The Others (12 page)

You’re angry at me, aren’t you?

Of course not.

Are you telling the truth?

I told you, of course not.

You won’t hate me, right? Whatever happens?

I began to grow uncomfortable with the repeated turns that our conversation took, always leading us in the same direction. Batul rescued me, kicking at the door, her words commingled with sobs. Maaamaaaa, come here, come tell them! They won’t play with me, I hope they rot!

Dai opened the door for her and picked her up. Her little sister’s face was flushed, her cheeks rosy and her eyes cascading tears. Dai brought the little girl over to the bed, next to me, and held her slight form on her lap, a little sparrow whose wings had just barely begun to sprout. She dried Batul’s tears and wiped her nose.

Yallah
, come on, again. Come on, blow your nose, ha-ar-r-r-d. Dai drew out the word and then made the sound of a nose blowing. The little one was responding to her demand with perfect obedience, imitating the sound exactly.

I’ll break their heads for you. Okay, sweetie. Okay, enough, no screaming. She looked at me. It’s another
mawwal
every day. A tearful song that never ends!

She opened the drawer of the bedside table and pulled out a Snickers bar. Batul took it and held it between her tiny hands, gripping it tightly. As Dai soothed her, her eyelids drooped.

Why does she call you Mama?

You could say that I have basically been delegated to meet all the demands of her upbringing.

What about your mother?

Busy.

We broke out in smiles at the same instant, me because I had asked such a dumb and prying question as this, and her to let me know that we had gotten beyond the stage where we would hesitate before asking such questions or stick to earlier commitments about where the red lines were when it came to invading each other’s privacy.

Do you fancy yourself a teacher?

You mean do I imagine myself being like my mother?

She left no room for me to object to the way she had understood my question, and she rounded her own question off with an emphatic
Impossible
!

And your diploma?

You know that majoring in English gives me a lot of different choices—Aramco, or a bank or a hospital.

Without any preliminaries and in contrast to her usual practice of keeping things to herself, she started talking volubly about her mother. What does daily life mean under the burden of doubting our mothers’ love for us? She had been a highly strung, stubborn daughter, to the point where the distribution of roles between the two of them did not long remain those clearly defined domains of a mother and her child. Rather, Dai had been a little one butting her head against rocky ground whenever she got angry, and her mother chose to confine and whip her hard for behaving badly. When Dai grew older she became a very calm person, aware and smart and older than one might suppose. Her grandmother began urging her to follow her path, the one taken a generation earlier by her mother and her aunts. They had all become Hussainiyya reciters. Their voices offered the glow of condolences and mourned along with bereaved women, all of them in black. They revived Hussain, thirsty and alone, on every Ashura. But Dai would slip out of her grandmother’s hands. Then, with a young teenaged girl’s recklessness and self-pride, she had rushed to try out her gift for writing. She had imitated in miniature the novels of Khawla al-Qazwini, the most felicitous of women writers during a time when our society was very conservative when it came to any sort of writing that fell outside the sphere of the religious authorities or the state’s Islamic sensibility. Dai’s novel circulated from hand to hand among her friends and received much approval and a lot of praise, but her mother offered nothing but a cold gaze and open sarcasm.
Don’t waste your time in such trivia. Concentrate on your studies
. That was when Hidaya extended her hands—Hidaya who tries to nationalize the creative production of talented women in the country, according to Dai’s way of putting things. For Dai, this was an opportunity to aim a successful blow at her mother; and for her mother, it was a chance to spread the branches of her tree much wider—that family tree which Dai’s earlier behavior had seemed to chop off almost at the trunk. Often, then, when I was with Dai, we would reach a point in the conversation where Hidaya’s name was bound to come up, and I would stop talking, for I am not nearly strong enough to take up a defensive position in a scuffle that Dai would start and refuse to let go, the cause of which would be Hidaya.

