The Others (3 page)

I was bent on distraction. There was nowhere safe to turn but Hiba. Can you loan me a pillow? I asked her. Ever since that night of mine with Dai, I had not touched anyone in any way, except for those cursory handshakes that my meetings at the Hussainiyya demanded, or the grasping of hands when I met up with one of my friends, someone I hadn’t seen for a few weeks or months. I held myself back, not kissing them, and I made do with letting them plant their kisses on my cheeks. Even my own body—I didn’t even touch that! I averted my eyes from others, from other women whenever anyone came near. I was completely drained and exhausted by my fear. I closed down my senses; I was terrified of what I might discover in my body—what else I might find in addition to what Dai had already revealed there.

I needed to be near to Hiba. I needed to touch her and I needed her to disclose to me that there was a place in myself that had not yet become soiled. That the cravings which had passed through my body were not a flaw in my physical chemistry that would lead me to commit the offense a second time, and then a third. I needed Hiba’s body to be close by, and I needed to find that nothing had changed about what I felt toward it, or my ability to look at it without framing it in sensuous physicality. I needed to find that I could brush against it without the blaze of my lust flaring up. Hiba was in a state of noisy excitement, showing off her new possessions, and so she completely forgot to answer my question. She finally managed a laugh, and said, Bring your own pillow or else pay me for it in advance. Nothing is free, gorgeous! I laughed just as smoothly in response.
Ya hilwa inti
! Speak for yourself, gorgeous! Then you’re selling me the pillow, not renting it out!

I do not have a pre-existing framework that allows me to define exactly what Hiba was in relation to me—or in relation to anyone but herself. It is not a problem of ignorance as much as one of knowledge, or more accurately, what my own scheme of knowledge about people is. That is, I tend to be attentive to particular details about people, their finer points which are the traits least likely to draw the attention of other people, and which probably do not mean much of anything at all. For example, the fact that some guy really likes the European football league and the Liverpool team, or that some girl has a room painted the color of cappuccino froth, even though I don’t know who is on the Liverpool team or what its history is, or anything about that girl’s room except the color of the paint on its walls. I wouldn’t set much store by the guy’s or the girl’s other details, facts which appear to people other than myself more important, more worthy of committing to memory, more appropriate to circulate: how many brothers and sisters they have, what their fathers do for a living, what their mothers are like, what their skin tone is, and what the names of their friends are. This means that I do not often have the correct answers when faced with questions about one of my friends, like How would you describe her facial features? Is she from a wealthy family? Her sister is studying medicine in Bahrain, right? She’s reserved for her cousin who is going to marry her after he graduates, is that so? Even I do not understand my particular brand of selectivity when it comes to details; I do not really fathom how it is that knowledge of others, as I gain it, is in the end so abstract—pointillist, if I can put it that way. When asked such questions, the most I can offer are vague and approximate answers, reserving for myself the truth that I do not know, and that anyway, I do not care that I do not know! I do not really see anyone, I guess. That is the truth in its simplest and starkest state.

My relationship with Hiba was a cacophony of memories—long silly conversations, meeting at the Basta market every Thursday, walking along the water, staying up late together when we had the next day off from school, and the walking stick of a grandfather from whose trunk our branches sprouted. We cooked up things that no one but us would possibly take the risk of tasting. We stuck a cardboard plaque on the door proclaiming our names as owners of the room, or to be more accurate, as an owner and her live-in partner, and of course the first of the pair was none other than me. True, I scoffed at some of her craziness. This human being appears natural but she drinks her tea only after it grows cold, reads the newspaper starting at the back page, and bathes in icy water even far into a wintry night for no reason but to spite the cold.

