The sound of a motorbike interrupted her meditations and she quickly moved on, afraid. She feared that the person driving the motorbike was the hunchbacked man from Abu Wadih’s, but he quickly disappeared into the darkness of the street before she could be sure. She kept walking cautiously for a few steps and then the motorbike came back toward her, really fast, as if it were going to run her over. This time she looked at the driver’s face to confirm her doubts, retreating. It was the hunchbacked man. And he stopped his motorbike suddenly. She screamed so loudly that she even frightened herself, but the man didn’t appear to have heard anything.
Maya: What do you want?
He kept staring at her with the same expression he’d had a little while before at Abu Wadih’s. She couldn’t make out any emotion on his face — he didn’t seem perturbed but rather eerily calm. A moment passed before she had the expected reaction to this kind of situation, which is to try to escape quickly. She was more skilled at running away from herself. Facing actual danger at that moment, it took her a relatively long time to comprehend that it was real and didn’t just spring out of her imagination. Despite this late realization, she finally obeyed the urge to escape, running surprisingly quickly given her small legs and her lungs destroyed by cigarettes. The only problem was that she ran the wrong way and darkness was advancing along with her. She wasn’t completely aware of where she was going, she could only hear the roar of the motorbike ringing in her ears as it got closer and closer. It seemed as though her defeat was imminent...
She didn’t know how it happened. Did she fall on her own or crash into the motorbike? But she found herself kneeling on the ground and the hunchbacked man standing across from her staring at her in the same way. She tried to get up but her knees wouldn’t support her. She felt that they were injured but she didn’t look at them and instead kept trying to stand. Suddenly the man lurched from where he was, grabbed her, and helped her get up, but then held firmly onto her arm, preventing her from moving. She couldn’t think of escaping this time, she was staring at the old building in front of her, not believing that she’d arrived here. She was standing in front of Khalid’s old building, all locked up and drowning in the darkness of the street. She remembered how sad she was when Khalid told her they would tear it down soon. Then she remembered the drawer where he used to keep her forgotten things. No doubt he’d made her another drawer in Canada and was reflecting on it with love and care at this very moment while she was here in the grip of this demented man. In this completely deserted neighborhood, no one would hear her if she screamed.
“You don’t recognize me,” the hunchbacked man said in a low, embarrassed-sounding voice. She examined him, baffled; his features seemed to have changed, slowly coming into focus, though he maintained his grip on her arm while he kept on talking.
“I’m Mahmoud, I used to deliver pizza to you from the place at the end of the street when you lived here.”
Why didn’t she recognize him before? Perhaps because she saw him at Abu Wadih’s in another context than the one she was used to. Or perhaps she’d erased him from her memory with all of the other memories she had of this place, in this house where she’d lived with Khalid. It was strange how her journey of escape had ended here of all places. Was it her legs that brought her here unconsciously? Or did he force her to take this particular road? She couldn’t understand anything anymore. She, like everything, was in a totally surreal dream and the best solution would to be to surrender to the logic of the dream until it ended and she woke up...
“Of course I recognize you, but let go of my arm!” She tried to free herself from his grip, but his strong arms held her in place. She didn’t do anything to resist. She merely tried to get some control over her rapid breathing. She didn’t want him to know how afraid she was. She thought that if he smelled fear he would become more ferocious. She read somewhere that dogs could identify criminals by the scent of fear on them and therefore would attack them. From that time on she had a dog phobia. Whenever she saw a dog on the road she imagined it would swoop down on her, not because she was a criminal but because it would smell the fear and guilt oozing from her skin. But she could usually control herself, so she went ahead calmly, thinking that she would trick the dog and divert its nose from the passing gust of fear. Yet this didn’t seem to be of any use with Mahmoud. She screamed without even being aware she was screaming: “Leave me alone, let me go! Are you listening? Leave me alone!”
She noticed that his left eye was twitching slowly and his mouth was twisted downward as if he were trying to pick up a smile that kept falling off.
Suddenly a rattle-like voice emerged from within him: “I love you.” He said this looking at her as if he were waiting for her to say, And I love you too. It seemed clear that for him what was happening was not assault, as she was experiencing it, but an act of true love.
She forced herself to speak as calmly as she could: “Mahmoud, I have to go because my family is waiting for me at home. Let me go and I’ll see you tomorrow. I’ll give you my number. But right now I really have to go.”
He didn’t seem to have heard her and was finishing the conversation by himself. He seemed totally absent but he wouldn’t let her go. Instead he pulled her violently toward him and grabbed her neck from behind. “I know I don’t have money and I’m not educated but I’m gonna make a lot of money and buy a car and get my teeth fixed too — they’re gonna look nice, like the guys you are with. And I’ll order you pizza too but I won’t let you open the door to anyone — I’m very jealous.”
She was quiet for a moment and then something happened that she didn’t expect. He let her go, turned around, and moved away from her, shouting while peering upward as though he were speaking with someone in the sky: “Mahmoud the Monster, Mahmoud the Monster! Listen to me, the Monster is speaking to you, listen to the Monster!”
She remained frozen in place, completely stunned, and watched him move farther and farther away. She didn’t budge until she saw him turn toward his motorbike. Then she started running again, even though her knees were hurting. She heard the roar of the motorbike again and ran even faster, though after a while she realized that the sound was still the same distance away from her, it wasn’t getting any nearer. She stopped and turned to see if he was following her. She saw him in the distance driving his motorbike toward a streetlight and then crashing into it. He reversed and then once again aimed at the light and crashed into it...
After walking for a quarter of an hour down the dark street alone, she finally got back to the Corniche. Dawn was breaking. She bent over the rail and stared at the empty boat, still in its usual place in the sea. She noticed that the sounds of the bombing continued, despite the cease-fire the Israelis had agreed to the day before. No doubt they’ll exploit every second before sunrise to bomb whatever they can. They probably hope that this dawn will last forever, while the people who live in the southern suburbs are praying for the sun to rise again.
Her mind was fixated on a dawn from another time, stuck in her throat — like the empty boat, bobbing in the waves slowly — making it hard for her to breathe.
Originally written in Arabic.
Under the Tree of Melancholy
by Najwa Barakat
Gemmayzeh
I am Mr. Kaaaaaaaa. And I am no one.
I lost my organs, one after the other, and I didn’t do so voluntarily or because of disease or an explosion or an accident of any kind. Now that I’ve atrophied, been pruned and abbreviated into only one of my senses, I wonder regretfully if organ donation wouldn’t have been the perfect choice for someone like me. If I had done it, my organs wouldn’t have gone to waste. Had they all been intact and working together regularly, they would have enjoyed the flattery that the old Armenian doctor would have inundated me with, when I would have brought my organs to him. He would have come to receive them joyfully, repeating in a kind of coughing fit, which changed the Arabic letters ha and ayn to kha in his throat: “Akhlan akhlan wa sakhlan, greetings to the orkhans of Mr. K.”