The Others (21 page)

So you weren’t in touch after that?

There were only the family occasions, which didn’t give more than a superficial glimpse of her. I was as far into despair as it is possible to be, and I was also stupid enough that I practiced total self-denial for her sake. At the time, I believed that the mere thought of allowing someone to touch me was a betrayal of Nadia, let alone the act of it. I wanted revenge on her, though! I wanted it so much that I began to conjure up new and false friendships in front of our friends in order that my fabrications would reach her and stir up her jealousy. I often thought, in my times of weakness and fatigue, that I would get my revenge on her through my body, I would respond to her single punch with two, and I would let havoc rage through my body with one relationship after another, just as she was doing. But I sensed that I was simply falling into the depths, that none of this was any use. Things went on this way for a year or more. Then I admitted to myself that I had to get back to living my life. There was no point in waiting for something that would never arrive.

So what did you do?

Nothing important. I had no interests and I didn’t care about anything. I started two relationships—no, three. I got involved with that sort of people … I don’t know how to explain this to you.

You can try me.

People who are pretty much available. They can give; they have some space in their lives and in their hearts. I resolved not to get really involved in any relationship, not to take anything beyond the surface. No consequences, not even temporary possessiveness. I felt so light. I didn’t have to carry anything. I did not owe anything to anyone. But I was afraid. I found it oppressive to even think about going back in to the dead-end maze of love, and I was terror-stricken by the possibility of again facing isolation and abandonment, as I had with Nadia. My first relationship after Nadia ended in a matter of days because I felt so guilty, and the rest weren’t any better, since I always hurried to put out any live coals before a blast of wind from the other direction could blow it out, leaving me all alone.

And I am one of those who are
pretty much available
?

I don’t know. When I met you, somehow I knew that you and Dai were …

That me and Dai were what?

I saw you looking at her, but you weren’t staring into her eyes. The two of you—well, your eyes didn’t meet, except maybe once or twice. You were avoiding her, very politely, so it was hardly noticeable. But I am very good at noticing these little signs and recognizing what they mean … I knew you would not stay bound to her for very long. There was something inside of you that was free. Liberated.

How would you have known that I was bound to her?

I know Dai. Everyone knows Dai.

So how could you have initiated it, kissing me, that day, if you knew Dai and knew what she was like?

You could call it an underhanded move.

I don’t understand you.

From the way she was acting so pleased and proud, I knew that you were not out of the same mold. I decided that I wanted to help you get free of her, even if it meant pushing you to be unfaithful. She would not accept anyone putting her hand on
her possessions
, I knew that, and if it happened she would either no longer be interested, and she would drop you, or she would go mad.

And then what?

And then she would force her hell down your throat and you would not stay. Are you finding this painful, what I’m saying? Am I hurting you?

Don’t worry about it.

Reassure me. I am pretty dumb about these things. I should not have made you think about this.

Believe me, it is really nothing to worry about. Do you still love Nadia?

Ohh! To say I love Nadia is a very feeble way to express what Nadia deserves. To be honest, my heart is so full of Nadia that it is incapable of really and truly taking in others.

So, what if she comes back?

Don’t make me even consider the possibility. It’s painful.

Would you take her back?

To the very last prayer I pray in my life, I will pray that she return! And you can still ask if I would accept her or not?

And if she were to return …

But she won’t, you know!

How often I have thought that when someone is gifted, the talent they have is a guaranteed treasure with a lifelong warranty. At the height of my energetic teen years, I saw the world as something that exists forever and never knows old age. And now, when I looked at Dareen, what came to me was that she was just another person who showed all of her confusion as she spoke, as she searched in the depths of memory for some logical procession of thoughts, some way to connect the places of her own little history. She looked for the sentence that she ought to have been able to fling out in silence’s face but was not strong enough to say. An ordinary person stripped of the advantage of her talents, with a story lacking wholeness. I considered this. Just because you are gifted, I thought, does not mean that you are extraordinary, or exempt from life’s usual rules.

Sometimes, we love for the wrong reason. Other times, as in my situation with Dareen, I did not love, also for the wrong reason. In truth, Dareen is the sort of person who makes you feel that she deserves every breath of life, every moment of existence, every divine gift, every love that anyone is capable of giving. But I was not yet capable of loving. I was not capable of setting myself free for that towering height.

I can come up with interpretations for it, sure. Love is a fantasy, love is a state of attrition, love is persistent, incessant. Love is a maze with no exit, love is … so, yes, I have many pathways I can take to avoid really saying anything about love. Speaking truthfully, I’ll say that there is no truth in any of these interpretations, no truth but fear—this ancient and acidic infusion, fear, which etches painful things on my heart. Love is painful, and all of the words paired with it are parallel states that do not intersect with it. Love and loss, love and flight, love and absence, love and sorrow. I surrounded myself with more walls and steel and trenches, and it was hard for love to come creeping in, alone, without an invitation, and to break through all of my barbed wire. I had never filled up on someone before. I had never allowed anyone to be a daily part of my life. I had not loved enough. That is because birds do not visit fields where scarecrows reign.

With Dareen, I felt I had enough reassurance to set my heart down next to us on the table, without having to fear that she would steal it if I stopped paying attention to it, or to her. Not because she could not steal it, not because she did not want to steal it, but because she had understood instinctively from the very beginning how badly I was a losing mare in this race, and so she spared me a lot of hardship by placing no bets on me.

With Dareen, I began to rediscover my body as if it were something new. She would lure me slowly, lighting two candles and whispering scandalous things that made my skin tremble to hear them. She stayed neutral when there were wars between me and my body, even though I sought to embroil her in those conflicts between us. The parts of my body had their names, one by one, even the most secret; our moments had their private and special expressions; and what I would have believed was a cheap expression unbefitting to Dareen and her immense daintiness turned out, I discovered, to provide a kind of grimy tonic. Who said that mire does not touch or arouse you? Our physical relationship was
sex
, and not what I was used to calling it, allusively and euphemistically:
that
.

