The Others (10 page)

I retained the letter in my grip, pressing on it unconsciously, nothing alerting me to this except the slight pain left by my fingernails digging into the flesh of my hand. I went outside.

I needed to breathe, and I needed to not throw up. At this time of day the bathrooms were crowded. I had half an hour on the bus ahead of me.

I was very damp, and I had no desire to sing “It’s raining men! Hallelujah” or “Rain, rain, come down rain … our house is made of rock.” My house was only bare and naked space now, and my men were devils of brackish water. It was not a merciful rain, or a loving one; not a tall rain man with calm features. It was only rain. Rain only. Not neutral, just lacking the competence to participate. It was not the rain of Qatif. Did we plant the barbed wires of our borders in your sky ourselves? Oh God!

The bus was late, and I did not stumble on an empty seat. A group of the girls who would fill the bus to bursting stood in front of the door waiting for the official in charge of transport, aiming to get him to provide another bus for them. I was not in the mood to make my way through the usual clamor: We’ve tried such and such a bus, no … that bus, then … try such and such a bus … I kept to my squashed position just inside the bus, on the first step, and I tried to sit on the step. The rain whipped the bus’s door violently. It was such a hard rain that it did not even slide down the huge glass window in front, but pinged back instantaneously, as if it were intent on continually assaulting my memory by means of its presence, angry at my ability to ignore it.

As soon as the bus emptied of some students at the first stop, I took the seat that one of them had vacated, the seat closest to the door. I gripped the metal column and let my head drop to rest on my hand. With the tremors of the bus as it rumbled along, my soul shook violently, up and down, while I kept swallowing it with the air, letting no sound escape.

I was completely wet, the water still coming off my hair and clothes, and the cold was biting me. A hand—I don’t know from what hell it came or from what heaven—left its warmth on my hand, pulling away only after a full minute—I think it must have been a whole minute—without my sensing anything at all. It was not curiosity about the hand that compelled me to lift my head and look through the window, but rather the fact that I had not counted the number of times the bus had stopped and so I did not know where I was and how many stops remained before my own. It was the stop where Dai always got out. I saw her unrolling her light blue
abaya
bag over her head, making it into an umbrella.

Describing “that inscrutable lad” in her famous song from the film
Watch out for Zuzu
, Suad Husni chants,

Bless his heart, that inscrutable lad

Masks his face behind glasses when he’s sad …

This is exactly what the dead do: they mask themselves in their absences. They convert to a shadow that, concealed as it is, shows its reflection baldly in all the twists and turns our lives take. In the first days of mourning, the women, as they came to console and mourn with my mother, would say to her, Be patient, desire is long lived. Now I understand what they meant. I figured that time repairs the breaches in us, not because we forget but rather because, as our lives regain their earlier movement, we get beyond the defeat that absence brings. But the passing days proved it otherwise. Hassan was as much here with us as was his absence, which was always here. Could there be a more bewildering equation?

Hassan curtains himself in his absence so that his presence will better encompass and surround my life. Here he is, going halves with me in all my problems and the choices I have to make, my daily apprehensions, my frail accomplishments and my painful falls. Often I used to see him conversing with himself, or talking to the mirror, the balustrade, his car key, the newspaper. When I teased him about it, he would say, There’s someone there who hears! Was Hassan conversing with his absent ones, exactly in the way that he is now my absent one and I talk to him? I hold whole discussions with him. I debate him and I wrangle with him. I whet my abortive philosophy on his words and I pass on silly trivialities and repetitive scenes. I tell him the latest news; I try concealing everything heart-wrenching from him, but I fail. I let him in on secrets that are scandalous, and that he absolutely must not reveal to my mother. Sometimes I want to tell him a new joke, but before long, I realize inside of myself that this was his role to play, and his absence does not give me the right to steal his roles away from him.

