A Rare Blue Bird Flies with Me

by Youssef Fadel

  I didn’t go near, since getting close to the airbase was forbidden. I stood far away from it. At a distance from the gate, and that’s why I didn’t know if Aziz was inside. People don’t disappear for no reason. Going near any government building is forbidden. When we went looking for him, Khatima and I, we spent the day far from the central prison because approaching its gate is forbidden. Is Aziz there with you or not? They didn’t say anything. Neither the guards nor the families of the prisoners who passed by carrying baskets of fruit for their relatives. We asked them if they’d seen Aziz, but they didn’t say anything. It was the same with the guards, who looked at my swollen belly.

  At the bus stop, a man we didn’t know approached us. I didn’t know people disappeared for no reason until I heard it from this man’s mouth. They leave their houses and they don’t return. They’re in prison, and tomorrow they don’t come back. Where do they go? They’re disappeared. What do I do in that case? Aziz disappeared when he was in his plane. As if a star swallowed him. His mistake was that he loved flying. He was piloting his plane while I was on the roof waiting for him to appear. But he didn’t. Not in my sky or in any other sky.

  I remember his car as I see it approaching. His Simca 1000. Coming out of the airbase gate toward me. Slowly. In a non-threatening way, spreading calm in my soul. As if it’s not coming from an airbase that’s forbidden to enter, but from a tranquil dream. Like a small miracle. I stood up, beaming, sweat pouring from my pores. I imagined my anxiety would end here. It would be over. The car stopped at the curb. The same car we rode in together, the same color, but it wasn’t Aziz, who I was expecting. The same blue uniform, yes. But the man who got out of it didn’t look like Aziz. My anxiety was only beginning.

  I was anxious, but not hopeless because I’m mature now, as my sister says. After marrying Aziz, she doesn’t say I’m young anymore. She didn’t like the work she was doing anymore. She kept saying she’d work in a rug factory until Aziz came back. But she worked at Madame Janeau’s, at Stork Bar. Aziz was her go-between but he didn’t come back. Khatima and I went to a fortuneteller. After she put her plate in front of her and moved on it her herbs, colored pearls, and strange seeds I wasn’t familiar with, she said only God would assist us. But no one would help us. I didn’t despair though, because I was mature. Pregnant and mature because of Aziz.

  The man I thought was Aziz was standing in front of me, in his uniform and his many medals. He put his hand on my shoulder. His hand was cold. The material of my clothes felt wet when the coldness of his hand pierced it. His white teeth weren’t his own. That’s why he seemed like he didn’t know if he was smiling or not. I didn’t smile because I was still thinking about the car without Aziz. The man says, as if reading my mind: “Aziz is a friend of us all. What happened to you happened to everyone.”

  I felt anxious as I stood listening to him. “You have to be patient. Wait. When things calm down. You’ll soon find your problem solved. There isn’t a problem without a solution.”

  This was the opposite of what the fortune-teller told me: “Only God will assist you. No one’ll help you.” People’s opinions differ like night and day. He seemed good, trustworthy, the man with the white teeth. He asked: “Where are you living?”

  “Me? I don’t live anywhere.”

  “Go to the Golden Sands Hotel and wait. I’ll bring you news this evening about where he is.”

  I found the Golden Sands Hotel after some effort. I saw the river. Then the port, and an incredible boat emptying its load of wheat on the curb. I saw the wide streets and a lot of storks and two bridges before I found the hotel between two clouds, between two bars with thick smoke coming out of their doors. The hotel owner was nice. She gave me a chair to relax on. She could see that I’d been walking for a long time.

  “Yes, from the airbase on foot. . . . It’s a long way, right? . . . My feet have been busy. . . . Yes. A pilot at the airbase.”

  After the chair, she gave me an orange. She was a nice woman. She said it was best to find me a room on the ground floor. For the child in my belly. So I didn’t have to go up to the first or second floor.

  I lay down in the bare space that looked like a room in a hotel should. Little light. The bedcover was cold. Like the man’s hand on my shoulder that afternoon. As I remembered him I heard a knock on the door. I opened the door but it wasn’t him, the guy with the white teeth, the man who was driving the Simca 1000 and who I thought was Aziz. What I felt wasn’t fear but anxiety, because my anxiety hadn’t settled inside me. There was a glass of tea in his hand. As if he was a hotel guest who had just stepped out of the next room. He calmed me down and gave me a glass of tea. He then asked me for my marriage certificate to be sure we were really married, me and Aziz. I handed him the certificate. I blushed as I waited for him to read it. Then calmly he tore it up into little pieces and put the small bits in his pocket, saying, with the same calmness: “The son of the bitch who’s in your belly doesn’t have a father anymore.”

