, and it wouldn’t be good for her to greet him with tears. But was he really going to open his eyes? If he didn’t, all their memories would quickly vanish. They would fade as though they’d been left in the hot sun. They would lose their features and their colors. They would wilt before anyone had taken notice of them, like the little bushes that had been planted up and down Al Jamiat Road. Once as she and Malek were driving past them she’d said to him, ‘How can they neglect such a marvelous thing?’
With a smile he’d replied, ‘And who else would think about things the way you do?’
As she passed her hand over his head that evening, she prayed to God that if the angels approached him, they would only approach to bring him back to life. She saw a wild deer running through grassy meadows. She smelled the odor of its dung. She smelled the odor of the bed’s cold metal. She smelled the odor of Malek’s body. At the right corner of his mouth she saw a small patch of congealed blood. She took a paper tissue out of a packet next to her and cautiously began scratching it off with her fingernails. When it had all come off, she placed it gently on the tissue in front of her. Then she carefully wrapped it up and deposited it in her purse’s inner pocket.
Why had she done that? She didn’t know. What was she going to do with a clump of congealed blood – put it with his pictures, letters and gifts? Would this be the last thing that remained to her from him – a clump of congealed blood that was sure to go to pieces?
She closed her eyes. But that wasn’t going to protect her from her thoughts.
The beginning of the 18th of Wail, the twelfth year after Desert Storm 1:30 a.m., her room
The next day her father would tell her, ‘You’ve got to stop visiting him.’ And she wouldn’t be able to say, ‘I can’t.’
He’d done what no other man would have done, and she didn’t want to put any more pressure on him. She’d seen how agonized he was as she stood before him in tears in the hospital lobby. ‘Dad,’ she begged, ‘all I want to do is make sure he’s all right! I know I’ve been completely out of line. But I’m about to suffocate, Dad. I’m about to go crazy. And I’ll go even crazier if I keep thinking how my brother is the person who did this to him and I haven’t tried to visit him. Dad, please. You know what kind of man Malek is. Don’t be unfair to him the way Hashem was. And don’t be unfair to me. Please, Dad!’
With a mournful expression etched on his face, her father kept repeating, la hawla wa la quwwata illa billah and hasbi Allah wa ni’m al-wakil. For a moment she realized how difficult she was being. But then she thought to herself that after all, he was her father, and he’d put up with all her foolishness. At the very least, he wouldn’t slap her and curse the day she came into his life.
Placing his hand on her shoulder, he said, ‘Calm down, Leen.’ Then he took her to the wound-dressing room. He was so distraught, he didn’t know how to turn on the lights. However, he managed to get her over to a bed in the midst of her sobs.
‘Calm down, Leen. Calm down.’
She tried to calm down for his sake. She wasn’t sure whether he would agree to let her stay at the hospital near Malek or not. She was weary, and hadn’t slept a wink for some time. A few moments later her father came back with a nurse. Speaking broken Arabic, he asked her to help Leen.
The nurse replied with a smile, ‘Not worry, Baba. God willing she all right. I give her medicine for sleep.’
The nurse brought her a glass of water and a pill which she placed in her hand with a collusive wink. Feeling grateful for the nurse’s complicity, she popped it into her mouth. Then she gulped down a little water as the nurse began spreading a blanket over her legs. Not long afterwards she saw her father leave the room and heard him muttering across the corridor. Staring into the darkness, she prayed, ‘O merciful God, look upon me. Let Your mercy rain down on me. Let me wake up from this nightmare. O merciful God, if You aren’t angry with me, send down Your mercy onto my spirit. Send down Your peace, O God of the heavens.’
At some point she drifted off, but she woke up, alarmed, to the sound of her parents’ voices rising in the darkness. Where was she? No sooner had she gotten her bearings than the door flung open and she saw her mother standing in front of her. She heard her voice ringing out, ‘I obviously didn’t know how to raise you! Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Do you want us to be the talk of the town?’
She hadn’t been dreaming, then. Her father really had left her at the hospital. And her mother? Her mother, who had given birth to her, was standing before her unable to show her any compassion. Leen made no reply. She kept her head bowed, her eyes fixed on the reflection of the light coming from outside onto the room’s dull tile floor. After sending away some nurses and a doctor or two who’d come running to find out what was going on, her father came inside and closed the door behind him.
With muffled rage he said to her mother, ‘We didn’t come here for you to raise your voice!’
