by Jo Glanville
How disgusting he was. In the beginning, because she was convinced that she loved him more than he loved her, and because Qais loved Leila more than she loved him and became mad with love for her, they agreed that she would be Qais and he Leila. He used to call her madwoman with perfect gentleness. Then, during the course of time and without noticing it he began to shout ‘madwoman’ whenever he did not wish to understand her.
He could see her back radiating rejection. The phone conversation was continuing without his having any control over it. He really had intended to make a nice salad and for them to have dinner together with a little warmth. He did not know why he could not end the phone conversation. He could see from where he was that she had not put black pepper in the salad. His colleague was now floundering in a cesspit of words, and this relieved him of having to concentrate.
He does not want to sleep with her any more.
The phone call ended.
‘Oh, you made the salad? I wanted to make it for you.’
‘For me?’
She felt her answer was no longer in neutral territory and hastily followed it up with: ‘I was hungry, so I thought I might as well make use of the time you were on the phone. Another time.’
She took her plate. He took his and a deep breath. He saw how the silence would stretch between them, so he tried to revive the conversation once more:
‘She was…’
‘I really don’t care.’
And so that her reply does not initiate a fight that will bring them back together, she lifted her head and smiled warmly.
He was tired of her fights and of her madness, so he smiled back and asked: ‘Could you pass me the salad please?’
‘Just a minute.’
She put some on her plate, passed him the bowl and began to eat, trying to forget about everything except what she was eating. He does not like the way she eats. She eats quickly and with some greediness. He asked her: ‘How’s the salad? Delicious?’
‘Yes.’
The way he asks the question limits her answer to how it tastes. There is also colour. He could have asked her ‘How’s the salad?’ and she would choose her answer. He asks only out of emptiness. A limited right-wing bourgeois emptiness which limits all that is around it. He was still looking at her; she saw that from the corner of her eyes. She lifted her head and asked: ‘Aren’t you eating? The salad is delicious.’
‘Yes.’
‘There is also chicken.’
Salad or chicken or whatever; in any case the food was falling into their stomachs, passing through their mouths.
The first time she saw him was at the fiftieth anniversary of the Palestinian Nakbah, the Catastrophe. Before that date she had not even known of his existence. She went with a music-loving friend to a concert for Anwar Ibrahim in commemoration of that Catastrophe. During the interval as she sat assessing the mix of concertgoers she saw a man wearing a blue jacket making his way between the rows of seats.
Three days later she saw him again. And another three days later, as she was walking alone one late afternoon in a street that was suddenly emptied of sounds and cars, while the sun remained high in the sky, its light covering the city and its green trees, she discovered that she loved him.
Now the fifty-second anniversary of the Catastrophe is approaching, and she did not even notice the passage of time. If she slows down her eating, the tears will seep out. Eating quickly held them back, and at this mere thought she almost cried.
He is eating with a deadly slowness. She noticed his precise movements and heard the boring rhythm of the fork colliding with the knife, with the plate, with the mouth.
What entered his mouth had a neutral taste, and all he felt was the coldness of the fork. He ate with a slowness motivated by her greed. He had pleaded with her a thousand times to eat slowly, and she would become mad. To her, such a plea is aimed at erasing her own character. When all he wanted was that she could enjoy her meal. Oh, he cannot stand her, he cannot stand this heaviness. He stopped eating and she apologised in a choked voice and headed for the first door in front of her and disappeared behind it.
Dinner was over.
He will not go after her. He started to collect the dishes and take them to the kitchen, placing them wherever and whichever way he wished. She, of course, would come and rearrange what he had done, as if what he had done was wrong.
He had lived well! Arranged and tidied plates, made lettuce salad and tuna salad and a thousand things before he knew her, yet with her everything seemed slightly wrong. Only she could cook and only she could clean! So let her do it. Why then should she get upset? It is her choice, so she should live with it. Okay, true he is disgusting, but only as a response to her madness. Outside in the world, in public, she feigns brilliance, her madness puts a smile on more than one sad mouth. Many men envy him having her. They could have her, and leave him alone. He is sad and only sad. All he wants is to go out in his car and drive off a cliff, or that this night would finish immediately. Or maybe to embrace her and kiss her, and she would become again happy and mad. She is capable of telling the moon or even a matchbox of how disgusting he is. She may even think that they agree with her.
He was so tired that he cried.
***
They had chosen the smallest single bed, so they could be as close as possible. And they still slept on that bed. But not at the same time. He didn’t read, didn’t move, didn’t touch her; he was like somebody asleep without actually being asleep, so that he would not disturb her. When he would tell her that he had stayed awake after her for a long time in the darkness, she would answer him with a smile of disbelief, because men always fall asleep before women. She remembered that he snored in the beginning, and all she had to do was disturb him slightly, so he would change his body’s position and stop snoring. Later, she did not hear him anymore: perhaps he had stopped snoring or she had got used to it and didn’t hear it anymore.