So long ago, back in the days when, standing on tiptoe, I could not even make myself come up to his shoulders, I took from his bookshelves a book called
Our Philosophy
by the martyr Muhammad Baqir as-Sadr. It had a blue leatherette cover and the fact that it was cool to the touch even at the height of summer was what made my fingers pull it off the shelf and take it from his library. He did not say that I would not understand it, that perhaps I would need two more years or even three, plus ten additional centimeters, that there were other books there more appropriate to my small brain. He smiled slightly and said, Tomorrow, I want you to come and discuss what you read, do you understand? I answered with a broader smile: Ayy. As I read, I stammered over certain words that were not in my vocabulary, and I would stop at particular sentences for days on end to absorb what they said. It took me seven months to finish that book, including two hours each week during which he explained to me whatever was too complicated for me to puzzle out. He was fairly exasperated with me for forcing myself unthinkingly into a silly competition that I did not need. Finally I gave the book back to him with a sure look of victory and a stinging question: Do you see me? Look how much bigger I’m getting! Fondly, he stroked my cheek a little. He and my mother were alike in the way they would stroke my cheek, with their long and slender fingers. You scare a guy! he said. I answered him with the very newest thing I had learned in English—
Sort of
—even though I was not certain that this was the right expression to use.

I never drew my nourishment from Egyptian culture as so many others did. When I was little, I did not follow the evening serials on the Egyptian TV channel, nor the Ramadan Riddles that the Egyptian stars Nelly and Sharihan performed, nor the puppets Buji and Tamtam. Omar Sharif’s looks did not leave me a wreck, nor did I fall in love with the dreamy romantic voice of the famous Egyptian singer Abd al-Halim Hafiz. I was not corrupted by famous comedies of stage and screen like
The School for Troublemakers
and
The Kids Grew Up
. I had no idea what Café Fishawi was, or where the Cairo neighborhood of Hilmiyya could be found, even though I saw them in films made from the novels of Naguib Mahfouz. I didn’t read loads of romantic novels by Yusuf al-Sibai or stories by Yusuf Idris and Naguib Mahfouz and Tawfiq al-Hakim—that famous Egyptian trio of mid-twentieth century writers. It was only very late in the game that I even heard of something called Arab nationalism and of individuals named Sadat and Nasser and Heikal and Sayyid Qutb, or a group called the Muslim Brotherhood, not to mention The Project of Arab Unity and the Camp David Accords.

This was a culture that I always viewed with a certain amount of skepticism and suspicion. I saw it as the culture of the generation before me, who in any case had gone right into their elder roles, playing paternalistic games with my generation, confronting me from a position of studied superiority. It was a generation of people who, at the age of sixteen, hung pictures of the “Cinderella of the Arab screen,” as-Sindarella, Suad Husni, on the walls of their rooms and plastered them to their closet doors. They lived their stories of first love to the voice of Abd al-Halim, and they participated in the events of Muharram 1400. They had witnessed close up Qatif’s transformation from its rural youth and its blue attire—the blue, blue sea that its pearl-divers frequented—into a quasi-city whose watery margins they were gobbling up, and thence into a network of pavements edged in yellow and black, asphalt streets, armored houses, and wells in which the water, if not the oil, had dried up.

What inscribed my childhood and animated my early teen-agerhood was the channel coming out of Dhahran, run by the businessmen at Aramco. My personality was sculpted, and the sphere of my attention defined, by a channel actually named Dhahran. It had American basketball, slow and boring golf reportage, and tennis matches—yaaah! Tennis! Wimbledon championships, the good-looking blond Boris Becker, and the inscrutable Pete Sampras. Matches held on grass courts and others on courts composed of finely ground red sand. And bananas. Back then, I did not understand. Why bananas, specifically? Films were another story. There was the solitary
Rain Man
Dustin Hoffman with his unparalleled athletic abilities.
Edward Scissorhands
Johnny Depp, that wicked Johnny Depp, with his sharp-cutting fingers of flashing silver metal, a machine with the power to love.
Scent of a Woman
and Al Pacino, always stirring up chaos, shouting, “I am in the dark!” These were part of an era that no one but my generation could properly experience. And then, on the pretext of cost control expenses—that is what they said—Dhahran was dropped from the list of available channels. It was an atrocious loss, certainly not compensated for by my ability to beam in Channel 55 from Bahrain or Channel 33 from the Emirates.

