Days of Ignorance (6 page)

The decay might be retarded, but it was bound to happen. She’d been trying for years to escape it. But when she’d gone to the autopsy room that day, she’d suddenly realized how weary she was of resisting it. She came to this realization as she was pondering the lifeless body of an unnamed little boy. According to her friend, a student had managed to facilitate his purchase from a man who worked at a certain hospital morgue. The six-year-old boy had been brutally raped and had been dead on arrival. He stayed in the morgue for months without being identified by anyone. Then . . . he was sold.

‘My God, how could raucous laughter and hilarity have turned into a lifeless corpse that’s changed color from all the time it’s spent in a refrigerator? And how is it that no one identified him?’

‘Maybe his family was afraid of a scandal,’ her friend replied.

She felt as though he’d died two grievous deaths. She couldn’t bear to look at his face, so she just looked at his plump little fingers and the black filth under his long fingernails. How strange, she thought, for a person to die, and for his fingernails to keep on growing!

She looked at Malek’s fingernails. They weren’t long. It occurred to her to trim them from time to time to keep them from getting long. It’s only the dead who don’t have anybody to trim their fingernails for them. But he wasn’t dead. No, he wasn’t dead.

8 p.m., the hospital

One time Malek had said to her, ‘You’re really stubborn about your ideas.’

She smiled impishly, raising her eyebrows. He acknowledged that there was nothing wrong with being stubborn if there was something worth being stubborn about. However, it turned into something offensive when somebody was just being stubborn for the sake of being stubborn. All right. Why was she thinking about her stubbornness now, in this room that was so unfamiliar to both of them, with Malek slumbering in his place of in-between-ness? What
should
she think about? About the first time he met her, weary and self-conscious, in order to tell her, ‘I love you’? When had that been?

Oh, God.

She’d been an insomniac for long nights after that. It had seemed strange to her to sense everything that was developing deep inside him, to feel the words teetering on his lips every time he called her, yet without his saying them, and to see herself giving him time to say what was on his mind. She would deliberately prolong their conversations, invent reasons for him to call her again, or do other silly little things that she was puzzled to see herself doing, simply because she sensed what was going on inside him.

She’d supposed that, as soon as he finally said ‘I love you’, she would smile and lean back into her chair. But she hadn’t. The spoken words had seemed different than they had in her imagination, and when they became a reality, she, too, became someone different from the person that had existed in her imagination – a person who wasn’t able to smile or lean back in the chair. All her limbs went cold, and she felt as though her neck was paralyzed. When she looked into his face, she knew for certain that he hadn’t slept for several nights, and that he’d resisted for a long time before speaking. Then at long last he’d sat across from her and said, ‘I love you, Leen. I’ve tried, but I can’t stand to keep it to myself any longer. There isn’t anything around me any more that doesn’t remind me of you. A couple of days ago I thought about you when I was stopped in front of a traffic light. I think about you all the time, actually, but when I was in front of that traffic light, I remembered your laugh. Why? I don’t know. In any case, I didn’t notice that the light had turned green, and I didn’t hear the cars behind me honking. Imagine! I swear to God, I wasn’t on Planet Earth. I was in some other place I don’t know anything about. I’d been completely ignorant of it until I met you. Would you believe it? I’ve started running away from people, from everything, so that I can be alone with you. I feel as though life is making fun of me. You know why? Because I used to make fun of love as it’s described by lovers in movies, soap operas and Arabic songs. And now here I am, doing and saying the things they do and say. So, make fun of me, Leen. Go ahead. Mock me. Maybe God will punish you and you’ll love me back!’

