by Raja Alem
“Your father seems to have been a spineless weasel.” It shocked her that she was using the same description her mother had used. “In Wajir, men like that were only good for pouring coffee,” she said, defensively.
Cut off from the world, they were little by little wrapped within another sphere, another time. The events outside, and the last days in particular, seemed unreal.
“Move!” Raphael dragged Sarab upright and pushed her in front of him to the roof terrace. “Let’s take a look at your world. Is this what you were fighting against? Or what you were fighting for?”
On the surrounding rooftops, life had resumed. Women appeared, cleaning up the mess created by the days of siege and their evacuation from their homes.
Long, flowery robes were scattered over the rooftops, rolled up to the knee and tucked into belts, revealing beautifully molded legs and bare feet, dappled with henna or wearing brightly colored plastic sandals, immersed in soap bubbles. Women were sweeping water in smooth movements as sweat gleamed on their foreheads under the morning sun. A fragrance concocted of soap and cooking aromas reached the two enemies in their hiding place on that distant rooftop. Sarab stood entranced, watching the joy on the rooftops; after days of hunger and fear, her taut senses were engulfed by what Raphael called “life.” She was overwhelmed by the loud “ah’s” exhaled by a female singer on a nearby cassette player, mingling with a man’s voice singing a love song for a gathering in the next alley.
A scene guilty of being composed of pure joy, washed clean of the horrors of the previous days. She watched it intently.
“Is there any life—or rather, is there no life—planted in you?” He swept a pitying, curious gaze over Sarab’s body.
She shrugged and moved away disapprovingly. Raphael stood and stared, aroused by the smooth, sinuous movements of her slim hips and round backside. As the days passed, Sarab could no longer ignore the glances loaded with meaning and desire. She didn’t seem to mind them, and perhaps even enjoyed falling victim to them. In fact, she could deal with the appeal in those glances, and the thought that he was looking at her, with more equanimity than his sympathy and compassion. It was making them both soften, threatening to topple their beliefs, leaving them prey to their humanity.
Unseen Ghosts
That night, in her sleep, Sarab was slowly drawn out onto the rooftop. Bewildering whispers made her look down at her feet, and she saw a large, dark stain sticking to them like a second shadow. At once she knew it was traces of dried blood she hadn’t noticed before. Something in the air was making her eyes sting and she wiped away tears as she tried to focus on the stain, which slowly began to turn dark red, then to pulse and gradually condense, until it took the shape of human bodies. Seven girls ranging in age from two to twelve years old poured forth; laughing and holding hands, they formed a circle and began to go round. The youngest snatched Sarab’s hand without warning and dragged her to join in their game.
Suddenly, gunfire broke out around them; it came from the tallest minaret in the Grand Mosque, where Sayf had been stationed throughout the siege.
Sarab knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was Sayf who was firing. She shouted at him over the rooftops to stop. She raised her voice as the bullets rained down and the girls fell, screaming, into their own blood. Everything was happening in slow motion. Their round-faced mother loomed in the background, bearing witness to the scene while voices urged her not to look, to leave the girls to be buried.
Sarab was screaming hysterically, surrounded by the still-bleeding bodies, when Raphael’s hand pulled her out of the nightmare.
She sat up, staring at the blackened spot where she still saw the girls writhing. The bodies she had seen in the Grand Mosque were nothing in comparison with those young girls, bleeding to death forever. Their blood stirred and became a wave, which descended on the quivering Sarab as she finally emerged out of the nightmare.
“There were children in this house . . .” That meaningless comment remained on the tip of her tongue. She wanted to convey what she had seen to Raphael, what that spot represented. She needed someone else to share the ghosts that haunted the silent roof terrace.
Suddenly she caught a nauseating smell; it was the smell of bodies rotting, and it came from the boxes where she had imprisoned the butchered dolls. Sarab turned delirious, imagining bodies inside those boxes, whispering and accusing her and her brother of murder.
“I never killed anyone!” she burst out, to Raphael’s surprise.