  From then on, if I was caught wandering around the airbase or one of the ministries. . . . I didn’t hear the final part because sweat started pouring out of me again. For the second time today, sweat was pouring off me. A sharp whistle pierced my ears and a thick wrap began falling over my eyes. And Aziz? He was far away. Then I understood the words of the fortuneteller. Aziz had moved even farther away. Instead of moving closer.

  3

  Yes, I spent a while bedridden, semi-absent. Khatima said I hadn’t left the bed since the miscarriage. Aziz’s sister said it was the high fever that caused it. But I wasn’t paying them any attention. For a long time, I kept feeling my child and his weight as he grew. His kicks as he moved. Khatima and Khadija didn’t feel this. Their bellies hadn’t swollen even once. So they could say what they wanted. I stayed hidden in various states of consciousness. When I woke up, I got up and started moving slowly so I didn’t bother him. My sister insisted the fetus miscarried and I’m not trying to disagree with her. I heard him kick inside me and I told him to be calm. “Relax, Aziz,” I told him. “They’re only your aunts, Khatima and Khadija, joking with you.”

  When I felt I could get up, I got up. Khatima went to work at the bar in the morning and didn’t come back until late at night. Khadija and I would stay behind. She too says I spent ten months raving. I didn’t leave the bed for ten months. It’s her way of talking. We then went to the roof and, to convince me I spent ten months in bed, she’d show me her second turtle and say she bought this female for her male tortoise and she watched her every day. Yes, ten whole months passed and they hadn’t laid their eggs yet. “This is the female, small, but she eats a lot. She especially loves lettuce and tomato peels. This is the male, big like a pig, but he doesn’t eat a lot since he doesn’t need to eat. He won’t lay an egg. He just eats and shits only.” We laugh. Then Khadija lays the piece of wood over the plant pots like a cover that’ll keep the hawk from seeing the promised eggs. She raised her head up to the sky but she didn’t see the hawk. She then asked me how many months a turtle needs to lay eggs. I don’t know about turtles. Or about crickets. We went up in the afternoon to see if they’d eaten all their vegetable peels, which we’d scattered around them. And for Khadija to see if the hawk had appeared in the sky.

  I went after Aziz again, after I heard about a barracks in the middle of the woods. I didn’t know how to get there, which direction I should head in. Should I go east or west? And I didn’t know how many forests I’d cross. Or how long my trip would last. It wasn’t important. I only knew I needed Aziz and that I had to find him, and that he was abandoned in a place that I had seen in my nightmares. I had to find him on my own, without anyone’s help. Like the fortuneteller said. Only God would assist us, she said.

  I was walking in the shaded forest. Tall cedar trees. The road was dusty and wet and the scent of dead leaves rose up from it. There were trees on each side. Their roots were thick. The trees were bigger than anything I’d seen before. Human arms couldn’t reach a
round some of them, not even four arms. Behind them, behind the thick trees, girls were laughing and showing their small faces and thin hands reaching out from behind the trees, begging for dirhams from passersby. They laughed yet seemed afraid at the same time. And the morning was spring-like and invigorating, arousing pleasant memories in my soul. This idea brought a small happiness to my heart.

  I was walking to a place I had seen in recurring nightmares. But I didn’t see trees in my nightmares. Nor did I recognize the many faces that flickered in my memory and that didn’t resemble the faces I saw in front of me on the side of the dirt road that zigzagged between the cedar trees. The skinny girls asked for dirhams with what look like veils of dried mud on their faces. The biggest one pointed back to where huts of wood, thick rags, and colored plastic were spread out. As if she wanted to show me the misery they were living in. And then I saw the camp. The mothers sitting in silence, picking lice off their many kids. There were no men. Then a small laughing child began pulling me by my sleeve. Her eyes were blue. Their blueness and the blue of the other eyes seem clearer because of the veils of dried black mud covering their faces. The girl holding onto my hand was five at the most, but her laughter was older than her years. She said she was big and strong and wasn’t afraid of the woods, as her father said. I asked her where he was. This time, she pulled me in the opposite direction. We left the camp behind us.

