She squatted next to the tub and took my head, pressing it to her chest. Like my mother, like Aliya, like Grandfather in his moments of tenderness. Maybe I cried again. Fatima raised me up compassionately and wrapped me gently in a bathrobe, embracing me. It was like when my mother would snatch me out of the washing basin, crooning songs of the harvest, tea, and rain:
She would take me joyfully and smell me, as though I were a ripe apple. Then she would kiss me and say, “My God, how sweet is my little Saleem. My baby is clean! My baby is clean!”
Fatima said, “Come to bed, baby.” She stretched me out under the covers for a second time. She arranged the damp hair of my forehead for me, brushing it away from my eyes with fingers like feathers. She kissed me on the forehead and on my nose, and I brought her fingers to the surface of my right cheek, where perhaps the stinging had subsided, where perhaps the red had disappeared. Maybe that was the case since she didn’t ask me about it. Or else she saw it and imagined it was from leaning against the edge of the bathtub. She didn’t ask me about it and was content to repeat her question, “What happened?”
And I repeated, “It’s nothing, nothing.”
After a while, she continued, “I found the club closed, and when I rang at your father’s place, Rosa came out to me and led me away from the door, whispering that something had happened between you two — I mean, between you and your father, Mr. Noah. She said he was lying in bed, drinking, smoking, and shaking. That he was in bad shape. She just told me something had happened between you two, nothing more, and that we wouldn’t open the club for work today. And she said, ‘Go, Fatima; stay with Saleem.’ What happened, Saleem? And why are all the pictures torn like that? You’re shaking.”
“Nothing. It’s nothing. Or, yes, I sinned against my father. I raised my voice against him and behaved shamefully. Do you know, Fatima, that my father never once looked into Grandfather’s face? Never! He respected him and revered him as one ought to. But me, me …!”
“Take it easy, baby. Everything will work out. It’s okay. Everything will turn out fine.”
“No! I’ll never turn out fine!”
“Rest now. Rest, and I’ll make you some green tea.”
I didn’t leave the house for two days. Fatima took care of me as though I were sick. She helped me carry out my desire of taking down all the photos, and she gathered the ones I had shredded into a single box. Sometimes she would caress my lips with her fingers and joke with me, openly flirtatious, “Do you want dates?” The longest that she was gone was to go bring me a pack of cigarettes, to shop, or to visit her sister. I later learned that she would meet with Rosa since she wouldn’t speak with her on the telephone except to exchange a few words, mostly just repeating, “Yes … yes … okay.”
Then Rosa came to me on Friday morning. Fatima had left me on the pretext that her sister needed her that day and that she had to take care of a few household chores like washing clothes, sweeping the floors, and shopping. She said that she would come back in the evening, “and your food is ready in the refrigerator.”
Rosa embraced me and wept as she interceded, “I’m begging you, Saleem! Come with me to visit your father. He’s killing himself like this. He doesn’t eat. He only drinks alcohol and smokes. He sometimes sleeps, shivering and delusional in his bed. He hits his head with his fists; he punches, kicks, and head-butts the walls; he knocks his head against the iron of the bed. He’s destroying everything. He’s destroying himself! He’s in agony, Saleem. I accepted your mediation between us — do you remember? So accept my mediation between the two of you. I’m begging you. He’ll kill himself if he keeps going on in this way. He’s torturing himself because he slapped you, and he isn’t telling me the truth about what happened. He just slaps himself all the time and says, ‘I struck Saleem, Rosa! I’m an animal. I’m an animal.’ Please, Saleem, come with me. Because he’ll kill himself like this. And if something awful happens to him, I’ll die too. Please!”
I went with her, taking along two packs of cigarettes and a heart beating with noisy commotion. She opened the door for me cautiously and whispered, “You go in; I’ll stay here.”
I saw my father lying on the couch in the dark living room. His hair was disheveled. One arm was hanging off the edge of the couch, holding a glass, and he took a drag from the cigarette in his other hand. As soon as he saw me, he rushed over to embrace me. We cried on each other’s necks, each of us asking the other’s forgiveness. He said he was a failure of a father, and I said I was a disrespectful son. “Forgive me! Please forgive me!”
When we stepped back from our embrace, I found him turning his right cheek to me, saying, “Hit me! Hit me!”
“No, Dad! No!” I kissed his cheek and embraced him again.
He seemed thinner to me, exhausted, defeated. I had never seen weakness like this in him before. When we had calmed down, we sat down next to each other on the couch with empty glasses all around and an overflowing ashtray on the coffee table in front of us. We felt more united than at any other time. We felt our loneliness and our true exile in this “fucked-up” world more than ever before.
Now that calm had the upper hand, I wondered whether I should take advantage of the situation by making it a condition of my forgiveness that he abandon his determination to carry out his goal. But I contented myself with leaving things as they were, for I was the one who needed pardon from him. Moreover, I wanted to avoid stirring up the subject a second time.
But during our subsequent conversation, I found myself indicating what I wanted in another, less forceful way, with feigned neutrality. He was the one who brought the subject up when he exposed the truth of his hidden weakness, or more precisely, what I knew to be his strength. He revealed to me the struggle inside himself over this issue, for he was, as he put it, caught between two fires. One of them was what I earlier called his moral and religious heritage. I knew the power of an oath on the Qur’an, especially because he had given it in Grandfather’s venerable presence. I also knew the meaning of vengeance and its importance, to the point of holiness, in our social customs.
The other fire was his private conviction, which suited both his personality and my own, that he, in all honesty, rejected violence and the culture of revenge, and that he disapproved of fanaticism. “Believe me, Saleem, even if I appear in the hide of a wolf, I have the heart of a meek lamb.” He said that if he carried out his goal, he would regret it and torture himself. And if he did not carry it out, he would regret it and torture himself then too.
“You will not regret it, Father, and you will not torture yourself. Believe me!”
“But I took an oath on the Qur’an, Saleem. I made a covenant with my father.”
“It says in the Qur’an, ‘God will not blame you for speaking rashly in your vow.’”
“I wasn’t being rash. I was speaking honestly and seriously in my oath.”
“It was the effect of the moment. It took place during an exceptional moment, filled with anger and devoid of clear thinking. God is great; he knows this and everything else. Grandfather will understand when things are clearer and more open in the world to come.”
I supported my argument with what I remembered from the Qur’an and the sayings of the Prophet, especially when I noticed how easy it was for my father to accept them. It may have been that he, at his core, wanted a justification from this exact source. “The Qur’an also says, If you dole out punishment, dole it out according to what was inflicted upon you. But if you exercise patience, verily, that is better for the patient ones.”