by Nafiza Azad
I turn and look at the red-bearded, not-human man. He is surprised by my gaze for a second, and then he smiles at me. In his smile, I see another man. One I thought I never would see again. I guess it is true what people say. You never forget the shape of your monster, no matter how much time passes since the last time you saw him.
The fear I feel is bigger than I am. It is darker and more malicious. But I am stronger than it is. I will always be stronger than it is.
I smile back at the red-bearded man and show him all my teeth. His smile withers at mine. Heh.
I could stretch out this strange play, build it up before letting the cards fall into place. But the night is aging and my girls will worry if I take too long. So, I plunge into the crowds, abandoning caution entirely, and lead my pursuers on a merry chase before I emerge out of the area where the food stalls are and into the space belonging to everyone else. Musicians, storytellers, entertainers, and a vast array of other entrepreneurs have set up shop in all available space here except one.
One square, just a little ways from the line of carts selling freshly squeezed orange juice, remains deserted. No locals venture there. If they have to pass by, they will go around it, keeping a solid distance between it and them. Tourists who stumble into the space leave hurriedly, often with ashen faces. Local middle worlders won’t cross it. They have learned not to.
To understand what makes the little piece of the square so vile to both middle worlders and humans alike, you have to understand the history of the Jemaa el-Fna. Particularly the part where it was used as execution grounds. The blood spilled in the square not only gives the magic here an incarnadine flavor, but it also makes the place thick with ghosts.
Ghosts are not common, but neither are they the impossibilities human science labels them as. Any place where emotions are spent in excess becomes fertile ground for ghosts. If the magic in the place is enough to sustain them, they will exist. Usually the magic isn’t, but here, it is.
Most of the ghosts lingering in the square are benign, barely held together by some unfulfilled wish or unspoken desire. They are wisps who only require one strong gust of will to dissipate. They have no anchors, so they grow no roots. That is not the case with Farah.
To call her a ghost seems like an insult to the strength of her being, but in the end, that is what she is. I met her, if one can meet ghosts, one afternoon when the storm inside of me was raging harder than the storm outside in the square. The pain, which constructs her, which binds her to this world long after everything she was, has decayed away, seems like a distant echo of mine. She lost her heart and then her life with scarcely a pause between the two. She was betrayed first by her father and then by her husband. Two things remain of her: her name, which she holds on to tightly, and her anger, which she grasps even tighter. She haunts the little piece of the square on which she was executed and exacts a payment from anyone who is unlucky enough to step into the space. She causes humans pain and rips the magic from middle worlders. She doesn’t kill them, but without magic, they might as well be dead. She is not searching for absolution; she has no wish to move on to anywhere.
What she and I have is not friendship, not exactly. You cannot be friends with a ghost. What we have is an understanding, a common language that we both speak. A language that anyone who has been violated and known fear speaks.
If I had wanted to escape the men, I could have done so in a hundred other ways. I could have hidden in a corner or blended in with a group of tourists, but we all have things we can’t do. I can’t let the fear rule me. I will not run away. So, I make sure the men are following and head to Farah’s square, stopping right in the middle of it.
The men follow me into Farah’s square, crowding me with their physical presence. Since they came so willingly, they must not have heard of the danger this little piece of the Jemaa el-Fna poses. Or perhaps they do not give credence to any rumors they may have heard.
Still, how can they not feel her? Do they not sense her in the frenzied beating of their hearts? One of the four men frowns and looks around, as if something in the air has disturbed him, but the rest are serene, confident of the power they have and think I don’t.
“Lead us to the keeper and you will go unharmed,” one of the men says. He uses magic to throw up a veil that makes us invisible to all observing eyes. “If you don’t cooperate, you will get hurt.”
I do not reply.
The red-bearded man steps nearer to me and opens his mouth, and at that moment the air crackles with lightning, though the night sky is clear. The men all freeze—but it is far too late.
She is there in the lack of color in their cheeks, in the swallow of their throats, and in the sweat dotting their foreheads. She is there in the pain that peels their lips back in silent snarls.
See, the magic is ripe in the Jemaa el-Fna, and ripe magic is strong magic. Strong magic intoxicates middle worlders and gives strong ghosts a bite that they usually don’t have. I step around the unconscious bodies of the four men and leave Farah to her meal.
From the Book of MEMORIES
AREUM
CITY OF ORIGIN: SEOUL
Midnight peeked before it passed
and found me with my petticoats up
observing my legs in horrified detail.
When did I become a monster?
Paheli: On the Frailties of the Heart
I.
It is late afternoon in Gamcheon Culture Village in Busan, South Korea, when I finally get there. The shadows are thick and sunset perhaps less than an hour away. The days are short this time of the year.
It has been five hours since I sent the girls ahead. Two since I left Marrakech. I wonder how they feel without me. Do they feel relieved? Have they realized my presence is unnecessary? Are they worried? Carrying a story on your own is difficult.
Taraana must be angry.
I stop in the thin alley I came out in and rethink my decision to return to the girls and Taraana. I can still run away from him. He must be one or two degrees over angry. How will I face his anger? I halt my steps and look down at my hands. They are not covered in blood, but they may as well be.
