The Others (18 page)

My chest, and the exact spot where she lay her head, had become a pool of salt water. She had rinsed her body of the intense, heavy, accumulated odor of the secret grief imprisoned within her, the sadness that had settled there so heavily, so dreadfully, so long ago, leaving her to suffer. To tell the story was to bring back to life an interlacing of deaths and disappearances. Her limbs were cold as her breath burned my body. She got to her feet, drained of energy. She turned on the table lamp, diffusing a pale light. She took my fingers and moved them across particular places on her body: her arms, the top of her right forearm, her palm and her thumb, her back, along the side of her leg. I probed small swellings that I had never before seen under a light, and had not noticed, as she told me what had caused each one. This one is because of a skewer hot from the flame, when we were eating chestnuts! That one—she broke a glass on it, she has a swelling too, just like it! Here, this is because the clasp on my bra stuck and she tried to pull it out by force and the edge of it poked me and broke my skin. That one—oh, we were imitating a foreign film in which we saw a scene about blood brothers and the ritual of brotherhood!

This one … that one … this one … my head was spinning. Her words were pounding relentlessly against my brain. She spread my hand out along the right side of her body. Here, I was really hurt, right here. She would dig into me with her knee. Huh! Look, when I jab my knee in your belly suddenly, what happens—the pleasure of your tall body suddenly folding, your back bowing. Look, this is for real, I’m not just pulling some trick out of my pocket.

I bent over her. I kissed the place where my hand had rested. The kisses would not do anything at this moment; they would not make up for what had happened, they would not erase the traces or replace them with traces of something better. I kissed all of the swollen places on her, one by one, and she moaned in a way I was not used to, the moans of a memory overflowing, bringing back scenes, pushing them to the surface.

Don’t feel sorry for me! And don’t hate me.

I’m not.

I love you. I love you, you’ve given me forgetting.

After the seventh
I love you
, I lost track of what was going on, although I had been trying to keep everything sequenced in my head. I wasn’t just taking note of her explicit expressions of love; I was observing all of her reactions as closely as I could. Her eyes, which bore such a flood of gratitude and hope that poured over me; the way she clung to me; her kisses; the unaccustomed form that her desire seemed to take; her crying, so quiet and still, which she said was caused only by how much love and pleasure she felt; her stillness on my chest.

If troughs and crests exist as part of relationships, as they do for waves, then that time was the highest point on the highest crest we ever reached, the absolute pinnacle, the very best time, without any hurt and without any painful aftermath. It was not just a matter of our bodies. I saw Dai, for once and only once without anything obscuring my field of vision. Without any closed doors, without any secrets, without any hiding places. I loved this Dai, and I fixed her in that image. And suddenly I felt certain about it: Anything that might happen, anything that did happen—nothing would disfigure her for me. I would always bring this image back, revealed, alight, perched between my trembling hands.

At the start of it, disgust and nausea were my overwhelming reactions. I had no idea that a mouth-to-mouth kiss was something that actually happened—and just like that, so simply. I warded it off, rejecting her, refusing to witness her fall from her angelic height. She took my hand, held it tightly, and in a voice of entreaty asked that we forget the whole thing and go on with our friendship on the old basis. I could not get the better of my feelings of disgust toward her whenever we met, however, nor of the fear that entrapped me whenever we were together behind a closed door. Gradually, our friendship flagged, until it ended of its own coldness.

The second time was different: it stirred up in me a lot of questions and doubts about myself. What was it that had made me experience the very same circumstances, the very same reactions, twice in succession? Did that happen to everyone? Why had no one taught me anything? Should I conceal what had happened? Was there some defect in me? Was it my childish shirts? My running shoes? My short hair? Was it the slightly formal way that I say I? Was it the way I drop the feminine
t
ending whenever I message girlfriends? Or was there some deep-rooted imbalance or disorder in me that I could not see, but that was visible to women who wanted relationships like this? Of course, by now I had grown a bit older, and I did understand that a kiss could be just a kiss, or that it could mean a relationship with all of its intimate details. I tried to unearth all of this through questions, but my excavations turned up nothing useful. That friend of mine seesawed between acting naïve and an inability to explain the reasons for it to me, giving only improvised and illogical possibilities whose details she would not elaborate. I did not understand anything. I examined carefully my every step, and searched my body, my behaviors and reactions, and the way I acted when I was with my friends, but I found nothing to cause any suspicion or doubt.

