Sarab

by Raja Alem

  “You’re crazy.”

  She was in a violent rapture. He looked at the blood on her lips. He could feel the poison accumulating in his opened veins and wanted to wipe the hideousness of his past from her lips.

  “Go and wash your mouth, please. I can’t bear to look at you.”

  She ignored him, concentrating on the broken medal; she was trying to repair the broken wing.

  “You should keep this in front of you and look at it from time to time,” she told him. “You’ll see the distance you’ve traveled between then and now, from the indifference of the past to the pain of the future.”

  He sank down on the desk, exhausted, while she retrieved the medals from the wastebasket and hung them back on the wall. A throb of pain ran up his spine and jolted his brain as he watched her hang his disgrace on the wall of their souls like a yoke of bondage.

  She woke with the taste of Raphael’s blood on her tongue. Her pleasure in their emotional closeness had disappeared, and with it the armor that had held her together. Gone was the logic with which she had faced his latest panic attack, her attraction to him, and the desire to touch him. The only thing left was a burning wish to be purified so that the angels wouldn’t turn away from her. She needed cleansing. She remained where she was, struck by deep revulsion.

  She didn’t want to cross the living room where Raphael was sleeping to go to the bathroom. She noticed the cup of water by her bed and took a sip, rinsing out her mouth which felt like a pit. Looking for somewhere to spit out the taste of everything that clung to it, she went to the window and spat out the full mouthful. The water sprayed everywhere, sending slivers of silver over the roof. She rinsed with a second mouthful, then a third, sending a thin jet of water over the sloping roof, not quite reaching the gutters. She gazed vacantly at the black moisture reflecting the lights of Place Saint-Sulpice as it carried away her sins. Her whole body was aflame with the thought of purity, and she wasn’t satisfied. She rushed to the bedside table, took a bottle of eau de cologne that had been forgotten there, and took a sip, swilling it around her mouth. The bitter taste of musk and sandalwood restored her to herself. She took another sip, choked, and started to cough; frantically, she took a tissue and began to scrape the taste from her tongue and the roof of her mouth.

  At last she sank down on the floor, shocked by what she had done. No water, no amount of cleansing would purify her from the taste of blood.

  As she lay prostrate and naked on the floor, the first birdsong of the day reached her from the tops of the trees in the Luxembourg Gardens, interrupting her mania. She realized it was time for the dawn prayer; in the absence of mosques and calls to prayer in Paris, the birds and sun were her muezzins. Again, she crept on tiptoe to the bathroom, averting her eyes from where Raphael lay, oblivious to her internal convulsions.

  Sarab realized she experienced an overwhelming sense of sin with every emotion she felt; it was a sin when she grieved, a sin when she was angry, a sin when she was happy.

  Distracted, she stood beneath the shower and let it wash her, marinating every secret crevice of her body, hair, and mouth with thick foam to ensure her purification.

  At last she left the bathtub and looked doubtfully at her nightshirt. Maybe it still held the sweat of the madness and the demons that had goaded her.

  She avoided the shirt and wouldn’t touch it even with the tips of her toes, so as not to spoil her ablutions for prayer. She wrapped her body in a clean towel instead, careful not to wear her leather slippers in case they also held traces of her sweat, although a voice in her head insisted that her impurity was unyielding and her absurd worries made no difference to it.

  She slipped back to her room and closed the door. Wrapped in the clean towel, she stood to pray, reassured of being at least minimally pure, although the taste of his blood that could never be washed away still ran deep in her lungs and through her veins.

  What demon made you suck the blood of this foreigner?

  Ending Number Three

  That morning they couldn’t bear staying in the flat. The atmosphere was charged with desire and the tension almost drove Raphael mad. They left at dawn and walked alongside the early-morning stream of delivery lorries carrying flowers and other goods to the shops, wandering aimlessly as the sun gradually emerged. Neither realized how much time had passed until they came across Place Denfert-Rochereau in the fourteenth arrondissement. Sarab stopped abruptly, drawn like a magnet to a poster depicting a pile of skulls. She stood in front of the picture, mesmerized.

