So we had each received the other’s story. We had acted as spillover containers for each other. I couldn’t think of a deeper or more profound act of service. What else could we do but bear witness for each other? Receive each other’s testimony and believe it, regard it, and preserve it lovingly? This trip, too, I thought, like the time we’d spent in Jerusalem, had become yet another thread that connected us through time and space.
In my mind’s eye, I could see my teenage self—thin, tanned, my hair long, my eyes brighter, my movements more hesitant—swimming across the lake, Omar struggling to keep up, eventually pulling me back by the ankles and pressing his body against mine. It was strange, I thought, that I could remember so much about his body—the lean musculature of his legs, his wide chest, the precise shade of his skin, the taste of his mouth—but I couldn’t remember the length or girth or shape of his penis or how it had felt in my hand or against my body or inside of me. It was eternally lost to me no matter that I would spend the rest of my life haunted by it. That very forgetfulness, I thought, as we were called to exit the hammam—our ninety minutes were up—revealed my lack of experience, my innocence, my naïveté, my powerlessness against Omar. I had hidden from my fears, suppressed any awareness of my vulnerability, a strategy that had allowed me to survive all these years. For the first time, I felt gratitude toward my mind, its discernment and natural intelligence, its hardwired will; my mind had known to let some things recede into the distance, to discard what I could not, and would likely never be able to, bring myself to hold. There was a power in forgetting I hadn’t been able to acknowledge before.
That night Ellie and I slept soundly without stirring or waking to use the bathroom, without remembering where we were. We slept a true sleep, a profound, transformative sleep, and woke up feeling refreshed, ready to take on the day. We had plans to get breakfast—café con leche and pan rayado—and head over to the Alhambra. We would finally walk through its glorious halls, take in all of its divine beauty.
What we didn’t know but would soon discover was that most people had reserved their tickets months in advance. We weren’t going to be let in. We hiked up and down the hill in the heat and asked every vendor, every guided-tour office—we even asked other tourists if they would consider selling us their tickets. Nothing. We stood at the arched gate of the Alhambra dumbfounded, in utter disbelief. Then we walked over to the mirador and looked down at Granada, at its white houses and green trees and clear-watered river. We sat there for a long time, staring out, crestfallen, shut out by our failure to grasp that the Alhambra was now the most popular tourist destination in all of Spain. “How odd,” we said to each other, just as we had the previous evening, the realization so utterly absurd that it warranted repeating. “How strangely dissonant the world is. Islamophobia was rampant. It had been singing its deadly tune steadily since 9/11, and now, almost twenty years later, hatred of Arabs and Muslims the world over was so common, it was considered normal. And yet here was our civilization’s ghost being celebrated.”
“Let’s just go,” Ellie said. She was breaking into a rash from the heat.
“My pale pumpkin,” I said, and leaned my head against hers.
She looked at her phone for other sites we could go to and found the Palacio de los Olvidados, the Palace of the Forgotten. We laughed heartily at our own strange fate as we made our way back down the hill and across the river to look at the recovered artifacts of Jewish families who had been tortured and banished from Spain’s frontiers.
We were the only ones there. The entire museum was ours, empty; all we could hear was the gorgeous Sephardic music playing over the loudspeakers and our own distressed footfalls as we walked through the exhibition, taking in Torah scrolls, challah covers made of embroidered velvet, wine goblets, menorahs, children’s clothes. We took in the framed deeds. We took in the torture devices used in the Inquisition: skull crushers, the famous doncella de hierro, the Judas cradle, with its pointed pyramid that ripped victims in half, knee splitters, waterboarding devices, brass bulls in which suspects were burned alive, their remains exiting the bull’s nostrils as plumes of smoke. We drew sharp, purposeful breaths before a set of metal “masks of shame” that were shaped like wild boars’ faces, with long metal beaks and muzzles that made it impossible to eat. Women were forced to wear them in public until they eventually starved to death. I saw that the wild boar, my wild boar—her soft animal body, which had never been given a chance to grow, her heart, like my own, unable to graze the green pastures of childhood—was omnipresent. She had always been there with her piggish face, her frightful gaze, her uncertain gait, tortured, hounded, hung upside down and denuded, skinned, hacked into pieces, and fed to men, not a being unto herself but a tool for satiating the hunger of others just as we women had been: edible, interrupted beings whose bodies were overpowered, whose lives were lives of service no matter our will.
I thought I saw the shadow of my wild boar sliding across the walls of the museum. I thought I saw her weaving her way between the artifacts. No—I did not think— she was there. We stood side by side looking at the boar masks mounted on female mannequins, our chests aching in equal measure. I breathed alongside her. I felt the rhythm of her hot, heavy breath synchronize with the beating of my heart, my two hearts. I saw myself running through time with her and knew that she would always break the laws that separate the living from the dead to pay me a visit. She would be most welcome. I would eternally salute her.
