Days of Ignorance

by Laila Aljohani

  The killer phrase had been the final one: ‘. . . the last to know.’

  For so long she’d thought she was close to him. And now, what should she find but that she was farther away from him than she could ever have imagined? Pain crushed her ribs, and something in her heart was torn to pieces. She thought about how Malek had had a part in causing this pain, and a part of her heart was torn to pieces. A little part that swore never to forgive him.

  ‘Why are you so quiet? Say something. Tell me off. Tell me you’re angry, that I’m a bastard and that I don’t even deserve for you to listen to me anymore.’

  ‘You had no right to hide something like this from me.’

  ‘I wasn’t hiding it. I didn’t think it would mean anything to you.’

  ‘What you thought was a dangerous thing, and what you did was even more dangerous!’

  ‘What do you mean, Leen? Don’t scare me, and don’t be cruel to me.’

  ‘You were cruel before I was. You’ll never know what you’ve done.’

  ‘. . .’

  ‘You’ve hurt me, and you’ve hurt yourself. And I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forgive you.’

  ‘But . . . maybe you’re right. Maybe I shouldn’t have kept something like this from you. There were moments when I thought of telling you. But I didn’t want to upset you. I’ve been trying for the last two years to get my status changed. Throughout this time I’ve dreamed of being able to tell you about it in the past tense. I thought I’d be granted citizenship soon, and that once that had happened, it wouldn’t be a bad thing for me to tell you that I was born here, but was only recently granted a certificate sealed with two swords uprooting a palm tree. Try to understand my motives. They weren’t bad at all.’

  ‘And you, didn’t you ever think about the pain I’m feeling now? If I told you you’d deceived me, could you deny it or blame me? Look where you’ve put me in your life. I always thought I was close to you, really close. And now I come to find out that I’m far away. You forced me to pressure you mercilessly to tell me something that a lot of other people around you already knew – a lot of people who may not have any intimate ties to you. Malek, how many times did you talk to me about the dilemma you faced, and that was forcing you to postpone our engagement? How many times did I try to find out what kind of a dilemma you were talking about? But all you did was keep telling me it didn’t concern me. You sat back and watched while I floundered about, worrying, racking my brain, not knowing what to think. I was about to doubt your intentions toward me. Yet none of that was enough to get you to take pity on me and tell me what your dilemma was.’

  She’d once written to him, saying, ‘I know the moment when I started to change.’ As she hurriedly threw out these words of hers, she’d realized she was changing, although she hadn’t known what she was changing into. The right half of her head was throbbing violently, and she wanted to end the call before she said something she would regret.

  She saw the cosmos confining her behind a cold glass barrier. She could see and hear everything on the other side, but all she could feel was cold. Even Malek she saw beyond the barrier, and she didn’t cry. Deep inside her there churned all the feelings that make a person want to cry, but without knowing how. Her throat went dry. Her spirit also seemed dry, as though love had never touched her.

  With difficulty she said, ‘I’d like to go now. I don’t have anything to say, and there’s nothing I want to hear.’

  ‘Take it easy, Leen. I love you.’

  ‘And you’ve proved it,’ she said mockingly.

  ‘Leen!’ he cried at the same moment.

  He couldn’t see that she wasn’t mocking him. She was mocking the innocence of hers that had so charmed him. Now she knew why it had charmed him. She was mocking the moment she’d once been so sure they would never have to face, only to find them facing it when they’d least expected to.

  ‘Let me go before I hurt you with my words. I don’t want to do that, and if I go on talking, it’s bound to lead to pain.’

  ‘Watch out, then, for the Leen I know, so that she won’t hurt the Leen I love.’

  Click . . . and she hung up. She didn’t even wait for him to hang up first the way she always did. She went over to her wardrobe and brought out a medium-sized, colorful box that held his letters, the box that, long months later, she would find Hashem hunched over, rummaging through its contents and scattering her photos.