The Cinderella of the Arab screen is one of those images that always accompanies Hassan in my memory. Hiba loved her, too, and put her at the very top of her list of favorites, memorized her songs and knew her films, recorded haphazardly on videotapes. And then there were the poems of Salah Jahin, the popular Egyptian vernacular poet, which Hiba recited, chanting them in imitation of Suad Husni’s style, her Egyptian pronunciation, and the tone of her voice with its tremors and the shroud of tears it seemed to carry. I heard her singing them and I memorized them from her. I remember once, Hassan had just bought new sunglasses, and he began to act up and swagger like a pampered young guy, acting the way he always did whenever he bought something that he really liked. So I began to chant to him.

Your words to him, they glow,

But he answers you just so

Bless his heart, that inscrutable lad

Masks his face behind glasses if he’s sad

And how does he live?

He’s just that way, that’s the way he is

And how does he shout?

He’s just that way, that’s the way he is

And how does he pass you?

He’s just that way

And he stops and he says,

I’m that one, I am,

I’m that guy, I’m that beau,

On this block in this town

I’m the tallest lad!

Hiba disappeared. To be more accurate, I made her disappear. My choice. Sometimes it is useful to be proactive in organizing your pain, to cut it short rather than letting it remain a stagnant vessel for more pain from others. Hiba was going to disappear in any case, and all I was doing was hastening the appointed time for her disappearance. The Cinderella of the Arab screen had an appointed time, too: she committed suicide, or illness killed her, or fame did it, or her girlfriend, or Jahin’s passing, or the Egyptian Secret Service, or the British police. She died. But Hassan’s memory does not die.

Hassan’s leaving is the very peak of what I am capable of enduring. It is the high ceiling of pain beneath which all else is indifferent. His leaving is pain, bereavement, the ache of missing someone, rejection, emotional breakdown, the fissuring of the soul, the body’s deterioration and collapse, the reign of absence that you cannot shake, the curse of fear, the savagery of the death endured by the bereaved who is sadly left behind. Death makes everything else an everyday mundane triviality, and makes me look at life with disdain. How can I take life seriously? I funnel half of my questions into a single answer, which is itself a question: So what does it mean in the end, anyway? What does it mean in the end for Hiba to disappear? What does it mean in the end for Dai to say goodbye? What does it mean in the end that I sin? What does it mean in the end that I fail the school year? What does it mean in the end that the winter is cold? What does it mean in the end that Umar’s phone is off? What does it mean in the end? It doesn’t mean a thing, it doesn’t mean anything at all. Life means nothing, my questions mean nothing. Life is itself the nothingness of my convictions, the nullity of my stances, the nonexistence of my existence, the nonexistence of all the others. Everything in its reality is the nonbeing of a being who has faded away. The remains, left to be sensed by him or by the others, are merely the traces of an old fever whose core was afflicted by frostbite.

A third window—but Umar’s phone shuts it in my face, just when I am in urgent need of using his presence to charge my spent battery. Moments like these take me back to the same old notions. How very exhausting the act (and the fact) of love really is, in whatever shape it comes and under whichever category it is lodged. What factories human relationships are for producing energy, or for depleting it. Need consumes me, though I despise giving in to my needs. I do have that complex—believing that if I could tame my needs and regulate them appropriately, and control their income and outflow, I would be able to manage life without anyone. On my own, in solitude, sufficient unto myself.

My longing to be independent established itself very early, as early as my first attempts to put on my socks by myself, tie my shoelaces, and sleep without my mother crooning nearby. I splattered my face with food rather than eating with her help, and I stung my eyes with shampoo as I avoided her bathroom supervision. I was always poised to work harder and to repeat my attempts time and time again without her extending a hand to me or guiding me into a particular way of doing things. My illness, too, buttressed my fear of collapse, of reversion to the uncertain steps of a toddler, of my body sinking under someone else’s sway. Old age scares me, too. I am afraid of suddenly having to face paralysis or senility, and being forced to have my needs met and my body cared for by someone whose duty it would become, someone other than me. I pray to God constantly that I may die before I see this dreaded fantasy of mine come true.