We were two lines that never intersected, and only rarely did we manage a little miracle across which we would truly come together. I am slow, apprehensive about everything, and perpetually suspicious. Hiba is an explosion always in the making, its echo never silent until she has scattered slivers everywhere. She is always on the move, rushing in absurd directions. She considers it an unforgivable waste of time to think twice about taking any single step. She appreciated her life, which as she described it was simultaneously empty and full, whether that life was on its way forward and upward or whether it was heading in reverse to careen downward. Every breath is a sacred blessing from God, she would say, and so why exhaust it in noisy irritation over things we cannot help?

It was natural that we would differ. Everything about our two lives diverged. Only occasionally did my family assess me on the basis of my studies, my volunteer work, and whether I was well-behaved or in a good frame of mind. My uncle and his wife, however, appraised their Hiba according to anything and everything that would enhance her opportunities in life—and according to them, life was summed up entirely for a girl in marriage. As they would always say, My Lord protect her with His shielding Hand. Thus, Hiba’s value plummeted every time her weight increased a few kilos or whenever she stopped accepting invitations to weddings and other social occasions for a while. It had all become harder since her decision to stop her studies after successfully finishing her first year of high school. At first, her parents paid little attention; it did not seem to bother them. In recent years, though, university study had newly become a near-universal condition on the list of desiderata for any respectable marriage, and so they wanted her to continue. However, their attempts made no headway in convincing her to return to her place in the high school classroom (and nor did mine, even if our goals differed). She would come up with excuses; she claimed she could not possibly sit at the same tables as children. Anyway, she said, her mind had grown too lethargic to be awoken by the riddles of mathematics and the enigmas of grammar.

The two of us were neither complete opposites nor very much alike. We were a pair of unlike territories, and only proximity linked us, while we had no shared topography to unite us. The yield? When our shared stock was at its highest, the indicator pointed to no more than one in ten fingers. Yet, true to her name, since Hiba means Gift, she gave me something which all the accords and alliances of this world are powerless to give: abundant security, in the shape of a soft, open hand; security crafted frequently like a bar of chocolate, or lit up on a screen where waves of color surged.

Why are you so down?

We’re all colored gray around this time, every year.

At the approach of the New Year, the whole world wears a dark grayish overcoat, the whole world grumbles and weeps, and the cold etches lines as long and as wide as it wishes, the scratches crisscrossing along my bones. I had just put on a recording of Fairuz and my hoarse voice followed and soared above her Lebanese warmth.

How often people

at the crossroads see people

and the world goes wintry

and they carried off my sun

and here I am on a pure clear day

and no one sees me

Though I envied Fairuz’s voice, hearing it against my own scratchy one, which emerges from a throat that is like an ice grinder, I did not dare enter the paradise of her voice and forget myself there. Or perhaps I already saw myself there. Hiba’s face took on a clouded-over byway, her features displaying a query composed of twenty question marks. So what’s the matter with you, huh? I opened a secondary road in the conversation to avoid falling into the trap laid by her expression. I posed a question about what I could possibly hope for in any period of time, ranging in length from about now until the end of the year, and then I rushed in to answer my own question.

God would be treating me really well if Hidaya were to be pulled from my shadow.

Does she annoy you?

I’m tired of the whole thing! I’m bored. It’s all absurd.

This wasn’t boredom, though. It was the overwhelming fatigue brought on by wasted efforts. For every single occasion we concocted the same arrangements: the hollow glamour and pomp at weddings and the gloom at funerals, the words of presentation to which no one listens and whose sense no one understands, the faces that never change, our closed and narrow meetings where nothing new is ever brought to the table. As soon as Hidaya would demarcate the event’s theme or focus, and parcel out the roles that each of us would play, we would claim to be hugely busy taking care of extremely serious tasks. Every new idea was a locus of doubt and suspicion. Everything that overstepped some boundary ended up in the wastebasket. I do not understand what we are doing here, then!
People won’t accept it
were the doom-laden words that would overpower the simple wooden dais on which we acted out our naïve and repetitive thoughts and ideas.
Fear God by fearing to wrong his people
, we would hear, and the pronouncement would flatten our voices before they even came out of our throats, to resound and tremble through our consciences as if signaling a private hell.
Beware of the zones of evil
. That sentence sent blindness into my eyes and uncertainty into my heart.

