by Raja Alem
It was vital to her that he understand this, and she clarified: “As time went on, and escape was no longer an option, I would watch the fighters getting ready to pray. They had to perform their ablutions with sand because there was no water, so they would beat the ground, which was covered with soot and blood, and wipe their faces and their hands with the dust. They prayed next to their own filth, in trenches they had made from prayer mats and furniture, because leaving them would have been suicide.”
She paused to allow him to fully grasp the picture she had drawn, and then went on. “Now the memories attack me whenever one of the dogs dawdles and goes to the side of the path. I can’t get rid of the thought that those small piles were the embodiment of the darkness we were living. It wasn’t just filth, it was our ignorance of the value of life that was piling up. That was our fate: to be revolting on the pretext of seeking Paradise.
“Whenever I pick up the droppings I remember my brother’s bucket. I took it away every morning, and the clearer our defeat became the more his waste turned into yellow sludge. When I emptied it, I knew I was emptying out the bile that the other side’s bullets had burst inside him. When the end became inevitable, I could detect Sayf’s fears, all his ups and downs, as the bile began to turn green.” Tears gushed over her cheeks. “But on the day I found his body, it was covered in blood and the bucket had been knocked over, and the contents had spilled everywhere. There was nothing but green urine and reddish-black lumps. All this time I’ve been haunted by the thought that he passed his liver that night, when he met his end at the same time as the dreams of salvation that had brought us there.”
Her guilt swelled with every frank declaration to Raphael about the siege; she felt certain that her disclosure was tantamount to betrayal, a distortion of the aim that had brought her comrades to the siege. Most of them had sincerely believed they were bringing enlightenment to humanity. But Sarab had fallen victim to brooding over the real meaning of being forced into exile and earning her living by picking up excrement, and she scorned herself for cleaning streets in Paris when she hadn’t done the same in the Grand Mosque.
“It reminds me of the punishment in Hell where we have to pick up animal dung.” She wondered which of her many sins she was being punished for.
From her grave, her mother caught the whiff of her mental fissure and pursued Sarab in her dreams.
“It’s a hell you deserve for your betrayal. You’re the servant of infidel dogs, gathering their droppings instead of burning every one of their owners. Burn them, burn them!” The command haunted her, and she felt guilty whenever she met Zolo’s elderly owner and his eyes twinkled in welcome. She avoided looking into them, afraid he would discern her mother’s command to kill him.
But the sum she received at the end of the first week somewhat calmed this inner rift. That evening, Raphael came home to find her standing stock still in the living room in front of his desk, staring at the banknotes laid out on the table in front of her.
“One hundred and fifty francs. They’re all mine.”
It was difficult for him to understand the insistence and gravity in her voice. “I never owned a single riyal in my life before. My mother dealt with the money, and whenever she sent us to buy anything she would give the money to my brother. After she died he was responsible for money; he didn’t trust me with it.”
Raphael also couldn’t understand her overwhelming concern for such a paltry sum, which frustrated her.
“Okay, what are you going to do with it?”
“Perhaps I’ll keep it till I need it.” After some thought, she added: “Or perhaps I can buy clothes—sleeveless dresses with a low neckline.” She laughed defiantly, and he chuckled with a mixture of compassion and love.
“Or you could invite me for dinner and you could pay for once . . .” Raphael instantly regretted this, and hurriedly added: “I mean, spending it all at once might be heartbreaking.”
Sarab realized he was trying to get her to see that her earnings weren’t very much.
He went on: “The important thing is that it’s yours, and you can do whatever you want with it.”
“It’s six hundred francs a month. No woman in Wajir ever earned anything close to that.” She fingered each banknote appreciatively, counting and re-counting them. “Money makes me feel like a man, more than being disguised in a man’s clothes.”
“Ah, does that mean I have to get used to dealing with a female man?” Raphael teased her, laughing. “You know, I couldn’t bear you turning back into a man again.”
Storm
It was night, and a muffled sound had woken her. Terrified, she got up and rushed to the living room, but Raphael wasn’t lying there as he usually was.
She stood there, heart pounding, waiting for something to lead her to the source of the moaning; she knew there was something wrong. All of a sudden, a murmuring came from the bathroom. Realizing that Raphael was inside, she ran to the closed door. She knocked frantically on the door, but there was no reply. Without thinking, she turned the door handle and was surprised to find the door unlocked. The scene that greeted her chilled her to the bone: Raphael was standing with his twitching back pressed against the wall, staring wide-eyed at his reflection in the mirror, oblivious to her presence. She reached out to take his hand but his rigid body shuddered in aversion, rejecting any human contact.
Sarab observed his contorted, clouded features and didn’t know what to do. She felt naked; somehow, he was mirroring a part of herself she had been careful not to show him before—the part that relived the deaths of the hostages in the mosque. They both stood there, face to face with their ugliness, cut off from their surroundings, while the night was plunged in shadow.