He wanted to tell her how many people he had killed, in case it was some consolation to her, but Sarab pressed on with her denials.
“I have betrayed my comrades. I carried a weapon like a medal on my shoulder, just so they would admire me. How am I a real believer? Even I doubted my faith, so I decided to kill you to make up for my cowardice during the siege. But I failed again; you’re still alive.”
“I don’t understand. Why kill, when a girl like you is supposed to create and nurture life? If war is necessary, it’s the trade of men like me.”
“Infidels like you sow doubt even in the nobility of dying for a belief.”
“What is your definition of a monster or an infidel? Is it someone different from you? Or is it, for example, someone who lives outside Wajir?”
Sarab looked at him doubtfully. She thought he was making fun of her.
“Listen, I’m a believer,” he said. “I started out Catholic, and when I was a child the priests made me join the choir.” He stopped suddenly, gripped with an urge to laugh at the contradiction; he was nothing but a killing machine shamelessly pretending to have emerged from Catholic roots. Astonishment showed on Sarab’s face.
“According to my father, singing in church was the highest ritual of faith, like prayer.”
“God forbid!”
“Is it a duty in life to kill those who aren’t an exact copy of ourselves?” His words were directed more at himself than at her. He expected her to substantiate this but she kept listening passively, as if what he said could have no relevance to her. All the while he kept striving. He wanted to save her, even if he failed to save himself; he wanted to wash the creed of murder from his brain.
He went on: “God gave us the right to choose. He is the one who will judge us.”
Her silence made him try a different kind of bait.
“We’re just people of the Book, along with the all the other prophets they sent with holy books to countries we don’t even know about. Didn’t they teach you that?”
“All I know is that you Westerners are the army of Dajjal, the Messiah who carries Heaven in his right hand and Hell in his left hand to tempt you, even though both are false. They’re both eternal Hell.”
“On this mission, they emphasized respect for other religions,” he said. “There is a verse in the Quran that describes the people of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus as Muslims. Why do you ignore this?”
Sarab was caught off guard. “Stop asking me questions like that.”
“Why? I know—it must be torture for you to be forced to think.”
“It’s nothing to do with you. Just remember that I won’t pass up the opportunity to kill you if it comes. So better keep your eye on the gun.”
“You know, I could surrender that weapon to you and I very much doubt you would use it to kill me. You hide your doubts behind that word—‘kill’—like it’s a barricade.”
Raphael’s doubts made Sarab murderous, and pushed her further into her delirium. She wasn’t aware of Raphael and the playroom where they were imprisoned; instead, she saw her childhood in Wajir, when she and her brother Sayf moved like two shadows split off from their mother and her powerful stride. It was easy for Sayf to match their mother’s pitiless march, while Sarab stumbled and kept falling until she could no longer even wish to get up.
Raphael perceived her utter helplessness and her lack of guile.
“Listen,” he said. “Let me take you home. I mean, to somewhere far away from here, where you can
purge your mind of all this war, where you can start a new life . . . where you can belong to something new.”
Her eyes widened incredulously at his offer. Without a word she rose and disappeared into the bathroom, fleeing the humiliating suggestion.
Raphael remained seated. He could barely believe his offer, made in a crazy rush. It would mean the end of his life as a soldier, but he didn’t care. There and then, a belief came to him that everything he had been building until that moment was finished, and now he wanted to find a way out for them both.
Berry Red
They heard footsteps climbing the stairs and a head suddenly appeared through the door. Its terrified eyes widened and swallowed up most of the face of a woman swathed in a black veil. Shock paralyzed any reaction.
The plump woman rushed into the room, and Sarab was struck by her resemblance to the woman who had appeared in her nightmare about the seven girls. The woman’s eyes flashed crazed sparks as she screamed, “You, with the weapon—you drank the blood of my seven daughters!”
She lifted the hem of her abaya, revealing the berry red robe underneath. “The day you entered the Grand Mosque, the blood came up to here.” She lifted her abaya to her knees, revealing more of her red clothing, her whole body trembling.