  “What’s this?”

  After some hesitation he replied, “The catacombs.”

  She felt his aversion to further explanation, but persisted: “What are the catacombs?”

  “It’s a burial ground for skeletons . . . nothing interesting.”

  “Why are all those people lining up to get in? Will they be buried here?” She watched people buying tickets and disappearing inside the building.

  “There are no burials here. It’s not a graveyard in the usual sense; it’s more like a mass grave for people who died in previous centuries. They were brought here from various graveyards and burial grounds all over Paris.”

  This surpassed Sarab’s comprehension. She pressed him: “A mass grave? From a war? From a plague?”

  “No, it’s just an old stone quarry that was turned into a repository for bones. It contains the skeletons of six million Parisians. They were brought here gradually over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the graveyards were closed because of the threat to public health.”

  Raphael was irritated that chance had brought them to that particular place at the very time when her life appeared to be threatened. It seemed to reinforce the feeling that death had been hovering over them ever since they fled the mosque.

  “What are these people buying?”

  “Entrance tickets—three francs for a thirty-minute visit,” Raphael replied carelessly, trying to dispel the apprehension settling on her face. “It’s a sort of museum.”

  “Really? A graveyard museum?” Sarab had become acquainted with the concept of museums and culture over the previous month. The museum reminded her of Raphael’s medals, but more so of her father’s antique rifles. The legend of her family, even of the tribe itself, had revolved around the rifles hung on the wall of their house, and everyone had drawn strength from that display every morning. She had left them behind her, buried in the house in Medina, and now they seemed like ghosts from a past century, stripped of their worth. This loss reinforced Sarab’s sense of negation and nakedness in exile and, correspondingly, her desire for vengeance and defiance.

  “The visitors are buying tickets to look and learn? Learn what?” He didn’t understand her question and she went on: “That life is over in a flash of lightning?”

  “Yes . . . and perhaps they like the tableaux made from the bones.”

  The peculiarity of this shocked her. She felt a mysterious threat in that warehouse of death whose essence she still hadn’t grasped.

  “I want to go in.”

  She was determined to challenge this mysterious force manifested in her and the place and even Raphael himself. She was possessed by a spirit of masochism, mixed with the living’s frustration with the dead. She wanted all the skeletons to rise from their mass grave and take vengeance for her body, which had been wrapped in the shroud of Raphael’s indifference when he rejected her as a woman.

  “No, I don’t think it’s a good idea. It’s twenty meters underground. There are murder victims buried here. It’s a nightmare.”

  “Even for a soldier like you?”

  “But what about you, after all you’ve been through? Please, let’s go to the café over there; it’s been preserved in the old French style, and I can take you to a graveyard another day if you really want to visit the dead. We could go to the Père Lachaise cemetery—famous people from all over the world are buried there. It’s very beautiful, with paths full of flowers and sculptures on the graves
and commemorative poetry here and there. It’s really worth seeing.”

  This only increased her confusion. “What an idea, this cemetery of famous people! Death is a sort of party to you people, something to display—you clip tickets and send out invitations for it!”

  Raphael couldn’t understand why she was so angry, whether her words were speculation or criticism.

  “Our graveyards are like anthills,” she said, “just bare ground with no tombstones, no names to pin down the identity of the person buried there, nothing to lure spectators. Just piles of dust to show there are graves there. We are buried with nothing between ourselves and the earth, wrapped in a sheet of white cotton which they open as soon as we are in the grave. They uncover our faces and throw a handful of dust in our eyes so our bodies come into contact with the earth and melt into it.”

  Raphael raised his eyebrows, unable to picture this, while she went on: “After a month or more, they open the grave and collect the bones to bury them in a mass grave, and they vacate the grave for someone else. We don’t have private graves. They’re shared, because there’s no such thing as property when you’re dead. We are given any available grave the moment our body arrives in the graveyard, whether you’re a minister or a street sweeper.”