Perhaps, yes, she fell asleep before him, but most probably she did not. Perhaps they fell asleep at the same moment. Is it possible for two different people to fall asleep at the same moment?
According to him: no. He fell asleep after she did.
Recently, she is sure that he had fallen asleep before her, on two occasions. Once after she returned from a few days’ holiday spent with her family, where sadness killed her because of what she saw of her parents’ relationship in their old age. She did not want to tell him anything, for such a concern would always sound to him exaggerated; but he insisted and insisted until she told him. After that everything seemed to her even more sorrowful. So she told him as well how her desire for life began to diminish with every new day until it no longer seemed to exist, and in its place came the desire for death. Suddenly she heard his steady breathing. He had fallen asleep. And now, once again his breathing is steady, probably because there is nothing in sleeping that can disturb the order of anything. She then tried to match her breathing with his, but she almost suffocated. She quickly breathed in as much air as she needed. And why should she anyway try to match her breathing with his? Why wasn’t it enough for her just to hear it?
This made her feel how she had lost her mind in loving him. Is it possible for Qais, the madman, to regain his senses?
Very sad.
She had completely forgotten the time when she had constantly wanted to fall in love. Her war now was with love and not with him.
And love is an idea that occurs to people from time to time.
So for a few moments everything seemed easy, so she lifted her hand to his hair and started playing with it with her fingers without waking the sleeper. Maybe this is the first time the little finger on her left hand has moved in his hair. It wraps some of the strands around it carefully, then turns around in the opposite direction and releases them.
***
They had woken up a little before the alarm went off. He kissed her, then said:
‘Good morning.’
She is fed up with ‘g
ood morning’.
He asked her: ‘How did you sleep?’
She did not answer because she thought it was not something to answer. However the question irritated her to the degree that she answered: ‘Like usual.’
‘Like usual.’
‘Like usual, like any sleep. Like usual.’
It was as if it were incumbent on her to ask him too: ‘And you? How did you sleep?’ But she resisted this question devoid of any meaning, just the talk of couples, which tries to prove at every moment how full of love it is without even actually convincing either party.
He said: ‘I haven’t slept well, for two nights. For two nights I’ve been sleeping with my hand in my pants, as there was not enough space for it and I had to squeeze it in my pants so as not to hang off the bed.’
‘For the last two nights my shoulder was hurting and I had to sleep on my back.’
She thought about suggesting that he sleep on another bed, but a suggestion like that at such a time would bring exhaustion rather than rest. Anyway, her shoulder was not hurting this morning.
He asked: ‘Why is your shoulder hurting you again?’
‘Maybe because of the cold. Because of the cold maybe. I think.’
‘Since when?’
‘Since two days ago.’
‘Yes, I saw you yesterday walking with your back bent.’
In her opinion she always walks with her back slightly bent. Perhaps that started when she was twelve and her breasts were beginning to grow. She did not tell him that she actually always walked like that, but because he was always running ahead of her he never saw how she walked.
And he would not have told her about all this, the hand and the pants, but at night he felt her hand looking for his until it reached it in his pants.
He thought of suggesting to her that he sleeps in another bed, but it was bad timing.
He wanted to go to work early, and she wanted to sleep because it was still early. And because of the noise he made opening and closing the wardrobe and the drawers, she decided to wake up, and because she woke up he decided to make coffee, which meant a delay of half an hour. While he was making the coffee she came over and kissed him:
‘This is a kiss in return for your kiss in the morning.’
***
For two years approximately they drank coffee every day and every day approximately came the same questions about the coffee.
‘How’s the coffee?’
‘Maybe it’s …’
‘Ahhhmm …’
‘Yes …’
‘Yes … excellent?!’
‘Aha … excellent.’
This conversation accompanies the first cup, then they drift into silence. These are truthful questions that come every day, as if each day is a new experience in coffee making, which has nothing to do with yesterday’s experience. And similarly, this conversation has nothing to do with whether they go ahead and drink the coffee, or refrain from doing so if it turns out not to be good. They will drink it each time, even if it were the worst it could possibly be.
With the second cup he started to talk: ‘I have noticed that the rocks over there are aligned in the same direction, look! Vertically.’
She had explained to him a thousand times as usual that she didn’t like anyone to tell her where to look.
‘Yes.’
‘But you didn’t look.’
‘Yes, but I understand what you mean.’
‘What?’
‘That the rocks are aligned vertically.’
‘Which rocks?’
‘Those ones.’
‘No. Not those ones. Those ones. They look like columns.’
A heavy silence fell. They would rather retreat into silence than apologise.
‘What for?’
‘Because they were contoured in the same direction.’
‘Yes, but why were they contoured in the same direction?’
‘It has been like that since the Ice Age.’
‘Yes, but why? Why?’