  “We don’t see him anymore,” the girl said. She laughed, as if her laugh was what led us. After the road, we saw the barracks. My disappointment stopped me as I realized the girl was leading me to the wrong place. But the girl kept pulling me by the hand toward it.

  Two tall hangars with bent tin roofs and a stone wall with a tower in each corner surrounding them. In the middle was a round space with no trees. As if they had been ripped out from it. At the same time, we heard dogs barking. The big wooden door was wide open. There was a lot of commotion inside. I grabbed a handful of soil and rubbed it on my face to look like the child leading me toward the barracks. No one noticed us coming in. They were busy. We just looked like two local kids, after I’d put mud on my face. Men of different ages wearing khaki clothes, uniforms of the auxiliary forces. They were holding thick sticks and hurrying in every direction, yelling happily as if playing a childhood game. They then stood in front of one of the two buildings in two long rows. Showing off their clubs. What were they doing? There were lots of dogs under the wall. More than twenty dogs spread out on the dirt and watching the work of the auxiliary forces with empty, lazy eyes. Then a whistle rang out, and at that moment the members of the auxiliary forces began moving their clubs as if beating someone, yelling: “Run! Run, you son of a bitch!” They laughed. Until they reached the second building. They then repeated it three more times.

  The heedless dogs, stretched themselves out under the shaded wall. Or licked their bodies with their long tongues or pulled fleas out of their hair, watching as if it were a sporting event.

  “What are they doing?”

  The girl didn’t pay attention to my question. She was drawn to the movements of the auxiliary forces. Should I ask her about Aziz? Or wait for her father, who was also playing with his club? Or ask her if their game will last a long time?

  Then the dogs moved without a sign from anyone. They got up, raised their ears, made a lot of noise, and bared their fangs. This time, a sheikh wearing a blackened Sahrawi gandoura whose sides hung down came out of the building. He might have been a hundred years old. He was thin, with a dark face and a few white hairs covering the bottom of his chin and reaching down to his chest. Thin like a reed.

  The girl said: “A weak breeze will push him to the ground.”

  They move the clubs over his back and on his face and nape as the auxiliary forces chase him and yell: “Run, run you son of a bitch!”

  They hit him on the head. On the head. The dogs were riled up and dragged away what was left of his rags and bit his thighs. But the sheikh didn’t run. He didn’t do what they wanted. Or what the clubs wanted. Or what the dogs wanted. The malice of the auxiliary forces and the zeal of their dogs increased. The sheikh moved with dignity and pride. The clubs hit and the mouths let out their vile words. What were they doing? This was no game. The hitting was real and the yelling was real. The blood flowing from the Sahrawi sheikh’s head, bare arms, and thighs was real. A bitch ran off with a piece of flesh from the man’s thigh and other dogs followed her as she growled, excited by the scent of raw human flesh.

  The girl looked at me and said: “They spend their days playing like this. They don’t get tired.”

  Do they play with Aziz like this? I didn’t ask her. This wasn’t the place to look for him. There wasn’t a place like this in my dream. The woman who saw in her colored pearls what my days were hiding said he’s in a far-off place and there’s no way to get there.

  As we come back, the five-year-old girl tells me her father comes home in the evening. When he sleeps, she hears him cry.

  15

  Aziz

  Morning the Next Day

  1

  A BLACK BIRD SNEAKS IN under the tin roof and starts building its nest on one of the wooden columns holding up the clay roof. This bird fills the place with questions that don’t exist. With a new air. It fills the place with an entire life that doesn’t exist, at a time when someone needs to clutch at straws. It doesn’t stop flapping its wings in that tight space between the two roofs. I see under my eyes everything it brings to make its nest. Pieces of straw, twine, wires, matchsticks. I don’t know what the surrounding land is like. I haven’t left this kitchen since I got here. I got here at night. I imagine the place surrounding us is a big trash dump because the bird also comes with very strange things, like cork or pieces of plastic. Sometimes dead scorpions. It does this coming and going, not forgetting to cast a glance down at me. I discover by chance it has one eye. That its pupil has a strange glimmer. Is it the light of another day making it sparkle in that exciting way? The glint in its eye gives the raven a look of evil intent. To excite its curiosity, I tell it I don’t like ravens, especially the annoying ones like the creature moving above me. I waited for its response for a long time but it doesn’t reply. I tell myself this luckless, black, one-eyed raven doesn’t like me. When I think this, I hear it say: “What makes you think I’m black?”