I looked one last time at the masks of shame. I thought of my mother, of all of our mothers. I thought of my father, of how his presence in our lives was made through absence. What is a father? I wondered. What is fatherhood, motherhood, brotherhood? I wanted to reach out and comb my brother’s hair. To whisper in his ear, Not everything is absence; let’s hold on to this life together. I’d been forced to bury the brother I had known while he had gone on living, a ghost of his former self. How confused I’d been. How utterly wrecked. How plainly disoriented. And yet I wouldn’t change anything that had happened. What’s the point of wishing for the impossible? The only way forward is to surrender to fate, the fate that had been made for me and the fate that I’d made on my own. It was all exactly as it needed to be. I was not alone. Neither was Ellie. We were bonded to each other, to our mothers and grandmothers and sisters and aunts across time, and while we could not change the wrongdoings of the past or fix the errors of others, we could hold hands and purge ourselves of the shame of our perpetrators. We weren’t the ones who should be wearing those masks of shame. No. They did not belong to us. Maybe they didn’t belong to anybody. Maybe we weren’t meant to experience shame at all. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Xavi had said to me in the early days of our relationship when he had intuited that I was holding back some internal darkness to protect our relationship. He, too, like Ellie, had softened me, had helped me to accept the shape of my life, to love it even. Xavi, who had learned my story, who had become my witness through it all. I missed him terribly. I needed to hear his voice. I needed his kindness. I needed to return to him and sit by his side, to feel him breathing next to me.
We walked up to the last floor of the museum. It was a partially covered terrace with a bench facing a gallows pole, a window looking out to the Alhambra. We sat down.
“Even here,” Ellie said, “there’s no historical context provided, no information plaques acknowledging the violence of the Spanish Inquisition, the expulsion and torture of Arabs and Jews. The hanging instrument, used to execute Jews and Muslims alike, is just sitting here, facing the Alhambra, without having been properly encased. There are no boundaries around it to imply its anachronism, which suggests it is still a tool that can be employed spontaneously.”
I told her that it seemed positioned in the most sinister way, as if to suggest that our death as Muslims and Jews was and would always be imminent.
She pulled out a bag of leftover peaches from her backpack.
“You’re going to eat those h
ere?” I asked.
“I am,” she said, and bit into one of the peaches. “It’s delicious and I’ll take my small pleasures where I can.”
I remembered sitting on Sahar’s roof in Bil’in, drinking tea, eating fruit, smoking hookah after hookah as we watched Israeli tanks roll through the streets, the trash being set on fire, dogs being beaten by frustrated kids. We had waited for days for the water to be turned back on. We hadn’t left her house more than once in the five days we’d been there. Eventually, we’d gone down the street to buy bottled water that had been brought in from the other side of the security wall. That terrace, I thought, was Sahar’s open-air prison. That was the last time we had seen her. She was no longer a part of our lives though we thought and spoke of her often. She was another vanishing point, another absence unaccounted for; we carried her memory with us even after she’d disappeared from our lives. I closed my eyes and took in a deep breath. I heard the tap-tap-tapping of the baby wild boar’s feet on the tiled floors again. I could smell her. She’d smelled of earth and dirt and mud, and I thought to myself, She, too, was my witness and I would forever be hers.
Ellie spat the pit into the palm of her hand. “Look,” she said, spreading her palm for me to see. “This pit is both an end and a beginning.”
“It is,” I said. “It truly is.”
We sat there staring at the gallows pole for a long time. We sat in silence. I thought to myself that in certain respects I had been beheaded by Omar, my identity interrupted. I’d had to invent myself anew after him. And I had. I had managed to look at my death head-on. I’d tried to venture toward what was concealed from me. I had tried to trace through language the accumulated erasures to which he had subjected me. But beneath these erasures, I had found others, just as within each verse in a poem is hidden another poem. So, as it turns out, I thought, I hadn’t written a book about Omar or me. I had written a book about the savage ghosts of history, about the dead whose pain continues to be recycled through this earth because we refuse to acknowledge our wrongdoings. I had created language, this language, as an offering bestowed to others, an offering of the simplest truth of all: that Omar and I and my mother, my brother, my father, his mother and father, and so on and so forth, every one of us, we are all caught up in this vortex of cruelty together; there were no victors, no victims; we were caught in a web we had woven together. We are all of us implicated, all of us responsible. That the betrayals we commit on others we first commit against ourselves. That we go down and rise up as one single organism. The undoing of one of us is the undoing of us all. How are we to contend with our fragility? We who are so reckless, so impatient, so perpetually obsessed with our unfulfilled needs? I hadn’t the slightest clue. The answer, I thought, looking at the sky beyond the window, a pearly pink lifted by a wild golden glow, was beyond my reach. It was beyond grammar. Beyond language. Beyond the spoken word. And then, looking one last time at the Alhambra in all of its glory and beauty past and at the gallows pole that had been used to annihilate that past, looking at the tool of death superimposed on this architecture that so thoroughly celebrated life, I thought, isn’t it possible to transform the cruelty that had connected Omar and me back again into love?
About the Author
© Kayla Holdread
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is the author of three books. She was a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree and is the recipient of a PEN/Faulkner Award and a Whiting Award, among other accolades. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, Guernica, Granta, Bomb, and elsewhere. She splits her time between South Bend, Indiana, and Chicago.
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Savage Tongues Page 23