“They want to undo the collars of death around my neck with their tragedies.”
Release the weight against my neck and disappear. I can feel the cartilage in my neck weakening and snapping and pressing down on my spinal cord. Maybe I shouldn’t listen! I want to have fun with you, be entertaining. I want to tell light-hearted, trivial stories. You, on the other hand, want me to write long letters like my rigid old self used to do. My body’s my dictionary now, a dictionary of much more than language and phonetics: a dictionary of this delicious laziness, of all my new discoveries … With every movement I discover another forgotten part of my body, with every action I shed another husk of fear and another layer of material …
The game of masks is over now.
P.S. Me too … I’m also as light as a ghost.
Piece by piece, we die after those we love.
P.P.S. I dreamt of a newborn baby, its umbilical cord still intact, with the following dedication written on its forehead:
To the tiny child who entered the world and left it in a violent termination …
It came and went quietly, no one heard the womb tearing or the umbilical cord being cut.
We neither repudiated it nor did we give it a name …
P.P.P.S:
‘Do I look ugly?’ she said.
And she blew her nose again.
A small smile came round his eyes.
‘No,’ he said, ‘fortunately.’
And he went across to her, and gathered her like a belonging in his arms. She was so tenderly beautiful, he could not bear to see her […] Now; washed all clean by her tears, she was new […] made perfect by inner light […]
But the passion of gratitude with which he received her into his soul, the extreme, unthinkable gladness of knowing himself living and fit to unite with her, he, who was so nearly dead, who was so near to being gone with the rest of his race down the slope of mechanical death, could never be understood by her. He worshipped her as age worships youth, he gloried in her, because, in his one grain of faith, he was young as she, he was her proper mate. […]
Even when he said, whispering with truth, ‘I love you, I love you,’ it was not the real truth. It was something beyond love, such a gladness of having surpassed oneself, of having transcended the old existence. How could he say “I” when he was something new and unknown, not himself at all? This I, this old formula of the age, was a dead letter. […]
[T]here was no I and you, there was only the […] consummation of my being and of her being in a new one, a new, paradisal unit regained from the duality.
(D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love)
I sit down to pray and my heart dives … into deepest sleep to re-emerge, reciting. I can hear you reading Lawrence’s words to me.
I return to bed, where I speak to God so that I don’t forget how to speak. Yesterday’s dream hovers around the edges of every word.
Between consciousness and dreaming, I’m rocked gently by your call, ^. If I lean a little too far, I’ll fall back into yesterday.
With the same sense of surprise.
As long as I don’t turn the lights on, the room will hold its breath and remain in yesterday’s labor pains. Only the clock tells me when it’s daybreak.
I leave my cubbyhole sunk in the delusion of night and savor Women in Love like the taste of coffee mixing with my saliva. Strong nicotine making my hands tremble.
I shine the intimate yellow light of my wobbly lamp on the page and drink the words along with their pallid background. It increases my thirst.
Do we cease to see when love calls on us to come out of ourselves? On the route between the I and the Other, is there some moment of blindness that you can occasionally pass through, but that occasionally stays with you, obliterating the whole universe around us?
One sees and the other is blind; is that how love is put together?
I speak out loud now to reassure the picture I took of myself with my cellphone: “I never said that Ahmad didn’t love me!”
The picture refuses to respond, however.
Maybe running away is love; even hate can be love … But I didn’t flee, I didn’t hate, did I?
I guess that means that my send and receive function is faulty when it comes to love.
When we renounce words, we shouldn’t complain that our interiors shatter into perplexing, repellent stutters.
Maybe we need to train our words to be tender, to flow like water and sink like perfume into the body of an idol; maybe we ought to be born equipped with a dictionary for the words of worship … I don’t know …
Attachment: A photo of the cubbyhole where I sleep.
My bedroom. We call it the cubbyhole because it’s between two floors, carved out like a tomb cut into the space of the dark room below. It weighs down on my chest. The house is just two rooms stacked one on top of the other, with my room in between. The upstairs room was where we slept as a family; downstairs was where my father sat and gave his private lessons.
As you can see, there’s no room in the cubbyhole for a lover. Nevertheless I keep you crammed in here, in the empty space in my head. I stuff you under my fingernails, so I can slip you past them and smell you from time to time, like the body’s first, strongest scent.
Aisha
When Nasser reached Aisha’s signature, he picked up a pen and paper and wrote down the name Ahmad. He repeated it in a long line and underlined it twice. “Another man in Aisha’s life. Let’s see where he fits into the puzzle of the Lane of Many Heads.” He ignored Birkin’s belief that there was “a gladness of having surpassed oneself, of having transcended the old existence” in taking the love of a woman to its furthest end. The sentiment irritated him. It set off warning signals in his head. It condemned his existence, which was beyond just “old.” It was the threadbare existence of someone who’d never experienced the kind of stormy exchange with another person that Aisha searched for in books and in real life, across an ocean, from Germany to a forgotten alley like the Lane of Many Heads. He put off facing up to that thought for some other time.
X-Rays
THE SHOPS THE LENGTH OF GATE LANE WERE OPENING UP, AND THE MUNICIPALITY workers were sweeping the gutters, making the most of the relative quiet to gather up the plastic bags and empty soda bottles littering the road. Nasser stood watching. Their fortitude seemed like a provocation. Faced with those mountains of trash, he would have lost his mind a long time ago, but they just carried on, earning only the meagerest salaries, shielding their heads from the Meccan sun that turned their uniforms to dust. They were there at their positions every morning, their patience solidifying with each movement until it became a layer that protected them from anything that might happen.
Nasser laughed at the sight of the one worker who was using gloves and a gigantic claw grabber to pick up the trash while his colleagues worked with their bare hands. He turned and stepped into the tiny Studio Modern, surprising Mu’az, who had just opened the place and was polishing the front window. Mu’az tucked the cloth away and drew down the wooden counter, placing a barrier between himself and the detective.
“You and I need to sit and talk a few things over,” said Nasser. Being a photographer had landed the young man firmly within the circle of suspicion. The detective had stumbled across a crumpled photo of the dead woman: a high-angle shot, taken from a rooftop through the lens of the imam’s son, whose photographic talents aroused whispers in the Lane of Many Heads (they were careful, however, never to let these whispers get back to his father the imam, so as not to endanger the boy’s chances in that profession in the future).