“What pigs?” asked Matta, and then he looked and saw, to his horror, that his flock really had turned into a herd of pigs, all grinning at him. He woke up with a bad taste in his mouth. He couldn’t swallow, his throat was too dry.
A red-haired young nurse came into the room. Without a word, she gave him two tablets and a sip of water. The medicine tasted bitter. When the nurse went out again she was marching like a soldier.
No one spoke to him. Where was Aida? He shouted for her, but it was the male nurse with the fixed eye who came in. At least he was kind and didn’t beat him, like Brother John, but smiled. He held Matta firmly, saying that Aida was far away and couldn’t hear him. Matta wouldn’t eat any more. He was convinced that Aida had been killed. The male nurse tried to calm him, without success. “Bring her here, then, if she’s alive,” Matta shouted at him. The male nurse did not reply, but looked fixedly at him again. Only later did Matta realize that the man had a glass eye.
Matta asked the red-haired nurse why he had been brought here, but she didn’t answer, just turned and marched away. Perhaps she’s a mute, thought Matta.
He was allowed to spend an hour in the gardens to get some fresh air, and met some odd people there. A wild-eyed young man in pyjamas approached him. “I wrote the Bible. I did, I was the one who wrote it!” he claimed. Another man took Matta’s sleeve and drew him behind an old birch tree. “Listen carefully. I know the secret of the factory,” he whispered. His teeth were just black stumps.
“What factory?” asked Matta.
“The underground factory where they make human beings. Oh yes, I know about it, and if the United Nations find out the whole world will explode. Crash! Bang! But don’t tell anyone.” As he spoke, he kept looking anxiously around. Saliva dribbled from his mouth. Then he stood to attention and saluted. “Step forward!” he called. A man in military uniform with a twig tucked under his arm was coming towards them. “How’s it going at the Front?” asked the uniformed man, making the V for victory sign.
“Good morning, Sir Churchill,” said the man who knew the great secret of the factory.
Later, Matta learned that the man addressed as “Churchill” had once been an army officer, but an explosion had blown his wits away.
Two days later, the male nurse came to take him to a large room containing a huge, dark desk. The notice on the door said “Dr Salam”.
A dwarf with a bald patch and a red tie was sitting at the table. When Matta saw him he thought the man looked funny, and chuckled. Then he laughed louder and louder, wagging his forefinger at the male nurse to show that he’d better watch the dwarf, because he was about to do a handstand on the desk. However, the man with the glass eye was not impressed. The mute red-haired nurse was there too, standing motionless by the door.
Matta felt a painful pressure in his bladder. It wasn’t his fault; they had forgotten to let him go to the bathroom that day. He saw a potted palm in a corner of the room, and went over to pee in the container, but he hadn’t finished when a slap in the face knocked him down. Lying on the floor, he saw the male nurse standing over him, shouting something. Matta went on peeing. The jet of urine rose in a small curve and rained down on his trouser leg. The male nurse lifted him, stood him up, and tucked his penis back inside his flies.
The dwarf didn’t do a handstand, but went red in the face and shouted something incomprehensible. The mute red-haired nurse was already bringing a bucket and a cloth. They all calmed down again. Then they laid Matta on a bed at the other end of the room. He was terrified. The male nurse put broad leather straps over his shoulders, stomach, legs, and ankles, and tightened them. Matta felt even more frightened. He could hardly breathe, and thought they had wound a cocoon around him. As a child, he had watched spiders anesthetizing the flies they caught by stinging them, and then wrapping them in silken threads.
“I’m not a fly,” he told the male nurse gravely.
The man smiled. “Nor am I.” Somehow that was reassuring.
“I want to go home,” said Matta, thinking of an extraordinary moment one day at dawn, when he had been alone with his uncle’s sheep. The sun was just rising above the mountains to bathe the hilly landscape in light. The sheep were grazing, and he sat down under an old tree. At that moment, a butterfly tried to emerge from its cocoon which was wet with dew. The butterfly slowly worked its way out. It was a very large insect, hanging upside down. After a while it spread its brightly coloured wings and went on hanging there, swaying in the morning breeze, as if to let its wings dry, and then it glided weightlessly into the air.
The dwarf was standing close to Matta’s head. The mute nurse put a pair of forceps to his temples. The silence in the room laid a cold hand on his heart. Lightning flashed through his brain, he felt his head hitting hard rocks, stars sparkled before his eyes. It was like the time when he had slipped while climbing and a small rock fall came down on him. He clung to the bed and screamed.
When the nurse took the forceps away, his temples were burning, and he felt thick, warm liquid flowing over his mouth.
“He’s bleeding,” said the woman. Those were the first words she had spoken.
“Tell me your name,” said the man with the glass eye in a friendly tone. “Mine is Adnan. What are you called?”
He wanted to reply, “Matta”, but his tongue would not obey him.
The dwarf spoke to the woman, whom he addressed as Kadira, and she put the forceps to his temples again.
There was another flash of lightning. This time it felt like the sting of the scorpion that had once bitten his forefinger when he incautiously turned over a large rock. Fiery fluid chased through his veins, like lava looking for a way out. He flapped about like a slaughtered chicken and screamed, but soundlessly. The man with the glass eye put a piece of rubber between his teeth. Matta was falling apart, and felt nothing more.
He woke up in his little room, with his throat and his temples burning. The friendly man with the glass eye had left him a jug of water on the bedside table.
Two hours later, Adnan came back, helped him to get dressed, and led him to the hospital gates, where he gave him an envelope, explaining that it contained his papers. Then he pressed Matta’s hand. “You can go home now, your voice will soon recover,” he said, at the same time starting off after a patient trying to get out into the street in his pyjamas.
Matta ran and ran until, hours later, he reached his aunt’s house in Ananias Alley. The sight of him horrified her. She wept and hugged him. “It’s all right, nothing can hurt you here, dear boy,” she said. Although Matta was enormously relieved, he was still mute. His tongue wouldn’t obey him, and the sounds that came from his throat were like the hissing of a snake.
When his parents arrived two days later, he ran away. He roamed the rooftops of the Old Town, eating whatever he could find, sleeping in abandoned sheds, and didn’t come back for three days, an hour after his parents had left. His aunt flung her arms around him and told him she’d been afraid he might have fallen, or someone might have caught him on the rooftops and told the police. She said she’d asked her sister Nasibe and her brother-in-law not to come back for a while.
For the first time in his life, Matta realized that there was someone else in the world, besides Farid and Aida, who cared for him.