Days of Ignorance

by Laila Aljohani

  In the beginning she and Malek had stood on opposite sides of this transparent barrier. He’d spread his hand on it from one side, and she’d spread hers on the other. There hadn’t been any warmth. They’d been right up against each other, so she would rest her head on his chest under his right collarbone, but he couldn’t put his arms around her and feel the contours of her body. With a growing exasperation she’d dug her fingernails into the meadow of his chest from behind the unseen wall. Then suddenly, part of the see-through partition between them had torn right between his left collarbone and his heart. Quietly and cautiously, she’d started widening the hole until she managed finally to cross over and touch him. Every time they met, she would pass through the hole and touch him.

  And how she’d loved to touch him.

  She’d loved to let her hand roam through the grass on his chest as they talked. They would talk a little about themselves and what awaited them, and a lot about life and its problems, about Al Ittihad, the people’s football team and Al Hilal, the government team, about the crossword puzzles she’d collected in her desk drawer so that they could solve them together some early morning, and about Taher Katalouj’s songs. He would sing them to her, which made her laugh and love him even more.

  Every time her hand went roaming through the grass on his chest, she would glimpse a little deer grazing along the edges. It was a pale sandy color, its eyes wide and glistening with little white windows lined up inside them, and it would peer out at a horizon she didn’t recognize. It was a lone deer in an open expanse without a hunter in sight. Did the deer love him? How happy she must be! After all, the aspect of their love that might cause the gazelle pain was the part that was past, not the part that was yet to come. The deer could go on grazing on the grass on his chest despite the white splint, and when he opened his eyes, she would be the first to know.

  Leen closed her eyes. But what good would that do?

  Everything they’d ever said and done lay hidden in the deep darkness of her spirit. She recalled the first time he’d ever called her. She’d been leafing through files stacked on her desk when the telephone rang, and he’d been on the other end. He’d told her he was writing a newspaper report on runaway girls, and that he hoped she would help him given the nature of her work at the Social Welfare Home. There’d been nothing strange about such a call, and it hadn’t even occurred to her to ask him how he’d gotten her number. That had been the beginning. Everything had begun from that point without their knowing it. As they talked, she’d noticed that his questions were different from other people’s. They struck her as the questions of someone who tries not to dwell on outcomes because he wants to understand the causes. They’d talked for a long time that day, and the following days as well. Later, when he told her how books had become his consolation, she’d known what it was that made him different.

  When the report was published he called her to tell her, and they went back to talking like a couple of friends who’d been out of touch for a day or two. He expressed genuine sympathy for the girls, saying he believed that what drove them to run away was despair of finding any other way out. When she got up the courage to speak to him about the little notebook where she wrote down her observations about the girls and some of her conversations with them during their stay at the Home, she somehow knew that Malek was going to be more than just a passing acquaintance.

  ‘Observations?’ he asked in surprise.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘Little thoughts.’

  ‘About all the cases?’

  ‘No, only the most striking ones, the ones that leave me speechless, and that force me to stop and think.’

  ‘I think that’s part of the beauty of your work.’

  ‘It’s also part of what makes it unpleasant.’

  Quite some time later he had asked her in passing, ‘Leen, do you remember the notebook you talked to me about, where you write down your observations about the runaway girls?’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Would it be possible for me to look at it?’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘It would be sort of embarrassing for me to let you read my thoughts. I’d feel pretty exposed.’

  ‘I’d hate you to feel that way with me.’

  ‘I didn’t mean . . . it’s just that I wrote things down the way I felt them, and I’m afraid you might hear a shrill voice that isn’t really saying anything.’

  ‘Have a little faith in me, and let me be the judge of that.’

  ‘You’re going to find a lot of grief,’ she said, and sighed.

  ‘I can take it,’ he said calmly. ‘Through it I’ll know how to get through to your spirit.’

  Her spirit?

