Yabis the Sewage Cleaner
IT WAS MU’AZ WHO SENT NASSER LISTS OF THE PEOPLE WHO WERE GOING TO heaven and those who were going to hell. In studying these lists, the detective found that the sewage cleaner Yabis was the only person to be excluded, to be left off of both the contradictory rosters.
The children of the lane ran on ahead, leading Nasser to the sewage cleaner who was clearing out the Arab League building’s septic tank. His burly body came into view; he was naked from the waist up and his bottom half was covered by a garbage-colored apron that stretched to mid-calf. The sewage cleaner was busy pulling the hose up out of the tank, disconnecting it, and wrapping it up the length of the tanker truck. Before Nasser could catch up with him, he’d flipped the tank over, ninety percent of which had been cleaned out by the pump, and in the space of a moment, he was swallowed up by clouds of methane. Nasser hesitated for a brief second, but he could see through the gas to the kids pointing to the center of the tank: “It’s Pokemon!”
Nasser was blinded by the methane fumes, his eyes watering so hard he could hardly follow what the man was doing down at the bottom, up to his knees in solid human waste and reptiles, barefoot and without any gloves or a mask for protection. It was as though he’d been made out of this primordial soup as he dug through layers of waste, preparing it for his colleague who scooped it up into a bucket, which was hauled up by the assistant at the surface. He in turn piled it up at the edge of the lane, unleashing a cloud of terrified, terrifying cockroaches in every direction. That’s the truth; it happened before our very eyes. But Nasser’s focus waned. I wondered if he’d begun to doubt whether the entire investigation was worth it, whether it was worth trying to save a neighborhood that kneaded and fermented its excrement so that they could get drunk on methane.
Nasser couldn’t linger at the cafe: he was running away from the eye-stinging, hallucination-causing methane cloud that had washed over my every corner. He felt he’d fallen into some space outside of known time.
When Nasser came back, he was determined to catch Yabis when he wasn’t at work. He headed to the two rooms with planks for a ceiling at the end of one of my narrow alleys. He was surprised to find the front door a half-meter off the ground and open to the alley but for a curtain drawn across it. The green flowers on the curtain reminded him of the violet hem of Azza’s mother’s dress, which was stuffed in the bars of Azza’s window. He could sense Kawthar, Yabis’ wife, moving behind the curtain, which was swaying in the wind. He knocked and waited. Nasser ignored the blank space where Yabis’ mother Matuqa used to sleep. Yabis had kept her bedroll folded up on a shelf beside the bathroom, which was the source of the most horrible odor ever to have blocked Nasser’s nostrils, the smell of human excrement. The curtain was pulled back first to reveal the edges of the sewage cleaner’s new purple sarong, and then the man himself. Nasser tried to ignore the hole in the shoulder of the man’s threadbare tank top — just how much use and sweat that must have seen. There was a smell of camphor in the air, as if a body had recently been washed on the other side of that curtain in preparation for burial. Resignedly, Yabis led him away from the room back toward his tanker truck at the top of the alley. Nasser looked at the end of the hose, which was covered in something disgusting. They sat on a crumbled doorstep, looking out toward the Lane of Many Heads, and without any preliminaries Nasser said: “Aisha was your daughter-in-law? Tell me about her.”
“Aisha was soaked up to here,” he said pointing to the top of his forehead. “A bunch of the kids here learn to read and write, but for Aisha it was like her mom and dad were books. She spent her whole life chasing books. I mean, for a lady. A lady isn’t a lady unless she’s like good soil, willing to receive her man. Aisha wasn’t soil. Lord knows she wasn’t. She was just dust. That’s what made my son’s guts get scattered here and there.” There was no bitterness or blame in Yabis’ response. “And of course she was the only member of her family to survive the accident.” Nasser was filled with a sudden delight that Aisha had been spared. “Would you believe she used to sleep on top of her books? She had an ocean of books hidden under her bed.” The man was sitting directly beside Nasser, unaware of the halo of putridity that surrounded him. Something in Nasser’s insides reacted to the latent smell.
“Did your wife Umm Ahmad happen to see the body?” The sewage cleaner looked at him. It was like he could detect something rotten in his question, the sour smell of an imminent accusation, but he answered anyway.
“My better half Umm Ahmad, the teacher’s mother-in-law, washes the dead. She attends to all the bodies. May God grant you that blessing.” Nasser was stumped. He could only stare at Yabis, holding back his laughter at the thought of a sewage cleaner marrying a corpse washer. It was a case of what you might call self-sufficiency, or self-cleaning, or self-recycling even. The hysterical synonyms swirled in Nasser’s head. A city could try to get by without tradespeople of all stripes except for these two — it would drown in its own disease and dissolution otherwise.
“Men are weak …” The sewage cleaner scanned the two sides of the alley, the people and the shops loaded up with food and toys and products. “All this is going to end up on the bench for washing corpses or down the sewer.” He stretched his hand out to secure the hose against the clip on the end of the truck, and then he wiped his hand on his new towel as a reflex. He left a smear on the purple fabric covering his thigh. “This is all just the earth’s manure,” he said, indicating his entire body. Nasser sensed there was some invisible blemish deforming Yabis’ body despite his good looks. The jet-black hair that fell over his forehead looked like a hump he’d put on, like the torturers who appear to the dead to swallow them up! Nasser drove the thought from his mind and wondered instead what would induce a man to take up a job like that in a time of technology and sewer systems, and in the holy capital, too. Nasser was drenched in sweat, but the sewage cleaner, who said he’d answered the official call for people to perform the job, wasn’t affected by the heat and carried on talking. They discussed the government buildings he serviced without going into great detail, and then he gave Nasser detailed information about how often he serviced the major residences in the Lane of Many Heads. Al-Labban’s house, better known as the Arab League building: “We clean it out every other day. That means, at a hundred riyals for the tanker, it comes to fifteen hundred riyals per month. I knock off two hundred riyals for them so their monthly excrement ends up costing them thirteen hundred riyals a month. You know, it costs a man money whether it’s going in or coming out.” Nasser was embarrassed that the sewage cleaner expected him to record these filthy details in his case notes.
“I told them they should get a separate tank for the cellar. God commands us to hide our shame. You know, nothing’s going to hide the shame of their tenant, the Turkish seamstress, and her guests, except a proper sewer.”
He had no idea what Yabis was getting at with his repeated “You knows.” From where they were seated on the doorstep, he examined the Labban building. The fight over who owned it started up at exactly the same time that the body was found. The windows of the cellar were open like the eyes of a genie traveling down a road. There was a toddler lying on the ground in front of the building, sneaking over to the cellar, spying on the ghosts who still played the role of girls sitting beneath those windows, their coconut-oiled locks falling down over the style patterns, taking lessons in the art of preening from the Turkish seamstress. The sewage cleaner felt that his body didn’t suit clothes, or a burial shroud even. That he was at his best when he was alone, half-naked, in the darkness cleaning out a septic tank. The true scents of the body and its excrement reaching his senses. Now that his mother, Matuqa, was dead, his loneliness had become complete.