We talked a lot about Allah and our sins and the form our desires took. Often I hurried behind Dareen to shut whatever doors she walked through, which she left uncomfortably wide open for me, beckoning me to venture into regions that left me feeling unsafe and always on the brink of falling. Yet she would reopen those doors soundlessly after me. If God created me like this, she would say, what fault is it of mine? In turn, I would ask her, How did God create me? In what form did God make me? Does God create things that are defective, corrupt, depraved? She would scold me then. There are truths, and there are realities, and there are prejudices, and you absolutely must not mix them up. I did not understand her properly. As time passed, though, I did come to understand; layers of opacity were peeled from my eyes. Fine, I would say to her then. I’ve had homo sex. But I’m not a homo. The constitution of my desire is not … I would look her way and find her smiling indulgently, but I would go on. I don’t mean that it is wrong, I would say. If I were really like that, then it would be my business and I would be responsible for handling it, period. As I said this, I could see that she was laughing.

Don’t apologize for what you’re about and what you believe in, she would say. And don’t try to justify yourself to anyone! So I would ask her, Is it bad for me to say to you what I am about to say? That what I really yearn for in you is a man—a man who will never show up.

She would respond only by saying, Don’t turn your desires into a criminal offense. Don’t criminalize your needs, either.

In most of Dareen’s conversations, Nadia was the topic of choice. What happened that last time? she would ask. Why did our relationship end? How did it end? I love her, I don’t love her. Dareen’s vast ability to hatch questions like these irritated me, for the questions were inexhaustible, and every question produced a hundred new ones branching from it. From the evocative expressions that lined her face, and from her questions, I believed that Dareen did carry an image of what had happened and what it meant, and she was trying to make it fit some image of mine even as the form that my responses took did not change. I continued to probe with a few words and a lot of obstacles that stopped me, until there came the day when I said to her, Didn’t you tell me before that you are not so concerned about every detail of what happened?

Yes, I told you that.

But that isn’t the way you sound!

You left the door open for me to walk through.

I
did?

Yes, you. Haven’t our conversations about Dai and your relationship with her bothered you, even upset you, starting with the very first question I put to you?

Yes, a lot!

Even so, you didn’t tell me that.

I don’t understand what you mean!

Yes, you do understand. Don’t expect others to be firm about respecting your limits if you yourself are not firm about them.

She never returned to the subject. I was sure that she had a secret crystal ball that gave her the appropriate answer to every question I would put to her, and the perfectly crafted, controlling sentence with which she could keep the wheel of conversation moving in the direction she wanted. I did not know whether this certainty about things was something she had possessed since earliest childhood or whether, like me, she lost herself with every next step and then found her way again only after a certain amount of time had passed. Time, time, time. Cursed, this time! I was the one who always chanted that song: The snow came and the snow went … twenty times snow came and went. The more grown up I say that I am, the more mature I become, the more I fall back on the sensation that I am only a little girl whose dress the breeze plays with, making it fly.

Life is nothing but a reflection of you, my mother says. And I reflect on whether her words are correct. Everything my mother says is right, of course, but why is my reflection as contradictory as this? A wounding reflection that sends my face back deformed when I look in my mirrors. Another reflection in Dareen’s eyes, that of a lost child searching for a hand that will pull her out of danger. I experiment with the idea that my mirrors are not muddy or cloudy or distorted, that my reflection on the watery surface of life does not wobble, torn up by twenty rocks that poke up through the water.

¹
An engagement gift, traditionally of gold. Usually a heavy gold necklace.

Believe me, the only truth that exists in the whole world is the one that you are living and that I lived: the absence of my father. Not the glory of his heroism, nor the wide expanse of his guardianship, but his absence. As far as I was concerned—me, that little girl whose heart was a series of patched-up holes, a heart rent with overwhelming feelings of orphanhood—these were nothing but useless words and fantastic myths by which I was rocked to sleep. These were the things my grandfather would tell me, his beard moist with the tears of a white dawn, or my mother, whenever I tired her out with my questions and my digging for answers.

When he went away, my mother told me, I did not sleep, not for an entire two days. She would wrap me in something that held one of his scents to quiet me because I would not stop crying, as if I knew that his traveling concealed a black fate for me. He did not return. For eight years on end he did not set foot over our threshold. He was on a trip to Iran to arrange his affairs there, and from there he would come back to collect us. When he did come, they exchanged his home for prison bars, and his bed for a tattered old blanket.

The world was a place in revolt. Qatif was afire, smoky with the bombs of
… ya Allah!
The empty Pepsi-Cola bottles, the squares of white cloth, a tank of kerosene, and there you had it, flaming missiles and everything in splinters. It was a very simple and small intifada, when what everyone wanted was something on a grand scale to overturn the balance-scales of the world. The Iranian revolution was sending blinding rays into everyone’s eyes, and offering them a shining display, a structure to emulate. I will never understand what happened after that, what came to a boil and bubbled over. What was it? What caustic blend of elements changed the face of Qatif? I do understand perfectly that I lived one of its very worst nightmares
.

And I no longer had a father. Fathers do not inhabit images, the pictures we possess, or the tales that others tell. I remembered nothing of him; he had gone away when I was still a crawling baby. Because God is very merciful and erases from our lived days our earliest memories, my father was, in my memory, only a blank, dark space. I grew older, my grandfather treating me compassionately in my fatherless state and my mother pitying me, and pitying herself, sorrowful over our aloneness, over the confinement of her shadow with no one to shoulder her burdens. Meanwhile, my father’s brother acted as an unending treasury to be spent on hosting guests.