by Raja Alem
Silence entered the space between them. She contemplated the untiring motion of the water in the fountain as it rose and fell, only to rise again, like souls striving to escape the material binding them.
“Life here gives me more time to think,” she said. “It makes me look deep into myself, and whenever I do, I’m surprised by what I find. I’ve never found the time to get to know myself, and lately I’ve thought a lot about my mother . . .”
She seemed out of reach to him. He stayed silent, his gaze blurring over the vast square around them, as her voice came in a whisper.
“I thought . . . perhaps my mother herself was a victim, since they called her Tafla—it means ‘spittle.’ They made her whole life into a struggle to rid herself of the triviality and filth of that name. . . . She started a war that cost her everything: herself and Sayf and me. Look at where I ended up, homeless.”
He took her hands in his but she quickly pulled them away.
“Earlier, underground, I was frightened at first, when I felt the same dampness on my face that I felt in the cellars of the mosque. I was sure I was actually suffocating, and for a moment I almost fainted, drawing my last, poisoned, breath.”
A pigeon landed on the ground between them, interrupting their conversation. It pecked at their feet, picking up the crumbs of her words.
Over the next few days Sarab convinced Raphael to take her on more trips to the underground metro tunnels. They would pick a metro line to explore from beginning to end, get off at a random station, and then wander through the branching tunnels, discovering the various levels of each of the principal stations such as Gare du Nord or Saint-Lazare. They were driven by Sarab’s insatiable hunger for plumbing her fear of underground worlds.
“It’s a parallel city where people are crawling eternally, like ants. I imagine that when Judgment Day comes, they’ll still be crawling and trying to reach the sky.”
Raphael realized that the metro, which he had taken for granted since childhood, was viewed as a wonderland by someone like Sarab.
“If I tried to describe an underground city of human ants to people in Wajir, they’d think I was mad and lock me up.”
“I can well imagine that.”
“You know what? One city under another is frightening because it opens the possibility of other worlds we know nothing about, which you and I can’t even imagine. I only moved from Wajir to Paris and here it is, a brand new world. What if we moved from Paris to some other faraway country? Would we see layers and layers of underground worlds, and other ways of living we can’t picture so long as we’re here?”
“It’s difficult to imagine any world outside the one we know.”
“But that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. That’s just how the people of Wajir think.”
He laughed, conscious that her brain was racing ahead of his thoughts, her natural intelligence incandescent. Coming from the desert, she was able to move freely between the spiritual and the material, to challenge the seen with the unseen.
“In the Quran, it says there are seven heavens and seven earths. How can all these worlds be?”
“So we have to start embracing the nomadic life. We just have to solve the issue of your official status, and I promise you we’ll travel the globe and see what new worlds we can discover.”
“Perhaps not in this world.” Again, he was bewildered by this sudden shift into melancholy, this affinity to grief that came from isolation in the desert.
There was another confusing element to the worlds under the earth, which Sarab couldn’t explain to Raphael or even to herself. One day, quite unexpectedly, while Sarab was standing on the platform waiting for the train, she felt something piercing her back. She wheeled around quickly and her whole body flinched as she looked straight into the eyes of her father, boring into her heart like fishhooks.
She gasped for air and was nailed to the spot, unable to avert her gaze or move away from those eyes. The thunder of a train arriving on the opposite platform pulled her out of the nightmare. That was when she was able to look clearly at the face of the woman printed on the advertisements; she had a strong resemblance to her mother, despite the lively, beaming smile. It was the contented smile that dug a pit of longing in Sarab; this was the smile she had craved from her mother and the world around her; the smile she had never received. For some reason, people had always seemed indifferent when they looked at her, apart from Muhammad, the Mahdi.
The train left the other platform and was followed by another, and yet another, and a tall youth in a khaki military uniform appeared on the platform where Sarab was standing. Her first impulse was to run away, but she couldn’t move for fear of attracting his suspicions or attention. Suddenly she realized that the uniform might be borrowed, and then she noticed the discrepancy between the usual stance of a soldier and this young man’s posture. She observed his handsome features and bronzed skin, and the stiff clump of blond plaits dangling down his back. Soon his smell reached her, an unbearable stench of decay. He had been making space for his countless bags and a colorful froth of lurid magazines, which he had probably spent years collecting. He was engrossed in digging through the bags, ignoring the people who were moving away from him, trying to escape the smell. Heedless of anyone else, within his own rotting cocoon, he started to scatter the magazines around, opening them at certain pages and leaving them face up on the ground, until he had finished creating a sort of shore of gaudy pictures around the bench behind Sarab. Finally the homeless man sat down on the bench he had selected, leaned over, and rolled up his trousers. Calmly, and to the horror of his observers, he took off his artificial legs. He put them on the ground so everyone could see them, and left the pink, shiny knee stumps exposed in confrontation to passersby. He lay back on the bench and started reading quietly, as if he were on a beach on some imaginary island, far removed from the concerns of the world.
Sarab’s shock at the sight of his amputated legs made her notice the pages the homeless man had chosen to leave open. All of them contained scenes of explosions and death. He had left a small plastic cup in front of him, outside his island, blocking the way of the people passing by. It asked for donations; to war victims, perhaps.