She bowed her head, suddenly gripped by loneliness – how she hated that feeling – and all sorts of sensations and thoughts began churning deep inside her. But nothing frightened her as much as feeling suspended alone in the heart of a storm. She remembered how, a few days after that evening, she’d looked into his eyes for a second, and in them she had glimpsed every moment she had ever passed through alone: the moment she’d stood atop the remains of Bab al-Majidi as bulldozers plied the site; the moment she’d received her high-school diploma; the moment when, looking out through the window of a Boeing 747, she’d glimpsed the lights on Airport Road as the airplane took off with her for Jeddah where she would begin her studies at King Abdulaziz University; the moment she’d first walked into the girls’ dormitory; the moment she’d surrendered to a peculiar fit of weeping on the night before January 17, 1991; the moment she was told that her grandmother had passed away; the moment she’d stood with her classmates, decked out in a graduation sash and smiling even though she was thinking about her grandmother buried in the ground and wondering what remained of her after all those years; and the moment she’d seen Sharaf’s body being consumed by flames, so paralyzed by the shock at what she was seeing that she hadn’t done a thing.

She’d lived through every one of those moments – and many others as well – alone, without there being anyone nearby to talk to about them. She hadn’t wanted anyone to tell her that what she felt was good or bad. She’d wanted to be heard, but she’d never been able to get the words to come out. It terrified her to think of anyone – anyone at all – knowing of the turmoil she experienced in the face of her feelings and the vulnerability they left in their wake. Consequently, she’d resisted to the point where she was convinced that she didn’t need to tell anyone what was going on inside her.

She was disconcerted when he asked her, ‘Are you looking in my eyes to see whether I’m sincere?’

She felt the blood rushing hot to her face and her ears. It always upset her for her agitation to announce itself so rudely. She’d often wished she knew how to put on a poker face.

‘It seems I’ve laid something heavy on you. You don’t have to do anything but be yourself, Leen. I have a lot of things I’d like to say to you before you say yes or . . . no.’

She only smiled lest the situation turn into a dramatic scene. When she told him about this later, he laughed, and said he hadn’t noticed. She found it fascinating to observe his nervousness, his little gestures, his way of pronouncing words, and the way he would alternately look at her and away from her.

‘Please say whatever’s on your mind,’ she replied calmly.

‘Thank you.’

She felt a slight pang inside when she heard him say, ‘Thank you.’ She didn’t want him to feel indebted to her. She thought they should be equals from the start. There shouldn’t be one party that gave and the other that felt indebted. She believed he was entitled to have her hear and understand what he had to say.

So she said abruptly, ‘Don’t thank me. I haven’t said my piece yet. Later you might regret having thanked me!’

He went pale for a moment. But then he smiled, saying, ‘Ever since I met you I’ve known you were a rare bird.’

Smiling back, she said, ‘I can’t stay long. But I’ll be expecting a call from you.’

She got up and walked away, leaving him at the table in the coffee shop on the ground floor of the Sheraton without turning to look back. As she made her way to the front entrance she heard the sound of her footsteps on the marble corridor. She thought she was dreaming, that she hadn’t met him, and that he hadn’t said what he had said. But the scent of his tobacco and his cologne filled her nostrils and followed her all the way to the car.

He loves me!

She was encompassed by a worrisome silence, and the steeds of fear went galloping furiously through her deepest parts. She wasn’t afraid of love but, rather, of herself. She knew she wouldn’t be content to love him in the torpid shadow of the hypocrisy and incongruity that enveloped life around her. Time after time she’d tried to escape from them, and from the seething indignation she met with because she didn’t accept without question what other people considered right, even though she had never once attempted to change their lives. No, she’d never made any idealistic attempt to change life. All she’d done was try to escape with all that she herself believed in. And now her escape was leading her to her death. Her relationship with Malek would expose the imperfection of life beneath her country’s sky. It would tear the lustrous, silken fabric in which this putrid life had enrobed itself. And no one would forgive her. From the moment when she bade Malek farewell that day, she had realized that if she proceeded along love’s rugged path, she would have to pay the price twice: once because she’d rent the veil, and once because she was a woman.

11 p.m., her room

When her father had come to the hospital that dawn, he hadn’t said anything in particular. He had remained silent the entire time. Once or twice she’d caught glimpses of him squeezing the edge of his chair and trying to avoid looking her in the eye. She hadn’t said anything, since she didn’t suppose words would be of any help to him, but for his sake she had resisted falling apart. That was the least she could do, she thought. Then she realized that she loved her father not simply because he was her father, but because he loved her in this different sort of way, and because he didn’t just claim to understand, but lived that understanding. It pained her to think that for days now, her father had been the victim of a bitter struggle between his love for her and what her brother Hashem had done.

