Sarab

by Raja Alem

  Ending Number One

  Mujan remained silent after he was arrested on December 4. However much he was tortured and cajoled, not a word escaped him. He already seemed to have moved on to the next world, and he endured pain, starvation, and interrogation in silence and utter passivity, letting them do what they liked to his body. He was a corpse in their hands, untouched by suffering, however intense.

  He didn’t raise his head when his cell door was opened, but the scent of the Kaaba’s perfume filled him with a crushing certainty that the end was near. His eyes gleamed, illuminating the death he was facing. For a moment, he thought he had died already and was in the presence of the angels. He lifted his eyes and was taken aback to see a group of the ulema who had taught him as a student in Medina, headed by Sheikh Hamid Amin al-Mauritani. Mujan thought he was hallucinating and didn’t move, afraid that the faces he had revered would evaporate.

  Sheikh al-Mauritani approached him, embraced him, and burst into bitter weeping. “Brother Mujan,” he said, “give us an argument to justify what you were bold enough to do.”

  After days of silence, Mujan’s lips parted. The deep voice said only a few words: “My brothers and I were propelled by the whirlwinds of this era. We hoped that if we took refuge in God and asked for His forgiveness, perhaps He would pardon us.” He said nothing after that, and sank into the silence of the grave.

  The ulema came forward one by one to embrace him and repeat, “May God forgive us all.” And then they left.

  Mujan was tried in a secret court, along with sixty-seven of his men who had surrendered, and the mufti pronounced their sentence.

  “Frivolous overconsumption and worship of money are not unknown in this country, but these rebels have erred on two counts: first in defying their rulers, and second in announcing the appearance of the Mahdi.”

  And so Mujan and his men were condemned to death.

  Back in Paris, Raphael attended an evaluation meeting with the operations team. It concluded with a videotape of the punishments and executions that had been carried out at dawn on January 9, 1980.

  Mujan was the last to be taken to the execution site in the Holy City, in the large square in front of Bab al-Malik, the main door of the Grand Mosque, directly below the minaret in which Sayf had been killed a few weeks earlier.

  Mujan kneeled before the executioner like a bow, taut with disdain. The sword, raised resolutely in the black-gloved hand, sliced the air. It hovered, traced a half circle, and then fell. In a moment, the head of the legend was severed from his body. It flew high into the air before falling at the feet of the officer supervising the condemned men’s sentences. A gasp went through the huge crowd that had gathered to witness the end of that unprecedented tragedy. Within ten days, a series of heads had flown in every direction in each of the principal cities. In accordance with the court rulings and on the orders of the ruler, sixty-three rebel heads were cut off: forty-one state nationals, ten Egyptians, seven Yemenis, three Kuwaitis, one Iraqi, and one man from Sudan. The heads were sewn back onto their bodies and buried in an unmarked grave.

  Raphael walked to his car, his mind still full of the ruling authorities’ official report. “The battle, which lasted over a fortnight, resulted in large numbers of casualties: 117 rebels during the siege, comprised of 87 casualties during the battle and 27 who died after reaching hospital. Nineteen rebels were sentenced to death, subsequently commuted to life imprisonment. The local authorities sustained the following losses: 127 killed and 451 wounded.” The report also mentioned that 255 pilgrims had been killed and 260 wounded.

  Raphael didn’t notice his colleague running to catch up with him.

  “Raphael, wait a moment!” The man blocked Raphael’s path to the car park. “Hold on, are you serious about resigning?”

  Raphael smiled. “It seems impossible, but yes.”

  “But why? After everything you’ve achieved with the forces?” The man stared at Raphael, his words boring into him. “You’re the best we’ve got! You’ve got the killer instinct.”

  Killer instinct! Raphael was shocked at this description of himself. His whole being contracted painfully, bringing on the despair that had become marked in him recently.

  He couldn’t believe it had been over a month since the suffering he had endured with Sarab after their return to Paris.

  They had arrived in Paris one early morning in December. An intense silence had descended on Sarab for the whole journey. Her eyes strained open all the time, barely blinking, during the seven-hour flight. He glanced at her furtively, certain that she was replaying the horrors of the siege in her head. However, wherever Sarab looked, she saw only her shorn locks of black hair. In her head, the scene loomed of the day Raphael had begun the preparations for her travel, when he cut off the first lock and threw it on the ground. To his surprise, she hurriedly bent over, picked it up, and put it on the table in front of her. She hesitated to do the same with the second lock, but he placed it on the table next to its companion.

