Days of Ignorance (15 page)

Smiling, Malek looked his classmate in the face and said, ‘Why should I be? I’m a nigger, you’re some trash that washed up from the sea, and some other guys are ‘‘Serbian Bedouins’’. Everybody gets what’s coming to him from everybody else, and nobody’s better than anybody else.’

Husam laughed, but Malek couldn’t share in his laughter. He didn’t see anything funny about it. All he saw was something agonizingly painful that he couldn’t understand, just the way he couldn’t understand how the books he studied could tell the story of Bilal ibn Rabah with such reverence while, most of the time, his color and origins were treated with contempt. Accounts like these seemed so remote from what he experienced every day, he’d suspected for some time that he must be reading legends somebody had thought up out of his head. Nor had he found any evidence to convince him otherwise. He hadn’t found a single branch to cling to lest he fall headlong into the sea of racism in which life around him was floating: Bedouins – city folks; Hejazi – Nejdi – Qubayli – Khudhayri; artisan – businessman; 110 – 220; slave –
kur
–
kuwayha
–
tarsh bahr
–
baqaya hujjaj
.

Even his mother said to him, ‘Watch out for Arab girls, son.’

He’d never argued with her. It had never even occurred to him to argue with her. As he heard her say the words, he would observe a faint smile playing at the corners of her lips. It was a collusive smile that expressed her delight in his manhood more than a genuine attitude toward Arab girls. Consequently, he hadn’t felt any need to justify to himself the fact that he listened to her without questioning what she said. After all, life around him was going the way it was going, and if he stopped for a moment to modify its course, it would just trample him underfoot and go on. After all, he wasn’t a prophet or a wealthy man. He was a black alien.

1:15 a.m.

I loved her by chance despite the enmity between her people and mine

And never, by your father’s life, can my desire be fulfilled.

(’Antarah ibn Shaddad)

The first time he asked her if they could meet, he’d expected her to refuse. However, she surprised him by agreeing to it. It had been seven months since their first telephone con­versation, during which time he’d been swept off his feet so thoroughly that he was ready to take a risk. He couldn’t contain his infatuation with her voice, which had a deep, calm ring to it. But what charmed him most of all was the way she said ‘Allô’.

Once he said to her, ‘You sound as though you’re of French extraction.’

A long ‘N-o-o-o-o, you!’ escaped her lips. Then she laughed.

‘No, really!’ he said. ‘You say ‘‘Allô’’ with an exquisite French accent!’

As on all the other occasions when he’d complimented her on her voice, her laugh, or her way of thinking, she made no comment. He assumed her silence was simply a way of not hurting his feelings. He thought maybe she was counting on him to realize all the barriers that stood between them, and that she didn’t want to be the one to cut him off.

Even so, he found himself being inexorably drawn to her. He threw caution to the wind, along with his silence and his unending desire for life to go away and for his present to be transformed into a past that he could leave behind and never look back at again. To his surprise he suddenly noticed that life had begun awakening inside him, and that he’d begun to change. As he realized this he felt afraid, because he had deep feelings for her, but didn’t know what lay hidden around the next bend.

He’d changed so much that, after having laughed at the love stories in songs, soap operas and movies, he caught himself picturing her on his pillow or repeating her name, feeling for a fleeting moment that his mind was devoid of everything. It seemed as though her name was being repeated like the murmur of a pearly ornament suspended from the ceiling of his room. If a puff of air touched it, it would tinkle with a mysterious faintness that resurrected vague memories from their resting places. Her name resurrected memories that had been hiding in places that, until that moment, he couldn’t have identified. One of them seemed like a memory of him fleeing from someone down an unidentified street, laughing and soaking wet. Another showed him standing at the door to their house wearing new clothes while his mother flitted about the house, spraying rosewater out of a spray can. In another he was sitting in a room, very little of whose furniture he could recall, as his mother handed him a plate of Labaniya, saying, ‘Happy New Year, son.’