That moment on the rooftop in Marrakech. How could I hug Taraana when I don’t deserve his embrace? What if I sully him? What if I don’t go back? What if I turn around and go back to the Between and—the thought of never seeing Taraana again terrifies me, and the fact that I’m terrified terrifies me.
I am a mess. You heard it here first.
I take a deep breath and feel the cold air cool my insides. Okay. I won’t think about all of this here in this stinky alley. I most certainly won’t have a breakdown here. I put my chin up and start walking again. We chose Gamcheon Culture Village as the location for our safe house for one simple reason: the area is young enough to deter other middle worlders from settling here. The magic here is too thin to sustain them for long, but it is old enough to easily keep us.
I follow the road for a bit before turning from it to climb the first of several flights of stairs. The corners are hairy and the going difficult, but I make it through with minimal wheezing. Finally, I make it to a house with bright pink walls and an equally bright blue roof.
Gamcheon Culture Village started life as a slum, flooded with refugees fleeing the Korean War. A government initiative turned this town built on the side of a mountain into a tourist destination. All the houses here are painted in happy colors reminiscent of a pastel rainbow, and that is just the first and most obvious way the place was transformed. The walls feature murals or graffiti art; the stairs are decorated with paintings. Art installations invite tourists to take pictures, and small cafés do brisk business serving visitors who need a place to sit down and recover from the many steep hills and stairs that compose the town.
From the front, the pink-walled house appears deserted, which is as it should be. The purpose of the safe house is to give us a place to go to ground. No one knows of this place apart from us and Eulalie. But what if som
ething happened to the girls and they didn’t make it here? What if by spending time without me, they realized they don’t need me after all? That they are better off without me? What if Taraana got so angry he left? What will I do without them? How will I get him back? Should I even want to? Perhaps it is better for me to be alone.
The front door swings inward at my touch. Breathe, I need to breathe. They will be inside and they will be safe. They will still love me. There is nothing to it.
When I step through the door and into the house, I see no one for a second and my heart cracks like a nutshell in a nutcracker. The next minute there is a scream, and suddenly I am besieged. I manage to extricate myself after a minute only to be immediately subjected to Valentina’s glare.
“What took you so long?” she demands. Her eyes are suspiciously bright. She might actually be glad to see me. Wow. My eyes sting in response. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.
I don’t know how to answer her. What do I say? I had to take care of business? My hands aren’t bloody, but they may as well be? I don’t regret what I did. I just don’t like how I feel afterward.
“Taraana?” I ask instead.
Daraja nods at the staircase. “He disappeared into one of the bedrooms when we got here and hasn’t come out.” She gives me a long look. “He’s… Well, just be prepared.”
“What happened to those men?” Ghufran asks, her hands holding mine tightly.
“They were taken care of,” I tell her. She smiles and lets go.
“Go talk to Taraana,” Widad says. “He has been slowly going out of his mind every minute you weren’t here.”
“I don’t envy you,” Kamboja says, taking a bite of a very red apple.
“Neither do I,” Areum says, her lips red from tteokbokki. Where did they get the food from? Weren’t they supposed to stay inside?
“The anger this time isn’t going to be solved easily,” Daraja warns. “Want to take him chocolate?”
“I don’t think a tub full of chocolate will help. Not this time,” Ligaya tells me with her unkind smile.
“You deserve whatever he says to you,” Etsuko says.
I look at Talei. “You have nothing to say?”
“I’m sure Taraana will say it for me,” she says serenely.
I look reluctantly at the stairs, but I have no other choice. I will have to dare the dragon’s den.
II.
I have been alive for a very long time, and I have met many different kinds of people, but I can honestly say that I have never met anyone who disconcerts me in quite the same way that Taraana does. I am upset by how easily he sweeps away my defenses and leaves me helpless against his direct gaze. I exert a lot of effort to be mysterious, and yet I am transparent to him. It truly annoys me.
I am fully prepared for his anger, you know. I expect him to rage at me. I am prepared to battle that hurricane. When I knock on his door, he doesn’t respond, so I open it. The room is shrouded in shadow; the only light in the room comes from a window on the far wall looking over the back of the house. Taraana is sitting by the window, staring out at the red-streaked sky. He doesn’t turn when I open the door, and he doesn’t respond when I call out to him.
So, here I am, standing like an elephant in heels in the middle of the room, waiting for the ax to fall. He won’t look at me and he won’t talk to me and I have no idea what to do. See, this is why relationships are a bad idea for me.
I take a step in his direction, and he gets up so suddenly that I jump back. He turns to face me, and all the words I have prepared to appease him disappear. He looks at me; his eyes travel my face and my body as if searching for some kind of wound. His hands clench at his sides. He lets out a ragged breath, then wipes his eyes with a fist.
I thought he would be angry, but the emotion I sense from him is something more potent, something darker, something I don’t have the words for.
“Taraana—”
“I am leaving,” he says, cutting me off.
I stare at him, uncomprehending for a second. “Where are you going?”
“It’s better if you don’t know.” He is entirely too calm. His voice isn’t shaking, and apart from the earlier show of emotion, his face is composed. It is as though I don’t know him.