‘You don’t want me to raise my voice? If you’d raised your daughter right, maybe I wouldn’t be raising my voice!’
Then, turning to Leen, she said, ‘God damn you, you smarty pants! I’d rather have died than had you! You come along with me right now!’
Grabbing Leen by the wrist, she began tugging on her. However, Leen wrested her hand violently from her mother’s grip. Taking a step backward, she said breathlessly, ‘I’m not leaving the hospital. Do whatever you think is best. You can even stay with me. But I’m not leaving here.’
The rage pent up from all the years past had begun flowing in her veins. It was the rage of a ten-year-old girl who’d come to an early awareness that she wasn’t wanted but didn’t understand why, the isolation that had confined her spirit, the loneliness that had sapped her, the neglect, the disregard, and the belittlement of everything she’d ever accomplished in her life. For more than twenty years she hadn’t meant a thing to her mother. So how could her mother expect to drag her away by the arm now, just like that, as though she were still a little girl, or as though nothing and nobody had changed?
Her father bowed his head, while her mother continued to eye her, her breathing rapid as she struggled to keep her rage and bewilderment in check. Leen didn’t know how to remind her mother that she was her daughter, and that people would never stop looking down on her no matter what she did. They would always find some excuse to despise her and talk about her behind her back, while her mother, with her screaming and carrying on, had given them all the more reason to do so. She thought of going over and kissing her on the forehead, but she knew her mother would callously push her away, and she didn’t want to make her pain all the worse. She was tired, and all she wanted to do was to wash her face in cold water, hoping – and not for the last time – to discover that everything that had happened was nothing but a long, long nightmare, and that she just didn’t know anymore how to wake up from it.
Gazing into her mother’s angry face, she said to her forlornly, ‘Wake up, Mom. You must be dreaming. What happens to me and what I do is of no concern to you. It was never of any concern to you in the past, so why should I believe it’s of concern to you now? You’re not even worried about me. (God, have mercy.) You’re only worried about Hashem. But believe it or not, Mom, I won’t say a thing. Are you afraid I might talk? I won’t. And I assure you that when Malek wakes up, he won’t talk, either. So don’t worry. Trust me, if only just this once. Go to Hashem and tell him, “They won’t do anything to hurt you. They wouldn’t do that. Everything will be forgotten.” Now go away and leave me alone. I don’t want anybody here anymore. I don’t want anybody anymore.’
She ran to the door and opened it awkwardly, then took off in search of a bathroom where she could wash her face. When she came back, they were gone. The door of the room was open, and the scent of sorrow emanated from its every corner. But does sorrow have a scent?
3 a.m., her room<
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She remembered walking distractedly through the hospital lobby two nights earlier in search of Malek. Her search hadn’t lasted long. She’d requested a taxi in the wee hours of the morning and left the house without saying a word to anyone. She sat in the back seat feeling sad, bewildered, angry and apprehensive. Strangely, she’d felt happy because she’d learned that, although his condition wasn’t stable, he hadn’t died. When she called his house, his brother Yusuf had answered. She’d paid no attention to his wary, surprised tone of voice. She’d wanted to know what had happened to Malek, and was prepared to let Yusuf think whatever he wanted to. Suspicions had steadily eaten away at her spirit. She didn’t ask him for any details. She simply asked about Malek. When Yusuf told her he was in the hospital in a coma, she sat down on the edge of the bed. Before calling to ask about him that night, she’d spent hours standing in front of the window, and she’d wept as she watched the morning approach with sluggish breaths. Standing at her window, she’d thought she would never see him again. She’d summoned an image of his face and nearly burst into tears. She hadn’t seen his face since the day they’d met at the Dar Al Iman InterContinental, and her longings confused her. Did she miss him because she’d been uncompassionate toward both him and the two of them on that day? Or did she miss him because she knew that even if she saw him, she wouldn’t find him – he wouldn’t be there? He would be far, far away, like a star on whose points the tattered remains of her dreams now hung, and she would wait patiently without being distracted by anything, even sleep.
O God, is there no sleep to be had?
She wasn’t going to fall asleep. She turned toward the other side of the bed as even the tiniest details of her grief kept coming to mind.
She loved him. She really did. However, the issue had to do not with love, but, rather, with the way people around her looked at this love, the way people in her country would deal with a love that had torn through the transparent partition that was raised like a protective barrier between different colors, races and ethnicities when it came to love and marriage.
Days of Ignorance Page 5