The Others (28 page)

Now, I told him the secrets—the only secrets whose doors I had closed to Umar, who was the only one, with the lightness of his being, to open them. I relived the secrets as I told them, chattering on and on wildly, unsure of whether I could really enable Umar to understand what happened, as it was not a question only of his knowledge of the events. And I was uncertain of whether I could forget them. The attempt absolves us of the failure, anyway, I said to myself.

I made a final point and came to a stop. Umar had said nothing the entire time except little mumbled exclamations that meant he was following my words, plus some questions and comments, just a few, to urge me on. He had made me halt for two seconds as soon as it was somewhat clear where my endless chatter was headed.

I’ll listen to you til the end, he said, but do try to be economical with the physical details.

That’s exactly what I mean to do.

He apologized for being such a lout, as he put it, and explained that it was just not a comfortable thing for his mind to play house to any fantasies about a physical relationship where I was one of the parties involved. It was like imagining your parents in bed, or like seeing the mark of a kiss on his sister’s neck.

I finished saying what I had to say. As I wrapped it up, I was already worried about having to handle a moment of silence that neither of us would be adept at breaking. So I said, with an enthusiasm that I hoped concealed my apprehensions, So, what do you think? Say something!

Do I have to?

Of course you do!

I can’t stand how neutral you are when you talk about all of this.

How neutral I am?

You cannot possibly be neutral and speak with such an unemotional voice when you’re one of the people directly involved. You shouldn’t do that. It’s not right.

It is not right either to get so tangled up in it that my eyes are blinded and I can’t see the truth of what’s going on.

Your eyes are wet, come on. You won’t convince me otherwise.

And here I am trying to stay dry. Dry and detached.

Do you love Dai?

I am not a lesbian. So don’t ask me that in such a tone of voice!

Do you hate her?

No, never!

And Dai—does she love you?

I don’t think so.

Why do you insist on denying the act of love?

What’s the use of it? With love or without it, we got to the same place.

Do you know what your problem is?

Tell me.

You have a kind of belief in yourself that pushes you to reject what everyone else says and does.

I believe in you.

I am your exception, and exceptions do not break the rule.

You know what? Not long ago, when I was talking to Sundus, I told her that I can’t seem to hold on to anything. Friends slip through my fingers like water. Writing stops being a gift granted as compensation against my madness. And the walls of my room are closing in. Everything, Sundus says in answer to me, everything is untrue and invalid except God. She said that everything I do for any reason other than pleasing God’s countenance will rebound against me. I think that is silly. God doesn’t play chess with our lives according to some pre-arranged set of rules telling us to either play every move in a way that accords with what He knows is good for us, or else He will spoil our game.

Her beliefs are of the sort that give her certainty that God is a fixed and unchanging part of everything’s equation, like the side of a triangle that never gets longer or shorter. Don’t deny Sundus her beliefs.

Well, I could say, then, that God chose the path my fate would take, and it is not fair that I have to bear the consequences on my own.

But it is an argument that goes against your beliefs, you know that.

Do you think God will be merciful with me?

I am very sure that God is much better than what we hear of Him. A whole lot finer.

Even if I don’t see what happened as sinful?

You should ask Him before you ask me.

So I would have to wait for a deferred response.

A final response.

You haven’t told me yet. How do you see me?

Nothing at all has changed.

My body betrays me. It hurts—the unfaithfulness of a body that has always been neutral, even in the worst of its histories with me. It has been so balanced that I do not recall even one day when I carried it and found that it weighed me down, nor do I remember a time when I stripped it off and cast it away only to stumble over it. For so long it was silent; when my chattering was at its noisiest, my body just nodded its head to show that it understood. For so long, it was in harmony, perfectly balanced, between hunger and fullness, between a warm embrace and the frost of aversion. For so long I took it at its word, because that is the way it was. It was good to me, and it treated me fairly.