When it came to Dai, years had gone by and my questions were all but submerged in the fog of lost memory, as was whatever acquaintance I had had with her. But at the college one day, she stopped to pass the time of day with me—by which I mean, with the country girls. She said hello and chatted a little, and then turned directly to me and said, Why don’t we meet, what do you think? Her question seemed a little odd or contrived, since in fact we did meet now and then, here and at the Hussainiyya. She added, You are invited to lunch at my home on Wednesday. We’ll go from the college to my place straight away, and don’t give me apologies and tell me you can’t do it! I did not.

Ever since the moment in which we sat down together on her bed, immediately after we arrived, and ever since she asked me which dress she should wear, and ever since I did up the zipper on her dress with confused fingers, and ever since, sitting next to me, she urged me to taste the dessert and then lifted the spoon to my mouth and fed me—ever since then, in some obscure fashion that I cannot explain, I had known somehow that with time our relationship would end up where it did. I did not know all the details of how this would happen, naturally, but I sensed the essence of the relationship and the roles of both parties to it. Every new thing I discovered about Dai replicated my initial forecast. And instead of bolting, putting myself at a distance, I was there, working hand in hand with Dai to set a decoy at every step that would draw me on to the next step. This course would not make me later into a liar, when I was bewildered at how far we had gone and what we had done, but it equally did not absolve me of responsibility toward any of our actions.

And now an entire month had gone by since the rhythm of our relationship had been at its fastest and most ascendant, a holiday jaunt so pleasant that it exceeded anything I was capable of imagining or supposing, not to mention actually living. It all seemed a pure fantasy of the imagination, or a temporary paradise where soon enough I would bite into the cursed apple and crash to an earth as slippery and as lined with thorns as ever. It was a narcotic pleasure so powerful that under its effects I no longer had any desire to take any precautions or to open my eyes on a tomorrow that would look in any way unlike today. Yet, whatever the extent of Dai’s virtuosity with her fingers, and however distant were the limits of her skills, inevitably there would be a wrong note, a finger slipping toward another string, something out of tune. And today she had sounded her ultimate discordant note, her fatal slip of the fingers.

As she gazed at me, I could see in her eyes the usual flash of her craving. I was not really ill, and so my pretext appeared weak. I was getting sick, but I was still in that pre-illness stage of dizziness, blurred vision, jellylike fingers that collapse to the touch, inveterate aching that you cannot pinpoint anywhere particular in your body, and the wild swings of feeling icy and feverish—I had all of those half-visible symptoms, but not yet a tangible illness. So I simply pushed her away quietly. It was the first time that I had pushed her off of me without it being a mere game of tom-and-jerry, a gazelle and her hunter, a desiring person out of patience and a desired one barring it.

She responded by reversing things on me. In Dai’s language there is no word for rejection. There is always a
naam
after every
no
. I negotiated with her.
Fine, but just a little bit
. I sensed that she was happy but that was just about all I could glean from her reaction. My body was swinging between two opposing states: a half-conscious stupor in which it could barely sense Dai’s pressure, and a doubly conscious one that turned everything she did into a nausea-inducing invasion that practically made me gag. I began to shove her away in distaste, thinking perhaps that the heaviness of my hand against her shoulder would be enough to remove her weight from me.
Enough
! Likely she heard in my voice a sharpness that upset her; my sudden reaction made her ask in surprise, Why? Disturbed and emotional, I answered, Didn’t we agree on just a little? Her face angry—I could see it only imperfectly, through my unfocused eyes—she asked, So, what has been making up for me?