  She began reading his letters and underlining the places where he had communicated respect for her difference, her mind, and her ability to understand:

  I refused to get involved with women before I met you because I wanted a woman who was different: a woman who would enthrall me with her mind . . . They say that Muhammad ’Abd al-Jawwad is the most accomplished left-back in the history of Saudi soccer. They always like to use superlatives: the best, the most beautiful, etc.! They’re free to do as they like, and I’m free to do as I like. So I say: To me you’re the most amazing woman . . . A prostitute phoned me yesterday. She claimed she was from Riyadh. I almost weakened and went to her. But I only remembered you. So I didn’t give in . . . Would it surprise you if I told you that your love has taught me to swear off racism? I used to be prone to it, horrible as it is. After all, there’s nothing strange about that in a society that feeds us on its stereotypes from the time we’re born: Indians are called ‘rafig’, Bedouins are called ‘Serbs’, Hejazis are called ‘Tarsh Bahr’, Egyptians are called swindlers, Lebanese are called pimps. And those are only some of the filthy epithets I used to use, but your love cleansed me of them.

  She kept wondering: if he really saw her this way, then why had he concealed his dilemma from her? She was alarmed to see how his behavior had given the lie to all the words he’d written about her, about life, about what ought to be and what ought not to be. She’d believed in the silly principle that says people should live according to the way they think. She’d clashed with lots of people around her because of this naïve principle since it flew in the face of the prevailing way of life in her country: her country, where people said what they didn’t do and did what they didn’t say. Her country, where life was being destroyed by corrosion after spinning endlessly round and round in a stinking mire. Like a vast unpolished silver surface – rough, frigid, and massive – her country needed a little hellfire to melt it down, purify it and reshape it. But God hadn’t sent down His punishment yet.

  It alarmed her to see the way his behavior gave the lie to the romantic picture of love that had filled her mind and that she couldn’t let go of. For a long time she’d thought that love meant being close to someone, as close as close could be. But suddenly she’d realized that, like anything else in life, love is subject to a person’s particular ideas and way of life.

  Even so, regardless of his motives or his way of life, Malek had had no right to conceal such a thing from her. After all, it didn’t concern him alone, but both of them together. It concerned the relationship between them. She would always think of it this way, and she would go on wondering what had caused him to behave as he had. Had he been worried about how she might react if she knew? Had he been trying to spare her pain? And what pain? She wouldn’t have been in pain. Rather, she would have understood the dilemma he faced and would have thought with him about how they could resolve it. She wouldn’t have pressured him or hurt him. Nor would she have gotten caught up in waiting for a commitment she had thought was imminent only to find that it was far, far away. She would have understood. But he’d chosen for her not to understand, believing – as he always did – that he was sparing her harm, and that the matter didn’t concern her despite the fact that it concerned her to the point of being excruciating.

  Oh, God. So he didn’t know me after all. All those telephone calls and all those times spent together suddenly show themselves to be flawed. All we were doing was wasting time on a long, drawn-out prattle.

  She was filled with rage, bitterness, confusion, amazement and grief. When she b
egan thinking about the fact that there might be other things he had concealed, was concealing, or would have concealed from her in the future, she realized, with difficulty, that she’d lost faith in him. And when she reached that moment, she came back to her old oyster shell, the one she’d opened for his sake, and let it quietly close around her. She stopped being happy: she stopped being the heavenly creature – as he used to call her – that had captivated him with its sweet spirit and pristine innocence. She stopped telling him she loved him or that she missed him, or that she was sad. Blame thrashed about deep inside her like a little child restrained to a bed. But she didn’t want to blame him, since blame wouldn’t do any good. It wouldn’t give him an ‘absolution’, and it wouldn’t restore order to the chaos his actions had left in their wake.

