it had gone on long enough.
As I drove slowly down the road her smile came back to me—now reassuring, now one of acceptance, now sly. What would I do the next time; from what point would I start? I had no idea. What I did know is that whatever I did, I would not lead up to it with words. Silently I would come in. She would be just as silent as she fell back from the door to let me enter. In silence we would sit down on that sofa and after a short interval we would shift position, so that we were slightly closer to each other. Pondering all of this in the car, I realized that I had nothing at all to say to her. Not even a single word. It wasn’t a question of that sort of complimentary chitchat on her health, or about how Bilal was doing, but the other kind of speech, the kind of talk that lovers continuously prepare in their heads in anticipation that there will come a time when these words can be said.
I have nothing at all inside of me to say to her, I thought. Not one word. What I felt toward her as I sat there in my car was nothing more than my own desire for what I imagined the reaches of her body to be, those parts of it I had seen as well as those I hadn’t. To look at each different region of it, my eyes close; and to stroke it as though to confirm for myself that I had achieved that closeness for which I so yearned.
That was it. I was not expecting her to say the kind of words that I should then respond to appropriately in an exchange that would leave me looking at her with some sort of bemused contentment afterwards. The kind of words that force the eyes closed momentarily as though they have to let this dream waft through the mind without anything troubling or corrupting it. The sort of talk that, after hearing it, would give me no choice but to take her in my arms.
I knew that if I could say something, whispering it into her ear so that only she could hear, and something I really meant, it would be: I love every square centimeter of your body. Just exactly like that and nothing more, falling back on vocabulary I had memorized in my schooldays.
My car journey halfway over, as I got farther away from her house I found myself resisting the idea of going anywhere that was a part of the life I knew. Not to the house—not to my home—and not to the mosque where I was also expected to be. Not even to drive through the streets and alleys that I often resorted to in my car when I needed to get away from things. I did not want this dream I had had—or this victory of mine, as I saw it—to be interrupted by anything that was familiar from my everyday life. Still heading toward the house, I swiveled my head in both directions at every intersection as if I was trying to choose the one that would best satisfy my needs. I would move the steering wheel slightly but then as the car swerved I would straighten it out and continue on my way down the main road. Here . . . or here . . . no, here, I muttered as I proceeded on to another intersection, farther on down the road, where I might park my car just off the main thoroughfare if the spot seemed pleasant enough. There, still in sight of the main road, I would just sit in my car, still enjoying the sound of the moving air that I would go on hearing after shutting the engine off.
*
It was not as if I could forget my illness just because something else was filling my head. It would still be there, crouching in the same location inside my body, a mass of matter whose size I could only approximate vaguely by opening my fist and stretching my fingers as wide as they would go. The mass sat there at the bottom of my stomach, quiet sometimes but then growing bolder as though those tiny huddled organisms that made up this density were stirring, and simmering, and then boiling over as some organisms rushed ahead of the rest and brought it all erupting to the surface. When that happened I had to get up. I had to walk, pacing slowly in one direction, and then taking the same number of steps back. Or, when that effervescent struggle inside of me flared up until it became too bad to ignore, I went down to my car and sat inside as the tug-of-war intensified. I would stick the key into the ignition and turn it quickly as though I meant to stay ahead of the turmoil that all of this movement inside of me was creating.
For the sake of keeping myself in the race, I would have to be very quick. As the mass feels like it is ascending all the way to my head, making me dizzy, I try to treat it with my own imaginings that are also fighting each other. Into the midst of it I introduce, among the objects I’m imagining, those shiny little medical instruments that treat you and are supposed to cure you, as well as pills that are tiny but so powerful that surely what they contain must have an otherworldly origin.
Even though I had some sort of premonition that this disease would find me, it was still a surprise. No one among my clan had died of a disease at this age. My grandfather Sayyid Murtada lived so long that he could be heard exclaiming how everyone he knew had died. My uncle Sayyid Aqil was killed by old age and its infirmities, while my aunt Hasiba didn’t slow down at all even after she turned seventy. Every time he saw her approaching our home, my father would call out to her, Slow down! Slow down, Hasiba. You are seventy now! But the only thing that could kill her was one of those vehicles she used to climb into early in the morning to go out to one of the villages where she would spend several days in the homes of people she knew, doling out various fatwas she had memorized. Our venerable grandfather Sayyid Abd al-Husayn was the sage of his era, she would proclaim to her hosts. Or she would recite a fatwa handed down from some other ancestor of ours that went counter to what one of the senior religious authorities in Najaf had decreed—on the topic (for instance) of what was to be done in the case of a woman separating from her husband. They were all ancient, those people she invoked, but they went on living inside the stories she told about them and the things they had said that she passed on. I could not imagine them except as gray-haired figures stooped by the heaviness of their turbans. Alone among them all, I had been afflicted while still at this age. Surely it had happened to me because of my fear of illness. That fear, ever-present in my mind, made it seem as though I was beckoning the disease to come to me, or as though my unshakable foreboding that it lived in me kept it going until it really did become a real disease. Those who came before me, to the contrary, believed a man dies after he has aged. Their bodies believed them. And so their bodies obeyed them.
There are special schools for deaf children, she said.
One of the teachers here had told her so.
I know, I said, as I tossed my car keys down on the side table.
Have you known for a long time?
Everyone knows about them.
Why didn’t you say anything, if you knew about them?
Because the boys are still young.
What do you mean, young? Boys their age started school more than two years ago.
Schools for the deaf don’t take children that young, I told her. I was waiting until they got a bit older because I didn’t want to send them off, and all the way to Beirut, when they were as young as this. Every time I imagined getting them out of the car and taking out their belongings, I would feel such sympathy and misery that I couldn’t stand it. I could only imagine it as a scene of abandonment, with me leaving them alone and in the hands of someone who would not know how to treat them.
You just aren’t interested. Because you never have to listen to them, that shrieking all day long.
I found it odd that she called the sounds they made shrieking. As if the only significant thing about the sounds she heard coming out of her sons was how annoying they were and how they gave her such bad headaches.
Today again they had a fight with the boys. Ahmad came home crying.
Which boys?
The boys, she repeated, as though she had to remind me of what she had just said a second ago.
I mean, which ones, what boys?
I don’t know . . . all of the boys. She was standing in the doorway to the reception room, the threshold she never crossed except when she was bringing in the tray to set it down on the table, after which she always went out immediately.
The teacher said she would go with me, if I take them there, to the school for the deaf.
No, I will take them, I said, putting my hands down firmly on either side to lift myself up from the sofa. She knew this meant I was announcing that I was finished with the business at hand and that she must