My body pains me, the kind of pain that Panadol pills do not take away, an ache that does not disappear when I try to ignore it. Pain that is like heaviness, as if I am pushing forward with difficulty across a terrain of mud and green creatures that stick to me, pain that urges me to abandon the whole idea of life altogether; a deceptive and complex pain. My head is a bullet hole around which voices buzz and the wind whips. Pain gallops through my head like wild horses. It is a pain that takes up all the space inside of me when it is here, and when it ebbs, the receding tide swallows whole my little pearl oyster shells, my sailors’ boats, their fishes and their fishing nets.

When I turned to face my bedside table, I laughed. I howled as though I had lost my ability to do anything but laugh. I don’t recall laughing like this, ever, except just before going into the operation room a few years ago, when I shattered my arm and it had to be set with a metal bolt so that the calcium would thicken and harden anew. I was in a huge, cold room, intensely white, with lights that were even whiter, and a lot of white coats constantly going by, their hands jerking back the curtains and then pulling them shut again repetitively, but not routinely enough to be comforting. The thought that came to me was that my shroud might not be as white as this room, and I laughed, as if someone was tickling me and would not stop. I laughed. And now, I was reading on my pillbox, in red,
400
, and I was laughing.

The bridge of confidence between me and my illness had collapsed since the scandalous seizure I had had in Hall 24 of Building No. 1. I could not get out of my head the terror on my classmates’ faces, and the curiosity and sympathy that I saw there, too. My illness was kind enough to leave me some breathing room the rest of the year, during which I didn’t have any convulsions worth the name. But the confidence I had had was no more than the translucent negative of a snapshot. I could not glean much substance from that, no more than a single image to keep me going. So it was very difficult to get that flimsy confidence of mine back. Confidence is a one-time thing. When we shatter it, only a miracle allows us to regain it, and for my part, I was not expecting or awaiting any miracle. I was not yet at the point of relying on that!

It was a burning hot summer, and no moisture had yet rained down to split open the roofs of the houses and break the heat on the first of June. I received my graduation certificate. The lady who gave it to me took my university ID, cut it in half, and threw it in a large faded container with other half IDs, lots of them, names and majors and university branches and classes all mixed together. She tossed it in there with no concern about what it meant, and then she gave me the document, smiled, and said, Congratulations.

I left the library where I had picked it up, my throat congealing into a lump of sorrow, and its tightness pushing that lump toward my breathing passages. I went outside and sat down on a wood bench. Salma waved at me. The time had come to act happy and pass on my good wishes. Praise God, who had restored her finally to His grace, Salma said. I said to myself, If only He had not! What is forgiveness, restoration to divine grace? It is nothing but a creepy discharge from life. What will I do now? Where will I spend my days, when there are no places where I can profitably use them, and when the days are no longer precious things to be hoarded?

I applied to volunteer at the nursery school attached to the charity association as a college graduate, though I knew that what they were looking for was high school graduates. I also presented myself as someone who had been on close terms with volunteer work for several years. My acceptance was guaranteed, though I expected to be taking on office work, not twenty-four children who would nourish my desire for motherhood. And with me came the presence of my illness, a presence that made a real difference. No heaven kept its tyranny over me at bay.

I loved my twenty-four children. I loved them each individually, even though I am a person whose memory has a lot of unpleasant collisions with people’s names and who comes up with responses that are always wrong. By the end of the first week I had all of their names memorized. I was put to the test—and I passed it—when I convinced Manaaf to stop using his teeth as a fingernail clipper, and Walaya to stop using her fingernails as weapons of both defense and offense, and Ali to stop using his wicked tongue as a sharp whip, and Iilaaf to stop giving other children her most stinging lashes. The children displayed an endless succession of bad behaviors that triggered more. For the sake of stopping them, I was forced into bribery, looking the other way, and all of the familiar reserve strategies, like putting on a tape. With the children, I believed I was secure, that a part of me had been created for a role like this, an existence like this, an effort like this. Those children helped me to achieve some equilibrium. I strengthened myself through them, and I counted on them to change my mood and re-orient the path of my day in a better direction. I depended on them to create a better person out of me, outside the criteria that people—or angels—apply.