Whenever he does not understand her she gets a headache.
‘There was a seismic fracture. The rocks were pushed along sideways, so they were contoured vertically, like when a sandwich …’
‘My head is aching.’
Silence returned for a longer period, and then till the end: ‘There is nothing to eat in the house.’
‘I’ll return early, at three, and we can go and do shopping.’
***
Some days, coffee cools quickly. Its coldness travels to the fingers that hold the cup, then to the lips and mouth and stomach and the rest of the body. And sometimes the coldness passes into the air and remains there for hours.
When she returned the cups to the kitchen she found a cucumber. He was gone. Cucumber is not only good for the skin, it’s also good for the mouth. It erases the taste of cold coffee, and is excellent for the stomach, taking the heavy feeling from it.
She walked from room to room, restoring them to their usual tidiness, closing the wardrobe and the drawers after him and arranging his shoes in a straight row. It depresses her, her lack of indifference to a pair of shoes positioned at an angle of more than zero degrees. They bought most of his shoes together and she witnessed the downfall of the shoes which they did not buy together. They chose his shoes and clothes together out of his desire to wear things she liked men to wear in general. Just like women who strip for the enjoyment of men, this man had dressed for her enjoyment. No, never.
Before she entered the bathroom she ate all of the cucumber, for fear of the germs that might jump on it. He had left his razor on the edge of the sink. He has been doing so for so long that rust has formed. And was still forming. She wondered whether he noticed this rust and if he wondered about its source. It was him. He was directly responsible for one of the endless instances of rusting in the world.
And her stories could continue with everything in the house. Everything had a story. Then she thought, it was possible to kill love by killing the stories of loved things.
When would she finally walk past his possessions as if walking past nothing? Like this small stone he placed on her table. Perhaps the death of sight would be better. Maybe the death of touch before sight.
She returned to the kitchen to try and write the shopping list.
Tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, always on the list. Also corn, tuna and pasta. Aubergine, cauliflower, courgettes, carrots and lemons. Fruit. A chicken. Cheese. Mushrooms and cream sauce. Spring onions, parsley, milk. Perhaps beer or some white wine. Toilet paper. Chickpeas. Flour. Something sweet. Envelopes. Yogurt. Corn oil.
She put down the basics, leaving space for things she would remember throughout the day.
Bread.
What is good about the sun is that it changes its route and the places it illuminates in the house, some days radically, and sometimes gradually. It is only very recently that she noticed this. Although they have been living in this house for two years, she was still discovering its corners. When she was working, she always left quickly in the morning and always returned very tired in the evening. He was the one who pointed out to her that it was possible to trace her daily movements in the house, by the dustless trail she left behind her. These pathways disappeared after she started her war against dust. A war that never ended but had to end. For a while withdrawing from the war on dust seemed harder than winning. If she didn’t clean what would she do?
When she worked, she wanted time for this, this and this, and now she cleans the house and writes shopping lists waiting for him to return.
From the moment he leaves she waits for his return. Every clock, watch or wall clock or alarm clock, all pointed to a relative time, connected to the time of his return. She kills the time stretched out between each glance at the clock, and she does things just to get over the pain of waiting. She forgets the time for hours, then glances at the clock to find only minutes have passed.
If she could only become a Greek goddess whose role is to move t
he clock hands forward.
She could not have any work better than this or have a desire for greater truth than her desire to speed up the time for meeting her lover. And he loved her when he had the time.
He will return in three hours. From tomorrow she will stop waiting for him. She will leave early in the morning without a watch, and she will go to far away places that take a long time to get to and return from. Every day a new place until she leaves him. She must leave him. She went out into the garden and remembered ‘salt’ when she saw the edge of the sea.
Nature is beautiful. The blades. The flowers. The pine trees. She even noticed the pine trees which she couldn’t stand. She approached one of the two chairs and found it very dusty. And so was the second one. So she sat on the least dusty of the two.
From the chair, she thought of all the possibilities, to die of boredom, to die of waiting, to commit suicide. But the shopping list on the table in the kitchen seemed to be in the background drawing her back to life.
She didn’t know how the time passed until ten minutes to three arrived. But that doesn’t mean anything. He will be late. The one time he arrived on time was the first time they met each other.
After a second thought, or maybe a fifth, she decided not to wait for tomorrow to stop looking at the clock, she won’t wait for that either, she will start now. She will not look at the clock any more.
As time went by and his lateness grew, so did the challenge and her determination to resist glancing at the clock, and she didn’t know if she would succeed. When he comes back she will ask him if he hurried, and if yes, then why? Was it because he had not wanted to keep her waiting in the house, or was it because he was afraid of her! Did he hurry at all to see her?
She opened the window – the cold calmed her sometimes. The waiting won’t end until he arrives. She was the one who had this feeling; he was the one who would end it. Either way he would return tonight.