That Smell and Notes From Prison (3 page)

I was sitting next to him, my hand cuffed to his. We were in
the back of the van with the rest of the vans behind us. He knew what would
happen but said nothing. He hummed snatches of an old love song over and over.
The wind was stinging and there was nothing to protect us from the cold. I began
shivering and my teeth chattered. We couldn’t see the road. We talked about
Hemingway. In the darkness, I saw him take a comb from his pocket and run it
through his hair, which was going white. I knew he dyed his hair to hide the
white. Silence fell over the car. In front of us, Ahmed had wrapped his head
with a towel. He was moaning. Whenever his guts shivered, his head ached. It was
dawn when we arrived and they forced us out with sticks and we sat on the
ground, shaking with cold and fear. He was the tallest one. I heard a voice say,
There he is, and they beat him on the head and said, Put your head down, you
dog. They began calling people in, then they called him in, and that was the
last time I saw him.

She said, You know, I got a letter from him before that where he
said the whole thing would blow over soon. I said to her that he’d told me he’d
never been able to sleep with Mona in his arms and that he used to smack his
hands together and say, I’ll get out before the rest of you. He wanted to get
out at any price. Mona’s mother looked around helplessly and closed her swollen
eyelids over her eyes. She dropped her head onto her short, fleshy body. She
signaled for me to come close and whispered, Did he really love me? And I said
to her, Of course.

What could I say, what was the point of going into it after
it was over, and who knows what goes on inside another person anyway? They say
some people are made for love and some aren’t. Others say love doesn’t exist
except in novels. As for him, he told me once about a woman whose family chased
him away with clubs because he was from a different religion. There was another
woman, but she died unexpectedly. He discovered that a third had agreed with her
husband to have a child no matter what. The husband was more than forty-five,
approaching fifty, and he wanted a child. One day we were out in the sun
together and he was distracted by his thoughts. I chatted away while he sank
into his thoughts, ignoring me. Maybe he was working it out in his mind. . . .
But once I was walking next to him down some stairs and we reached the ground
floor when we heard a sharp, quick, continuous sound on the stairs. Then a tall
young woman appeared, standing in front of the elevator. Sunlight fell from the
staircase windows onto her face. She looked at us and she was laughing for some
reason and her hair was wild and her cheeks were red. She wouldn’t stand still.
He stepped down next to me and his eyes were on her and I heard him give a hot
sigh.

She got up and went to her room and came back carrying a little
wallet from which she removed a few sheets of paper and handed me a worn sheet
of paper and said, He wrote this poem for me before we were married.

She was always lost in thought and when he asked what she was
thinking she said: About life and death. And he wrote:

I am sad, child
sad and alone
I lie in my
bed
my cold dead bed
with no one to speak with
with all the
books read
with no one to laugh with
with no tears to
shed
this is death
but more terrible
for the dead have no
thoughts
unless the worm has thoughts
but the lonely man
thinks
and desires and gazes and chases
without knowing what he
chases
it is life and death
it is not life at all
though I
haven’t died yet
quiet! here are steps
human steps
coming
closer and closer
are they real? yes! no! maybe!
yes! they ring
the bells
I hear the human steps
I hear the human
voices
alight with laughter
a friend? more than one
many
friends, child
I am not sad anymore, child
but afraid
they
will go and leave me again
to life and death!

And the bell rang and Sakhr came in and he had shaved
his mustache and combed his hair and carried all the morning papers under his
arm. The bell rang again and a well-dressed young man came in. Mona’s mother
said, pointing toward Sakhr, This is a friend of my husband. And the young man
said, I know him. Sakhr leaped up and put on his glasses and began pacing the
room. There were some English and French books on the shelves and he began
leafing through them, then placed a hand on his hip and carried one of these
books over to the window and began leafing through its pages while observing the
well-dressed young man from time to time over his glasses.

It must have been one of his happiest moments to discover
there was someone who knew him for some reason. In the past he thought everyone
knew him, then gradually he discovered the truth. The first time I saw him he
was bare-chested, walking with slow steps and occasionally raising a finger to
fiddle with his mustache. In those days, world leaders sported a variety of
mustaches and it was no accident that each was distinct from the others. These
mustaches turned out to be a trick. The men who wore them were gone and so was
their fashion. They left nothing in the heart. They never had. And he began to
beat his head against the steel door until it nearly split, crying.