Even if the world were to love me, she said, the whole world, I would still be convinced that no one loves me. As she finished this sentence of hers, she picked up Batul to carry her to her own bed. I yearned to take her hand and say, No. Stay, just like you are right now, like a mythical goddess, a woman at the apex of her motherhood. If I were a photographer or a painter, this scene would not have faded from my mind before I could recreate it fully: a lap molded to welcome the little body, two hands reaching around to embrace its frailty and drawing out of that transparent form a sprite exuding light and warmth. This is not Dai whom I know, not the sociable and elegant personality at the college, nor the astute artist at the Hussainiyya, nor the ferocious mauler in bed. This is another Dai, one I have not known before, in whom I did not catch whiffs of heaven as I do now,
ya Allah
! Is this what motherhood does to us?

As soon as Dai pulled the cover over Batul, she woke up and refused to go back to sleep. Dai opened the chocolate bar for her and she took a bite, murmuring over and over,
yummy yummy
. Then she went out of the room, still carrying the little girl, and I heard her scolding her brothers about their Play Station and threatening to make TV watching off limits for a while. Noticing the particularly loud echo that reverberates through a new house, I realized that she was yelling down from the top of the staircase. Some moments later, she returned.

You can’t imagine the degree of madness and chaos those naughty boys cause!

In fact, I am incapable of imagining it, having always lived in a home nearly empty of children. She added, in a tone of heavy and almost angry sarcasm, Four demons pouncing on one piece of candy, Batul—my God, it’s beyond belief!

She laughed, and I laughed along with her. I love this sunny mood of hers, and it bewildered me to see the reversals and mood swings that I so often saw in her—when, at moments like this, I liked her so much and she makes me feel so good!

I pointed to my lips and raised my eyebrows at her to get her to realize that there was a chocolate smudge on her lips. She shook her head and commented, When will you start really remembering your lessons and begin applying them?

She was on the point of kissing me, but I nibbled on her fingertip instead, showing her that something was occupying my mind.

What is it? What are you thinking about?

Come on, let’s go for a walk, how about it?

It was a completely ordinary day. Nothing about the way it began or the brilliance of the morning light gave any hint that it might be different. Nothing turned my attention toward any possible breach or miscalculation. At an early hour, I finished reviewing for my exam. I got dressed, waited for the car, got in, and arrived at the usual time, ten minutes before eight with a few seconds to spare. The place was like a beehive; the usual routine of exams never changes. I performed reasonably well on the exam and was ready to leave the hall a little before the time was half over. From the start, my calculations did not include setting very high expectations, but nor did I predict the worst. I went out and searched for Sundus unsuccessfully, but I knew which lecture hall she would be in for her last lecture on Wednesdays. Room 7, Building 3, the guillotine of the math wing, as Sundus calls it. I was sure to find her in the end.

It had happened before that Aqil had given me a two-day deadline, insisting that I finish my article and turn it in, or he would be forced to finish writing and editing the magazine without my essay appearing on the next-to-last page. It had never happened before, and it would not be
his
choice for it to happen. I hated this promotion, as Aqil asserted it was when he removed me from the trial list and added my name to the roster of the magazine’s essayists. At the time, I got very annoyed at him, and so he told me that he knew my interests better than I did; what an overbearing guy! I was so irritated that I took my time coming up with a title for my corner of the newspaper, and so he named it for me. He called it
I Hear You
. And because I was the last to understand the intent in naming it that, just like any reader, he explained the whole thing in Platonic fashion. My writings as a whole were insistently focused on one idea: we must listen to each other instead of screaming into a void, in a miserable, futile attempt to make all the others listen to us—those others who were older, more mature, more seasoned and farsighted.

I had finished my article the day before. When I turned on the computer to make a copy and then send the file, I discovered that the computer was frozen, suffering no doubt from stress and overexertion. The only thing I could do, then, was to hand it directly to Sundus.