Sarab was still frozen to the spot, stranded in the ocean far away from the island of that young homeless man.
“Sayf and I could have ended up like that.” She was swept by profound gratitude to God that Sayf had died, but she felt a similar amputation in her own body. Her stump was invisible to passersby, but she was like that homeless man all the same. The fragrant soap that perfumed her hair did not make her any different from him, because inside they were both alike: lonely and marooned on an island of delusion. There was no truth other than the life she had been born into in Wajir; the life of Wajir and the idea of its heritage were like solid rock under her skin that left no room for another life to grow. She shook off this depressing idea and affirmed to herself that she was acclimatizing: only that morning, Raphael had affirmed that she was, in a way that made her proud.
Now, she huffed sarcastically: “What is this nonsense, ‘acclimatizing’? All my life has been spent acclimatizing . . .” This small truth came as a surprise to her. “When will the moment come when I can stop acclimatizing and stand before my Lord as he created me: uncultivated, spontaneous, without having been pruned or tamed?”
She turned away from the homeless man and her desire for defiance worsened: “Lord, as You created me!”
She took courage and admitted to herself that she was attracted by those advertisements . . . and there was nothing sinful in that. She stopped for a moment to grasp that truth, embracing her insubordination.
A simple fact, but one that was vital to her.
Without hesitation, she moved on. Her eyes leaped to other advertisements, which showed happy people hugging their clothes joyfully or pointing radiantly to their products. Probably they were uttering cheerful phrases in a language it would never be her destiny to speak, even if she coul
d guess at it from their smiles. Their blissful expressions, open and unrestrained, made the hypothetical world they belonged to more alive than the reality manifest on the station platform. Sarab felt swept along with it; her life depended upon sampling the joy they were proclaiming. For a fraction of a second, she was no longer certain whether she herself was just a picture on one of those walls, or whether she was a person of flesh and blood emerging from the tragedy in her past.
From that day, when Sarab decided to be “as my Lord created me,” she exercised her freedom by surrendering to small pleasures. She savored the stream of images in the constantly renewed advertisements that coursed over the walls of each metro station like a river. Sometimes the advertisements were mixed with real-life figures, transforming the living world and its images, configuring them both into a single mass pulsating with life. She was aware of a separation in her response to that current; the hidden rebel like Sayf, who had smashed the dolls and erased the pictures of the little girl on the wallpaper in the Holy City, had been drowned by the pictures in Paris, a flood far worse than the electrified water that had drowned them in the cellars of the Grand Mosque and swept away their faith in the war they had started in the house of God.
These pictures formed a parallel world determined to last. She couldn’t kill it; no force could kill it. She found gratification in the thought that it was eternal. Somehow, the guilt she was accustomed to feeling whenever she saw a picture had been taken away, along with her responsibility for its necessary destruction, and the fear of punishment if she failed. The world of the pictures became a world of its own. It unrolled in front her, refreshing, with its own soul, which it imposed forcefully and with discernment on the old world. The world of pictures was no longer her sin, or anyone’s sin. She wasn’t accountable for it; she wouldn’t be asked on Judgment Day to breathe a soul into every picture she liked or that was displayed in her house, and she wouldn’t be tortured when she was unable to do so.
It was a parallel world, laden with a soul, and part of God’s creation and creativity; to her surprise, she began to be in fuller harmony with Him.
Jam Tomorrow
One day as they were entering the lobby of Raphael’s apartment building, they noticed an announcement on the wall. Raphael smiled when he read it.
“What is it?” Sarab asked curiously.
“Nothing important. A group of the older residents are saying they need someone to walk their dogs. The person who used to do it has quit.""Does it need a certificate or special skills?” she asked, somewhere in between mockery and gravity. “I mean, can anyone apply?”
Raphael was surprised by Sarab’s evident interest. He nodded. “Anyone with the patience to be dragged around by six excited and energetic dogs every day.”
“I can do this job. Anyway, it’s a source of income.”
Raphael laughed. “Walking six dogs, all barking and excited—they’ll launch you into the air like a paper airplane.”
“At least it’s a language I might be able to understand. I can’t speak your language, so I should take any work I can find.”
She intended this statement to sting a little; she enjoyed a battle of wills, and he had no choice but to allow her to triumph and disregard his opinion. He realized her profound need to be defiant, to be intractable, and to give her views free rein.
Over the next few days, the neighbors became accustomed to the sight of that thin, haughty girl being dragged behind a pack of dogs. Sarab would take the dogs to the nearby Luxembourg Gardens and walk there aimlessly, or she would sit on one of the green iron benches by the small round pound and watch them as they chased each other and bounded back to her. They licked her hands, and their affection touched her deeply. Her mother had not been the type to translate her feeling into touching of any kind; she had wanted Sarab to grow like a wild briar. But now, the dogs read the alchemy of her feelings and gave themselves permission to lick her face and ears and neck, and the animals’ tongues scraped from Sarab’s body twenty-one years of neglect and emotional sterility.
