A Rare Blue Bird Flies with Me

by Youssef Fadel

I felt my eyes closing and my body went limp. I was still tired from the effort I’d made that night. I’ve become senile. I’ll be lucky if I can fit in with that simple Sahrawi family.

  17

  Benghazi

  10 a.m.

  1

  THEN THERE’S THIS WOMAN WHO comes looking for her husband. I don’t see her at first when she gets out. I am lying down in the room and I think: Today’s the day I go to the city to try my luck. The only thing on my mind is the horses that’ll run in the afternoon. I drink a cup of tea and leave my room. I find a bus full of tourists. My uncle told them we don’t need tourists, most of them are spies. He’s in his office, my uncle. Either they’re French or Italian or Indian. What do we do with them? They’ve come to marvel at the impenetrable walls and what’s left of the pasha’s tiles and his decorations in the catalogs they carry. They’re sweating a lot. It’s May. The tourists don’t understand what I say but the guide responds to their questions.

  I say: “They’re spies and we don’t have any prisoners here, thank God.”

  The guide doesn’t know how to explain so I say: “All this was left by tyrannical colonialism. As for now, thank God, the country enjoys freedom and happiness.”

  And the guide: “The casbah’s closed because today’s Friday.”

  And the tourists protest: “Today’s Sunday.”

  And I yell: “Regardless, today’s a Friday in this region.

  And the tourists scream: “We protest strongly.”

  And me: “May God bless your parents, go. The journey’s over.”

  My uncle’s in the office. They’re trying to charge the door as I tell the guide to stop them from coming in if he wants to end his day safely. Tomorrow I’ll open the door for them because it’ll be their Friday. No races, no horses, no numbers. There’s no one left, nothing that the French and Americans will be able to accuse us of. God willing. For now, entering is forbidden and that’s it. My uncle knows half of them are spies who’ve brought their evil intentions and preconceptions and my uncle says they’ll sow evil words in newspapers, whether we open the door for them or not.

  I say goodbye to the guide and his tourists at the door, and when the bus moves, it leaves the woman behind. Standing on the other side of the bus where it was stopped. The numbers are going round in my head. Dogs running and horses following them and sometimes running together in the same race. And the woman is standing under the sun. Dogs, horses, donkeys, and chickens. She looks up at the casbah walls in the morning light. She doesn’t look like the tourists who come to see us from time to time so we can show them our historical achievements. Her skirt’s long with white buttons, covering her from top to bottom. Her modest bag and her smile full of hope. Her bag is of black leather. Her tight held hair in a decorated bandana. Maybe she’s Shilha from Immouzer or Timhdit. And when she says she’s looking for her husband, Aziz, I know she isn’t Shilha. I know immediately. She says her husband’s name. I pretend I don’t know him. Why would I be responsible for knowing him? I don’t know anyone, ask my uncle. Or whoever’s above him. Or above us all. I pretend I like what she was saying because the casbah’s a place tourists from all over the world come to. Even from Japan. I ask her if Aziz is a Japanese tourist or a guide like me in the ministry of tourism. Because I’ve been a guide in this casbah for twenty years without seeing a colleague with that name. Aziz, you say? She’s looking at me, breathless, and wondering and hoping and disbelieving. Then sympathy fills my heart. We buried him only yesterday. If she’d come the day before or two days ago. But that’s another story, as they say. She says she spent the night on the bus because she was coming from Azrou. She’s not hungry or tired. She only wants to see her husband. A mature woman, her chest mature and full. I remember him in his hole in the middle of the courtyard where I left him last night under the ground, rotting in peace. I ask her about his work and why he disappeared and why she has kept looking for him all this time. Because a man doesn’t disappear unless he has a plan. I tell her about men I know who have disappeared because they had a plan. They wanted to change their lives completely.

  She said her name was Zina. I didn’t feel like carrying on saying the same thing, while she looked at me with her teary eyes. And I, in my mind, saw her, instead of my wife, sitting at my house, waiting for the happy birth. I see her through new eyes. As she presses with her fingers on her black leather bag and says: “The woman who showed me the place.”

