by Jo Glanville
‘Look, Saad. Your father planted these on the very same day, and they were identical. This one grew and bore fruit, and this other one is still small. Its time hasn’t yet come. You’ll get tall, Saad, and you’ll get sick of how tall you’ll be, and you’ll grow up and become a man!’
Afterwards, you followed the trees’ growth, watched the small one on your way in and out of the house, in case it grew and surpassed the one on the right, but it never did; like you, it remained small.
Today was the first day you realised the benefit of your small size; for, if it hadn’t been for that, would Maryam have let you into her room? Would you have been able to be with her without any embarrassment, to sit so close to her, if you had grown like the apricot tree on the right?
Saad drank all his tea. It was dark and tasted sweet. He added two lines to the letter and left it without a signature, as she’d requested, and he never told anyone about the pound.
A week passed, then two, and Maryam would only smile at him when she saw him. Three weeks on, the taste of the candy he’d bought was but a faint memory.
The boys in the yard would wait for you, then catch you and go through your pockets for beans and sour patches and sweet sesame bars. Eventually they stopped envying you and taunting you, when they realised that your fortune was a temporary one.
He stood in her doorway and asked, ‘Maryam … won’t you write to Khaled again?’
Why did she hesitate to answer? Her face reddened, and she lifted her palm and rested her chin against it, and looked around the room in embarrassment even though there was no one around except for her children.
‘Huh? No, no, Khaled … Khaled came back from abroad. I forgot to tell you, Saad! He’s back. He left Kuwait.’
‘But I didn’t see him come back.’
‘Oh, of course not, you won’t see him, he went to Amman for work. He’s busy now, maybe he’ll come visit during holidays, I don’t know!’
That night went by so slowly, and you decided to hate Khaled. Did your words really affect him so much that he responded? Goddamn composition class and its effects! If he’d stayed in Kuwait, maybe the pounds would continue falling on you, and you’d enjoy drinking tea and sitting near Maryam. Maryam, who is beautiful regardless of money and letters!
The few times Saad saw her again, at the beginning of winter, when the alley was empty of playmates, she was more and more beautiful. He threw a ball into her yard on purpose one day, while he was playing alone, so that he could spy on her. She didn’t come out for days, so he jumped over the fence and glimpsed her in her room. She smiled when she saw him, but she never visited his mother again, after that.
Life distracted him. It grew colder, so the alley was completely deserted, and the teachers bored his soul with homework. He preoccupied himself with daydreams about a pound in exchange for two words.
A young boy whispered something into his ear while they were playing with a ball of fabric at the end of the alley, in the warmth of spring. The boy put on the speech and body-language of a grown-up.
‘Did you hear, Saad, that her husband didn’t behave like a man! He saw her with him and he let her run away … he went to her father and brothers crying, like a woman! Oh, he was no man. The entire neighbourhood can’t believe it. Maryam! But as my mother always says, “Beneath a bubble there is always trouble”.’
It took him a while to comprehend what he’d just heard. He asked, his mouth still wide open, ‘You’re saying Maryam … Maryam ran away?’
‘You midget! Haven’t you heard? The entire neighbourhood’s been buzzing about it. Maryam ran away with her boyfriend, Khaled al-Haddad, the taxi driver. She’s been with him for years, she was in love with him before she got married, and no one knew it until her husband caught them together. But he’s an ass, can you imagine, Saad … he didn’t kill her! He left them and ran crying to her family like a woman, and when he came back she’d escaped. Her husband’s a woman!’
His friend wanted him to play for a while afterwards, but Saad asked him to go away, so he did. The place cleared up and no one remained in the alley but him, in the pitch-black darkness. Khaled the taxi driver? She’d insisted that he was her husband’s brother! And you’ve been sitting around feeling happy about your pound, you idiot! Khaled al-Haddad? The one with the black hair, which he combed carefully every time his taxi made a stop? His hair shone with gel. And his eyes were stupid, and his voice was rough; you could hear him sing loudly whenever the taxi drove by. And she lied for him!
His mother poured tea into her exhausted husband’s cup, and the boy listened and cried, his face covered in a blanket. His mother whispered, ‘Oh dear, what a terrible man! He’s got no honour, no respect, no dignity! And her father and brothers, they aren’t men either. They swore they wouldn’t rest in their wives’ beds until they’d killed her and washed their honour clean.’
He’s now in his bed, in the corner of the room. When did his feet begin to shake? When he pulled up his body, which was overwhelmed with fear, he saw Maryam suddenly crouch down beside him, her thick, waist-length hair frizzy and dishevelled. The blood exploded from her bludgeoned head, and he fled fearfully, but a red waterfall spewed forth from her chest as she came nearer and nearer. He could hear his quickened breath, as he thought, Khaled al-Haddad! You wrote to him, begging him to come back. You tried and she didn’t like what you wrote, until you came up with the most beautiful words you’d memorised, as the ocean misses the breeze, as the thirsty earth longs for rain … as the lofty tree misses birdsong!
Did that jerk understand what you’d written? Did he return because he felt moved by your words?