  Her spirit was so tattered, you could see through the holes in it to the emptiness deep inside, where there was nothing but her enervating sense of having been let down. It had kept getting emptier and emptier and emptier until it started to rob her of sleep.

  She opened her desk drawer and took out the notebook. Then she started leafing through its pages and reading . . .

  . . . When they brought her to the Home for the first time, she was recovering from her illness. She was short, emaciated and jaundiced, and her narrow forehead was covered with fine wrinkles. Her papers said she was from Badiyat al-Shallahah and that she was fifteen years old. If I’d seen her outside the Home, I would have thought she was a lot older than that. Muznah didn’t say a word the entire time, and the following morning the supervisor told me she’d spent the night sobbing miserably.

  When she sat down on the chair in front of me, she said, ‘I’m sick.’

  ‘I know. I sensed that yesterday.’

  She didn’t look up from the floor. Fearfully she asked, ‘Are you going to send me back? I don’t want to go back.’

  ‘Why not, Muznah?’

  ‘It hurts me.’

  I didn’t understand. ‘Does it hurt you to go back to your family?’ I asked stupidly.

  But she didn’t reply. She remained silent, wandering about in a realm I knew nothing about. I felt slightly ashamed as I looked at her cracked hands. Seeing what a rough life she’d had, I hid my own hands. By the time I finished reading her file, I knew how much pain she must be in. I knew she had probably been raped. However, I knew he was her husband, and I realized who and what she meant when she said, ‘It hurts me.’

  How trivial things seemed then. My whole life seemed trivial. I thought about how, when I cry, I cry over trivial things, and how, when I get sad, I get sad over trivial things. I also thought about how I hold my life in my own hands. No one’s taken it away from me. I haven’t lost it yet. And, though I don’t know why, I thought about the fact that Muznah is aware of her pain, but she doesn’t understand it the way I do. For a fleeting moment I had the certainty that Muznah would never realize the seriousness of her loss. When she ran away, she’d been running away from pain. She’d wanted not to hurt. But she would never be aware of the injustice she’d endured – or at least, she wouldn’t be aware of it in the way I was. And she would go on believing, possibly till her dying day, that her father had married her off because this is what fathers do when their daughters grow up. They marry them off to the first suitor that strikes their fancy. And ’Awad had struck her father’s fancy. Besides, he was his paternal cousin, he lived in Medina, he’d paid a handsome dowry, and he’d bought her father a new minivan. He might even have been older than her father. But age doesn’t diminish a man. There’s nothing that can diminish a man. Her father hadn’t made a mistake when he gave her in marriage. It was just that she hadn’t been able to bear the pain. She’d tried, but the pain had just gotten worse. By the third day she realized she wouldn’t be able to take any more, and she had no one to turn to. So she ran away.

  She said she knew that if she went home, her father would send her back to her husband, so she’d decided to run away to the streets and squares near the sacred mosque. It was from there that she’d been
brought to the hospital in a pathetic state. When the physician examined her, he suspected that she had been raped. Consequently, she’d been referred to the Social Welfare Home, where she’d begun to talk and everything became clear.

  What are they going to do for her? Nothing to speak of. They’ll summon her father or her husband, and whoever comes will sign a pledge not to do her harm. Then he’ll receive her and take her away. She won’t have the option of saying no. She’ll cry, but no one has the authority to keep her at the Home as long as she’s fifteen years old and has family members who are willing to take her.

  ‘It hurts me . . .’

  She looked up from the notebook, and for a moment she kept repeating the words, ‘It hurts me, it hurts me, it hurts me.’