  A few days later, she adamantly refused to see him. She knew now that she was angry, but she didn’t know how to get rid of the anger, which had turned her into what he described as ‘a poisoned blade thrust into my heart’. She didn’t deny this, but she also didn’t tell him that he was the one who had thrust the blade when he chose to relate to her as though they were starring in some sappy Arab film: the star conceals his big secret from his sweetheart in the belief that he’s doing the right thing, which leads her to think badly of him. He revels in the role of victim until suddenly all the facts come out and she cries giddily, ‘Do you really love me that much, Sharif?!’ in response to which he nods his head with a smile before the words ‘The End’ descend on the screen over their heads. And, as the fairy tale goes, ‘They lived happily ever after.’ But life isn’t like films, and that’s part of the tragedy, since the other part is that in the rough-and-tumble of our everyday lives we forget all about films, and we don’t forgive ourselves when we try to turn our long, tumultuous lives into quick flicks with happy endings.

  She’d decided not to blame him and had struggled mightily not to do so. She might have succeeded in keeping herself from blaming him. However, she wasn’t what she had been before. She couldn’t fight off the wave of grief that had flooded over her heart and spirit. And Malek couldn’t see any justification for that grief. Consequently, he was filled with a bitterness and resentment that he didn’t understand. He thought the source of her grief was that she was resisting her desire to run away from him. He voiced this thought directly at times and alluded to it at others. But she said nothing. She didn’t know how to make him understand that of all the feelings that had churned deep inside her – rage, resentment, confusion, amazement, and grief – grief was all that remained. All the other feelings were gone, and nothing was left but her old heartache. She didn’t know how to make him understand how painful it was for her to watch her lifetime – which she’d wanted to spend with him – slip through her fingers like cold water. Her days were devoid of even the shadows of the gaiety whose time she had thought had come, only to see it dissipate like a fleeting summer cloud. Out of the blue she’d discovered something else that also prevented them from committing themselves to each other. Besides color, there were other, unyielding restrictions. There was another barrier they would have to breach in order to reach each other. She’d thought for a moment that everything was about to fall into place. However, a blind force had suddenly pulled her back without giving her a chance to realize what was happening to her. Nothing on earth pained her the way it did for things to come too late. This was a part of her that Malek hadn’t understood. He’d tried, but he hadn’t been able to comprehend the pain that wrung her heart. How could she rejoice in something whose presence would only remind her of the long, painful time she’d spent waiting for him? And how could he understand her spirit’s anguish?

  She was about to turn thirty – her old dream. She’d begun to explore whether it was possible for a woman to reach the age of thirty without a husband or young children in a country where a woman’s existence was only validated by having a husband or a son. She’d been waiting anxiously for her thirtieth birthday. Never once had she met a woman in these desert sands who was waiting for her thirtieth birthday or even thinking about waiting for it. But turning thirty was her unique obsession. During her teen years she’d thought it must be a magical event for somebody – anybody – to become thirty years old. So she’d started waiting for it, and what a long wait it had seemed to be.

  At fifteen, people waited to become twenty so that they could seem grown-up in the eyes of those around them. She thought back on the dreams suspended there in the lavender sky of twenty, the expanse that opened onto infinity, the rashness, the sweet frivolity, the forgivable imprudence, the naïve ideas that made people think life could never betray them, and the heart that never tired of searching for a special sorrow, since sorrow is maturity, and happy people and those who laugh a lot are gullible folks who don’t know what life is about. As for the sorrowful, they’re the mature ones. The sorrowful are the children of life. She’d thought about all this. Still, all she’d been waiting for was her thirtieth birthday. She had believed – though she didn’t know why – that by the time she turned thirty she would have surmounted the obstacles in her life. And she thought she would reach that age with a heart that was still tender and glowing, a spirit that hadn’t been broken, and wisdom that was still intact.

  God, Leen! Where were you going to get wisdom thinking like that?

  She scoffed at herself as she remembered how she had imagined that once she turned thirty, she would experience profound happiness: a staid, thoughtful happiness, not a frivolous, light-headed happiness. But does happiness wait a lifetime before it comes? And is it possible for someone to describe happiness as being ‘staid and thoughtful’ or ‘frivolous and light-headed’ without being scoffed at?