  Her eyes bulged when he bent her head forward and she felt his electric razor denude the back of her skull. The buzzing noise drilled a cavity in her brain. She raised her head and gasped when she saw the woman in the lemon-yellow dress staring back at her from the mirror. With the locks that Raphael had left on top of her head, she had become the woman who had embraced her child’s dead body. She wrapped her shorn hair in a towel and put it in her coat pocket, and on entering the airport, she laid it like a corpse in one of the large blue basins. All her mother’s attempts to obliterate her paled before that act of shaving, and the hair that had previously meant nothing to her suddenly, with the first snip of the scissors, became a symbol of absolute negation.

  Now, the glass window of the airplane reflected the face of the girl on the wallpaper. It occurred to Sarab that with her short hair, she embodied all her victims, beginning with the woman in the lemon-yellow dress and ending with the girl on the wallpaper. Raphael didn’t sleep a wink as he watched Sarab hiding inside the heavy black coat and men’s trousers. He was familiar with the signs of mental breakdown and knew one wasn’t far away, so he kept silent, afraid to break the fragile shell holding her together. When she didn’t touch her meal, he opened the tinfoil covering without being asked, took the knife and fork from the small wrapper, and tried to feed her pieces of chicken. She refused them coldly, but when he put the fork in her hand, she took it automatically. Since they left the Holy City she had been no more than a puppet, with him moving the strings. It was the first time she had seen a fork. He watched as she began to stab at pieces of potato in a daze, trying to convey them to her mouth before they disintegrated. She started to shovel food and drink into her mouth with the mechanical gestures of someone filling in a pit.

  When they left the airport in Paris, they were startled to see snow flying through the air. Sarab’s eyes were dull. She stood stock still in front of a taxi, its door open and waiting for her, as the snowflakes glittered in her black hair and eyelashes and on the tops of her ears. She turned to Raphael in terror and almost asked him, “Can you hear it?” But her voice betrayed her, wounded by the sudden assault of cold. The tufts of snow carried a whisper only she could hear; she was tempted to think the snow was a message meant for her alone.

  It was clear that the souls of the dead were communicating with her.

  She was unsure how to respond to the snow. Gently, Raphael placed a hand on her shoulder and urged her into the taxi, and she shivered. The snow had gone under her collar. He wrapped her neck in his scarf as he took a seat beside her. She was staring fixedly at the road, and he was unable to tear his gaze away from her. He would have given half his life to be able creep inside her head and share the anxiety that nested there. She was absorbed by the thick layer of snow covering the fields and the sides of the road. It was a shroud . . . she was piercing through a shroud. From Charles de Gaulle Airport to the center of Paris, her gaze swept over cars and rooftops robed in snow and people on their motorbike
s, all the black driven away by pure white.

  This is the barzakh. She was sure she had died and was crossing over from this world to the next. She was filled with contentment, all her senses muffled by the snow; the smell of smoke, which had never left her since the siege, had subsided, and with it the taste of fire and gas and gangrene and corpses. Everything entered a tranquil state of suspension.

  The fountain was frozen in Place Saint-Sulpice, which could be seen from Raphael’s apartment in Rue Bonaparte in the sixth arrondissement. She crossed the distance between the taxi and the apartment in a state of peace, like a delicate snowflake.

  “This will be your room,” Raphael told her, leading her into his bedroom. “You have absolute freedom in this space . . .”

  The concept of “absolute freedom” wasn’t in her lexicon.

  He went on, inscribing the fact into her head. “This is the key. You can lock the door whenever you want and no one will go in but you.”

  The thought of a key and a lock appealed to her.

  He led her to the bathroom barefoot, went to the ancient, high-backed bathtub, and opened the taps. Speaking to himself, he explained which tap held the hot water and which cold, and then he added bath salts and soap balls scented with green tea. She just stood at the door, watching the fragrant clouds of steam and the velvety, pure-white towel waiting for her on a heated rail. She compared it to the single towel she had shared with her mother and brother in their house in Wajir. Raphael gestured to her to step inside the bathtub and then he left, pulling the door closed behind him. The look in her eyes begged him not to go far.

