I was sitting next to him, my hand cuffed to his. We were in the back of the van with the rest of the vans behind us. He knew what would happen but said nothing. He hummed snatches of an old love song over and over. The wind was stinging and there was nothing to protect us from the cold. I began shivering and my teeth chattered. We couldn’t see the road. We talked about Hemingway. In the darkness, I saw him take a comb from his pocket and run it through his hair, which was going white. I knew he dyed his hair to hide the white. Silence fell over the car. In front of us, Ahmed had wrapped his head with a towel. He was moaning. Whenever his guts shivered, his head ached. It was dawn when we arrived and they forced us out with sticks and we sat on the ground, shaking with cold and fear. He was the tallest one. I heard a voice say, There he is, and they beat him on the head and said, Put your head down, you dog. They began calling people in, then they called him in, and that was the last time I saw him.
She said, You know, I got a letter from him before that where he said the whole thing would blow over soon. I said to her that he’d told me he’d never been able to sleep with Mona in his arms and that he used to smack his hands together and say, I’ll get out before the rest of you. He wanted to get out at any price. Mona’s mother looked around helplessly and closed her swollen eyelids over her eyes. She dropped her head onto her short, fleshy body. She signaled for me to come close and whispered, Did he really love me? And I said to her, Of course.
What could I say, what was the point of going into it after it was over, and who knows what goes on inside another person anyway? They say some people are made for love and some aren’t. Others say love doesn’t exist except in novels. As for him, he told me once about a woman whose family chased him away with clubs because he was from a different religion. There was another woman, but she died unexpectedly. He discovered that a third had agreed with her husband to have a child no matter what. The husband was more than forty-five, approaching fifty, and he wanted a child. One day we were out in the sun together and he was distracted by his thoughts. I chatted away while he sank into his thoughts, ignoring me. Maybe he was working it out in his mind. But once I was walking next to him down some stairs and we reached the ground floor when we heard a sharp, quick, continuous sound on the stairs. Then a tall young woman appeared, standing in front of the elevator. Sunlight fell from the staircase windows onto her face. She looked at us and she was laughing for some reason and her hair was wild and her cheeks were red. She wouldn’t stand still. He stepped down next to me and his eyes were on her and I heard him give a hot sigh.
She got up and went to her room and came back carrying a little wallet from which she removed a few sheets of paper and handed me a worn sheet of paper and said, He wrote this poem for me before we were married.
She was always lost in thought and when he asked what she was thinking she said: About life and death. And he wrote:
I am sad, child
sad and alone
I lie in my bed
my cold dead bed
with no one to speak with
with all the books read
with no one to laugh with
with no tears to shed
this is death
but more terrible
for the dead have no thoughts
unless the worm has thoughts
but the lonely man thinks
and desires and gazes and chases
without knowing what he chases
it is life and death
it is not life at all
though I haven’t died yet
quiet! here are steps
human steps
coming closer and closer
are they real? yes! no! maybe!
yes! they ring the bells
I hear the human steps
I hear the human voices
alight with laughter
a friend? more than one