Through the window I saw a girl in the house opposite embrace
another girl, kissing her on the lips. Then a girl who was blind in one eye came
into the room and cried and while she cried, Sakhr stroked her hair with his
hand. And Mona’s mother said that the girl was like that, that as soon as she
saw a man, she cried. Finally, Mona came home from school. I said to her, I’m a
friend of your father and she gave me a suspicious look. I took her to the club.
There were other children there and I asked them to take her into the water with
them, since I didn’t know how to swim, and they took her away. She ran and
played and was happy. There was a piece of wood that helped with swimming and
she grabbed onto it. But another little girl, a fat girl, took the piece of wood
from her and floated on top of it. Mona held on to the piece of wood. The little
fat girl grabbed her hair and pushed her away from the piece of wood, taking the
piece of wood and swimming on top of it. Mona was a long way from the edge of
the pool. I ran quickly toward her. She was bobbing up and down in the water and
gasping for air and her eyes were wide with fear and I called out to her but she
sank beneath the water and didn’t reappear. One of the swimmers swam to help her
and dragged her up, carrying her to me, and I took her home. While we were
climbing the stairs, she said, If someone is there, I’m going to say you’re my
father. Don’t say you aren’t. We went into the house. Her mother was getting
dressed, so I waited. Then my eyes fell on the wall clock. I jumped up and
rushed for the door and rushed into the street. The policeman would arrive at
any moment. I reached my room, gasping for air, and found a letter waiting for
me. I checked to see who had sent it. It was from Nagwa. I read the letter
slowly, then I lit a cigarette and stretched out on the bed and read the letter
again. She was wondering if we might meet again after all these years. I closed
my eyes to see what I could remember of how she looked: her affectionate eyes,
her tender mouth. The bell rang and I got up to open the door. It was the
policeman. I asked him to wait and came back to the room with the notebook for
him to sign. He left and I kept the notebook in my pocket for next time. The
bell rang again. When I opened the door Nagwa was there. I embraced her. She
hugged me back violently, pressing her whole body against my body. But I didn’t
press against her, I pushed her away to look at her. Then I led her into the
room and turned off the light and sat on the bed and pulled her down next to me.
Then I pulled her toward me and kissed her on her lips. She pulled her face away
and said, Talk to me. I didn’t want to talk. I stroked her face. It was hot and
soft. She pulled her face away, saying, Talk, say what happened. I put my hand
over her mouth and pulled her head toward me and kissed her, gripping her lips
between my lips. She bit me back in the same way, rough and unpracticed. Then
she pulled away.

This is how it always was. The first time I kissed her, she
acted shy. I was sitting next to her and the light was falling on her cheek and
we had stopped talking. I rested my head on her shoulder and she didn’t object.
I kissed her on the cheek, then on the lips. When we’d gathered a little more
courage, she gripped my lower lip and bit down on it hard. It hurt. I wanted to
feel her soft lip in my mouth. I couldn’t get enough of it. If I could have held
her in my arms all day, I would have. I felt the heat in her face, in her
thighs. Every time after that I would make her stand up naked and contemplate
her thighs. They were beautiful and soft and dark. I would ask her to bare her
forearms so I could kiss them and feel them against my body. But she hesitated.
We would lie pressed together in the dark to forget the world, to forget
everything. We thought of nothing, feared nothing, and when my cheek brushed her
cheek, when our noses touched, when our heads rested against each other, when
our eyes stared at the same place on the ceiling, then nothing else had any
importance. Soon I would move my head and my lips would sneak over to her lips.
We shared delicate kisses and rough kisses and then she would pull her head back
and sigh. The first time she held me violently and said, Where were you all this
time? Another time she said, Lover. I was quiet. The word echoed in my ear for
the first time. I didn’t trust myself. But soon she turned away and said, I want
to sleep. I lay on my back, eyes up on the ceiling, hoping she would turn and
embrace me but soon I felt her regular breathing, the contented and peaceful
breathing of someone sleeping. So I turned and raised myself up to look at her.
Her head rested on her arm while she slept. Her hair was spread across her neck
and her other arm rested on her side. I let my look linger all over her body,
then dropped back on the bed.

She stretched out next to me and laid her cheek on my hand, offering
me her face lit by a little moonlight. She said, I’ll do the talking. She talked
for a long time, then stopped. I told her I was worn out, that I had always
wanted her. I pulled her toward me but she pulled away. I asked her to bare her
forearm and she did. I kissed her forearm and her shoulder in the moonlight but
soon she said, It’s cold, and she covered them. Then she stretched out on her
back. She must have been thinking the same thing I was thinking. Something was
missing, something was broken. She said, I want to sleep. I pulled her toward me
and kissed her. My lips wandered from cheek to ear, kissing her there until she
shivered and raised her eyes to mine and smiled and said, And this, where did
you learn this?