I swallow. All right, this is serious. “Why are you leaving?”
“The answer is obvious, isn’t it?” he replies, turning his back to me. Again.
“No, it really isn’t. Look at me.”
“I don’t want to.”
Oh. Ouch.
“I survived well enough without you protecting me, you know.” He should maybe just hit me. That would hurt less.
“Look.” I step closer to him. After thinking about it, I place a hand carefully on his arm. If he flinches, I may never recover. He stiffens but doesn’t otherwise react. All right. “I am not going to apologize for what I did today.”
“I am not asking you to.” He turns to me abruptly, and I realize how close we are to each other. “You don’t think I am strong enough to protect myself. You consider me weak and afraid, and maybe I am both those things. But you, you are cavalier with your disregard for danger. You taunt death as if daring it to try to take you away.” He takes a deep breath. “There was no reason for you to stay behind today. No matter how you try to justify remaining behind, the fact is, you could have run with us, escaped with us, but you chose to remain behind. Perhaps to prove a point, perhaps to confront your fears. I don’t know.”
My eyes prickle. Oh no. I am not going to cry. I will be damned if I do. He can go if he wants to. I don’t care.
That is a lie. Damn it all.
I do care. I care too much.
Do you know how difficult it is to love anything or anyone when your sense of self has been shattered? It took me a long time and a lot of help to even admit to liking the way the sun felt on my skin. I admitted to liking Taraana. I admitted that I might even love him someday in the future. Shouldn’t that be enough?
Taraana crosses over to the wall, and a door to the Between appears.
“Wait. Wait. Wait.” I am all panic.
“Listen.” He grabs my hands in his gently. “I know you have your own demons to fight. I shouldn’t have asked you to battle mine as well. I’m sorry. You don’t owe me anything.” He pauses as if fighting the urge to say something else. Finally, he shakes his head. “As for the other thing, I—” He stops. Shakes his head again. Lets go of my hands. Turns away.
If he leaves, I will never see him again. But to ask him to stay will take the kind of courage I only pretend to have.
“Convey my gratitude to the girls. Thank them for being the family I never had.”
“Wait, Taraana.” Dammit, I am crying. If I am going to do this, I will have to do it all. I wrap my arms around him, forcing him to stop walking toward the Between door. His heart is beating furiously under my cheek. His skin is warm and he smells like strawberry soap. “You can’t leave.”
“Don’t tell me what to do, Paheli.” He growls my name. I look up into his eyes and am trapped by the stars that glimmer in them.
“I am going to kiss you now,” I tell him, and proceed to do exactly that. I rise on my toes and press my lips to his, and the world explodes in a festival of feeling. Neither of us is familiar with the concept of kissing, but his lips are soft and I like them. I like touching him. I want to touch him as I have never wanted to touch another person. I want us to kiss longer and deeper. Kissing him is like getting that little bit of myself back. That bit of myself I lost so long ago. Our kiss is flavored by tears, though I don’t know whose tears they are.
The first thing he says when we finally stop kissing is “This doesn’t change anything.”
My mouth falls open and I gape at him. “How can you say that?” I demand. Why doesn’t he realize how much courage it took me to touch him?
“You will leave me behind again the next time there is danger. Or perhaps you will intentionally deflect all attention, all da
nger, to yourself because you think yourself dispensable.”
“I don’t think that!”
He looks at me with those eyes that see too much. I look away from him, but I don’t let go of his hand.
“All right, maybe you have a point. A tiny little point, but it’s not because you are weak. It’s because you are precious to me.”
“Haven’t you ever thought that you are precious to me as well?” he replies.
“I…” I look at him, bewildered. I sit down on the bed, and he sits down next to me. Actually, honestly, I haven’t.
He sighs and his arm snakes around my waist to pull me softly against him. “I am in love with you, Paheli. When you put my tear on, you unintentionally and unknowingly became my companion. I spent nights curled up in a cage, sometimes hurt, sometimes bleeding, feeling what you felt. The place Baarish kept me was dark; there was never any light, but through you, I could see the sun. Baarish used to talk to me after torturing me for a day. He used to tell me my only purpose in life was to provide him with my tears. He sat on a stool outside the cage and talked. He told me I was useless. That my parents threw me away. That no one would ever love me. He didn’t know that I had you. Your pleasure when you eat mangoes, your anger, your fear, your sadness. I feasted on your feelings. They were so much more than the bleak despair that composed my days.”
I am crying so hard, I feel dizzy.
“When I first saw you that evening in Byblos… there is nothing I can say here that can encompass the entirety of all I felt in that moment.” He cups my face with his hands, wiping away my tears with his thumbs. “Our feelings aren’t the same yet. I understand that. I have loved you longer. You are precious to me. Infinitely so. I won’t ask you to not take risks or do anything that you don’t want to as long as you will realize that I will do the same thing. You can’t leave me behind or stay behind unless I am allowed to do the same thing.”
I pull away from him and grab some tissues from a box on the bedside table. I wipe my eyes and blow my nose and try to stop crying. It takes a while.