The Others (24 page)

Let time take its course. Have confidence in Nadia and trust your own heart. Don’t overwhelm her, don’t let her take fright. Get some distance on what happened before, forget about your absence from each other, don’t leave her feeling it was her fault, even if it was. It’s natural that she is different, in three years everyone gets older and changes. Don’t be aggressive but don’t be more submissive than you have to be. For you to love her is one thing and for you to buy her return with your love is altogether something else.

We had switched roles. She was no longer the girl who was my elder by not just one year, but rather by 573 days, according to her calculator, and who put on the eyeglasses of a teacher and scolded me. Now I was the older girl, the one who taught her every daily lesson. The gist of all of my lessons was: How do you build a good and secure relationship in ten days? It was no longer odd or unusual for me to find twice the number of text messages on my mobile screen when I woke up at two o’clock in the afternoon. I would already know the reason: she was to meet Nadia later in the afternoon.

The only thing I could not claim to have professorial insight into was a huge question, one of those questions that seem as huge as a mountain when you begin to consider the endless possibilities it raises. Why was I not feeling jealous? Here I was, opening a door and pushing her through it to reach a riverbank that I hoped would be salutary for her. Here I was, too, giving all of her heart and her body to that other one, a stranger to me, an other one of whom I knew nothing except through Dareen’s words and desires.

I was doing this without a single one of my nerves starting to shake, without a single heartbeat screaming out. I was doing it completely confidently, totally calmly, and with utterly loyal determination. All of this to protect the most desolate, wasted areas of my soul, and the doors whose dark recesses were to be concealed from Dareen’s light. I was doing it without standing motionless for even one minute of silent mourning for what had been; without the truth stinging me that I was exaggerating how black my blackness was, without a belated slap to the back of my neck at a sudden vision of what I was letting escape me.

Like her, I was happy some days because the thing seemed a success, and tense other days because it was on the point of failing. I would pick up her breathing on the phone and the anxiety of her weeping and ask her to calm down. On the whole, I would tell her, life is a circular path where you always come back to the beginning. Its high points are an exact reflection of its low points, and the highs precisely reverse the lows. Life is just a matter of equivalences, and they are all written for us in advance.

Contrary to the way Dareen saw it, I do owe some kind of justification, if not to all who pass through my life, then at least to myself. A justification by virtue of which I could distance the guilt, place it beyond me, make it smaller; by which my hell would feel less oppressive. Passing through my life: this was exactly what the world and all who lived on it were doing, as far as I was concerned. I was determined—and I could not do otherwise—to preserve all of my ties, but keep them weak, intent on weaving the relationships I had into cobweb-like structures. Actually, spider web strands have a stickiness to them, and their ends carry poisonous stings, and these are qualities that I do not have or wish to have. Stickiness means attachment and poisonous stings mean binding another being to me. I am certainly not in need of any of that.

Lightness. That is what Dareen called it. That is what I want. At the age of twenty-two, I have not yet come to think with the lightness of
Mal’uun
Milan—the accursed Kundera. The lightness that is unbearable, the lightness that is a countervailing presence to heaviness and is equal to heaviness in what it does. That is what the physics of nature teaches us. The effect caused by a hundred degrees centigrade is the same caused by its negative equivalent. The lightness of zero is what I mean to have. Zero, the only reality that is absolute; and to each side, objects are merely the reflected images of the same reality.

I can barely fathom now what I am really heading for in my life, this being who is me. I was the absence of the others, and the black hole in their memory. I was another step beyond, outside of who they were, a dirty stain in their datebooks. I caused fear precisely because, before I left them (and that I did often), no one ever assumed that I could cause fear or worry. Having their trust and affection, I would shock them with my sudden departures. Indeed, no one left me! Even Hassan himself did not leave me. Yet at the same time, I had left more people almost than I had fingers on my hands. Likely they are all now somewhere wallowing in forgetfulness, and probably, they are like me. They probably have fallen into the darkness of the fear that never ends.

Dareen has an explanation for my fear. It is the same explanation she has for everything: that my fear is one of the aftereffects of the year 1400. Not just my fear—my urgent need for fear. I think she is making too much of a generalization when she attributes my fear to reasons as inclusive as this. I told her, This is Qatif, it isn’t Beirut in the civil war. She answered, Fear is fear, even if the locale has changed! She said nothing for a moment and then she added, And anyway, it is an infectious condition. Isn’t infection transmitted through the umbilical cord?

Do you remember the chemical masks? she asked me.

Who could forget them?

After two years of the war, no more than two years, not a single house retained any of the masks they had bought. Isn’t that a little strange? There was no motive to hang onto them. The war pretty much did not reach us. Anyway, it ended.

You are so naïve! We felt secure. And then, in a single night, our covers were yanked off and we were naked. Everyone was in an utter state of denial and searching for forgetfulness by any route. They were too eager to get rid of the war, to amputate it from their lives. We’d had one long period of insomnia that seemed to never end, and suddenly it was a thing of the past, something useless to ever look at again. Don’t you think we all feel some discomfort when Kuwaiti TV shows the pleas of the prisoners’ families, and doesn’t let us stop thinking of them day after day after day? Why do we react this way, if we really have nothing to do with what happened? Isn’t it because they are reminding us of what we work very hard to bury in the well of forgetting? Now, you are not going to also tell me that what happened was not another cause for fear!

On this at least I agree with you.

Do you know what our new fear is?

What?

A sense of belonging.
Intimaa
.

Intimaa
. What do you mean by that?

Before, when we faced anything unexpected, anything different or new, we knew we were sure to have one. One person, one response, one voice—we were united, in unison, like military uniforms. Now it is different. There are currents, perhaps even movements; resonant names; turns of phrase that you or me can barely pronounce correctly. Everything is mixed up now, and we are no longer capable of defining what we want or mean. What are we searching for? What are our choices? What direction ought we to turn? There are a lot of questions and not enough answers, or not enough good answers, to suit everyone.