The letter! What did he do with it? Did he keep it? What if her family found out about it? That you’re an accomplice? Would Maryam ever confess that your letter is what brought Khaled back to her? Or will Maryam keep your secret to herself? Would she die for Khaled al-Haddad? How did she ever fall in love with a person like him?
How and when do we call for the spirits of men? They were chasing after her, looking for her! Men he didn’t know were out for her head. Why did the walls around him feel as if they were closing in on him, making him more and more afraid, suffocating his breath?
He crept out of his bed when his parents were fast asleep. The road and the alley and her house had all surrendered to a sad silence. When his eyes became accustomed to the darkness, he found that her gate was locked. Her house was covered in darkness and was frightfully still.
He resisted his fear, but still hesitated for a long while before he climbed the wall and sat on it. The house and the yard were coal black in the night and its darkness. The roughness of stones and cement scratched him, and a chill went down his spine. He sat still and swung his dangling feet back and forth.
As he got used to the darkness, the sand-filled yard looked still and quiet. It was empty except for his small shoe, which had fallen off and landed there. The loneliness of that shoe preoccupied his thoughts, he wondered whether it would fit any of her children. Next to the single shoe, from the stillness of the sand, Maryam bloomed, spread out in the night’s stillness and the dark’s cold. She was covered in wounds, and her blood flowed heavily, dripping around her, and flooding the entire place. She was a motionless, voiceless body.
The sight of her paralysed him with fear. He covered his face in his arms and wept, as the cold and terror went on, moving from the stones and the night into him. He leaned and cried and fell towards her. The blood-soaked body seized him, and his fearful wails escaped from his body as he landed – Bang! – right on top of her.
The sand was dry and hard and cold, and around him there was nothing but silence after the sound of his fall to the ground had evaporated.
He spied nothing in the empty sand-filled yard but a single, small, lonely shoe. He ran, opened the gate and took off into the road, racing away from his fear.
Translated by Randa Jarrar
SAMAH AL-SHAYKH
At the Hospital
Peop
le’s feet looked a bit bigger than they really were, which made me feel dizzy. The clean floor was rising slowly up towards me, smelling of disinfectant. At the far end of the corridor a child began to make a noise as if he was crying, but he wasn’t, I was certain of that. It was more like a signal to the other children, for at once a baby lying next to me in a woman’s lap began to scream excruciatingly, then a few seats along a child of about two burst into tears, going on at his mother to give him something, although what it was I couldn’t make out from his garbled speech. Then the place suddenly erupted to the sounds of a child’s bitter sobbing coming from behind the closed door next to me and the voice of an invisible doctor pleading with him to keep still so he didn’t hurt himself, and promising him that it would soon be over.
Thanks to the air conditioning it wasn’t too hot and I no longer needed the handkerchief I’d been holding when I entered the hospital to wipe the sweat off my face. It seemed to be fine now. But then, when I noticed the faces of the people around me getting longer and longer in response to their crying children, I began to sweat again in embarrassment and confusion. From the start they hadn’t looked nice, or not normal anyhow, and then I realised that they were all families waiting with me – a father, a mother and a child or several children – and I wondered if this was a children’s hospital and I’d ended up here by mistake, or if it was pure coincidence.
There was a secret deal being made. I saw from the look in their eyes how its main points were being relayed wordlessly from one to the other, but I couldn’t understand – it wasn’t a deal so much as a conspiracy being forged behind everyone’s backs, mine, the children’s, the doctors’ and the nurses’. Before long I witnessed with my own eyes the children joining in this conspiracy. They’d all suddenly gone quiet and were burbling incomprehensibly, making sounds that didn’t seem childlike in the slightest, and tugging at their mothers’ dresses or their fathers’ trousers with a disgusting kind of neediness, which filled me with fear, while their mothers’ and fathers’ faces continued to grow longer, and I wondered if things would go on being this slow here for ever.
I longed to see just one doctor or nurse. The place was hard and austere, and the only person to appear on the first floor, where I was sitting, was an official of some kind who was presumably in charge of allotting patients to the appropriate consultant. This character alone was enough to make you depressed. The way he treated you, you’d think you were there by force. I swear if you talked to him this dead weight would descend on you, and you’d become the heaviest person in the world. Maybe I haven’t described him very well, but all I can say is that when I was registering my personal details with him he dragged me right down.
As I sat waiting, a very fat woman came in on her own. I laughed a little to myself, imagining she’d already encountered that official, and been as thin as me beforehand, but secretly I was pleased that she’d come on her own like me, and felt glad when she sat down next to me. But then, having fiddled nervously with the contents of her extremely small handbag, she left again almost at once. We didn’t know why she came or why she went and she never even reported to the official at all, although you were meant to on arrival.
Only then did I think of leaving myself. I couldn’t stand it any longer. I remembered I’d been in a hurry when I first came, and wondered how I could have managed to forget. The children’s eyes mocked me, and I thought they’d try and stop me, and figured they were strong enough to do it. So I looked back at them defiantly, determined to go, then stood up to show I meant it, although inside I was anything but certain. I was shocked to find they all appeared normal, the children just children and their parents not unnaturally elongated. I’d been really unfair. I felt embarrassed to be standing up in this stupid, meaningless way and wished I could sit down again without anyone noticing.