How could she remember while I had forgotten? When my lips
climbed up her thigh and I kissed her there for the first time and she looked at
me with a mixture of pleasure and surprise and shyness, she said, Where did you
learn this?

I reached my hand toward her chest but she pushed it away and said,
No. I rolled away, then stretched out beside her. I waited for her to turn and
embrace me but she didn’t. I was awake. I felt the pain between my legs. I got
up and went to the bathroom. I got rid of my desire, then came back and
stretched out beside her. I slept and woke and slept again and when I opened my
eyes it was morning and she had already put her clothes on. I’m leaving now, she
said. When will I see you? I asked. I’ll come by, she said. I stayed there
stretched out on the bed, then finally got up and washed. I put some powdered
soap in a basin of water and stirred it until the foam rose, then put my dirty
clothes in. My sister and her fiancé came by. I put my clothes on and we went
out and I bought the morning papers. In the entrance to the building we met a
friend of my sister and her uncle and we went to a café. My sister’s fiancé
said, We want to be happy for you. That will take time, I said. Why? he asked.
Love isn’t easy, I said. He shrugged and said, Here’s my advice, love comes
after marriage. The uncle said, I’ve been married five times. I left them and
went to see Sami at his place. I was brought into the living room and waited for
him a long time. A little girl came in whom I recognized as his daughter. She
walked up to me. I felt uncomfortable. I needed to use the toilet and I broke
wind and the little girl smelled it. Caca smell, she said. I pretended not to
smell it. But again she said, Caca smell. So I started sniffing all around,
saying, Where? until the smell went away. Finally I gave up on Sami and got up
and left. The traffic was terrible. I went to the offices of the magazine but no
one was there. A radio was playing loudly in the street — it was a song in
English about children and I realized that Muhammed Fawzi’s new song was the
same song. I got on the metro and the crowds were horrendous and I almost
suffocated. I looked at the faces of tired women with eyeliner running down
their faces. I went to Samia’s house and found them eating. Samia smiled when
she saw me and said she had waited for me for a long time before starting to
eat. Really? I almost said. I asked about her boy and she said he was sleeping.
I felt myself smiling. Her smile was simple and sincere. I hadn’t thought that
she was so simple and so graceful.

So what? She has her husband and her child and there’s no
place for anyone else in her life and soon I’ll leave and that will be the end
of everything.

Every now and then she sighed hotly and said, O Lord. I said to her,
If Freud heard you, he would have something to say about that. Lots of things,
she said. We finished eating and she stood up. She was wearing a light shirt
with nothing under it and just beneath her armpit I saw the side of her breast
where it bulged out from her chest. I was surprised it didn’t droop. It was
milky white. I looked away and into her eyes, so frank and so straightforward.
She went in to sleep and I slept too and when I woke up I looked for her in her
room. Her bed was on the far side of the room and she was lying on her back with
her head turned away from me, gazing at the wall opposite, with her son at her
chest, still sleepy and looking around in confusion. Her leg was bare — it was
milky white — and she quickly covered it. She got up and put on an orange skirt
and we sat on the balcony and she said that her little boy liked me. I loved her
easy, honest voice, her simple gestures. I told her that I felt like an old man.
I hardly smiled or laughed. All the people I saw on the street or on the metro
were unhappy, unsmiling. What was there to be happy about? We talked about
books. She said she’d stopped reading a while ago, when her boy was born. I
asked if she had read
The Plague
. I felt as though a lot rode on her
answer but she said, No. I was about to tell her that I envied her simplicity
and her grace. I told myself that I would say so when we said goodbye. I looked
at my watch. I had to go. I stood up and so did she and I said to her in a low
voice, You know, you’re really strange. She looked at me in surprise. Today, I
finally figured you out, I said. She bent over her little boy and busied herself
straightening his clothes and I couldn’t see her eyes very well. Her husband
came home and I said goodbye to both of them. They accompanied me to the stairs.
At the garden gate, I turned around. She was going back into her nice cool home
and I watched her orange skirt disappear behind the door. I walked back to the
apartment and saw a nice-looking girl walking next to the train rails as if she
was having trouble with her shoes. I went into the building. The light was on in
the wood-paneled room by the entrance and the door was open. I peeked in and saw
my sister’s friend Husniyya. I went up to my room and my sister came. I said to
her, Samia’s nice. Then I said, Is she happy with her husband? Of course, she
said. I bet she doesn’t love him, I said. Impossible, she said. Where else will
she find a man like that, as far as personality and position? And she said they
had met before getting married.