I did not understand what she was implying. Please, Dai, I’m so tired, I said. She was shaking me, emotionally, with that look in her eyes that only a demon would offer.

Answer me! Who touched you? Who?

I was on the verge of screaming in her face, Don’t overdo it with me, Dai. Don’t even think that way. But I also had a contrary emotion, a pressing desire to know just what her limits were, and how excessive she might be with me.

All the details of what happened after that seem unreal when I think about them. Beneath her, my hands bound to the bedpost, unable to move my left wrist, a hell erupted across more than one part of my body. Uppermost in my consciousness at this moment was my shoulder, which must have collided with the floor as she dragged me from her bed, and my lowest rib, where she had used her knee to immobilize me. My breathing was strange, several quick breaths and then a long suspension. I almost choked on a single, interrupted inhalation while my stomach cramped, one spasm coming right after another. There was a pair of scissors—I know it must have been scissors from the sound of them, and from the sharp cold edge boring into my skin, and from the air slapping me. I was afraid to open my eyes until I became aware that she had picked up something from her night table and had bound my eyes with it, snuffing out my sight, leaving me in an unending darkness. She had gotten up to walk toward her desk. I could hear her move; all of my senses were funneled into my ears. I heard the scratching sound of pens in their metal casings, and then she returned and wrapped her thighs around me. She was tearing at my clothes randomly, or to put it more truthfully, in a manner governed only by a wild vengeful anger. I was naked, yet she went on uncovering my denuded surface. She was searching my body for the scent of another, the sticky pollution of
her
fingers, another woman’s betraying mark, the signs of her kisses and her tongue, the sounds of her moaning colliding within the hollowness of my body, the signs that yet another relationship was breaking down. Any tiny thread at all, even if it were a single hair noticeable because it was the color of henna! This is the nature of a situation when it has gone as far as this. It grows vicious. I knew I was her prey, and her anger had doubled its strong push. Now she had my neck encircled tightly in her hands. Tell me—who?!

Hassan’s face took me away, and I saw the warm eyes whose lively sparkle never stopped shimmering under the light nor in darkness. He had taught me how to be a
heroine
, as he put it. Some self-defense strokes based on his karate, with a few street moves thrown in, of the sort that young men are skilled at launching at the least provocation. That hand planted on my neck in anger was no longer hers; now it was Hassan’s hand, stretched all the way around my neck, as he asked me in a gentle voice to sink my nails into the veins at his wrist, my thumbnail to be specific, while letting my fingers curl around his wrist, pressing it firmly into my thumb. He wanted me to press and dig with all the might I could bring to it, even if it took every last bit of vitality that I could squeeze from my being. I am in a real fix right now—that is what he said—and my chances of getting out of it are really slim. If I relax, that means death. Slowness means death. Hesitation means that I die. What situations like this demand is not so much courage, like we generally assume, as the use of that wholly instinctual part of you, the thing that makes cats eat their young and chameleons change color. It is the primitive part of you that human civilization has not yet been able to destroy. If you move fast and without any hesitation, if you plunge your fingernails into the major veins at the wrist, no blood will reach the hand. The veins will be completely throttled and the hand will weaken. The grip will loosen. If you delay, though—and it only requires a hesitation of fifteen seconds, which is the time the body is granted before things start to collapse—you will be the one who is throttled, whose grip loosens, so that you are no longer able to do anything but sense the thread of air that unravels from beneath your collarbone with difficulty. Empty of air, your temples will swell, and the pupils of your eyes will widen at the shock. Finally, your life will be extinguished, you will feel it going out, second by second.

I am sure that I heard Dai say—several times—something like
you whore
. And I’m certain that I heard her crying, and I am sure that the whole thing went on for some twenty minutes. I am completely sure that I am not really sure of anything at all. There is a region in my head, in my memory, which at that moment gave up recording anything, so that at a later time it would not have to attempt to erase it all. My head slipped into the gray recesses at the edges of oblivion, where I can easily manage to not remember something, and where the thing in question appears to me simply as an extremely bad, disgusting joke.