  I don’t hear what she says. So no one can say I heard. I tell her that standing here, near the casbah, or far from it, is forbidden. Do you know getting close isn’t permitted, even for tourists? Nonetheless, as my uncle says, they’re put on a list from the Ministry of the Interior so spies and enemies don’t sneak in.

  Welcome to you in any case, if you want to visit. But I tell you now you won’t find who you’re looking for. Not even half of him. All the wings of the casbah are empty, thank God. I tell her this when it becomes clear to me that moving away is better than standing here very close to him. And to the hole we threw him in. He might get up at any moment, as Baba Ali says. My uncle might be spying on us from his window and abduct her because he’ll think she came to drink whiskey with him. It’s not necessary for us to keep standing here. I don’t have a solution for her. As I told her, we don’t have any people for her to look for, except for the dead. And may God have mercy on the dead. Is it possible to say more than that? I told her: “This is a tourist place.” And tourists come here for the beautiful palms in the neighboring oases. From the casbah roof, they seem beautiful at dusk. Do you want to see dusk from the casbah roof and other things, as they call them? The tourists sit on the roof to drink Moroccan tea we make for them as they watch the red spread from the sun setting on our beautiful oases. Maybe there’s another place. With the same name and the same descriptions and with this man who . . . What’s his name? Aziz. I tell you men don’t disappear like that for nothing. You say twenty years? Really? That’s a lot. No one looks for someone for twenty years. He might have gotten married and had kids, and he’s now playing in the stadium of the Royal Federation of Soccer or studying medicine in Belgium or selling hashish in Rotterdam.

  We move away then and I let the current lead me. God alone is able to find a good solution. In the taxi, my elbow touches hers. The horses are running in my head, and time runs. I’ve got enough time to get to the bookie in the city. Two hours going and two hours coming back. And other things. Nothing’s turned up in its place. And my arm’s leaning on hers. Like two friends busy with the concerns of the world. And I speak with her about everything happening around us. My wife’s pregnant. That’s right, seven girls. The boy, I’ll call him Ismail. Imagine, triplets in a single night. If there is a boy. And I’ll buy a ram from the market this morning for us to slaughter in case there is. And she says she came this whole distance to see her husband. All night and by bus. Without eating or sleeping. And I say: “God will make it right. If God wants you to know where he is, you’ll know and if He wants you to see him, you’ll see him because God doesn’t waste these things and other things like them. God willing.”

  My wife is in her ninth month. In her last day or the one right before the last. She leans against me when the taxi turns to the right and I lean against her when it leans to the left. I feel for her and I’m sympathetic to her. Her smile at this moment is closer to submission to the command of God and His decree. Her breasts are like pomegranates shaking under her dress. If he was alive, I’d tell her. Or I’d drop a hint so she’d know and calm down a bit. She stops twisting her fingers. But he’s dead, and by God on high, I saw him with my own eyes and we buried him with my own hands and there’s no use going back to the past. Baba Ali alone saw him alive again, but he’s always talking nonsense. If the matter was in my hands, I’d have tossed the two of them into the same hole. And I’d have tossed in my sinning uncle, the commander, and the old dog and been finished with the whole thing.

  As the taxi moved us away, I say: “A
time will come when you’ll forget this illness whose name’s Aziz. There’s no illness human beings won’t heal from.”

  If only she’d let me propose to her another life without Aziz and without a wife who gives birth to girls. Life’s beautiful without boys or girls. If she’d only let me sleep on her chest and hear the beating of life. We’ll start over. A new start. From the beginning. Without pits or bodies or my godless noisy uncle. And I see everything’s possible this time. With her, I’ll go back to the beginning.

  2

  We found Baba Ali lame. She stands, and so do I. His wide red eyes fill with tears and a yellow fluid comes out of them. What’s wrong with you, Baba Ali? He’s like someone who’s been stunned by something. He says he was always expecting the administration would send him on the hajj. What administration? We don’t have anything we call the administration. No papers and no register with our names so they can identify us. If Baba Ali’s a cook, he has to write to a ministry concerned with cooking, and if I’m a real guide, I have to go to the Ministry of Tourism. Baba Ali says they have to send us together on the hajj. “Why? Did you commit sins, Baba Ali?”