Hours passed, and reality gradually began to penetrate their aching senses. Their feet were stiff from standing for so long, and his bare skin began to perceive the coldness of the wall it had been leaning against. Only then did Sarab notice he was naked, but it was an awareness stripped of sensuality or desire, laden with maternal feelings, as if she were receiving a baby still warm from the womb.
Silently she took his hand and led him out of the bathroom, back to the living room. He sat on the edge of the sofa, his head in his hands, while Sarab sat next to him, trying to gain insight into the film of atrocities turning in his head.
“Am I so hideous?” he asked. “Is this really the face that appears in the mirror every morning, and I’m still not stopped short by what I really am? The worst thing you can see is your real self. I can see the names of my nameless victims carved on my face in fire, all the piles of body parts—they’re part of me. Why am I so weak now? Why didn’t this weakness help me before? Is it real, or is cruelty what I really am? Who can say that I’m not acting right now?”
Sarab listened and watched while the thick skin of indifference peeled away from his body and soul leaving him raw and vulnerable, like a film reel burning up from the rays of agony he had inflicted on the world.
“Resigning has released me,” he went on. “I’m free of the barricade of indifference. And I’ve only just started on the lonely road of guilt for all the atrocities we committed in the name of freedom and democracy. I’ve become a moving wound.”
He raised his head, his eyes wet with tears; avoiding Sarab’s gaze, he focused instead on the medals he had earned over the years. His gaze turned to the tribal dagger he had won in the Sahara, which was now a wall decoration. For a moment he found great comfort in imagining that dagger piercing his heart, puncturing the tumor of guilt swelling there. He trembled at the notion of suicide. Sarab knelt next to him, clasping his knees, and the touch of her slender arms restored him to reality. He looked at her head, buried in his thighs. Leaning over, he tenderly kissed the top of her head.
“Forgive me, Sarab.”
“May they forgive us.” It was an appeal to the wider world, to the ghosts hovering overhead.
They sat there until dawn broke over the Luxembourg Gardens, when the scent of the
flowers wafted in through the open windows and plucked Raphael out of his abyss. He noticed Sarab, who had fallen asleep on her knees in front of him. He gently pulled her up onto the sofa and covered her with a blanket. Her eyes opened in shock, looking straight at him, and he stared at her despairingly.
“You’re the one keeping me alive.” What he wanted to say was: “Life—my life—is meaningless.”
She knew that he would continue to suffer from these fits, just as she did, but they had to be careful. This beautiful apartment, spacious as it was, was too small to accommodate all the victims of the siege and his many battles around the world; it was too innocent and humane to absorb such horror.
Partly Overcast
For months, a red line was drawn which both were careful not to overstep. She kept to his bed in the bedroom he had vacated for her, while he kept to the sofa in the living room. Raphael was scrupulous about this line, aware that both of them needed to face their inner cyclones before they could adjust to the changes he sought and the relationship they both craved.
But his self-restraint made Sarab doubt her attractiveness, and her warped memories sprang back to life. Over the years she had grown used to her disguise. The men in the singles’ bedroom had not been enticed by the femininity buried inside her, and her body had not responded to theirs. But being with this man, even with a locked door between them, was bewildering. It roused an inner struggle she was too embarrassed even to acknowledge. Her heart thudded wildly one evening when she felt him pause behind her as she was looking out of the window; the blood rushed to her head, an engine whistled in her ears, she stammered, her legs weakened, and she stumbled away. She was cornered by a suppressed agitation she hadn’t realized existed, and now she didn’t know how to deal with it.
That feeling of rejection led her to close her door every night with a degree of resentment, as if she needed this barrier between them, not as protection from him but as protection from her need to throw herself into his arms, to burn every bridge to her past and throw off all the nightmares that haunted her, awake and asleep. But this, of course, was Raphael’s fear; that Sarab was surrendering to him as another escape.
This pressure was on the verge of betraying her, especially at night, when she felt most fragile and the red ghosts of the siege were hatching all around and sharing her bed, or when she needed to go to the bathroom and was forced to cross the living room. She wasn’t afraid of waking him, but of what would wake in her when she passed his body, its contours sharply defined beneath the thin blanket.
One night she woke up feeling thirsty. She was crossing the living room sleepily when her senses caught hold of that vision stretched out on the sofa.
She stopped in the middle of the room like someone risen from the grave. During the Jahiliya, before Islam was revealed to the Prophet, men would bury their daughters alive to rid themselves of the shame of fathering a female; in a similar vein, Sarab’s body had been smothered under a mask of masculinity, but now it sprang vigorously to life. She was sure that Raphael was totally naked under the blanket that barely concealed him. She knew of no precedent for a man sleeping naked, other than Adam in Paradise. She sensed his warm breath while the night crept silently over her skin, peeling away its indifference, innocence, and sterility. Suddenly, like a tongue of flame, Sarab realized that she had a body, a female body, without a shred of doubt. She was terrified now that it was breaking loose, more fanatical in its desires than all the fanatics in her past.
Raphael lay under the blanket, nothing of him visible other than part of his left leg, which had escaped the blanket. A tremor ran along her spine at the sight of the toes sculpted with such luminous beauty, the arch of the foot, the golden hair creeping up the perfect leg muscles, the shadowy hollow beneath the knee.