  Trancelike, she took off her clothes and stepped into the bath. She froze for a moment with her left foot in the water, while the perfumed steam ran over her body.

  At last she put both her feet fully into the water and stood there, bewildered by the water reaching to her knees. She was bending over to splash her face and shoulders, when her foot slipped and she fell on her backside. She sat there, stunned by how the smooth bath and the fragrant water felt on her backside and over her breasts and under her arms. Slowly she slid her body down until she was lying in the water, and then she let her face sink. She held her breath for a few seconds, and time stopped. Her past detached and rose to the surface of the water, to float there like a second body.

  Raphael was packing his clothes into a suitcase when she sprang into her bedroom, wrapped in a white towel. She didn’t look at him. Without a word, she slipped into the king-size bed and sank into the fluffy covers like a caterpillar. She had never been wrapped in such softness, apart perhaps from the womb before Tafla wrenched her out. Her body had never known anything but the hardness of the ground through thin strips of sponge, or the bare marble of the Grand Mosque. As she fell asleep, a thought snagged in her head: “This bed would do for a whole family in Wajir.”

  Raphael stood there for a short while, gazing at her slow breathing, and then he went out. He only came back when he grew worried that she was dead, but she was still breathing. After a while, very quietly, he carried the suitcase to the living room and closed the door to Sarab’s room.

  The following morning there was no sign of her. In the evening, he knocked at the door and she didn’t reply. He pushed the door open, apologizing: “I’m sorry, I was worried.”

  He found her lying on the bed, her eyes fixed on the ceiling. At once he knew that something was wrong.

  “Sarab.” Her pulse was slow and her body was in a state of suspension. Her eyes were glued to the scene behind him, on the snowflakes falling past the window onto the treetops of the Luxembourg Gardens.

  “Sarab, please, what is it?”

  She didn’t respond.

  The doctor he called to examine her gave her an injection to prevent seizures. “She is probably suffering from panic associated with severe stress. It seems to be the result of some psychological trauma.” He prescribed some antidepressants and left.

  For three days, Raphael devoted himself to caring for her. As if tending to a child, he fed her, gave her the medicines, and left the door open to watch for any relapse. His life hung on hers.

  On the fourth day he woke to find her in front of the bathroom door with wet hair; she had gotten up early and bathed.

  “I don’t need this drug now,” she told him serenely, taking the box of pills from the side table and throwing them away.

  It was plain to him that she had passed the point of crisis.

  “You see, I have no control over myself,” she said, more to herself than to him. “My body is here and my soul is there . . .” She pointed at the door to the street. Looking at her, Raphael was surprised by the violence hatching within him. At that moment, he knew that if worse came to worst, he was ready to stuff medicine and food down her throat to force her to live. She had no choice, because if she lived, he would also join the living, having been among the dead. Through this girl, he would be saved from everyone who had died at his hands throughout his military career. But she avoided this, returning to life with the same suddenness with which she had withdrawn from it.

  “You have the killer instinct.” His colleague’s phrase returned him to the present, and he confirmed it bitterly.

  “Yes. But you could say I’m addicted to change.”

  “You’ve never given us that impression.”

  “True, but we have to burn certain bridges in order to move on.”

  “It’s not just me; all your superiors agree you can go far in this field.”

  “Not far enough.”

  His friend burst out laughing. “Ah, so it’s never enough! Not even if you were nominated for president?”

  “My resignation was a leap in the dark, but perhaps it’s much simpler than that. Perhaps now I will try to become a chef.”

  They both laughed at this.

  “Really?” his friend said. “You were always the joker, even on those missions that turned everyone else’s hair white.”

  “No joke this time. I’m serious.”

  His friend felt almost insulted. “It’s weird to imagine eating something made by hands that are used to breaking necks.”

  The quip hurt Raphael; he seemed painfully trapped by this fact.

  “Please, rethink your decision, my friend,” his friend said. “Be sensible. Don’t let this whirlwind blow you off course. We’re in an era where war has become the only way of keeping this little globe balanced. The world needs an iron fist on the reins to lead it in the right direction. We’re just keeping it balanced.”