She sat barefoot at the edge of the lake, touching its chilly water with her tiptoes as she observed the various facets of her character, suppressed in the past and now vigorously manifest in these free, innocent animals and their unconstrained, unconditional love.
A special relationship grew between Sarab and Zolo, a Mexican hairless who lived with the ninety-nine-year-old former psychologist on the top floor of the building. Zolo was a reflection of something rare and proud within her. There was beauty hidden inside her that she wouldn’t allow to surface, but she allowed Zolo to strut, just as she herself craved to do, and she enjoyed seeing passersby admire his soft silver fur, which was like the surface of a mirror. From the first day, she decided to take him off his lead and allow him to prance to her left like an independent being, like a king.
Zolo walked beside her like a friend, intelligent and sensitive to her moods. Like her, he seemed to laugh at the naughty, purebred Löwchen who was cheerful and playful, and had an insatiable need for attention. Sarab felt herself mirrored in this small pack; each member represented one of her many hidden faces, the ones she had never dared to acknowledge in the past, and didn’t dare to examine at this point of her life in exile. As an act of self-release, she began to allow these dogs off their leads one by one, aware she was courting danger and the displeasure of their owners if they noticed what she did. But she didn’t care; she savored the intoxicating feeling of reckless freedom, and of being the one to grant this freedom.
The dogs loved her, and displayed a frantic enthusiasm at seeing her. In walking them, Sarab felt that instead of losing a home and a family, she was gaining more of her of secret self with every day that passed. She particularly saw herself reflected in the British bulldog, Max, one of a pair of twins; she had particular compassion for him, as his left hind leg hadn’t grown properly. It was so short as to be almost nonexistent, causing the poor dog to limp and seem always a step behind. It broke Sarab’s heart to see Max dragging his bulky body everywhere and falling farther behind with every step, running and falling countless times, but nevertheless continuing to press on, while his fully formed twin, Jax, lay next to her, snoring loudly. Jax never bothered to raise his heavy eyelids to acknowledge her presence, and he showed absolutely no interest in the freedom she offered them. As soon as she took his lead off, he would collapse heavily and begin to snore, reflecting the defensive indifference Sarab had learned to show to the world.
A close bond developed between Sarab and the twins, particularly on the morning when a seven-year-old boy rushed toward her with an automatic rifle and started firing. It was only a toy gun, but Sarab was paralyzed by the boy’s eyes; they were the eyes of her brother Sayf, bulging at her furiously. Apologizing profusely, the boy’s mother dragged her son away while Sarab sank onto the edge of the lake, shocked, her eyes welling up with tears. Suddenly Jax awoke from his deep sleep and approached her. He reared up on his hind legs, planted his left paw on her knee, and stared into her face, while his right paw gently brushed her hand. Sarab looked into his mournful eyes and knew he was saying, “Come on, stop crying, let’s play.” It was the first time Sarab had experienced such loyal affection, such raw, animal warmth.
The vanity she didn’t dare to show was embodied in the final two dogs, a pair of cotons de Tuléar whose owner dressed them in human outfits. Their beauty felt offensive to Sarab, just as she had felt insulted by her femininity during her childhood and adolescence. As soon as she turned into the Luxembourg Gardens, she removed their silly clothes and coaxed them into running naked. She cherished the bare bodies of these dogs and found their clothes baffling. One day when walking with Raphael, she had passed a shop that specialized in dog outfits, and was shocked at the sheer variety on offer, and the exorbitant prices of the tiny T-shirts, coats, hats, and scarves.
“Two hundred francs for a silly dog hat? Why do people waste all this money just to restrict their pet’s movements?”
She could understand that. “The idea of my job is to take dogs for a walk so they can relieve themselves. Does that make me their poo friend?”
Raphael burst out laughing. “Don’t torture yourself thinking about that. There’s no difference between your job and going for a walk with a friend, and you enjoy it.”
But she could only focus on that side of her job when she was hunched over with a plastic bag, picking up their waste to throw it into the rubbish bin.
She flinched at the touch of the droppings, warm and thick in the palm of her hand. Through the thin plastic bag, she could feel every detail of them. All her senses were focused on this lump of heat that had just been extruded from an animal’s bowels.
“It reminds me of the waste of the hostages and the fighters during the siege. Those dried-up lumps were piled up everywhere, and I still dream about them.”
The shock on Raphael’s face made her wonder whether she had shamed her comrades. But his silence and lack of condemnation encouraged her to keep talking.
“The siege was an experience I can’t put into words. It’s like a snake’s egg: if you allow it to hatch, something dead will come out. It’s the little details of living through it that you carry with you, more so than the fighting. Perhaps you won’t understand if I say that it wasn’t the murder that upset me so much as the loss of purity.”
She was surprised that the word purity didn’t rattle Raphael as she had anticipated it might. For her, the thought of purity was all-consuming. It was her obsession day and night, and it continued to be a fundamental source of guilt that Raphael, as a foreigner, couldn’t comprehend. She had been raised on the concept of purity, the water that washed the act of love, the water of prayer, and she felt defiled unless she was immersed in this water.