  But – she wondered as she leafed through the pages of the notebook again – was it pain she was feeling? She scanned quickly down the page until she came to the name ‘Sharaf’, and stopped up short. The ugly creature hidden inside a tiny box jumped out. It had a foul odor. For a moment she felt on the verge of nausea. She remembered how she’d gone on feeling nauseous for days after Sharaf’s death, and how she hadn’t been able to get rid of the smell of burned hair. The smell of it had clung even to her skin despite the fact that, during the days that followed the event, she’d bathed over and over again. She’d cried for a long time in the shower, remembering the body in flames passing before her eyes. Meanwhile, a voice uttering words she couldn’t make out echoed everywhere like an evil omen. The voice replied to her questions in a way that both bewildered and fascinated her. She kept wondering how a marvelous creature like Sharaf could die. How could she have surrendered to despair that way?

  ‘. . . And he danced with me.’

  I stared at her for a moment, amazed. ‘Did you need somebody to dance with you?’

  ‘What I needed was to be alive. When I met him, I knew how dead I’d been.’

  ‘Is he the one who taught you how to put words together this way?’

  She smiled with resignation, saying, ‘No. I’d been afflicted with words before I knew him. I left notebooks filled with words in my family’s house, and I think they found them and tore them up. One time he told me my words weren’t bad even though they described bad things.’

  ‘What bad things?’

  ‘The bad things in my life.’

  ‘Is your life bad?’

  ‘Look at where I am now.’

  ‘And was your running away going to take you to a life that wasn’t bad?’

  ‘I didn’t run away.’

  ‘So, then . . .?’

  ‘I left a house where I wasn’t able to find an iota of understanding.’

  ‘You left?’

  ‘Yeah. Just the way you leave your home every morning to go to work.’

  ‘But I come back again.’

  ‘As for me, I can’t go back to pain anymore.’

  ‘Has what you did freed you from pain?’

  She smiled dolefully. ‘How can you speak to me in that tone of voice? What do you know about pain?’

  ‘I know enough about it for you to trust me. I’ve suffered, too.’

  ‘No! You don’t know what I know about pain. You’ve never been beaten by a younger brother because you hadn’t made the tea for him and his friends. You’ve never had to keep yourself from blowing up while you ask him, “What right do you have to beat me?” only to have your mother scold you, saying, “Sh-sh-sh-sh. Don’t raise your voice at your brother!” You don’t know what it’s like to have your brother force you out of the car when you’re about to go with your mother on a family visit. He doesn’t explain why he’s insisting that you get out and not go with your mother. All he does is say coldly, “You’re not going anywhere. Come on, get out!” Then at midnight he suddenly opens the door to your room and says, “That’s so you won’t get out of line again, and when I tell you to do something, you’ll do it and keep your mouth shut.” Then he slams the door. No. You don’t know what pain is. And you don’t know what humiliation is. I was nothing but an object in that house. I wasn’t a living creature. How could I have done anything but leave?’

  ‘But you took a huge risk for the sake of a man you hardly know.’

  ‘Maybe. But I’d been suffering for so long, I’d started to turn savage. I didn’t want to turn any more savage. I ran away so that I wouldn’t lose what was left of my life. I wanted to marry him, but they wouldn’t let me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He doesn’t have ‘‘an absolution’’.’

  She said it with bitter sarcasm. Then she went on, ‘I ran away so that I could marry him in court. The clerics there looked suspiciously at me, and one of them sent me away. He said, “Go get your guardian, girl.” “You’re my guardian, Sir,” I told him. “I would be,” he grumbled, “if the man you want to marry were a Saudi.” That made me mad. I said, “But he’s Arab and Muslim.” “Don’t talk so much,” he told me rudely. “Bring your legal guardian and a paper from the Ministry of the Interior. Then God will solve your problem for you . . .”’

  But Sharaf didn’t wait until God could solve her problem for her. Instead she delivered her body to the flames, leaving the odor of her incinerated hair clinging to everything and everyone she passed. And Leen – when she saw the flaming body rushing past her – what had she done? Nothing. Nothing at all. She’d just stood there, her neck paralyzed with fear, and all her physical strength gone. She couldn’t turn, scream, or run after her to help her. She’d seen the supervisors and some of the girls racing by, and she’d heard people screaming and calling out. She’d seen panic and tears. She’d seen a woman throw a blanket over the body and fling it to the ground. As for her, all she’d done was stand at a distance. Sinking into her deep, dark depths, she’d been pulled inward with blind force, and was helpless to understand why. She couldn’t even ima­gine how despair could be so dreadful.

