FROM: ARABIC
Translated by: Nancy Roberts
It was her panting that drew me
over. I was exhausted, as the new work regime had been sucking every last drop
of life out of us. But my misreading of the situation (what with the cries,
groans, and stifled moans) put some life back into me, and I shot over to her
like an arrow.
She was alone under a palm tree
in front of an abandoned shop and surrounded by her filth. Even though it was
pitch dark in the alleyway, a shaft of light coming from a lamp on the main
street illuminated her sufficiently for me to see her dust-covered face, its
petite muscles drawn taut, and the redness of her eyes as they alternately
narrowed and widened in a painful, mechanical sort of way as though, in her
loneliness and gloom, she was crying out for pity to the demons of darkness. My
gaze slid down to her hands, which she was pressing against a swollen belly
beneath threadbare garments. When she saw me, she went quiet all of a sudden,
gazing at me with steady eyes, and with a face as cold and expressionless as a
mummy from the age of the Pharaohs.
Then, in utter innocence, she
said, “Can you deliver the baby…? It’s going to split me in half. I’ll die if
you don’t!”
Without thinking I asked, “Why
don’t you go to hospital?”
She gave a dark, heavy smile. “I
can’t walk, and I don’t have the taxi fare. Besides, I wouldn’t be able to pay
the hospital. Everything costs money.”
She let out a faint meow and then
passed out, babbling like a drunkard. I didn’t know what to do. All I had with
me was five pounds for the bus ride home, and it was ten-thirty—just half an hour
before curfew. I was so worn out from sweeping and mopping the cinema, I
wouldn’t be able to pick her up and carry her on my back. And even if I did,
the hospital wouldn’t admit her. After all, there isn’t a hospital in this
country that would treat somebody out of the goodness of its heart.
A voice whispered inside me. I
couldn’t tell if it was the voice of an angel or a demon.
“What’s with you?” it said. “Her
Lord and Maker can find her a way out. Just take care of yourself now. Curfew’s
in half an hour. So, hurry up and catch the last bus. Then come back tomorrow
morning, and you’ll find that she gave birth to a big cockroach. It’ll be
sitting next to her checking out the world with its antennae and its beady
eyes.”
Then I had an idea: to try
carrying her to the sidewalk along the main street. A patrol might find her and
take her to the cells, then bring her a midwife or a doctor who’s paid by the
government.
But before I could do it, the
curfew patrol took us both away.
The doctor might have been right
in part. She was dirty, filthy even. She reeked of the discharge caused by a
sexually transmitted disease, and the stench was piercing, unbearable. So the
doctor instructed the cleaning lady to remove her pubic hair with its crabs,
foul odor, and rank secretions, wash the area thoroughly with warm water and
carbolic soap, and apply Dettol.
Then he went to the sink and
vomited up everything in his gut, cursing the day he’d decided to study
medicine, gynecology, and obstetrics.
“Help me, please,” the cleaning
lady said to me.
“I’m dying,” said the girl.
“Die, then! Die!” the cleaning
lady lit into her furiously. “Make it easy on us and on yourself!”
Parting her brown legs, soiled
and spotted with sores, the girl fell into a semi-coma, surrendered to the labor
pains and the pleasure of travail.
When its front claws
appeared—small, white, soft and smooth—the cleaning lady and I were startled,
immersed in a dense, phantasmagoric trance that was being imprinted on our
consciousness by the reggae music wafting in toward us from the health office
next door: The squeaking of rats, the roaring of the sea, the cawing of black
crows, the gentle rustling of the towering palm tree outside the window, a
sudden clap of thunder, vague chatter filtering through the pores in the walls
and the spaces between the beds, pieces of heavy white fabric, bloody cotton
pads scattered here and there.
We felt cold all of a sudden as
we saw its rectangular head emerge into the room, its tiny black whiskers
drenched in sticky, translucent, jelly-like mucus.
The cleaning lady said to me
later, “I felt things glowing, as if bright little moons had landed on them.”
I said, “When that happened, I
was filled with eerie-sounding, weighty talk that I couldn’t understand. It was
choking me up.”
With a final contraction, it
popped out, nimble and energetic, as though the strains of the reggae music
were giving a rhythm to the flow of blood in its newborn arteries.
In my statements to the
Department of Criminal Investigations, I told them that the Qur’anic chants,
the cooing of the doves, and the hymns of adoration hadn’t been coming from a
specific source, and that we couldn’t possibly claim that any of us would be
able to put Time’s standstill to music.
At that moment, the palm tree’s
ripened fruit fell, a nightingale sang, and a star that had illuminated the
world’s Eastern reaches tumbled to Earth. Opening a pair of bright black eyes,
it shook the mucous off itself in a series of violent jerks. Then, as others
can attest, it barked and leapt through the window onto the sidewalk outside.