Arna Hemenway - Elegy on Kinderklavier

Bajh had also been invited. Araz caught sight of him across the wide living room, his white taqiyah standing out, his hands clasped behind his back, not drinking, his face half-serious, half-amused as he met Araz’s eyes. Araz had to wait to speak with him, a whole hour wasted between the host’s little speech about loyalty as a new government coalition was formed (delivered pointedly in Bajh’s direction) and the nattering of Asti’s husband, who was an uneasy, very poor man whom the other men allowed because he supplied the alcohol. Asti helped his little shifting operation in the market sometimes, selling the residents of the Chevalier’s slum aged cans of Turkish beer and crumbles of the hash bricks that Asti wheedled out of their supplier and split between Araz and herself.

When Bajh finally did come over, he turned to Araz as if continuing a conversation that had been interrupted only minutes ago.

“So I go on these walks,” he said, and smiled playfully. “I find they clear my mind.”

And so they walked, not just that night but each night they could escape early from the biweekly meetings in the Kurdish politician’s house, which were becoming tenser and tenser, and eventually on days when there were no meetings at all. They rounded the city, Bajh showing up in the square in front of the Chevalier or Araz waiting patiently for Bajh to get out of one of the Sura study sessions he led a few days a week at the mosque. They walked in the cool spring nights and the humid, breezy afternoons. In the north of the city there was a small laundromat (everyone used washers now, due to the city’s new, larger electricity ration), and sometimes they followed its scent of jasmine and linen as it wafted out into the fields, mostly abandoned now, until it mixed with the smell of the real flowers that grew in the fallow tangles. They didn’t talk all the time, but sometimes Bajh asked about what it had been like in England, and Araz told him about the sallow-faced, Yemenite Muslim chaplain at Darlington because he thought Bajh would like to hear about that. Other times Araz asked about what it had been like in the town while he’d been gone, but Bajh had difficulty answering this, and the conversation usually devolved into Bajh simply listing the fates of people they’d known as children. If they’d started out in the afternoon they came back to the slum just before last prayers, Bajh returning to the golden bulbs of the minarets’ spires, Araz to the fuzzy, colored lights strung over the market in the square at dark.

The days began to slip away from Araz. His money, which had been mostly exhausted just getting back to the town, dwindled to nothing; the lease on his flat was the only thing remaining, a final parting gift from the man in Kensington. Araz reclaimed consciousness each morning to the distant calls and chittering insults of the other residents of the Chevalier as they stirred. The hotel had become a sort of refuge in the slum. Aging Syrian prostitutes with thick black eye makeup mixed with the fey boys who put on dance shows in the square on weekends. There was Araz, the half-foreigner, on the fourth floor, and Asti and her husband, the alcohol seller, on the first. The days became hourless. Araz was not even able to say when his and Asti’s hash sessions got earlier and more frequent, eventually lasting more or less all day. Neither could he say when the visitors started appearing in his living room. Of this especially, scenes became inseparable from their own recurrent memory, causing them to surface, reexperienced, with the whim of Araz’s boredom or moods.

The visitors were almost always from the mosque, members of the “security force” that people were already calling the “Imam’s Army,” referring, of course, to no real or local imam but the lost imam, the yet-to-come imam: the army, then, of no man. Araz saw them sometimes as he and Bajh inspected the city near the mosque: teenagers mostly, lying on the ground behind ancient, bulky-looking machine guns, aiming them into the empty twilight. Then Araz would see them again the next day, in late afternoon or night, before or after final prayers, hedging back and forth in his doorway. They were timid as they had sex with him, or, if the only way they could bring themselves to do it was in a fell swoop of violence, sometimes they were rough. Araz didn’t care, didn’t ask questions. He made them do it in front of the long, dusty mirror he’d propped against the wall, so they had to look down at the awful geography of his back.

The Kensington man had refused to look at the sea of mottled skin while they had sex, but Araz knew from his experiments at Darlington what it looked like. Whoever was behind him would try and fail to ignore the scarred field, the landscape of it, blotchy with faded yellows and vermilion, the swells and vales of it, uncanny membrane that both resembled and did not resemble skin. A failure to look away was sharpened by the final discovery of the flesh near Araz’s hip that had taken on the grid imprint of a medical wrapping left on too long in the early weeks. One visitor, older than most, lay on his side on the floor and cried afterward, until Araz threw him a towel and told him to stop embarrassing himself.

Though he asked for and required nothing, the visitors brought Araz little gifts: food, clothes, or sometimes just money, placing whatever they’d brought on the small table in the entryway where Araz left it all untouched, taking only the money to use with Asti to get new and purer supplies from her husband’s connection. Araz ate little and slept less and lost weight. Each time after a visitor left, Araz lay with his back against the cool, dirty tile of the floor and felt the swelling in his chest, the one he’d had since he’d first seen Bajh again: the feeling that the world was accelerating around him, not in time but in pitch, in intensity, a terrible inertia, as if together he and Bajh were approaching some small apocalypse. Araz felt a terrible drive in himself to be owned by his desire, to continue until nothing of it was left, until he had no money, until there was no one left to sleep with, until the not-skin of his ruined back stretched taut over his ribs. He imagined, lost in his drugged reveries, that the entire town was wasting away just as his own body was, until all that would be left in the slum’s square on the last day would be himself, barely there, and Bajh, in perfect condition, the leveled buildings and fields presenting him like a statue.

•

The city seemed to be holding its breath. On their walks, the people in the streets no longer joked or called to Bajh and Araz as they passed. Bajh also grew quiet in the Kurdish meetings and during their perambulations.

One afternoon at the end of their walk, Bajh offered to come up to Araz’s flat with him to wash the mud from their feet — this instead of obeying their unspoken rule of doing it separately: Bajh at the mosque’s ablution fountain, Araz in the communal bathroom at the end of his hall. Araz watched Bajh as he made his way through the halls and stairwells of the Chevalier. Those who saw him were silent at first, standing tensely in their doorways or stilled with laundry baskets in their hands, their eyes guarded. But Bajh was kind, oblivious, respectfully greeting everyone he saw and making conversation with anyone he could until, by the time they reached the second floor, the hallways were alight with his presence.

In the flat, after they’d washed the dirt from their feet, Bajh stood and watched while Araz changed his splattered clothes. Araz turned away from him as he pulled off his long shirt and watched Bajh watch him in the mirror. Araz stood still. Bajh’s gaze had dropped to the middle of Araz’s bare back and was hovering there sadly. He stepped forward and stood close behind Araz. Araz closed his eyes and imagined what Bajh’s breath would feel like on his shoulders then, if he still had any sensation there. Bajh reached out gently in the space between them and traced very lightly the longest blooming ridge of scar tissue. He leaned forward and down in an awkward sort of bow, and Araz could feel the cool weight of Bajh’s forehead pressing against the back of his neck.