  4 a.m., her room

  From the moment she glimpsed Hashem’s face that night, she knew he’d pulled one of his innumerable stupid pranks, but she hadn’t thought it had anything to do with her. When their eyes met, she saw a look she didn’t know how to understand or interpret at the time. He was frightened and agitated. So she, too, became frightened. Something had happened, but she didn’t want to think about its being something bad. Bad things don’t happen this quickly. She saw her mother splashing water on his face and wiping his head with it as she recited Suras 112, 113 and 114 of the Qur’an to ward off the evil she dreaded. At that moment the two of them looked to her the way they always did: like a couple of Siamese twins fused back to belly. Her mother was always behind him: protecting him, pushing him, directing him along life’s intersecting paths. At moments like these, all Leen could feel was that she was a mere happenstance, and, sometimes, a drain on their existence. Their existence was complete. Hence, there was no need for her to be a part of it, or even to check in with them from time to time. Hashem avoided looking at her as he rushed to his room with her mother close on his heels. If she’d taken a long look into his eyes, she would have seen Malek lying there, bleeding and in pain. But she didn’t.

  Hashem!

  Oh, God! How many years had passed since her mother gave birth to him?

  Her mother had been about to wither up like an old palm branch, and would have done so if she hadn’t given birth to him. Her uterus had been unstable, and her fetuses were weak and vulnerable. No sooner had they begun to develop than they would lose their hold on the uterine wall, leaving her with nothing but heartbreak, sorrow, and an increasingly fierce desire to try again. She’d cried for a long time before her body swelled up in a frightening way, with her belly hanging down in front of her like a huge, solid pumpkin. And she was happy. She did nothing but lie around and relax lest her unborn child get angry and leave her the way others had. She would caress her belly, and when the baby began to kick, she would take Leen’s hand and place it on its outer wall. At those moments she would have a captivating expression on her face
, perhaps because she was so happy. Life had taught her – belatedly, as usual – that happiness is like magic, because it makes a person beautiful.

  Malek had often said, ‘All you lack is joy.’

  Her mother hadn’t just been happy. She’d been like someone who was about to produce a miracle that would eventually reveal itself as a crime.

  For long nights prior to this she had cried, asking her husband, ‘Isn’t God ever going to give me a son? I want support from my children. I don’t want to die among strangers. I want a son who’ll take care of me when I get sick and old. But Leen isn’t ours.’

  Leen had tried to understand why she wasn’t enough for her mother, why she didn’t bring her the joy she expected to receive from the male she longed for. But she’d never been able to figure it out. Every Friday afternoon before conceiving Hashem, her mother would take her by the hand and they would walk down the narrow streets of Bab al-Majidi neighborhood – in the days when there’d been a neighborhood by that name – to the holy precincts. They would go in by the ’Uthman Gate. Once there, her mother would withdraw to an out-of-the-way spot where she would perform ritual prayers and offer supplications, and sometimes she would break down and weep. Leen would busy herself throwing grain to the pigeons that came fluttering down one after another into the mosque’s open-air courtyard paved with gravel and sand. Every now and then she would glance over at her mother, then at the men on the other side of the courtyard as they came to perform the sundown prayer. Life at that time hadn’t been marred yet, and the holy precincts were still without partitions, screens or men with long beards and gruff voices who would shout at those coming in, ‘Hey, let’s go, hajji! This is a women’s area. The men’s section is over there.’ As they spoke, they might jostle an elderly man leaning on a cane who knew only enough Arabic to recite the Fatihah in his ritual prayers.