  I don’t know how to respond to its unexpected and dumbfounding question. Hesitantly, I say: “Maybe it’s the lack of light.”

  Or maybe I’ve forgotten the colors. It seems my answer doesn’t convince him and his crying out increases.

  I think about what happens outside, outside the kitchen, in the other kitchens. How many of us are left? I know our number’s have gone down by a lot. Are there black or green birds above us debating with the other prisoners? But I don’t know how many we were so I can’t know how many we’ve become exactly. And how many birds are in each kitchen? Maybe five, maybe less. Is there a raven above all their roofs, building its nest, making the same chaos this damned one is making? Do they have the same problems I have with this bird?

  Silence inundates the corridor. There are other guests I don’t see. Maybe they were here and they didn’t come back. I had been hearing the whisper of their movement but I don’t hear it anymore. I was listening in on the nightmares of their sleep. I don’t hear anything anymore. There’s a light movement in the corridor but you’d never know if it’s a snake moving away or scorpions falling from the nearby ceiling or rats running or a human being in the final agony of death. Or a cook walking on his tiptoes.

  The bird keeps collecting its strange things that attract my attention and increase my curiosity. I decide to forget him, to forget his lit-up eye. I decided to concern myself with myself and what’s been happening to me after I came back from my coma and found dirt and lime covering me from top to bottom without knowing where it came from. No doubt the cook sprayed me with lime to kill the lice that ate half my testicle. I took my clothes off and tossed them into the bottom o
f the basin and sat naked.

  I raise my eyes and see something flashing through the holes of the clay roof. I do everything I can to focus on it. This time, the bird doesn’t turn toward me. It keeps at its work, moving the piece of curved tin it brought in with its beak and feet. In this direction and then in that. It seems it isn’t straight enough to make it happy. It leaves it hanging there and goes away. It continues collecting straw and twigs. It finally stops moving. It’s enough to watch the raven’s work. And what I discover is that the piece of curved tin is reflecting sunlight. Then that bird’s color wasn’t black. The day acquires a color and a presence. The light reflects off the bottom of the piece of shining metal and a sun appears at its base. A captivating, transparent light, between violet and blue, fills the place. I sit in the middle of the kitchen, naked, thinking about the bird that fetched the day to me. I discover its charming light on my entire body. Bit by bit. I look over my testicles as if seeing them for the first time. These are my feet and these are my legs and this is my penis and this is what’s left of my right testicle. This is a piece of skin from my left testicle. I put it back and grab it so it clings to its brother. The sickly yellow color of the skin disappears and the scars disappear and the wounds disappear. I look with surprise at the change that’s happening to the worn-out skin. I have no way to take some of these rays and keep them for a day when the sun finally disappears. Perplexed, I discover the wounds are healing. The skin’s coming back. And the boils are recovering and the pus is drying up. I stretch my feet out in front of me as I look at this miracle. I look at my hands this time, extended in front of me. The right, then the left. I turn them over in every direction, enchanted by their appearance and by their color, changing from light yellow to brown like someone who spent the summer under the sun. I move on to my fingers. I move them one by one. I see all their old movements have come back to them. They point in the same old directions. They speak the same language. I discover a gold ring on one of my fingers. I don’t know where it came from. Isn’t that strange? I had it on all this time without noticing it. A big part of my memory is split apart around this. I don’t remember where I bought it. I don’t remember if I bought it or if someone gave it to me. I don’t even remember if it’s stayed on my finger all this time. Maybe it belongs to someone who was here before me. Should I hide it so the cook doesn’t see it? Should I throw the ring in the corridor or give it to another guest who knows how to hide it better than me? I call out to my neighbor. No one responds. Except for the hum I heard in the corridor and that I don’t understand, I don’t respond. Haaa. Another guest discovers for the first time the sunlight and the miracle it makes before his eyes after a bird like mine alights on his roof. Haaa. Maybe it’s connected to the echo of my voice. I spend a long time trying to get the ring off but it’s as if it is attached to my flesh. Every attempt produces more anxiety than pain. When I am able finally to get it off, I put it to the side. I have the whole day to think about a good way to hide it.