  Raphael looked at him sympathetically, but he went on.

  “They’ve only postponed accepting your resignation because they’re giving you an opportunity to review. You should thank your lucky stars they didn’t punish you for disappearing at the Grand Mosque; they were prepared to forgive you, considering your past service. Please, just take a holiday; take a few days to reflect on what you’re sacrificing by resigning.”

  In some way, that trivial exchange convinced Raphael that he was right to hand in his resignation. He sat behind the steering wheel of his silver Peugeot, contemplating his outstretched hands. “You were made to kill; you were made to cook.” He was accustomed to finding his fingers cocking a rifle or pulling a detonator, but an age had passed since he had cracked an egg.

  His fingers felt fragile, like those of a child who shared his father’s passion for cooking. Raphael punched the steering wheel when he remembered his father’s lame words: “Your mother can’t bear a man in an apron.”

  This was the mother whose pride and monstrous egotism was only nourished by a businessman husband; his father had acted the part, but it sucked the life out of him like a vampire.

  Raphael made a mental note to search for his father’s notebook containing his own recipes, probably buried somewhere in his bookshelves. He heaved a sigh of relief to be leaving these bloodied years behind him and paving the way to facing his demons.

  Despite his fears and doubts, he suddenly felt light, as if catch
ing sight of a new life he had never reckoned upon. It was as if he had broken an invisible siege that had been imposed within and around him, and around the truth of what he had wanted all these years.

  He drove toward Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the car making its way through the crowds of tourists wandering into the bus lane, and he stopped in front of a café, Bar Saint-Germain. A girl hurried toward the car, her coal-black hair cropped á la garçon in striking contrast to her clothes, a white linen dress that reached almost to her ankles. He watched the wide, lily-shaped hem flapping freely and gently brushing her legs. The neckline was like a crack across her shoulders, revealing their grace and drawing attention to her long neck. Her walk contained the appetite of someone touching the world with her bare body for the first time. He remembered how, in the second week after they came to Paris, he had surprised her with a parcel, which he had left on her bed. From where he stood in the doorway, he watched her open the bundle enthusiastically and fall suddenly silent when she pulled out three dresses of silk, lace, and delicate cotton. He hadn’t chosen short dresses or daring necklines for her, guessing she already found her sudden transformation difficult.

  At the bottom of the parcel lay some lace underwear sets in blue, white, black, and red. Her fingers trembled and she didn’t dare even to touch them. She sat, staring at the small red rose on the belt of the small red panties. He quietly closed the door and left her alone. He didn’t know how long she remained sitting there.

  Sarab felt a thick skin peeling off her, and she thought of the wound the snake makes in itself when it sloughs off its skin. This was that wound. Calmly, she stood up. She took off the male trousers and shirt in which she had left her country, she took off the body her mother had forced over her own for all those years, and she stood naked in the middle of the room. Defiantly she avoided the neutral colors and picked up the red lace panties. When she slipped them over her thighs she shivered, and she allowed the red rose to dig into her with exquisite pain, like a live ember. She stood still for a few moments, feeling the burning sensation of the rose spread through her veins. That rose touched her like nothing had ever touched her before; no bullet, no wound, had hurt her this deeply. Aiming for more, she struggled to work out how to put on the red bra, looking for help in the picture drawn on the box. Finally she managed to put it on, and another red rose burned between her breasts. She didn’t know what devilish impulse had enticed her to choose the red set. She contemplated her body, a statue of gold draped in red. She was haunted by the thought that she was embodying the apex of sin, but delighted in it at the same time. Her body moved spontaneously, reveling in its feminine nakedness, glowing throughout the room. She gently stroked its softness, unprotected by rigid or coarse coverings. She crossed the distance from the bed to the window and stood there; she couldn’t believe how the breeze stimulated and invigorated her body, now open and breathing. In those two strips of red, the womb of iron that had imprisoned her had been shattered and now ejected her, reborn. She trembled. Hurrying over to the blue cotton dress, she lowered it around her body and sat there, feeling a nakedness that couldn’t be covered up. When she finally opened the door, she felt like a drop of water.