Qissat (17 page)

Thanks to the air conditioning it wasn’t too hot and I no longer needed the handkerchief I’d been holding when I entered the hospital to wipe the sweat off my face. It seemed to be fine now. But then, when I noticed the faces of the people around me getting longer and longer in response to their crying children, I began to sweat again in embarrassment and confusion. From the start they hadn’t looked nice, or not normal anyhow, and then I realised that they were all families waiting with me – a father, a mother and a child or several children – and I wondered if this was a children’s hospital and I’d ended up here by mistake, or if it was pure coincidence.

There was a secret deal being made. I saw from the look in their eyes how its main points were being relayed wordlessly from one to the other, but I couldn’t understand – it wasn’t a deal so much as a conspiracy being forged behind everyone’s backs, mine, the children’s, the doctors’ and the nurses’. Before long I witnessed with my own eyes the children joining in this conspiracy. They’d all suddenly gone quiet and were burbling incomprehensibly, making sounds that didn’t seem childlike in the slightest, and tugging at their mothers’ dresses or their fathers’ trousers with a disgusting kind of neediness, which filled me with fear, while their mothers’ and fathers’ faces continued to grow longer, and I wondered if things would go on being this slow here for ever.

I longed to see just one doctor or nurse. The place was hard and austere, and the only person to appear on the first floor, where I was sitting, was an official of some kind who was presumably in charge of allotting patients to the appropriate consultant. This character alone was enough to make you depressed. The way he treated you, you’d think you were there by force. I swear if you talked to him this dead weight would descend on you, and you’d become the heaviest person in the world. Maybe I haven’t described him very well, but all I can say is that when I was registering my personal details with him he dragged me right down.

As I sat waiting, a very fat woman came in on her own. I laughed a little to myself, imagining she’d already encountered that official, and been as thin as me beforehand, but secretly I was pleased that she’d come on her own like me, and felt glad when she sat down next to me. But then, having fiddled nervously with the contents of her extremely small handbag, she left again almost at once. We didn’t know why she came or why she went and she never even reported to the official at all, although you were meant to on arrival.

Only then did I think of leaving myself. I couldn’t stand it any longer. I remembered I’d been in a hurry when I first came, and wondered how I could have managed to forget. The children’s eyes mocked me, and I thought they’d try and stop me, and figured they were strong enough to do it. So I looked back at them defiantly, determined to go, then stood up to show I meant it, although inside I was anything but certain. I was shocked to find they all appeared normal, the children just children and their parents not unnaturally elongated. I’d been really unfair. I felt embarrassed to be standing up in this stupid, meaningless way and wished I could sit down again without anyone noticing.

But standing was preferable, as I found out when I did sit down and they all reverted to being as they had been, or in fact even sillier and uglier, their eyes smaller, their noses puckered and wrinkled, and their faces frighteningly long. I took out my mobile phone without stopping to think why and they all turned to look at me. I had the impression they were begging me not to use it, and they moved their eyebrows imploringly, humbly.

I leapt acrobatically from the window and landed in my father’s car, or rather in the car boot. My father had been waiting for hours, even though we didn’t have an arrangement. He didn’t remark on my lateness, which had been a waste of time anyway, since I hadn’t seen a doctor, but now I was safe here and nobody would see me, not even him.

The sound of the waves coming in through the window started to fade until the shutter was completely closed.

On the bed facing the window lay a woman in love for the first time. Her body is stretched out under the mild influence of drowsiness. With her back, she faced the room and the man she loved. He faced the rest of the room with his back. His face was turned towards the waves passing by the window.

Later, the rumble of a plane joined the sound of the waves trapped outside.

She did not know where his hands were after he had closed the shutter; she needed them at that moment but did not ask for them.

He suddenly approached her and covered her.

He covered her body well.

After he wound the cover around her feet, he climbed onto her back and said without particular desire: ‘My love, please don’t go.’

