The Others (17 page)

And so there I was at lesson time, in Balqis’s company, upset and confused about the miniature flood on my underclothes and apprehensive about whether my clothes themselves bore visible stains. I crouched instead of sitting all the way down, balancing on my feet, afraid that I would spatter something on the carpet in her room, and very uncomfortable as I shifted my weight back and forth from one foot to the other. She gazed at me attentively and then lowered her head toward the book. Then she looked up at me again, and then a third time, just as my face was tensing up under the impact of a sharp pain in my gut. She asked me, What’s wrong? I was at a loss, confused about what to respond.

I do not know how she knew so definitely the enormity of my problem: there I was, a girl child of twelve whom blood had taken by surprise, and who did not know what to do! Balqis reached into her wardrobe and took out a sanitary napkin and handed it to me. I took it with a stupid expression on my face, for I had no idea what to do with this object. Hah! When I catch sight now of the
how to use
lettering on a packet of sanitary napkins, I laugh. The instructions must have always been there but I was too blind to see them. Just imagine it, my dear! Something as silly and small as this would have, could have, kept Balqis from her passage across me!

She sat down on the edge of her bed and enveloped me in a mother’s arms and a houri’s perfume. She taught me how to use this thing, and with a little smile she said, Don’t be embarrassed. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. This is where children come from. You’ll have children as sweet and pretty as you are.

That day, she talked to me a lot about blood and other things: scratchy hair; pain; and my body, where the clouds of childhood would lift and disappear to reveal the body of a woman with transparent wings, who bore the home of her children wherever she went. She worked on me until I was no longer afraid, and until I felt grateful to the blood, indebted to it, happy in its intimacy.

Days passed, and more days, and the beads of the prayer rosary were counted and recounted. (I love Balqis, I am crazy over Balqis, Balqis is so so lovely with me.) My grades in math were higher than ever. Then there came the day in which I got an “excellent” on the examination. Close your eyes, she said. I have a gift for you. I was very excited. My soul trembled. She kissed me. That was her present, a kiss, lips on lips. She said, People who love each other give each other kisses on the mouth, and I love you. And then she added that this had to stay a secret between us, and if I were to tell anyone, or love anyone else or kiss anyone else, she would stop loving me. I didn’t understand why this was so. She said, Do you want to never see me again? Do you want me to not love you at all? Do you want me to be angry at you? These questions of hers and the spark of suspicious light in her eyes as she asked them opened a fissure in my heart. I shook my head in fear. No, no, no!

Naïve, that’s what I was. I was a child. The slightly threatening timbre of what she said did not arrest my attention. I was not put off by a vague sense that there was something amiss about the whole picture. I felt that she was granting me something special, something superior, that no one else could possibly share. I believed, too, that she was acknowledging my merit and deservingness, and elevating me above my child’s sense of inferiority. I didn’t just love her, I worshipped her, and from that time on I began to do whatever she told me to, exactly as she asked and without any discussion.

That kiss did not reoccur in the days to follow. She treated me as if nothing had happened. I made tremendous efforts. I outdid myself, hoping to win another gift from her. She did not grant me even an ordinary friendly kiss. I would take full advantage of the quickly passing seconds when she was absorbed in explaining things, writing out a problem or reviewing a basic rule, to stare at her lips. Her gaze would fall on me like the eyes of an eagle, sharp and wounding, and I would take my eyes away immediately, for she had caught me, eyewitness to the crime. I was thirsty. To the point where I would start weeping, I was thirsty. I thirsted so much that I was groveling. Because of a kiss, I no longer slept. I would lie down, my head on the pillow, tasting my own lips with the tip of my tongue, biting them, closing my eyes and going over it all again and again without ever growing weary, that half second, that kiss.

Then she did it. Without any preliminaries, without a perfect score on the examination, without any appended command. She kissed me. The kiss grew and swelled and filled out and matured, and slowly and gradually and deliberately it became an entire body, a tremor, a sticky moisture, a release, a liberation. And this was what happened time and again: a moment and then hunger, a single time and then hunger, an instant and then hunger. Balqis trained me and tamed me—or should I say the opposite? I had been a little girl, and I had become a wild mare. I had been a girl and I became a savage cat. I had been a girl and I became a monster, misshapen and deformed. Isn’t that what I should say?