  Ha, ha, ha! Laugh, Leen. Have a long laugh over your naïve ideas. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! Have a good long laugh that puts a miserable lump in your throat at the end of every ‘ha’ while the tears pour endlessly down. Ha, ha, ha. A person only turns thirty once. Ha, ha, ha. You’ve left thirty behind forever. You reached it once, Leen. Then you left it with a wizened heart, a tattered spirit, and no wisdom. Ha, ha, ha. Malek says, ‘You’re a flawless woman.’ No, you’re a woman who’s nothing but flaws, nothing but flaws, nothing but fl-a-a-a-a-a-ws. Ha, ha, ha.

  Thirty!

  What she had done was far less than she’d always thought she would. By the time her mother turned thirty, she’d given birth to her daughter, and to her sacred male Hashem. And now, her mother would look at her with a sigh – sometimes – surrounded by her stacks of books and papers. For all she knew, her mother might be wondering what she’d done wrong to make her daughter turn out this way, and whether she would forever be stuck with books and words she didn’t understand and didn’t want to understand. She might be wondering what her daughter found in a world in which there was nothing but books stacked in neat rows atop the shelves or piled near her bed: a world of paper. Leen had never expected her mother to understand the secret that lay behind her attachment to a world that seemed suited not to a woman but to a man. When a man wastes his life on books, no one blames him. And the moment he comes to his senses (since books, like drugs, rob a person of his senses), life is there waiting for him. Life will always be waiting for the man, since he makes his life. As for the woman, she waits for hers. No matter how old he gets, a man can always start all over again. He’s bound to find a woman and have children. And he’ll find a woman and have children even if he remains attached to his books. As for the woman, well . . .

  Oh, how a woman suffers!

  And she had suffered. She’d suffered for a long time, certain that she had never been close to him in the past, and that she would never be close to him in the days to come. Depression hadn’t been her preferred choice. She’d striven mightily to recover the spirit that had once been hers, but she found herself alone, with no one to support her. And Malek? It pained her to realize that his love was no longer a haven where she could find refuge when life took her by surprise. It pained her even more t
o think – if even for a moment – that most of her suffering now came from this very love. As she spread out its large fabric in front of her every night, trying to mend its holes, she wondered if he was there on the other end doing the same thing. It agonized her to see herself having turned into a cold, hopeless machine. She would wake up tired after a fitful sleep, read a little and work a lot. She would eat and drink because she had to. She’d grown thin, very thin, as she waited to recover from the loss of her first hope. And when she didn’t recover, she promised herself not to let life torment her with hope ever again for fear that the wait might reveal something else she wouldn’t be able to bear. The moments pierced her heart as she thought about the fact that they – that is, all the moments that were passing with Malek far away – would have been more pleasant if he were near. But nothing had ever brought him near: not the letters, not the phone calls, not the furtive trysts. Nothing had brought him near, and nothing ever would. At least not now, or tomorrow, or the day after that. It would be a long time before he was near, if it ever happened at all. She would always think this way. It might not be to his liking, but it was the only way she knew how to think, and after all her years of living, it wouldn’t be possible for her to learn some other way. So, was she supposed to apologize for this? Should he blame her for shuttering hope’s windows as she fled from any glimmer of hope – as she fled even from seeing him?

  For months he’d pressed her to let him see her. After despairing of the idea, he’d stopped insisting. Then, a few days earlier, he’d called. A long year had nearly passed since she’d learned of the ‘absolution’. It was mid-Sha’ban.

  When he called her he said, ‘I’m in the mood for a pre-Ramadan picnic. I’m in the mood for mushabbak, hamam al-barr, and you.’

  She remained silent. Any word she might think of saying would open up like a fresh wound. When she finally gathered the courage to speak, she said in a tone that she hoped wouldn’t betray her agitation, ‘You don’t get it.’