Days of Ignorance

by Laila Aljohani

  He’d moved from job to job, institution to institution and company to company before settling at the archives of a private clinic. More than three years earlier he’d run into a friend from high school. In the course of their conversation he’d learned that his friend was working as a freelance reporter for a local newspaper. His friend had suggested that he try his luck at the same newspaper, because they needed someone to provide them with news items, coverage, reports, interviews, and it was this happenstance that had led him to Leen.

  There were moments when he’d wished that happenstance had never occurred. He’d been dejected. Love had been eating away at him without his seeing even the faintest glimmer of light. He wondered what sort of a crime it was for him to love her and want to marry her. What was it that would make it impossible for him to do so? His color? Why did people make his color into a sin that nothing could wash away? When they did this they seemed to be saying to God, ‘You created a color that’s bad!’ But why was he wondering about such things when he was almost certain that there was nothing that could heal the sickness in his soul? No one – not even Leen – could feel and understand what had happened to him at the moment when he realized that he was bound inextricably to an outcast’s color that he hadn’t chosen for himself, to a situation he’d done nothing to create, and to a country in whose vast fabric he’d wanted so desperately to be a tiny thread.

  He wished he could let out a long scream. For as long as he’d known her he’d been hearing the scream of the being deep inside him. It was a frightful scream that neither fell silent nor brought relief. For as long as he’d known her he’d felt cheated, and that his life – his entire life – wasn’t his. He’d lived it, but it hadn’t been his. He’d had another life, but it had been wrested away from him. Or, rather, he’d allowed it to be wrested from him. Only much later did he realize that he’d relinquished his own rights, and Leen’s rights too. Meanwhile, in his heart of hearts, he believed he was less than what she deserved. He hadn’t completed his education, he didn’t have an ‘absolution’, and he hadn’t been fierce enough not to give in without a fight. He’d realized too late that he’d been led away to the fate that others wanted for him, and that the fates he’d fled from were no worse than his present capitulation. As for the people around him, they would think he was unworthy of Leen for the simple reason that he was black. In their eyes she would be too good for him – so much so that they would give themselves the right to condemn, and to nastily wonder aloud what would make her want to be associated with him. They would even go so far as to refuse to marry their daughters to her brother or to allow her sisters to marry (if she had had sisters) because, like leprosy, his color was something that could only be coped with by avoidance.

  A year after meeting her, and after realizing that she’d found a place in his heart, he’d begun applying for an ‘absolution’. All the papers he could get his hands on that might demonstrate his right to citizenship – his birth certificate, his diplomas, a certificate of good conduct from the local chief of police, a tattered document testifying to the fact that his mother had been born in the country – he gathered together and organized into a green file. Then he started getting his hopes up, and decided not to mention it to her in the hope that he would be able to tell her the story some day. ‘Imagine!’ he’d say. ‘When I first met you I still didn’t have an “absolution”!’ Then he would laugh, and she would open her black eyes wide as saucers, saying, ‘You’re kidding!’

  But he hadn’t said, ‘Imagine . . .!’, and she hadn’t replied, ‘You’re kidding!’ The whole thing had turned into numbers, dates and little pieces of paper with appointments written on them that he would stuff into the breast pocket of his robe. He would take the little pieces of paper with him to Riyadh only to come back home with still more of them, but without being told by anyone at the Ministry of the Interior whether he should get his hopes up or stop hoping altogether. One day he’d asked a ministry employee, ‘Can you tell me if there’s any hope?’

  The employee had looked at him for several moments before saying in a serious tone, ‘Have you got really good connections? Or can you play soccer?’

  He shook his head sadly, and the employee said nothing more. Even the sound of the papers the employee was shuffling died. There then came the moment when he realized that putting off the announcement of unpleasant news only makes it all the more unpleasant. The matter of the ‘absolution’ had turned into a sharp bend in the road. As they rounded it, he and Leen were about to go careening into a dark wasteland, and he couldn’t blame her for a thing.