But standing was preferable, as I found out when I did sit down and they all reverted to being as they had been, or in fact even sillier and uglier, their eyes smaller, their noses puckered and wrinkled, and their faces frighteningly long. I took out my mobile phone without stopping to think why and they all turned to look at me. I had the impression they were begging me not to use it, and they moved their eyebrows imploringly, humbly.
I leapt acrobatically from the window and landed in my father’s car, or rather in the car boot. My father had been waiting for hours, even though we didn’t have an arrangement. He didn’t remark on my lateness, which had been a waste of time anyway, since I hadn’t seen a doctor, but now I was safe here and nobody would see me, not even him.
Translated by Catherine Cobham
ADANIA SHIBLI
May God Keep Love in a Cool and Dry Place
The sound of the waves coming in through the window started to fade until the shutter was completely closed.
On the bed facing the window lay a woman in love for the first time. Her body is stretched out under the mild influence of drowsiness. With her back, she faced the room and the man she loved. He faced the rest of the room with his back. His face was turned towards the waves passing by the window.
Later, the rumble of a plane joined the sound of the waves trapped outside.
She did not know where his hands were after he had closed the shutter; she needed them at that moment but did not ask for them.
He suddenly approached her and covered her.
He covered her body well.
After he wound the cover around her feet, he climbed onto her back and said without particular desire: ‘My love, please don’t go.’
And she answered with artificial warmth:
‘Maybe I won’t …’
‘Maybe not’ has the same probability as ‘maybe yes’, but the conversation ended there to the relief of both.
They will search for neutral, necessary words to make living together in the same house and sitting at the same table and inside the same car possible. They will look for the end of their relationship as they would look for the expiry date on a pot of cream. She wanted their relationship to contain every ingredient, and he wanted to protect their relationship from everything, even from her. She is tired and her tolerance of his mistreatment of her has run out. As for him, he is tired, and sad.
She asked him: ‘Are you hungry?’
After some hesitation he answered: ‘Yes.’
‘The chicken from yesterday hasn’t been touched. And maybe some salad, but I don’t want to prepare it.’
‘I’ll do it.’
They headed towards the kitchen, happy to have killed their first conversation.
And because her steps were always quicker than his, she arrived in the kitchen first, while he never got there. The phone rang before his feet touched the kitchen floor and sent him back to the living room.
It was a colleague, who had a big problem with her jealous husband who would examine her body every day after she returned from work to make sure no one had put his hand, mouth or anything else upon her. Sometimes when she would bump into the corner of a table or fall over, she would not think of her pain and injury but fix her attention on the details of the place where the accident occurred, like a good investigator, so that she could convince her judge with the evidence, yet he would never really believe her.
She did not tell him about all that during this phone call but on another occasion, when she had come over so that they could work on an urgent project. And she, the lady of the house, was away visiting her parents for a few days. After many hours of continuous work he touched her breasts, then he started biting her neck like a wolf. And, as she was afraid his bites would leave some marks, she told him about the daily examination.
The onion was the last thing she chopped. After a little salt, oil and lemon juice the salad was ready and he was still on the phone with that bitch he spent all day, every day with. She turned on the cold water tap and washed her tear-filled face, then drank. She did not know why she always needed to go to the bathroom every time she cried and wondered if the same thing happened t
o all people.
After leaving the bathroom she headed towards her bed and retrieved the book ‘G.’ by John Berger from under the duvet and threw it in the wastepaper basket. The basket was full of his papers. Most of the rubbish in the house was his. In general, he was a good rubbish producer since everything he had could be transformed at any moment into rubbish. Her only rubbish was the usual rubbish that could be expected of anyone, like potato skins or a tin of tuna or, at worst, a paper tissue.
She remembered that the waste basket in the bathroom was also full and decided to collect the rubbish from the whole house and put it all in the dustbin, then perhaps this would give her the feeling of a new start.
As she was carrying the bag along the street toward the dustbin, she began to reconsider discarding the book.
When they met she never used to cook; she used to consume whatever was available alone, without a thought of either him or the children of Somalia. Then she invited him for dinner. Macaroni with mushrooms and cream sauce, and a tomato and lettuce salad. He was ecstatic despite the simplicity of the meal, and from then on she had searched for any occasion to cook for him, until it gradually became a daily occurrence.
One of the passages in the book had talked about the Man who cooks for the sheer sense of taste and the Woman who cooks out of a deep internal impulse to cook. In reality, it was he who had turned her into a cook for the delight of his sense of taste. She put the bag into the dustbin and returned to the house.
He was still on the phone. She set the table and sat at it motionless. Perhaps he was attracted to that neurotic bitch.
He had heard her moving in the kitchen, then heard the sound of the knife falling on the chopping board. He was sick of racing ahead of her to do things just so that she did not exert herself more than necessary. He was aware that he had not seen a dirty pair of socks for a long time. Yet, when he saw her carrying out the rubbish bag, he decided to continue the phone conversation. He did not want to live in terror of her. Terrorist. Madwoman. Disgusting.