And she answered with artificial warmth:

‘Maybe I won’t …’

‘Maybe not’ has the same probability as ‘maybe yes’, but the conversation ended there to the relief of both.

They will search for neutral, necessary words to make living together in the same house and sitting at the same table and inside the same car possible. They will look for the end of their relationship as they would look for the expiry date on a pot of cream. She wanted their relationship to contain every ingredient, and he wanted to protect their relationship from everything, even from her. She is tired and her tolerance of his mistreatment of her has run out. As for him, he is tired, and sad.

She asked him: ‘Are you hungry?’

After some hesitation he answered: ‘Yes.’

‘The chicken from yesterday hasn’t been touched. And maybe some salad, but I don’t want to prepare it.’

‘I’ll do it.’

They headed towards the kitchen, happy to have killed their first conversation.

And because her steps were always quicker than his, she arrived in the kitchen first, while he never got there. The phone rang before his feet touched the kitchen floor and sent him back to the living room.

It was a colleague, who had a big problem with her jealous husband who would examine her body every day after she returned from work to make sure no one had put his hand, mouth or anything else upon her. Sometimes when she would bump into the corner of a table or fall over, she would not think of her pain and injury but fix her attention on the details of the place where the accident occurred, like a good investigator, so that she could convince her judge with the evidence, yet he would never really believe her.

She did not tell him about all that during this phone call but on another occasion, when she had come over so that they could work on an urgent project. And she, the lady of the house, was away visiting her parents for a few days. After many hours of continuous work he touched her breasts, then he started biting her neck like a wolf. And, as she was afraid his bites would leave some marks, she told him about the daily examination.

The onion was the last thing she chopped. After a little salt, oil and lemon juice the salad was ready and he was still on the phone with that bitch he spent all day, every day with. She turned on the cold water tap and washed her tear-filled face, then drank. She did not know why she always needed to go to the bathroom every time she cried and wondered if the same thing happened to all people.

After leaving the bathroom she headed towards her bed and retrieved the book ‘G.’ by John Berger from under the duvet and threw it in the wastepaper basket. The basket was full of his papers. Most of the rubbish in the house was his. In general, he was a good rubbish producer since everything he had could be transformed at any moment into rubbish. Her only rubbish was the usual rubbish that could be expected of anyone, like potato skins or a tin of tuna or, at worst, a paper tissue.

She remembered that the waste basket in the bathroom was also full and decided to collect the rubbish from the whole house and put it all in the dustbin, then perhaps this would give her the feeling of a new start.

As she was carrying the bag along the street toward the dustbin, she began to reconsider discarding the book.

When they met she never used to cook; she used to consume whatever was available alone, without a thought of either him or the children of Somalia. Then she invited him for dinner. Macaroni with mushrooms and cream sauce, and a tomato and lettuce salad. He was ecstatic despite the simplicity of the meal, and from then on she had searched for any occasion to cook for him, until it gradually became a daily occurrence.

One of the passages in the book had talked about the Man who cooks for the sheer sense of taste and the Woman who cooks out of a deep internal impulse to cook. In reality, it was he who had turned her into a cook for the delight of his sense of taste. She put the bag into the dustbin and returned to the house.

He was still on the phone. She set the table and sat at it motionless. Perhaps he was attracted to that neurotic bitch.

He had heard her moving in the kitchen, then heard the sound of the knife falling on the chopping board. He was sick of racing ahead of her to do things just so that she did not exert herself more than necessary. He was aware that he had not seen a dirty pair of socks for a long time. Yet, when he saw her carrying out the rubbish bag, he decided to continue the phone conversation. He did not want to live in terror of her. Terrorist. Madwoman. Disgusting.

How disgusting he was. In the beginning, because she was convinced that she loved him more than he loved her, and because Qais loved Leila more than she loved him and became mad with love for her, they agreed that she would be Qais and he Leila. He used to call her madwoman with perfect gentleness. Then, during the course of time and without noticing it he began to shout ‘madwoman’ whenever he did not wish to understand her.