  It had been a long year since he’d applied for the ‘absolution’ and two years since they’d met, when she asked him impassively, ‘Haven’t we been in love for a long time now?’

  He understood what she meant, and he loved her dearly for having said what she said in that particular way and tone. He heaved a deep sigh, inwardly cursing everything and everyone that stood between them. Then he said, ‘Listen, Leen. I’ve got a bit of a dilemma on my hands that has nothing to do with you and doesn’t concern you. I’m trying to resolve it, and once I’ve done that, the road ahead will open up for us.’

  ‘It has nothing to do with me and doesn’t concern me? Does that mean I don’t have a right to know what it is?’

  ‘Let’s not go there, all right? But I swear to you that I’ll tell you about it as soon as I’ve resolved it.’

  ‘When will that be?’

  The question tore into his heart, hot and merciless. He resisted the pain as he said to her, ‘I really don’t know. But let’s hope it will be soon.’

  She had asked him about the dilemma a number of times after that. She’d asked him laughingly, worriedly, furiously. Then there came the time when she said to him, ‘Not understanding hurts. I’ve tried to understand why you’re stalling, but I’ve failed, and I can’t take it anymore. I can’t go on being in the shadow of your life in this land of suspicion. Three years have gone by, and that’s too much. It’s longer than I’d expected, and it’s longer than I can take. It’s also longer than I can forgive myself for if I sit down some day and think about the story with my mind. And you know my mind.’

  There descended a gray silence, heavy as lead. Then, with some effort, he said, ‘You’re right.’

  ‘So then, if you’ll excuse me . . .’ She hung up without giving him the chance to say a thing. And what could he have said to stop the steeds of suspicion that had gone galloping through her deepest places? What word could have taken her back to before the moment when she said, ‘. . . you’re stalling’? Or to the moment when, after an intimate meeting, she’d written to him saying:

  ‘I wanted to see what your touch might do to the woman hidden deep inside me, the woman who’d slept for so many years that I’d begun to think nothing and nobody could wake her up. Seeing her asleep peacefully there in the darkness, I thought I might have lost my mind so completely that I’d fled for all those years from letting a man touch me intimately. But actually, the issue isn’t whether you touch me, but, rather, whether I love you so much that I wait passionately for you to touch me.’

  He’d smoked a lot of cigarettes that night, drunk cup after cup of coffee and tea, and read her few letters. Then he’d gone over the text messages from her that were saved on his cell phone. For a moment he was suffocated by his sense of impotence. He hated the ‘absolution’ and the raunchy taste of coffee when someone gulps it down cold after a long drag on a cigarette. And even more than that, he hated the cold voice that kept repeating mechanically whenever he called her, ‘The mobile number you are dialing is currently unavailable. Please try later.’

  Afraid of losing her, he was gripped suddenly by a desperate desire to erase the world. It was the same desire that had come over him for the first time years before as he ran through the hospital lobby in search of someone to help him carry his brother Yusuf, who lay spattered with blood in the car at the hospital gate.

  He’d gotten home late
that night. Then, as usual, he’d gone to see his brother in his room. But no sooner had he opened the door than he saw the blood, which was forming a small, dark, viscous pool on the covers where Yusuf lay.

  ‘Yusuf!’ he screamed in terror.

  He didn’t think of calling an ambulance. He didn’t even wait to figure out what had caused his only brother to cut his own artery. He didn’t wait to figure it out because he himself had come to the same precipice from which Yusuf had flung himself. Unlike Yusuf, however, he hadn’t been able to close his eyes and descend into the lightless abyss of despair. Instead he had retreated at the last moment, perhaps in order to grab his brother and bring him back. He still didn’t know how he’d picked Yusuf up and run with him to the car, or how he’d driven to the Dharbat al-Shams Hospital without seeing anyone or anything the entire way. He hadn’t been the least bit self-conscious when, in search of help, he ran through the emergency-unit entrance, his robe spattered with blood.

  When help did come, he stood at a distance watching two orderlies transfer his brother from the car to a stretcher, then rush him to the emergency room. Meanwhile, he began thinking about his mother, who had been left alone sleeping in the house, and how she would panic if she woke up and didn’t find the two of them.