“And then it came to here.” She lifted the abaya to her hips. “People who have no fear of God, they dragged me outside to save me, and they buried my poor girls, day after day. For ten days my poor girls were alone in a single grave in Maala.”
The woman ignored Sarab, turning instead to the muscled soldier whose machine gun had agitated her. She struck him lightly and pushed him backward toward the roof terrace, uttering a laughing sound like a bird.
“Hoooyaah, hoooyaah,” she cooed manically. She flapped the edges of her abaya like wings, using them to drive him backward; it was hard to tell whether she was sane. Raphael went along with her out of pity, and perhaps out of astonishment at the novel noises she was making. He put his gun on one side to calm her.
“You waded in their blood, hoooyaah.” She herded him toward the dark bloodstain on the roof. “Seven girls in a hail of bullets.”
Sarab felt the mad woman’s stab of agony; it was possible that the girls were her brother’s victims. The darkness she had lived through in the Grand Mosque came back to her and swept her away, along with the girl on the wallpaper and all of her cheerful red clothes; the dark bloodstain on the terrace obliterated them all. In that moment of darkness, Raphael was driven to a corner of the roof terrace covered with a thick canvas sheet, which neither had noticed before. As soon as he trod on the canvas, the ground opened beneath his feet and swallowed him up, and the woman’s breast split in a joyful cry of “Hoooyaah,” followed by a savage bark of laughter.
Sarab gasped, and before she could think she flew to save him. With savage glee, the woman bent over the hole that had appeared under the canvas, only to find her hopes dashed; instead of falling seven floors to the foot of the demolished staircase, Raphael had seized a piece of broken wood from the roof and was still dangling in midair. The woman hurried to snatch up a chair, cushions, and whatever else she could lay her hands on to fling at him and break his grip.
“Stop! Stop!” Sarab shouted as the woman kept up her frenzied attack. “Stop, or I’ll blow your head off.” She pushed the gun’s barrel into the woman’s skull, trying to carve some rationality into that insane head.
The woman snarled and slowly backed away from the hole, submitting to Sarab’s order. She swayed from side to side while Sarab drove her to the bathroom and shut her inside.
Sarab locked the door and secured the handle with a broom, then hurried back to Raphael. Winding a nylon cord around the roof pillar, she hastily twisted the ends together and threw it to Raphael. He caught hold of it with difficulty, holding tightly to the wood with one hand and using the other to try to drag his heavy body upward. It was impossible for his sweaty hand to grip the plastic cord, and he kept slipping. The endurance tests he had undergone to join GIGN were nothing compared to the struggle with this cord. Sarab watched him in despair. At last, he succeeded in jamming his foot into a crack in the wall, and she used all her strength to help raise his phenomenal weight onto the roof.
They lay there panting, in a state of discomposure—and even awkwardness, seeing as she had rushed to save him. In the flood of embarrassment, they both forgot about the woman who had vanished, leaving the broken bathroom door as the only proof of her peculiar visit.
Raphael mastered himself first, his soldier’s intuition reading the danger inherent in their position.
“That woman will most likely rush off to inform on us, and as soon as she does this place will be surrounded.”
Sarab appeared drugged, incapable of understanding him.
“Let’s get moving,” he urged her. “We have to leave at once.”
He felt his fate was entwined with the fate of this skinny girl, although he was still confused by why she had rescued him. Nevertheless, he felt a profound sense of gratitude, and was resolved that she should follow him.
“The soldiers will be here any minute, and they will execute you without mercy.”
“I won’t go anywhere,” Sarab stammered, her heart fluttering in her throat. “Let them come and take me. It was cowardly to flee the Grand Mosque, and even though I failed in killing an infidel like you, I should face what my comrades faced.”
“Are you mad?” Desperation seemed to have erased the girl in the wallpaper from the wall; the wall had transformed into a flat, bare surface, while Raphael frantically tried to convince Sarab.