I took a chance and dove into the cafeteria to do something about my hunger. The hideous crowd kicked me outside in a hurry. I returned to the spot where the country girls would gather. I had dashed off my article in a hurry and had not bothered to write a clean draft. It looked like a mass of hieroglyphics whose code no one but me could decipher, so I set to the task of rewriting it in a readable hand. Otherwise, Aqil with his biting tongue would transform my poor handwriting into his latest joke and would make it a stimulus for general amusement. However, I was interrupted constantly by girls asking about the exam. I had no choice but to engage in the conversation; we exchanged the answers we had given and I talked about how to understand the questions with some of my classmates who had been in the lecture hall. All of this meant that by the time the break was over, I had not even gotten through three lines of my text. Oh well. In any case, the next two lectures would be by video hook-up, since male professors were not allowed in the same room as female students. While in class, I could finish what I had just started.

It was a third of an hour into the lecture, and so far nothing truly deserved attention. A very short time later, I sensed a bitterness in my mouth and my tongue began to go numb. Tiny delicate ant feet seemed to crawl from the tip of my tongue to its roots. I took a deep breath in order to avoid a frightened panic that might lead me to act in a way that would prove embarrassing. These were the familiar early signs of my spells. At this point I would know that I had before me a little respite of somewhere between two seconds and one minute before the spell would attack me and my convulsions would begin. Sure enough, as soon as I stood up and asked permission from the supervisor to go to the bathroom, I felt my tongue getting heavy and the words began to stumble from my lips with a lisp. It is one of God’s protective ways that this lecture of mine was in Room 24, exactly facing the bathroom, so that I could run inside and lock the door before the seizure really struck. It was a simple one and ended quickly. I stood facing the mirror over the sink, my eyes reddened by proliferating blood veins and heavy tears that clouded my vision. I washed my face and took some long breaths and returned to the lecture hall.

It was not the spell, which lasted under a minute, that drained me completely of energy, but rather the fear. It had only happened once that the spell had struck when I was in public, and it was so long ago that I had all but forgotten. It happened on the day my cousin—the son of my father’s brother—got married. The spell took me by surprise. I was next to my mother, who took me in her arms and concealed my crying beneath her
mishmar
. One of our relatives asked, What’s wrong with her? And with a frank sincerity that I did not understand, my mother began to explain my health condition and the nature of my illness. I hated my mother that day. I hated her furiously. I hated the feeling that she was stripping me naked, in all simplicity and cheapness, and that the secret I had been determined to preserve—indeed, I thought, the secret we would all preserve—was now out, and she, my mother, was the first to let it spill!

Every evening, in my final prayer of supplication before closing my eyes, I begged God that my condition not become scandalously public, that I not be forced under the guillotine of sympathy, that my spell not drive me into the maze of loving but enervating kindness. And God was kind to me, so generous indeed that even my unending prayers were not sufficient to thank him. And now, nine years on, my praying stumbles on its way to the heavens. My prayers do not ascend high enough now to reach God, who does not answer them. Why doesn’t God answer my prayers? Why does God leave me on my own, now, after I had become so certain, across the space of nine years, that he would not? Why does God set me down and abandon me so close to another spell, when not even five minutes have passed since the last one? And if my mother could explain away Hassan’s death by calling it an act of a mercy, then why is death not merciful to me, taking me along, taking me to where Hassan is?

The seizure had puffed my eyes to slits. Because my spells are the kind that leave me extremely alert rather than putting me into a faint, I could see everyone around me and I caught glimmers of their reactions. And the terror I felt was just like the terror of all the other girls, bending over me in a miserable attempt to lighten my condition: the terror of my own hell, to put it bluntly. This was not simply a spell: this was the most terrifying of my nightmares. Under the influence of my desire to reduce my convulsions to nothing quickly, and despite my certainty that it was futile to try, I was working very hard at it; yet, my spell just got stronger and my convulsions increased. All I wanted was to close my eyes, or for God to grant me the hands of that girl who was half earthling and half Martian in that foreign TV show, when she puts her two forefingers together and the earth stops. Or for God to draw over me and everyone else a temporary blindness so that none of us could see.