  Since I first saw her behind the bus, she hasn’t sat down. I ask her to sit. Does she think I’ll tell him something about her? That she came looking for her husband, who we buried yesterday? I tell him her name’s Zina. Her name comes off my tongue easily.

  This catastrophe is happening to Baba Ali because he doesn’t remember God. How will he remember God if he’s not praying? He lives alone like a mouse after he left his children in Taza. My house is better than his. His house is a room five meters long, it’s two rooms in one. In addition to a kitchen and bathroom he shares with the neighbors. It’s as if God the Almighty told me: Here’s your chance if you want to change your life with a good woman. With her shyness and her way of lowering her eyes. And he’s here, extended before us, losing control over his right side. Before three o’clock, if I hurry, I can reach El Hajib and Midelt before three. I’ve got in my pocket the winning numbers. Twenty years she’s been waiting to come to the casbah gate to say she’s looking for her husband. And I say she’s not looking for her husband. A lost woman, she’s looking for someone to save her. And I, as if I were striving to save her. God put me on her path so I can grant her the life she’s looking for. Without asking her where she came from or how she spent the past twenty years. Ready to accept her as she is. With her sins and reckless deeds. Should I leave her with Baba Ali like someone waiting for her husband to come back from work? Should I go to El Hajib or Midelt to get rid of the numbers playing in my mind and go to the hammam and then to the barber? The woman is looking for stability. Food and a house to take refuge in. And then it was fated for her to settle down with me in Midelt or El Hajib. Or a distant city so we don’t see the casbah. Or the men buried in it. God will find us a solution at the right time. Not before or after. And Baba Ali’s looking at us with his unparalyzed half. If he’d said In the Name of God the Compassionate the Merciful yesterday when he thought he saw the dead man moving, the matter would have ended and that would have been it. But God didn’t run this sentence on his tongue because He doesn’t love him. Baba Ali was as good as finished when he saw the dead man alive. Baba Ali has lost his direction. We buried the man she was looking for. And then Baba Ali ran out of the room in the middle of the night. Have you, Zina, forgotten to bury a dead man and found him the next day without a stomach and with his head covered in mud, without any eyes? Yes, this wonder happened to us. But it’s the past. And with the help of God, I’ll become someone else. Instead of the mouth, there was a hole full of dirt. What was left of the body was mangled from head to toe. I swear to God the Most Great. I’m very lucky because, at that moment, I said: I take refuge in God against Evil Satan. If not for that, I’d have been struck like Baba Ali. Bones sticking out like branches with the remains of pieces of flesh hanging down from them and spots of blood darkened by soil sticking to them, God protect me from that. Baba Ali won’t ever say a word. Because when someone is right with himself and his family, these things don’t happen to him. I won’t leave her with him in case he says something. I’m not sure God finally tore out his tongue. Because if the left sides of human beings’ brains are paralyzed, you don’t know what’s going on in their right brains. As happened to Baba Ali, whose mouth fled toward his ear and whose eye was red and hung down and widened, looking in another direction. His hand became lean and slept next to him, frozen, unmoving. And we, as if we’ve come to comfort him for half an hour, in a friendly visit. As long as he thinks we’re good friends and we haven’t abandoned him in these disasters. Afterward, we’ll go back to our house in Midelt or El Hajib. And I took a checkerboard from under his bed and told him: “Play, Baba Ali.” What would he play with since his fingers were stiff? I told him: “Your left hand, Baba Ali, is still good and you can move checkers with it, and thank God it hasn’t become stiff like the right one.”

  I put the board between us. Baba Ali glanced at the shut door. I asked him: “Should I lock the door, Baba Ali?”

  I got up and locked it. It let out a strange sound. Like moaning. I opened the door again and sat on the couch next to Zina and she arranged the pieces on top of the squares. He kept looking at the wide-open door as if he was expecting the dead man to appear in front of him to ask him for the shroud. He kept indicating toward the door. No one was at the door. The sun was ablaze and I heard the chirping of the bugs and nothing else. I didn’t know exactly what Baba Ali wanted. Maybe he had no desire to play. “You don’t want to play, Baba Ali? Should I ask my uncle to pay for the pilgrimage to Mecca for you?”