A  m o n s t e r!

At a moment when my desire was at its most vulnerable, she asked me to slap her. I would not do it. She raised an angry palm and slapped me. She asked again and I refused, and she slapped me harder. A third time and I cried. She shook me and said, Don’t cry! Don’t be such a child! Don’t close your eyes! Give it back to me! Hit me, get your revenge on me. Didn’t I hurt you? Her slaps were harder or softer, I would not know in advance, and when she got to the fifth slap and my ears were ringing and I could hardly hear at all, I raised my palm and slapped her with all the strength that this pain had thrust into me. A fierce pleasure suddenly overtook me. It made my bones shudder and it set my temples on fire. I had no power of recall over this act of pleasure, a boon granted by might, greatness and tyranny, no matter how many times I slapped or however much my store of wickedness was used up.

That was the miserable beginning of it. The more accustomed I got to it, the more she raised the threshold of pain, until my body lost whatever share it had of contentment, going insane if it was not in pain, collapsing into distraught uncertainty when it was not being hurt. Pain became its profession, its craft, its route in search of pleasure. In a certain way, my body did continue to resemble its original human formation, a human body’s limited capacities for endurance and the particular qualities of flesh and bone. But it went beyond those human characteristics to attain an advanced stage of I don’t know what! It was a body whose capacity for feeling and reaction had grown very weak, had all but left, to the point where a terrible blast of pain could not even shake its nerve endings. I would try harder, try to return the merciless exhilaration of pain to my body. Every time I reached a new and exorbitant threshold, my body grew accustomed to it after repetition, and I would demand more, more and more and more, and every time, a question pelted me until it was breaking apart the very cells inside of me. Is there more? Something more than all of this, is there more?

At the time, I held myself in the category of an observer, for only a few moments, watching what she was doing to me, and simultaneously I was the recipient of its impact. As time passed, she transformed me into an active participant, discovering and experiencing and inventing. People become addicted to drugs and alcohol, they become addicted to the television or Internet or video games. I became addicted to Balqis’s body. More accurately, I became addicted to what she did with me, the ruthless force, the slavery. Beneath her, I was a
jariya
, a slave girl, whose life was given over to the pleasure of another. She was a goddess who could kill and bring to life. I learned how to exchange roles with her. I was not serene until I had acquired my share of her, nor would my agitation abate until I had made her a plaything in my hands, just as I was in hers. These were dalliances whose danger I recognized, but the more clearly I perceived the danger, the stronger was the impact on me. I no longer cried. I had grown up, and grownups don’t cry
.

And at the height of talk, all words ceased.

The words grew silent. Balqis’s craziness over me went still. Her desire for me disappeared gradually until it went completely cold. She made excuses to my mother, using my high grades in math to claim that I no longer needed her. Three years of private lessons—it was a long time, Balqis told her, and it would be better for me to begin to depend on myself. Thus, my lessons at Balqis’s ended. One day passed, or two days, between meetings, and then three, four days, and then a week. My heart was churning and my body was seething and Balqis was not distinguishing what was correct or reasonable from what was spurious. She used the pretext of “things she had to do,” events that were keeping her busy, and I understood perfectly well that her excuses were lies. I did not understand what was behind them, and because of them, I went round and round in the vicious circle of doubt and jealousy. I would make up silly reasons to stop by her home, weak excuses, completely illogical ones. All I wanted was to sniff the fragrance of my houri and regain some reassurance from her. I noticed that she had a new visitor. I took note of the times of the new girl’s lessons. I noticed her breasts, which had not yet swollen to their fullest. I noticed how she was still growing and developing. It was as though noticing everything, at that particular time, was a kind of drug that I had to have, or a state of stupor that preserved me. Belatedly, I noticed Balqis’s disgusted reaction to me, mounting to the point of nausea, disgust at my body, at the growth and maturity of my femininity, at the child’s body now vaulting toward its adulthood, at the growing accentuation of my waist and hips, the rising mounds of my breasts.