He wanted to tell Leen about all these images, and others too. He wanted badly to let her see what he saw every night when, enclosed within the walls of his room, the details of his day would leave him and all that would remain was her voice, her words, and her laugh. This was why he’d asked her if they could meet. He’d prepared himself for the worst, since he hadn’t expected anything but either a sharp no or a subtle rebuff. But instead, she’d shattered all his expectations. In fact, ever since he’d met her she’d been shattering his negative expectations.

‘All right,’ she’d said. ‘Why not?’

And now, in the darkness of the night and the sorrow that enveloped his soul, he closed his eyes and remembered how awkward he’d felt when she sat down across from him and he saw her face for the first time. He’d sat back in his chair slightly so as to give himself more distance across which to contemplate her. The strangest thing he’d realized when he saw her beauty was that he’d been counting on her not being beautiful. In fact, he’d hoped she wouldn’t be beautiful! As soon as he realized this, he knew that desolation had eaten away at him so deeply that he’d become small in his own eyes, afraid of having to pay the price for receiving what he really deserved. However, at that time he hadn’t wanted to think about desolation. He was so anxious, he had wanted to say what was on his mind, all at once and without stopping. True, the coffee shop hadn’t been crowded. He had chosen a rather secluded corner, and had asked the waiter to surround their table with room dividers that would insulate them from the world around them. Even so, anxiety had been tearing him to pieces, since curiosity was the order of the day, and their contrasting colors were certain to arouse both curiosity and suspicion. So how would he be able to protect her from others’ crudity if he couldn’t even protect himself?

Later, when it became possible for them to meet far from others’ inquisitive gazes, he told her that her beauty had rather taken him by surprise. It wasn’t a dazzling sort of beauty. Nor, however, was it an ordinary beauty or the kind of beauty one could easily forget. When, long after their first meeting, he passed the tip of his forefinger over her lower lip, he thought he would never recover from it, and that he would go on thinking about her even if he went into a coma some day.

1:20 a.m.

When night had fallen Yahya heard the screams of the women whose men had been slain. He asked what it was he was hearing, and when someone told him, he said, ‘After daybreak kill the women and the children.’ They did so, and the killing went on for three days. In his camp there was a commander with three thousand black soldiers who took the women by force. By the third day Yahya had finished slaying the people of Mosul, and on the fourth day he rode out with spears and drawn swords. As he departed he was waylaid by a woman who took hold of his mount’s reins. His companions wanted to kill her, but he forbade them. She said to him, ‘Are you not from the tribe of Bani Hesham? Are you not a paternal cousin of the Messenger of God, may God’s blessings and peace be upon him? Do you not deem it beneath the dignity of Muslim Arab women to be raped by black men?’ Making no reply, but moved by her words, Yahya had one of his men escort her to a safe place. (Ibn al-Athir,
al-Kamil fil-Tarikh
)

From the time he realized he was falling for her, he’d made a point of letting her know what color he was. His intense concern about the matter made him realize that he viewed his color as a handicap that he felt obliged to inform her of before she discovered it for herself. But, although he spoke to her about his color, he postponed telling her about the matter of the ‘absolution’. He’d thought he would tell her about it later, but he never had, not because he hadn’t wanted to, but because he hadn’t known where the path would lead them.

By the time he met her, he’d despaired even of his despair. He’d been living his life without expecting to get anywhere. He went on because he had to go on. Four years after finishing high school he’d decided to postpone the idea of emigrating indefinitely. After all, how could he emigrate when the salary he collected at the end of every month seemed like so much salt that dissolved in the sweat on his palms: a few grains that he clutched tightly in his fist only to find that when he unclenched it, he had barely enough to meet his personal needs and those of his mother and his brother. His father had died long before. He’d died so long before, in fact, that he’d forgotten many of his features. His maternal uncle had supported them for years, but as soon as Malek got a job, the situation had changed, and he’d become the household’s sole breadwinner.