I was completely exasperated with Hidaya, to the point of getting a little bit mean and sneaky in my dealings with her. What happened was that in some newspaper I found a report on the suicide rate in the country. I read it to her. The number of cases had reached five hundred and a third of those were from Qatif. Three-fourths were young women, most of whom were legal minors living in very reduced material circumstances. Was this not a problem that deserved somebody’s attention? I asked. This is a Hussainiyya, she responded, and not a Social Services Center or a volunteer center where people can call in their emergencies for free! The utter scorn in her response stunned me, especially since this wasn’t her usual style at all. I kept silent. But she made a bad situation even worse: she added more moisture to the clay, as we say. Two days later, my mother was telling me about Hidaya’s phone call. Hidaya complained about me to my mom, grumbling about the way I did things, about my impetuous ways and my desire to change the world with a snap of my fingers.

Hiba knew that when I started talking like this, chattering fast, my voice resentful, I was bent on escaping some anxiety rather than making my way patiently across its winding turns. Relying on her knowing this, I could be certain that she would spin out the thread of my chatter without breaking it—if, this time, she had not disappointed me and done just the opposite.

And you are not brave enough to leave!

Do you really think that?

I envied Hiba her ability not to care. Her view of things was that whatever does not give you double the enjoyment compared to the effort it drains from you does not deserve any of your brainpower. It follows from this that Hiba thought I did not invest my time well. Time is a life passing, and a life going by is not the hand of a clock that returns to make the same circuit over and over again. Yet, as sharp as she was about anything she saw as a colossal waste, she did not put me on trial. She was never in a big hurry to show how distasteful she found it when I emptied into her ear my weariness with the tone-deaf region where I stood. She did not spout eloquently composed pages of highbrow critique on my behavior or outlook, although in her view I was heading in utterly the wrong direction. I was always aware of her ultimate and decisive solution to anything.
Get used to it or get out
.

I would explain away her canned response to my complaints on the grounds that she had never had the experience of giving to others, giving to the community, something she had produced through her own efforts, something she cared about, in the way that I believed, at the time, that the world would become a more pleasant and better place if we rubbed and polished its outer skin a little, if we plunged a random hand into the world’s brain, wherever that was, and reorganized things in there just a bit. The path to God is clear and unobstructed, so why do we always find ways to open new potholes at some points on the road, while we pile up the dirt and create new obstructions at others? That way, we squander the chance that each person has to find his own particular map. Does not God say in His Holy Word, Wheresoever you turn, God’s face is there? Hiba’s response to all of this was to thump my empty head sharply, as if it were a watermelon, tapping out its long-running delusions and phantoms. Wake up, girl! A time will come in which you will be exactly like one of those dust motes that you try to wave away but you can never get rid of. You will become another Hidaya—whose name, after all, means
Guidance
.

Always before when I had heard this notion of Hiba’s, I would not let her get away with it, but now I would find myself asking her, You think so? I was making a serious attempt to alter the face of the world, but it looked like it was only my face that had undergone any change. Now I do not have so many questions that move with the speed of a 260-mile-per-hour wind; I very nearly have nothing left within me. Who gives me the right to be so adrift? So rebellious, such a harlot, an
aahira
, arriving like a prophet who has no miracle to show, who grasps the microphone and with a quasi-artificial humility and a tremulous conviction, speaks to others on the subject of God?

I stared at the wall, on and on, as I traced Fairuz’s voice with my own. Gradually her voice faded and my fragile voice could no longer hold onto any substance. On the edge of words: that is where I found myself, thinking something that took me by surprise and filled me with dread. I could not leave enough room there for Hiba to descend into my hell. Rather than letting her in, I would have to give myself an extra layer of protection; I could not drop the veil of my pretense in front of her. Angels cannot possibly fall from the height of seven heavens after a single little error, and was I not Hiba’s angel?