You like theorizing, Dareen!

No, I just want to understand and there’s no one to explain all of this to me free of charge.

Something else about Dareen frightens me. What she says is so like me that I could almost swear she makes a copy of my mind every day and then she brings it out again later, when the edginess of my questions and the sharpness of my apprehensions begin to fade, and she can stoke their fire again. It is not just what she says. We used to fall in love with the same things: foreign films without subtitles,
makaruna
with red sauce, blueberry beer, Fairuz, plain bed covers. We despised the same things, too: okra stew, Jim Carey, yellow lighting, the screech of the printer, and finding someone waking us up. Even the way this could spoil our mood for the rest of the day was similar. All alike. Dareen was like me in a way that made me appear a less mature image of her. She was similar to the point of being exactly alike in some aspects, to the point of being my mirror image. It scares me to be as tremendous as that, it astonishes me to be astonishing, just as it frightens me that my mirror rouses me to live, that it coaxes me toward life in this way.

Unlike our most recent phone conversations, this time she did not mention Nadia’s name, and she did not surround her words with apologies and modify them with double thanks for everything. She said, I want to see you.

Me, too. I have something small for you.

What is it? she asked.

A secret.

When can we meet?

Whenever you like, I said. I’m at your command.

You’ll be my guest, though, she said.

Ah, contrary to the usual. Are you intending some evil toward me?

I have already stolen you once before. I don’t know if I am capable of more than that.

When I got there, she blockaded me at her door. I want what is mine now. Now! I tried playing with her ready ebullience a little, putting her off. This is a truly dirty word, don’t say it, period! I was hoping she would let out a string of swear words at me as usual, but she only gave me a big kiss on the cheek, took me by the hand, and led me to her room, where we had never before been together.

Holding the disk I had just given her gently between her thumb and forefinger and staring at it, she asked me, What is it?

“Waiting.”
Intizar
. I always think of you when I hear it.

There was a time when I believed that with writing and music I could survive, could open up a free space in this world capable of holding me fully and warmly. Later on, I completely abandoned my faith in writing. Every new piece of writing became a noose that would wind its way around my neck and do its part to throttle me. I had had enough of my horrendous ability to misrepresent facts and make sorrows beautiful. I had had enough of being able to write out my fragmentation between two memory spaces—what happens, and what is written. And I had had enough of naïve attempts to steal my vision and toy with my heart. Writing was no longer giving me life, and now it was taxing me enough that it might be giving me death. Music was what was left for me.

There is a saying: Music is the food of the soul. I do not approve of expressions like this. Music itself is a soul, and how can we draw food from a soul? Anyway, how can we grasp that soul in the first place when we do not know its nature and have no description of its essence? The world is stern with us, though, demanding definitions according to the criteria it gives us, so as to verify the beings and objects that dwell upon it. Names are for one’s memory, and definitions are for the dictionaries; and music, even though it may fly, is not a creature whose wings can be fixed with pins on a piece of cork, its body left to dehydrate.

On the Internet I have often typed random words into the search engine and studied page after page of results. Several tries might yield a disappointing nothing, and then one try bears fruit and causes me such sheer astonishment that it can swallow up the whole of my long night. Once I put in the word
intizar
, having already chosen to search images, and then I switched to audio files; surely such a word would yield decent results. I found the song and it staggered me so much that I did not wait for Umar to get onto the web at his usual time. I called him and we listened to it together, and I asked him, What do you think of it? He answered, Aah, I don’t know! That’s it exactly. Beautiful things always steal the language from us and force us into silence.

It’s a piece of music from Iraq.

She put it into the CD drive.

No, not right now, I said.

So, when?

Let’s listen to it together tonight.

3 a.m.—does that suit you?

It’s kind of late for love.

Love is the only thing that is never late.

She waved at the door. See—it’s closed.

I noticed. You’re a heroine!

I’m …

You’re what?

She came over to me, a trance-like look in her eyes that was like magic. I was already half lying on her bed. She went down toward my feet and kissed them. This time I did not tense up with worry. I did not feel assaulted by an anxious sense of being tickled. I did not start thinking, My feet are too lowly for her to kiss. It did not occur to me to worry that my foot might slip after a spasm, mistakenly strike her and give her a nosebleed. I understood her need to do it, to show her gratitude in the most lucid way possible, so I left her to it. Then I gave her a hug. I laughed a little as she said, Finally—it’s only today that my room is having its first experience. I laughed with her, she put her arms tightly around me, and I asked her, Does she treat you well?

Nadia? Oh, sure, of course.

She began to laugh slyly when I pushed her away, and then said, Don’t be annoyed, I am just teasing you a little. We were quiet for a moment as I trailed my thumb across her cheek. Her smile, with its inviting, ironic cleverness, gave me the impression that she was serious in what she said. Likely, she wanted to pass on this bit of information to me, and she chose to do it by arranging for a little light banter.

It’s true, what you are saying?

Yes.

Why?

I don’t want to build our relationship only through our bodies.

We went through a confused moment and then my inner self tried to entice me to say, Fine, you are right. Or, No I won’t leave you! But she spared me the sin of either wounding her or leading her astray when she put out her hand to me and said, I want to show you my secret hiding place.

The heavy scent of paint walloped me when she opened the door. She said, Go ahead, please.

It was a large room, with very bright lighting; the north and east walls were enormous windows of one-way reflecting glass. On the west wall hung three huge paintings and others were propped against the wall, showing only their backs, except for a row of seven canvases facing outward. Where I entered there sat a large table with several storage areas, its surface strewn with drawing tools and holding an easel.