  He wanted to quip: “A socialist grave?” But she went on in a reproachful tone: “And however many dead there are, the graveyards are never full and they are never shut in our faces.”

  The sky clouded over suddenly, and lightning flashed on the horizon. There was no rain, just a dry darkness lowering over them, but it drove them to the entrance.

  “Fine,” snapped Raphael. This catacomb is just a mass grave and it’s not worth visiting.” Her anger had finally succeeded in sparking his, but instead of deterring her, his exasperation only redoubled her determination. He had no choice but to buy them two tickets.

  They walked down the steps, Sarab leading the way, rushing into the gloom.

  With every downward step she took, her pulse beat faster. She was wrapped in the darkness of the stairs and it chilled her veins. But she maintained her impassive exterior, so that Raphael wouldn’t take her back.

  An overpowering force was driving her on, leading her to the underground entrance to the catacombs. They passed between two black pillars like the rooks in a chess game. Each pillar carried the outline of a white triangle pointing upward, symbolizing the souls still rising to the heavens, and the gateway was marked on both sides with a white rhombus inside a black rectangle.

  “If I’m correct, the rhombus is a symbol of alpha and omega, the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet,” Raphael volunteered. His flat tone betrayed his indecision between irritation at her stubbornness and an impulse to alleviate the somber atmosphere. “They mean that God is eternal, the first and the last, before and after death.”

  With his eyes fixed on her slim back, he pitied her body, burdened as it was with a combative soul that was determined to surpass its capabilities. Meanwhile, Sarab had almost forgotten his presence; like a lump of mummified will, she went forward on tiptoe. Everything in front of her was somewhere between white and black, like death and life, and she didn’t know one from the other.

  “Arrête! C’est ici l’empire de la mort. Stop! Here lies the empire of death.” Raphael’s voice exploded behind her in warning, amplifying the line of poetry crowning the door.

  Shuddering, Sarab came to a halt. She was haunted by the belief that she would be destroyed if she tried to pass through the door, but the force in control of her propelled her to take a large stride across the threshold. The guard observed her keenness with a wry smile, and she went forward alone. A maze of shadowy display halls opened up before her, their mystery enhanced by the pale bones of the dead covering every wall. The arm and leg bones seemed helpless and forlorn to her, nothing showing of them but their joints in a mosaic of knee and elbow bones. Intolerant-looking skulls speckled the walls here and there, their nullifying stare emerging from bloated pillars and above walls of leg and arm bones.

  Suddenly the silence thickened to a gelatinous blanket, slowing her movements. It brought her to a halt beside fourteen skulls arranged in the outline of a heart. Sarab was particularly frightened by the skull in the center, which had been destroyed so that nothing was left of it but the jaw. She rushed forward into the next hall. The catacombs suddenly seemed to have been emptied of visitors and guards, no one was left but Sarab and Raphael moving through the silent caverns where nothing spoke apart from ancient, unconcealed death. She didn’t hesitate, because she had no choice; she moved forward, encouraged by the sound of Raphael’s stertorous breathing as he followed her. She realized the tableaux of death had revived his nightmares of Madagascar. In point of fact, Raphael had started feeling the cold breaths of his victims, exhaled by the skulls, on every part of his body. He would have fled this horror if not for the girl who kept pushing on until she almost disappeared, swallowed up by the malicious gleam of the bone mosaics.

  In an attempt to lighten the dread of those canopies of death, he carried on with his explanations: “The bodies were brought here in wagons known as ‘black convoys’ from different graveyards where all kinds of people were buried, from vagrants to starving artists.”

  He directed Sarab’s gaze to three skulls lined up vertically, one dome under another. “Here, for example, it is believed these are the skulls of the Le Nain artists, three brothers who faced life as one. All their works are signed by one name, probably all by one hand.”