  ‘O God, don’t let her panic,’ he prayed, ‘and bring Yusuf back to her.’

  He’d seen Yusuf’s desperation. However, he hadn’t seen the depth of his despondency. One night he’d heard him blow up in his mother’s face when she scolded him for coming home late.

  ‘So do you want me to sit around at home like a woman?!’

  ‘No. But don’t be late and make me worry about you. And if you do have to be late, call.’

  ‘Like, what’s going to happen to me?’

  ‘Son . . .’

  Interrupting her irritably, he said, ‘Why did you have me, anyway? So that I could live in torment?’

  ‘Have some fear of God, Yusuf. What’s the matter with you?’

  ‘I’m fed up! I mean, do you like the way my life is, Mom? I can’t even get a middle-school diploma since I don’t have any connections to get me into the school, and there’s no work.’

  ‘Things will be better tomorrow.’

  ‘God damn tomorrow.’

  ‘Shame on you! What do you lack?’

  ‘What I lack is to be a human being in other people’s eyes.’

  ‘God forbid! What are you, then? An animal?’

  But Yusuf made no reply. Instead, he stomped off to his room and slammed the door behind him. His mother’s murmurs grew louder and louder, but it didn’t occur to Malek to go out and check on them, since anguish had taken him to the same barren island from whose edges Yusuf was shrieking, and he thought Yusuf would know how to survive, since he was shrieking in rejection of everything he encountered, whereas he, Malek, had succumbed to silence and abysses, filling them with his days and pieces of his life, then moving on without looking back. Not for a moment had he thought that Yusuf was shrieking because he was frightened and unable to survive – not, that is, until he saw the pool of blood under him.

  He looked over at his brother lying there with a stillness that shot him through with sorrow. He thought about how he was going to tell his mother what had happened. Bad news is exhausting, and sometimes it seems easier to receive it than it is to announce it. Yet soon he found himself announcing it.

  She turned to him with a bewildered look on her face. Then, in a tone that killed him, she asked, ‘Are you talking to me about my Yusuf?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Your brother Yusuf slit his own throat?’

  ‘He tried to, Mom, but we got to him in time.’

  She looked at him for a moment, then got up and headed for her room. Before going in, she turned to him and said, ‘Your brother died a long time ago. The person in the hospital isn’t my son.’

  ‘Mom . . .’

  But she just went into her room and closed the door. After that she refused to visit Yusuf in the hospital. She refused even to say that she was shocked or saddened. She surrendered to a silence that razed the very foundations of the house. When Yusuf came home, she refused to see him or speak to him, and she avoided being in the same place with him. Then she started speaking of him in the third person as though he were deceased: ‘Yusuf, may he rest in peace, used to say . . .’ ‘Remember, Malek, how Yusuf – may he rest in peace – used to come home late?’ ‘Yusuf – may he rest in peace – didn’t like dark clothes.’ ‘Yusuf – may he rest in peace – used to like Labaniya.’

  He thought about how, day after day, she had begun withering away from the inside. Yet he was helpless to extricate her and Yusuf – who had both capitulated to silence and melancholy – from the abyss into which they had fallen and flee with them to somewhere far away. For a moment it seemed to him that his mother had turned her back on life, unable to face it any longer because she’d lost certainty. She’d seen everything she thought she’d built over the years disintegrate suddenly before her very eyes. It tormented him to see her surrender to one ailment after another, but eventually he had no choice but to seek out the help of a woman who came three times a week to take care of the house, wash, cook and iron, breathing life into a household from which joy had absented itself because it was without a woman.

  If his mother had been there, he would have buried his head in her lap and cried his heart out. But she wasn’t there anymore. She’d withdrawn to the point of no return. She’d relieved herself of her burdens and begun visiting him in his dreams: smiling, calm and composed, yet without saying a word.

  Sometimes he would ask her, ‘How are you, Mom?’