He could see her back radiating rejection. The phone conversation was continuing without his having any control over it. He really had intended to make a nice salad and for them to have dinner together with a little warmth. He did not know why he could not end the phone conversation. He could see from where he was that she had not put black pepper in the salad. His colleague was now floundering in a cesspit of words, and this relieved him of having to concentrate.

He does not want to sleep with her any more.

The phone call ended.

‘Oh, you made the salad? I wanted to make it for you.’

‘For me?’

She felt her answer was no longer in neutral territory and hastily followed it up with: ‘I was hungry, so I thought I might as well make use of the time you were on the phone. Another time.’

She took her plate. He took his and a deep breath. He saw how the silence would stretch between them, so he tried to revive the conversation once more:

‘She was…’

‘I really don’t care.’

And so that her reply does not initiate a fight that will bring them back together, she lifted her head and smiled warmly.

He was tired of her fights and of her madness, so he smiled back and asked: ‘Could you pass me the salad please?’

‘Just a minute.’

She put some on her plate, passed him the bowl and began to eat, trying to forget about everything except what she was eating. He does not like the way she eats. She eats quickly and with some greediness. He asked her: ‘How’s the salad? Delicious?’

‘Yes.’

The way he asks the question limits her answer to how it tastes. There is also colour. He could have asked her ‘How’s the salad?’ and she would choose her answer. He asks only out of emptiness. A limited right-wing bourgeois emptiness which limits all that is around it. He was still looking at her; she saw that from the corner of her eyes. She lifted her head and asked: ‘Aren’t you eating? The salad is delicious.’

‘Yes.’

‘There is also chicken.’

Salad or chicken or whatever; in any case the food was falling into their stomachs, passing through their mouths.

The first time she saw him was at the fiftieth anniversary of the Palestinian
Nakbah,
the Catastrophe. Before that date she had not even known of his existence. She went with a music-loving friend to a concert for Anwar Ibrahim in commemoration of that Catastrophe. During the interval as she sat assessing the mix of concertgoers she saw a man wearing a blue jacket making his way between the rows of seats.

Three days later she saw him again. And another three days later, as she was walking alone one late afternoon in a street that was suddenly emptied of sounds and cars, while the sun remained high in the sky, its light covering the city and its green trees, she discovered that she loved him.

Now the fifty-second anniversary of the Catastrophe is approaching, and she did not even notice the passage of time. If she slows down her eating, the tears will seep out. Eating quickly held them back, and at this mere thought she almost cried.

He is eating with a deadly slowness. She noticed his precise movements and heard the boring rhythm of the fork colliding with the knife, with the plate, with the mouth.

What entered his mouth had a neutral taste, and all he felt was the coldness of the fork. He ate with a slowness motivated by her greed. He had pleaded with her a thousand times to eat slowly, and she would become mad. To her, such a plea is aimed at erasing her own character. When all he wanted was that she could enjoy her meal. Oh, he cannot stand her, he cannot stand this heaviness. He stopped eating and she apologised in a choked voice and headed for the first door in front of her and disappeared behind it.

Dinner was over.

He will not go after her. He started to collect the dishes and take them to the kitchen, placing them wherever and whichever way he wished. She, of course, would come and rearrange what he had done, as if what he had done was wrong.

He had lived well! Arranged and tidied plates, made lettuce salad and tuna salad and a thousand things before he knew her, yet with her everything seemed slightly wrong. Only she could cook and only she could clean! So let her do it. Why then should she get upset? It is her choice, so she should live with it. Okay, true he is disgusting, but only as a response to her madness. Outside in the world, in public, she feigns brilliance, her madness puts a smile on more than one sad mouth. Many men envy him having her. They could have her, and leave him alone. He is sad and only sad. All he wants is to go out in his car and drive off a cliff, or that this night would finish immediately. Or maybe to embrace her and kiss her, and she would become again happy and mad. She is capable of telling the moon or even a matchbox of how disgusting he is. She may even think that they agree with her.