  Sarab wasn’t paying attention. A red glare lured her toward a skull that rolled along and disappeared. Its haughtiness reminded her of her mother’s skull; when she looked away from it, she was astounded by the sight of the hall they were in, closed off by a pillar in the form of an enormous barrel holding up the ceiling. The barrel’s swollen body was paved with arm and leg bones like a riddle, and it was girdled with three bands of skulls, one close to the ceiling, the second in the middle, and the third near the ground.

  “Those yellow skulls at the bottom are probably plague victims; they make up two-thirds of the skulls here.”

  Sarab wanted to retort that it was smallpox that emptied out eye sockets and uncovered skulls in the desert, but her voice had dried up. At the corner, she was again confronted by the skull that appeared to issue a red flame.

  Raphael followed her gaze, and explained nonchalantly: “This skull, which appears and disappears, has a famous story that has inspired a lot of writers. It’s rumored to be the skull of Madame de Brinvilliers. Her lover ordered a certain box to be opened after he died, and it contained memoranda and letters which they used to condemn her for adultery and the murder of her father and two brothers.”

  The mingling of fornication and death increased Sarab’s terror. Her body was tempted to strip down to its skeleton and slip in among the others.

  Raphael went on: “They cut off her head and threw her body into a fire, but they brought her skull back to Paris.”

  Raphael was torn between putting Sarab at ease and punishing her for excavating these skeletons. He continued with his comments, giving form to the gloom of those underground passages, even though all these strange, foreign names and stories conveyed nothing to Sarab. None of Raphael’s commentary seemed to stick in her memory, but when she stood facing one particular elongated skull, out of nowhere she remembered the nightmare that had woken her the night before. In the dream, she had seen her father on a white bed, surrounded by heaving armies of black ants. Whenever he moved his hand, whole armies died, only to multiply and start heaving again. Beside him, her mother was absorbed in cooking while sewage flooded all around and began to seep into the food. The dream confirmed to her that her sins were eating away at her parents in their death; they were being tormented in the afterlife for her flight to this foreign life.

  Sarab’s recollection of her father’s sin-laden eternity weighed her down with despair, made heavier by the gloom in the catacombs. To Raphael, still following her
patiently, she seemed the embodiment of the nightmare that had kept them awake all night, and that had caused her to swathe herself in black this morning. Raphael hadn’t missed this spontaneous reaction of hers; he had come to realize that whenever she was beset with guilt, she wore black clothes. And here she was, walking ahead of him in a mass of black, surrounded by a teeming sea of white skulls, while he, disturbed by his own past, was called upon to stem any evil. And Sarab was lured onward.

  Suddenly she was brushed by a breeze, like a misgiving coming from the pattern under the door at the end of the corridor. A double row of skulls traced a human body with two arms and two stumpy legs open wide. Between the legs was a small skull, beginning to fall, and Sarab realized that she was witnessing a birth.

  As soon as her eyes fell on that skull emerging from the womb, Sarab reeled with dizziness. Suddenly there was no more boundary between them: she was the one emerging from between those legs of ancient death. The little skull crawled into Sarab’s skull and unrolled its hellish memories, throbbing and taking over her brain along with the millions of other skulls stored in this metaphysical world. Sarab’s head began to expand, swallowing up the passage around her and growing until it reached the size of the catacombs. Six million arms and legs jostled and burst out of her arms and legs, and she could make out the skeletons of her fellow rebels rushing toward her from an unseen world with no border, filled with rage and coming to occupy her body. Swallowed up by her own ugliness and the emptiness of all these skulls, she fainted.

  She came to in Raphael’s arms as he carried her up the staircase. She looked up at him tongue-tied, watching his clouded face hovering over her, and he seemed more terrified than at any point during the battle and his captivity. Once they were in the sunlight, he leaned over her anxiously, sprinkling her face with bottled water and wiping her cheeks as gently as if she were a child. She smiled, embarrassed, and he smiled back.