  This time, he yelled in his voice hitting the ground. I heard him say: “Do you think God will forgive us?”

  If he doesn’t go on the hajj, everything he did will follow him to the hereafter. “They’re the reason. They’re the reason for everything that happens to us, Benghazi. The man who—”

  I yelled in his face not to say his name. “What’s He forgiving us for, Baba Ali? Did we do something forbidden that our Lord will punish us for? Did we do something not mentioned in the Holy Book, Baba Ali?”

  He returned to his senses and we went out and the woman didn’t ask what Baba Ali wanted to say. She got up and followed me. No one likes Baba Ali.

  Are we the ones who brought them to the casbah?

  I left her standing at the door and went back to Baba Ali. So I know I felt pity for him. That I was changed because of this new feeling. The new heart beating in my chest.

  “I didn’t bring anyone here and we didn’t kill anyone, Baba Ali. With the help of God, you’ll get up and resume your life and it’s no use going back to the casbah because no one lives there anymore.”

  I swear, he’ll talk to the others. Everyone will get what’s coming to them, northing more and nothing less. Are you comfortable now, Baba Ali, because I’ve explained it to you? His voice was only a whistle. I didn’t know Baba Ali had a voice that whistled. What’s wrong with you, Baba Ali? Maybe he’s lost his mind. Should I put the board and the checkers back under the bed or should I leave them in front of him? Maybe they’ll help him regain his mind.

  3

  The house was as I left it fifteen days ago or more. There was nothing to indicate that she’d given birth to what was in her belly. No trilling and no congratulations. No scent of sauce with chicken and saffron. And Zina was standing at the door. The house was hers. Until now, there has been no other house. Later, when we settle down in our new house, in El Hajib or Midelt or any house she chooses. . . . And for the first time, I told her: “Zina, go in.” If my mind had been helping me, I’d have seen she was surprised as that name came off my tongue again. She was looking at me with her pleading eyes and looking at my pregnant wife on the mat, her forehead moistened with scraps of cloth. The television in the living room was telling its stories to my daughters Ruqiya and Fatiha. Other than them, there was no one. I said: “The house is empty this morning except for the noise of the g
irls.”

  My two girls kissed my hand and said their sisters were at their grandmother’s. Then they said their mother was waiting for a boy. And my wife was in labor in the middle of the long room and sending her calm looks toward me. But I don’t trust the looks of women. She told me with her eyes that it would be a boy. But I don’t trust the looks of women. At that exact moment, I didn’t care. Because I heard the name in my ears a third and fourth time. Zina. Zina. I told my wife: “This is Zina. She’s looking for her husband.”

  I said it because the name stayed in my mouth. Zina was still standing there, laughing with the girls near the door. And the actors on television were laughing. They were happy with the new arrival on the way, preparing for her a special place among them. When I went back to the living room, Zina came back with me and sat down. We carried on watching my wife from the window. As if we were looking at another woman far away. In some hospital. In some wing. With no connection to us. She and everything that’s in the room. As if she’d forgotten the reason she came.

  I gave her a glass of tea and some sweets. She had no desire or appetite. She only came to look for him. She was not the first woman to find herself in this position, far away. Maybe the time had come for her to go back to Azrou, as they call it.

  “God will make good things happen. But now it would be better for you to relax and change your mind about going back. This will be your place, as soon as I come back.”

  She ate a piece and waited for my return, when God would enable us to be together. Instead of moving, Zina’s eyes kept watching the TV show. This was good too. I went out and closed the door behind me. Men and women passed before me, celebrating in their colorful clothes and their kohl-lined eyes and all the other things that happen in a marriage festival. Why didn’t we get married in the middle of the music, dancing, and beating drums? This was a unique occasion. She was on her way to forgetting. And the girls were crossing the alley, laughing. And groups of male and female singers headed to the square with red and white flowers around their necks and ululations rising up from every direction. I don’t want either a boy or a girl anymore. God has put the marriage festival on our path as a sign.