“What if . . .” Suddenly, she was painfully aware of the small details of her body: her nipples, her round breasts, which she felt swelling with a fever she had never known before.
Her body pulsated recklessly, dangerous and outside her control, needing to be touched, even violated. The death she had fled had left her with a brutal need for destruction, and now this male body, lying there passive and unaware, was driving her mad. Every weapon of the siege was crammed into its masculinity, and a bottomless pit opened up in her to receive it. Her body swayed from the torrent of rage she directed at him, her arms reaching out to strike him in the chest, her teeth bared to rend the muscles of his slender abdomen. Her feet burned from the savage kicking she had enjoyed giving that male member at their first meeting in the Holy City. Her eyes blurred with the effort of staying where she was and not bringing shame on herself and her mother by crossing the short distance to where that foreigner lay, ten paces and entire galaxies away from how she had been raised. But the resistance that Raphael strengthened every day was stronger than every barrier of shame that had been erected under her skin since childhood. Since they had come to Paris, Raphael appeared to have wrapped her body in a shroud. He was always talking about giving her space; space to take stock, space to choose, space to breathe. She had never experienced this thing called “space” before; she had always been confined inside the suffocating framework of her mother and brother, and when something like “space” had been manifest around her during the siege, it had been encircled by fire, brimming with rotting corpses. Now, she was furious at this space that laid her out and embalmed her.
“You are pushing me back to being a man!” she burst out in silent accusation against him. “Is it my fate to live as a virgin?”
Her gaze fell on the dagger hanging on the wall, and she felt faint when she imagined its blade slicing those buttocks.
Stung by her thoughts of violence, she rushed toward the bathroom, knocking over a vase in her agitation. He raised his head sleepily. Their eyes met, and he saw the fear and the dawning of naked desire in her eyes.
He closed his eyes, resisting the urge to charge toward her and crush her in his arms. She stood still as the minutes passed unnoticed, facing his desk and the wall decorated with the medals he had earned from the blood he had spilled in Libya and Chad, Nigeria, Mauritania, and the Lebanese civil war.
At that moment, she was sure she was not repeating the mistake of being attracted to a sophisticated killing machine. On the contrary, Sarab remained free, a daughter of the desert; she was drawn to a man who was emerging from his iron world and trying to reach the human inside him, throwing off the military uniform that stifled his soul. He was determined to help her complete her own transformation without exacting any commitment toward himself, without any intention of exploiting her vulnerability and keeping her captive. For this reason, she had surrendered to the feeling that her home lay with him; he was her home and her country, more than any house she had lived in, including her mother’s.
He gripped the blanket to stop himself rushing toward her and upsetting the natural flow of their simultaneous transformation, he toward the soul and she toward the body. He was grateful that the fates had given him the opportunity of knowing this girl from the desert, delicate and steely at the same time. Since their dramatic meeting, fresh air had been moving through the layer of ash whose embers his soul was trying breathe life into. So he allowed her to take the reins, although he could have crushed her easily, and he preferred her to every one of the elegant women he saw on the streets of Paris every day.
He got up, crossed the distance between them, and walked past her to the wall where his medals were hanging. He took them handful by handful and threw them into the wastebasket under the desk. She stopped him, pinning his hands against the wall to prevent them from plucking off more medals. They both dropped their hands, which were burning and sweating.
“No, this is the record of your work. Even if these decorations disappear from the wall, they won’t disappear from you.”
He lowered his eyes in shame.
“No, don’t be ashamed. When you have really finished with the past it will fall away by itself, like a scab from a woun
d that has healed.”
Bitterly, he contemplated the trifling decorations invented by humans to celebrate murder. Every medal represented a battlefield.
“This silver medal with a gold heart is the Légion d’Honneur, chevalier class, awarded to the bravest of the brave. It was given to me in recognition of a massacre; we set fire to a resistance army in Mali. We only discovered afterward that it was an army of boys, maybe twelve or thirteen years old.”
The sight of their small, charred bodies rose vividly before his eyes and the apartment was filled with the stench of burnt human flesh. He slammed his palm into the wall to destroy the medal and shattered one of its five white wings. Blood sprang from the wound, and, agitated, Sarab rushed to tend it.
“My senses were dead all those years, and now nothing can erase the smell of burnt flesh.” He held his breath until his face turned dark red. “I can only block the smell if I stop breathing.” He inhaled deeply, punishing himself. “I was a legend. I was never even wounded. My comrades were sure I was immortal, with more than one soul. I was proud of myself for emerging from one inferno after another without a scratch. But look at me now . . .”
She didn’t know how to alleviate his suffering.
“In your opinion, how does my soul look now?” He reflected on the contradiction between the actions of his past and his current concern about his soul.
“Back then, I stood at the edge of the village watching the bulldozers push the burnt bodies into a mass grave, and I just didn’t care.”
To his surprise, she took his hand, brought it to her lips, and sucked away the blood. He pulled his hand away in disgust, almost knocking her to the ground.