Their reactions to life astonished me. Their little details, the way they closed their eyes, the way they moved their fingers, the particular look that came over their faces when they were trying to get me to understand their need to use the bathroom—it all astonished me. The racket they made at breakfast time arrested me, as did the way their faces screwed up uncomfortably when they drank juice. Daily story time amazed me. They would pile themselves up on the floor, surrounding me from every angle, and try to guess the events of my story, try to touch the storybook. The room filled with their colors, crooked lines and the latticework on the plant arbors. When we finished telling the story they would sketch out the scenes that had pleased them the most. It amazed me when one of them would clap for himself because he knew the correct answer. When I forgot the tin of sweets, I soon saw how displeasure gathered in their eyes and disgust puckered their mouths. They were my little paradise, a heaven that every day concealed a greater surprise for the next.

They made me, the night owl, into a person who drank the morning in from its earliest dawn. Daily, I would wake up with the dawn call to prayer, bathe, dress, listen to my mother’s morning bits of news as we waited for the bus to the nursery, which came at 6:30. It would honk for me and I would come out of the house, ascending two steps with my hand—soon enough to be grasped by little Hawraa—on the metal railing. The minute I took a seat in the next to last row, Yusuf would cling to my jean skirt—always a jean skirt—and yank it—he would always yank it.

But this time that seemed like it would never end was doomed to come to a close. My illness, which had been playing games with me from a distance, was no longer content to peek at me from behind the door or through the window shutters. It had to declare itself, to show up with definite and final demands. It was not a question of the size of the damaged pit in my brain, which was not growing. For me, the important issue about the absence or presence of my illness was how often I got seizures and how bad they were. That was a message I could not ignore. My disease was announcing that it was here to stay. I had to begin taking appropriate measures.

Was my leaving the nursery a precautionary measure? God alone knows. The only thing I know and am certain of is that I could not gamble on the consequences of something as frightening as this for my twenty-four children. Life would terrorize them enough as it was, and I had no right to load their tender hearts with anything more. I submitted a rather misleading excuse to Najat, our director, known as Umm Hashim. My excuse was that I was going to apply for an MA program at King Saud University, and that meant I would have to study English intensively for the TOEFL exam. I was not lying, but I was seeking an excuse. Results were never confirmed until months after the exam, and my English was not so poor that I would have to devote all of my time to it if I took the test. At the end of the academic year, acceptances to the program would be posted without our having to have already passed the TOEFL. My name was not on the list.

Umm Hashim responded to me with her usual kindness, restricting herself to asking whether I would stay until the end of the school year so that my children would not face the disruption of a new teacher. She was holding back the stream of my excuses, meaning to spare me having to justify myself. Just beneath the surface of her sweet, light face, compassion hovered, mingling with affection. It was the same look of concern that I saw in the faces of the other teachers and the women on the cleaning staff.

I knew that talk would fly around fast. My seizures would soon become the stuff of whispered gossip. My spells had been coming insistently, surprising me at any time of day, in the bathroom, in the teachers’ room, and even in the one meeting of the association’s women’s committee that I attended. Sometimes, the seizure was so light that I barely felt it. It appeared in the guise of a lump in the throat, a light choking sensation, or a cold little slap of breeze. It would inject my eyes with tears and my throat with saliva. Sometimes it would repeat itself, with a clear border marking off the waning of one seizure from the beginning of another. And sometimes, it was so violent and intense that it would put me into a faint and wipe my memory. I had not had memory lapse problems before. This new element frightened me. It scared me not to know what had just happened. It frightened me that I had no idea of how I came to be where I was, to have blankness in my mind around the details.