They say that memory grows tired and falls asleep, and then, if it is not constantly whetted, fades and dies amongst dreams and drowsy images. Every day, I had some memory of Balqis. Not a day would pass in which I did not think of her. In my mind, I would embrace her so hard that her ribs would hurt. I kissed her so feverishly that I stole her lips from her. I slapped her on account of her absence, and I slapped her for the sake of the new little doll that she crushed beneath her body. I would slap her and then I would regret it. I would love Balqis and hate her, worship her and denounce her. I reconstructed her over and over, tens of times, and then I demolished and scattered her. I no longer had access to her body and so I played with her image. My heart was a vast pump sending delusions across my body, and my blood was polluted.

Often the thought came to me that I was going to live forever in extreme hunger, that a greater hunger would come and accumulate along with the hunger I already felt. Balqis would not return. Her doll would not resist becoming her new plaything, just as before, I had not refused. I went into a state of hysteria, shutting all the doors to myself. I was in an entirely closed-up hell. If my condition had lasted even one more day, I would have started a war of blood and dust against Balqis to force her to come back to me or have no one. All that kept me from it was a hand that reached out to me. Given the circumstances, it was merciful, though it was made of the same kind of pain and the punishment it visited on me. It soothed me and returned freshness to my body with the abundance of its waters. That is how I grew addicted to a first-rate alternative, which I exchanged for another, and then a third, a fourth
…
my relationships lasted exactly as long as I was in raptures over their sharp and spicy taste, but as soon as I became accustomed to their flavor, I moved on to another
.

And then I met you and loved you. I loved you from the very first time we exchanged greetings in the Hussainiyya, when you apologized for not wearing stockings because the maid was too busy with other things. It was the worst excuse I had ever heard. If you had not pointed it out then likely no one would have noticed. Three years, when I closed and opened my eyes on you every night. You were an untouched little bud yet to open. I was the bud that had opened prematurely, its petals falling one after another. In you, I caught new scents, the fragrance of firsts, of pure things, of a time that had remained unpolluted. I loved you and you made me forget Balqis, and my pain, and the brutal stamping over of my childhood. But not the wildness of my body. I loved you the way men in heaven love their virgin women. I loved you even more. I loved you and I was afraid. I must not touch you. I must not come near. I must not soil you with me, or with my madness, or the commanding force of my body. I loved you and I protected you from myself, but I had not yet learned to resist the lush ether of you. I thought you had the power to make me pure. I thought that impact on me would be stronger than my demons, able to hold off the bats that inhabited my black world, the darkness of my soul. And so I drew nearer to you.

You had a black shirt, a V-neck that buttoned. Whenever you wore it, I would give you surreptitious looks, catching glimpses of that little birthmark just below your neck, with a sigh every time I saw it, slightly above the visible parting of your breasts, the size of a little red ant, and also the very color of a little red ant, spilling onto your milky chest, and I thought I would die. I want you! That is what was in my mind. I know that I troubled you, even harmed you! I wanted not to hurt you, I really did, I meant that and felt that and willed it strongly. I stayed in those relationships of mine so that I could pour into them all of my violence and my desire for pain, so that I could empty myself of them and not hurt you. For my body demanded its share of pain. But I could not do it. In some secret way, you deflected me from truly betraying you. You prohibited my body from being totally there with anyone else. From every direction, forces turned me back toward you, and even so, I felt unfaithful. You were so soft and kind, softer than your ability to hurt me, and I contained more violence than you would be able to stand. I failed several times because of you—yes, because of you. You would be there, your image, crumpled into a little heap between the two of us, me and whoever I was with, somewhere or other. My eyes closed, I would see you. I would all but swear that you had been there. I found the idea of doing this to you indecent, and I would shake the stem of my longing with someone else, when you were all I longed for—not just your body, but you. You, what I desired out of life, what I wanted from love. You were the salvation and release that I implored Allah to grant me. And now, when you are mine, my possession, I have learned that this mark of yours is a little closer to your left breast. Now I can stroke that red ant of yours, kiss that red ant of yours, lick it and sleep on top of it. And I am afraid, after all of this has happened, I am afraid that you will grow tired of me and leave me.