He’d moved from job to job, institution to institution and company to company before settling at the archives of a private clinic. More than three years earlier he’d run into a friend from high school. In the course of their conversation he’d learned that his friend was working as a freelance reporter for a local newspaper. His friend had suggested that he try his luck at the same newspaper, because they needed someone to provide them with news items, coverage, reports, interviews, and it was this happenstance that had led him to Leen.

There were moments when he’d wished that happenstance had never occurred. He’d been dejected. Love had been eating away at him without his seeing even the faintest glimmer of light. He wondered what sort of a crime it was for him to love her and want to marry her. What was it that would make it impossible for him to do so? His color? Why did people make his color into a sin that nothing could wash away? When they did this they seemed to be saying to God, ‘You created a color that’s bad!’ But why was he wondering about such things when he was almost certain that there was nothing that could heal the sickness in his soul? No one – not even Leen – could feel and understand what had happened to him at the moment when he realized that he was bound inextricably to an outcast’s color that he hadn’t chosen for himself, to a situation he’d done nothing to create, and to a country in whose vast fabric he’d wanted so desperately to be a tiny thread.

He wished he could let out a long scream. For as long as he’d known her he’d been hearing the scream of the being deep inside him. It was a frightful scream that neither fell silent nor brought relief. For as long as he’d known her he’d felt cheated, and that his life – his entire life – wasn’t his. He’d lived it, but it hadn’t been his. He’d had another life, but it had been wrested away from him. Or, rather, he’d allowed it to be wrested from him. Only much later did he realize that he’d relinquished his own rights, and Leen’s rights too. Meanwhile, in his heart of hearts, he believed he was less than what she deserved. He hadn’t completed his education, he didn’t have an ‘absolution’, and he hadn’t been fierce enough not to give in without a fight. He’d realized too late that he’d been led away to the fate that others wanted for him, and that the fates he’d fled from were no worse than his present capitulation. As for the people around him, they would think he was unworthy of Leen for the simple reason that he was black. In their eyes she would be too good for him – so much so that they would give themselves the right to condemn, and to nastily wonder aloud what would make her want to be associated with him. They would even go so far as to refuse to marry their daughters to her brother or to allow her sisters to marry (if she had had sisters) because, like leprosy, his color was something that could only be coped with by avoidance.

A year after meeting her, and after realizing that she’d found a place in his heart, he’d begun applying for an ‘absolution’. All the papers he could get his hands on that might demonstrate his right to citizenship – his birth certificate, his diplomas, a certificate of good conduct from the local chief of police, a tattered document testifying to the fact that his mother had been born in the country – he gathered together and organized into a green file. Then he started getting his hopes up, and decided not to mention it to her in the hope that he would be able to tell her the story some day. ‘Imagine!’ he’d say. ‘When I first met you I still didn’t have an “absolution”!’ Then he would laugh, and she would open her black eyes wide as saucers, saying, ‘You’re kidding!’

But he hadn’t said, ‘Imagine . . .!’, and she hadn’t replied, ‘You’re kidding!’ The whole thing had turned into numbers, dates and little pieces of paper with appointments written on them that he would stuff into the breast pocket of his robe. He would take the little pieces of paper with him to Riyadh only to come back home with still more of them, but without being told by anyone at the Ministry of the Interior whether he should get his hopes up or stop hoping altogether. One day he’d asked a ministry employee, ‘Can you tell me if there’s any hope?’

The employee had looked at him for several moments before saying in a serious tone, ‘Have you got really good connections? Or can you play soccer?’

He shook his head sadly, and the employee said nothing more. Even the sound of the papers the employee was shuffling died. There then came the moment when he realized that putting off the announcement of unpleasant news only makes it all the more unpleasant. The matter of the ‘absolution’ had turned into a sharp bend in the road. As they rounded it, he and Leen were about to go careening into a dark wasteland, and he couldn’t blame her for a thing.