  Her only response was to smile that smile which, after some reflection, he realized was the smile of someone who’s finally found rest because he knows. How he wished that he, too, knew, so that he could rest as well. But for years he hadn’t even known what awaited him when he drove through an intersection at the end of some Medinan night; when, without meaning to, he stepped onto a sidewalk; or when he handed his residence card to someone who expected to see a national ID card. The most painful thing about these occasions was the tone of disapproval and disdain that he encountered: ‘And a Camry 2001, too? What have you left for the country’s own people?’ ‘You’ve cheated us with that robe of yours, and your keffiyeh!’

  2:15 a.m.

  Abu al-Hasan al-Asadi related to me on the authority of Muhammad ibn Salih ibn al-Nattah, on the authority of Abu al-Yaqazan, who heard Juwayriyah ibn Asma’ say, ‘’Abdullah ibn Ja’far received a slave by the name of al-Nusayb, whereupon he supplied him with a mount, gave him gifts, and clothed him. Then someone said to him, “Abu Ja’far, why have you given all these gifts to a black slave?” “By God,” he replied, “although his skin is black, his heart is white, his poetry is in eloquent Arabic, and for the lines he has composed he deserves more than what he has received. As for the gifts he has been given, they are nothing but she-camels that grow gaunt and feeble, garments that become old and tattered, and dirhems that are spent and consumed, whereas the praise he has earned will endure, and the eulogies he has composed will be recited for generations on end.”’ (Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani, Kitab al-Aghani)

  I beg thee, long night, be gone and give way to morning, though the morning that follows thee will be nothing but more of the same! He let forth a faint, doleful laugh as he listened to his tone of voice in the stillness of the long night that had gone on without end, and weighed heavily upon him. The night that had given him its color but hadn’t taken his sorrow from him. The night that, according to his mother, was the time when he’d been born, and in which he now hoped to die. The night in which he’d fallen so many years earlier, only to have an iron skewer pierce his chin, leaving a deep scar that ran diagonally from just beneath his lower lip, slightly right of center, to the tip of his chin. (On a number of occasions Leen had run her fingertips over it, telling him that she was ‘charmed by it’.) The night at the end of which he didn’t
know what he would say to her or how he would say it. He couldn’t tell her to stay, and he couldn’t tell her to go. To tell her to stay would be selfish, and to tell her to go would be treacherous. Whichever he did, he would never stop blaming himself, and before he did either, he would have to listen to whatever she had to say.

  What harm would there have been in their never meeting? What harm would there have been in his remaining the ten-year-old boy who used to leave the holy precincts after the Friday congregational prayer and go out by Bab al-Majidi, and who, drawn in by the first lines of Awraq al-Ward by Mustafa Sadiq al-Rafi’i, had stopped at the Dhiya’ bookstore to buy the book? What harm would there have been in his continuing to sell refreshments and ice water to pilgrims and visitors to the city of pilgrims, at the shrines near the tomb of ‘the chief of the martyrs’, at the Seven Mosques, including the Mosque of the Two Qiblahs, and elsewhere?

  Oh, God!

  She’d known all the same neighborhoods, streets, alleys and seasons. But the two of them had met much later, which only made the anguish more devastating. There was no hope. Never since the time he met her had there been any hope. It was just that love had turned his being inside out, causing his fears, uncertainties and disappointments to settle to the bottom so that they stopped flashing like danger signals in the darkness of his long road. He realized now that hope – whose wiles he had tried to resist – had so subtly wrapped its snare about his feet that he hadn’t noticed until the rope had tightened and drawn him in. So he found himself suspended in mid-air, swinging back and forth in a vast cold expanse with no reason to hope that anyone or anything might loosen the rope and give him a chance to escape.

  But what was escape? At that moment it appeared that his only escape was to cry. But, ironically, he wasn’t able to cry. He felt a lump in his throat that was about to choke him. This time it wasn’t his lip but his heart that had been pierced with a red-hot skewer. And now it had begun gradually to cool down without his being able to pull it out or even budge it, since the shock of the pain was too great to be endured twice.