there a lot of them? I asked. And, after a pause, These women are her colleagues? But as I spoke I gave my head a little toss, wanting to show him that I wasn’t much concerned about the answers to my own questions.
Sometimes they all come.
He always seemed aware that when I was asking about her I was anticipating hearing back something more than my question was actually asking. He knows, I thought. Sometimes his answers gave me what I was looking for, going beyond the vague question I would ask in the details he gave. Sometimes I got the feeling that this inquisitiveness of mine toward his mother pleased him.
So I’ll take you home.
No, no—I can get out at the service-taxi stop. I always find a car there to take me home.
Because I always wanted to prolong these little moments of tacit collusion, where we seemed to understand each other without needing the words for it, I would go quiet and he would follow my lead, neither of us saying whatever it was we had been about to say. That’s what I would always do. But right now my fatigue was getting the better of my desire to keep up a conversation about her—that desire I had given myself every encouragement to pursue.
Do you have enough money for the car?
Yes, he said, stretching his body along the car seat so that he could reach his hand into his pocket. You gave me enough, and my mother did too, he said as he shoved his open palm in my direction to show me the wad of bills.
When I stopped the car there, three service-taxis were waiting for their complement of passengers. But he took his time. His hand still gripping the half-open door of my car, he seemed to be having second thoughts about whether he wanted to get out. It only lasted a moment. He turned back to me and asked if I wanted him to stay with me. It was his way of apologizing for getting out of the car and abandoning me. Once outside, having closed the car door, he flipped around again and poked his head through the open window to tell me to wait here so that he could get rid of the splotch that still clung insolently to the window directly in front of my eyes. I wanted to drive off but his insistence kept me there. I watched as he hurried over to the service drivers who were standing together next to one of their cars, talking.
The plastic bottle he was clutching when he returned was more than half full of water, and grubby from so much re-use and refilling. But when I saw the water pouring down against the windshield I suddenly realized how dry my throat was and how thirsty I felt. He had emptied the bottle completely when he motioned to me to activate the wipers. But the stain on the windshield defeated him this time too. I motioned back to tell him to forget about it, and that I would go now.
Illness doesn’t arrive just like that, unbidden, without some prior summons. The rest of the way home, now that I was alone, the onrush of thoughts in my head clamored for my attention as they tried to crowd each other out. Perhaps it was my home that had made me ill. The air I had been breathing was poisonous because it hung stale and still in the closed rooms of that house and refused to leave. Or maybe it was my wife who had brought on the illness. Though she never seemed capable of putting on anything but those worn-out, shapeless gowns that always had a water stain down the front, she never stopped letting me know—merely by the looks she gave me—that this was not how people lived. This life she was living, not knowing how to live any other kind of life, did not please her. Every time I had to encounter her in the narrow corridor, pressing her body against one wall so that I could pass by, I tried to imagine her looking different—some other shape, some other expression on her face—but I never succeeded. I couldn’t even manage to add a little color to her cheeks, not even a smidgen. That wan yellow coloring that she seemed to have sucked in from the recesses of this stale house gave her face a thin, drawn, bloodless look, as if a layer of skin had been stripped away.
She plasters her body to the wall, her entire body, from her backside to the top of her head, as if to make certain that not a centimeter of me will touch her as I go by. When she is coming toward the sitting room where I am sitting with whoever happens to be visiting me, but she is still on the other side of the doorway, she is already summoning me to take what is in her hands, speaking in a tone of voice that is an instant rebuke. The tea tray, she snarls. Or—again, from the other side of the doorway—she snaps, Your father! It is her way of telling me he needs some help from me.
Sometimes I have a recollection that she was pretty once. Just once, when she stood in the entryway to her house, there at the top of the stairs. Mashallah! my father exclaimed as he craned his neck to give his small eyes a closer look. He said the same thing to her father, Sayyid Jaafar, once we were inside their house. At the time, she was twelve or thirteen years old.
Yes, I accept. That is what I wrote back to my father when he wrote to say that now I must get married. She is the youngest daughter of Sayyid Jaafar, our relative in al-Kawthariyeh, he wrote. And that was all he ever said about her, since he did not think it would be proper—as my father—to describe her in any other way. To say, for instance, that she was pretty, or to go into any details about her appearance, commenting on her eyes or her mouth or her voice when she spoke. Yes, I accept, I wrote back, exactly as if I had been standing right there facing him as he conducted the small ceremony affirming the marriage contract. As though I were not, at the time, so far away—all the distance that separated our village in south Lebanon from the holy city of Najaf in Iraq.
I didn’t find her particularly pretty when she arrived in Najaf with him. But she wasn’t like she was now, feeble and colorless. Yet in the four or five years since I had seen her that one time, she had changed. She was no longer the girl she had been on that day. They were strange, those first looks she gave me, long and direct. She didn’t avert her gaze as other girls did. She kept her eyes fixed on me even when I finished saying whatever it was I had to say to her. As though she were informing me, by letting her eyes linger for two or three seconds more on my face, that I had harmed her by allowing them to bring her to me. I began thinking that perhaps she was like me. She was a person who was waiting for another life, even expecting a different life to be granted to her. Or, perhaps like her schoolmates, she was dreaming of a life that would be something other than the life she had lived with her family or the life she would live with me.
That reproachful, even censorious look: she always had it ready for me. When she stood up after a meal to carry away the tray and our plates into the kitchen; when, already at the door, I told her that I was going out; when I opened the door to let myself in after being out. Likewise, when I came to her at night; and then when, after our union, she bent down to pick up her gown from the floor and take it into the bathroom.
In those days—through the entire ten years that passed without her getting pregnant—I used to tell myself that anyway, the kind of union we made wasn’t one that would produce children. When she did begin to have children, I began telling myself that a woman like her would get pregnant only with the sort of children she did finally produce.
When I pushed open the solid iron door that fronts on the street, gating our house, my daughter Hiba was sitting behind it halfway up the steps to the door above that opened into our house, her doll in her lap. She looked up but when she saw it was me coming in, she went back to the doll who was now napping on the step beside her, covered up to her chin beneath a scrap of fabric. She didn’t raise her head when I stopped in front of her or when I spoke, asking her if she had fed her doll. Come. Come inside with me, I said to her, putting out my hand to help her up. But she went on sitting there, occupied with the pair of tiny eyes that rolled open again as soon as she had shut the eyelids with her fingers.
Get up, I said. Come on, come and play with her in the house, she doesn’t like sleeping on the stairs.
When those eyelids went on resisting her she pressed her entire palm down over them to keep them shut, as if to force the doll to go to sleep against its will.
I left her there and continued climbing the stairs slowly, my legs heavy and sluggish. My wife had heard the sound of my steps. I saw her standing behind the door, which was only a crack open, straightening her hijab hurriedly, tugging it into place across her forehead.
What did they say to you?
No one had told her anything,