“Some of your comrades escaped when they had the chance, and even Mujan didn’t pass up the opportunity of fleeing and resuming his fight somewhere else.” His words struck a nerve and she seemed to hesitate, so he went on. “Look, your death won’t serve any purpose. It’s suicide to stay here.” He looked desperate, and she was embarrassed; she couldn’t believe she had really saved this infidel from the fate he deserved. When she didn’t budge, Raphael pointed the gun at her head and said, threateningly, “Now, move! That’s an order.”
She was propelled less by the gun than the despair in his voice.
He made her search the room for anything they could use as a disguise. They hastily dug up a bundle in the corner containing women’s clothes and black abayas. Raphael ordered Sarab to put on the loose, flowery cotton clothes, probably belonging to the plump mother. She retired to the bathroom, and as soon as she started undoing the buttons of the military shirt, she felt living scales shedding from her skin. She trembled with fear at the protection, the habitual identity, that was falling away from her; hastily, she re-buttoned the shirt. She put the women’s clothes over the National Guard uniform, doubling her sense of schizophrenia. For the first time in her life, Sarab appeared as a woman. Her body rejected the female clothing like an emasculated man, and she hastily wrapped her body in the black abaya to preclude any possibility of inhaling that vulnerable femininity. When she came out of the bathroom, Raphael was wearing a long green satin robe that barely reached his ankles and slithered oddly over the coarse military uniform. He too hurriedly wrapped himself in a black abaya to conceal the pleasure he took in this feminine form. Both were engrossed in this playacting, following Raphael’s instructions. They covered their faces in black chiffon veils and Raphael crammed his large feet into women’s shoes; the shoes Sarab chose were loose on her.
They hurried down the stairs, but heard footsteps tramping quickly through the entrance hall in their direction. Raphael retreated and turned into a corridor on the second floor. They reached a window on another corridor and found that it opened onto the roof of the neighboring house. Without hesitation, Raphael pushed Sarab, so that she had to jump through, and he followed after her, and they slipped from the open window onto the roof of what seemed to be an animal pen. They jumped down among the goats, which rushed about in consternation and then withdrew to watch them doubtfully from the far side of the pe
n. Sarab and Raphael slipped out of the pen, taking the risk of running into someone who might reveal them to their pursuers.
In front of them was a narrow passageway, and a small boy stood watching them with a gleam in his eye. They froze, trying to guess what he would do. His smirk made Raphael even more aware of his jumbled and amateurish disguise; the boy seemed to know he was a man under his satin dress, and a hairy one at that. Raphael hurriedly covered himself up, and without a word the boy pointed to the dark lobby leading to the back door of the house. They plunged into the narrow passageway as the boy watched them from the doorway. Behind them, police sirens laid siege to the house they had just left.
Hurriedly, they adjusted their veils and disappeared into the alleyways of the suq. Despite her suicidal state, Sarab’s senses were refreshed by the vitality around her, while Raphael felt lost among the unfamiliar items spread out around them. Tables arranged in circles were loaded with gleaming fruit and vegetables brought in from the meadows around the city. Boys in colored clothing were calling out their wares and dusting the display piles, and small shops were opening up on both sides of every alley and small passage. The market seemed to be exploding with life after the three-week paralysis imposed on it by the snipers in the minarets.
As Raphael hurried on, he was dominated by a single thought: How could he get this girl out of here, and out of this country? He would manage it, even if he was forced to abduct her.
He could leave her in the middle of the suq and disappear; he could go back to his life. But, against his will, he was fascinated by his captive and the danger staring them both in the face. He was well aware that she was a danger to everything he was and had built. However, he no longer cared about that, or about anything other than getting her out of there. But how? His mind raced, and then lit upon a ridiculous rescue plan.
He moved, trusting in one thing: to keep up the male identity she had assumed. Sayf’s identity card might form their only means of escape. Perhaps it would be easier to forge a passport, visa, and the chance of a better life for a man than it would be for a girl. Sarab should continue to disguise herself as a man; the man who had kidnapped him in the mosque.