Her father had come in to check on her twice since her return from the hospital. The first time, he had come cautiously up to the bed, hoping she would be asleep. As soon as he saw the light stealing in through the window reflected in her open eyes, he bowed his head, then left the room without saying anything.

‘Dad,’ she said, ‘don’t be sad. I won’t lose my mind, and I won’t die.’

But he had quietly pulled the door shut without hearing what she said. Fifteen minutes later he came back, so she closed her eyes on his account so that he would calm down somewhat and go to sleep. As soon as she heard the sound of the door closing behind him, she opened her eyes to the semi-darkness. Then she turned on a lamp to the right of her bed, whispering, ‘Isn’t there hope?’

Why didn’t she sleep? How long had it been since she had slept?

‘
O God of the heavens, sleep, a little sleep . . .
’

She laid her head on the pillow and began pondering the shadow her body cast on the wall in front of her, certain that she wouldn’t go to sleep. She thought about the fact that Malek might have woken up, but with her far away from him. He might have been alarmed by the room’s blue beds and walls. Everything in his room was blue: the walls, the blankets, the pillows, even the sky peeking in through the windowpane. Blue, blue, blue. Death is blue. The cloth that had been draped over the coffin they’d shipped her grandmother’s body in from Jeddah, where she had died, to Medina many years earlier had been blue. When, after her grandmother’s body had been removed for burial, the coffin had been opened for the last time, it had been empty like a blue, cloudless sky. She’d found out that when people die, they turn blue, then dry up. She closed her eyes, but she saw Malek alone, shrouded in blueness and hooked up to machines and tubes, and it pained her to think that he’d always been weary and alone.

Sighing dejectedly, she gazed at the color of the designs on her cotton shirt in the yellow light emanating from the lamp. She remembered the color of Malek’s body in the same type of light, and the memory broke her heart. She could have scratched the color a bit, causing the layer of gold underneath it to glitter under that same light. It was a gold that had been smelted by untold interwoven sorrows, then forged and cast into a big, compassionate heart. How could she have failed to say such words to him before? How could she have failed to tell him about all her troubled little thoughts? She remembered his smile. She shut her eyes tightly. But how could she escape from what was there deep inside her? All the tricks she resorted to in an effort to flee led to the same deep pit, and she was afraid of what was inside it. She was afraid to look down into it and see the solitary, savage little girl concealed there. Malek had been capable of taming that little girl. And now she could almost see her – the little girl – becoming agitated in the darkness: blind, unkempt, fearful, wild.

Never for a moment had it occurred to her that things would turn out the way they had. But now she understood that her life had changed once and for all. She wished she could open her eyes and find herself napping on a chair in the semi-darkness, with a television screen in front of her flashing the images of WMD inspectors in Baghdad driving their white Land Cruisers from building to building, of Palestinian martyrs being escorted to their graves to the sound of ululations and loud shouts of ‘
Allahu akbar!
God is greatest!’, and of George W. Bush inciting the civilized world against the ‘axis of evil’. But that wasn’t possible anymore. Everything that was past had been her own protracted dream. And now she’d woken up to the ugliness of people and things around her.

As she looked into Malek’s face that evening, she knew she was trying not to cry, because if she did, she wouldn’t be able to stop, and crying would take everything out of her. She also didn’t want to cry because he might open his eyes all of a sudden, and it wouldn’t be good for her to greet him with tears. But was he really going to open his eyes? If he didn’t, all their memories would quickly vanish. They would fade as though they’d been left in the hot sun. They would lose their features and their colors. They would wilt before anyone had taken notice of them, like the little bushes that had been planted up and down Al Jamiat Road. Once as she and Malek were driving past them she’d said to him, ‘How can they neglect such a marvelous thing?’