Rawi Hage - Cockroach

I greeted the Korean grocer at the counter and went straight to the beer fridge. I picked up a few bottles and put them on the counter. Then I pointed to a package of cigarettes behind her back and confused the lady by shifting my pointing finger, telling her left, down, and up all at the same time. As she looked for the package like a distracted dog, I leaned on the beer bottles, pushing them together to make loud noises, and simultaneously attacked the chocolate bars below the counter with my other hand. When she finally laid the package of cigarettes on the counter and started to ring the cash machine, I asked her if I could pay tomorrow. She stopped, grabbed the bottles and the cigarettes, and shouted, You pay noweh! You pay noweh! CASHEH! CASHEH! NOWEH. I cursed her and left the store with the chocolate bars in my pocket. I walked around the corner and into a back alley near an Indian restaurant.

It was freezing cold. But chocolate does taste better when it’s cold. A chocolate connoisseur knows that chocolate at a certain temperature, exposed to the air to breathe, makes for a refined experience. I peeled the plastic delicately from the top of the bar. Then I opened it completely, threw away the paper, held the bar with two delicate fingers, and watched the freezing air do its work. I shifted my two fingers, making sure that the whole bar was exposed to the cold temperature. I started nibbling the middle, holding the bar like a harmonica. But one must take care to nibble the bar, not blow on it (I let the city wind do that).

When I felt that the temperature was getting too low for the ingredients, I moved towards the exhaust of air that was coming out of the back of the Indian restaurant’s kitchen. Now the experience would drastically change, not without some risk, of course. I held the open belly of the bar high up towards the steam, like an offering, and counted to ten. A chocolate bar masala, I called it. An exquisite delight direct from the Orient, it was!

No one should suffer in hunger, I thought as I nibbled. Though, to be frank, I only loved those who suffer. I loved Shohreh because she suffered. She had come to see me a couple of times now, and on one of the nights she brought a bottle of wine. She was happy, flirtatious. Short skirt. Low-cut blouse. Pulled-back hair. Red lips. She wanted to drink. She wanted to dance before I laid my hands on her. She asked me to play French songs. I turned the dial on the radio looking for songs. Leave that song on, she ordered me, and pulled my hand, leading me away from the window. Her arms around my waist, she said to me, Relax. I will lead.

I am not used to happy women. I am not used to slow dancing. When I dance, I fly and stomp. I go around in circles; my head rises like that of an ancient fighter. I shake the ground and the underground. In the presence of a sad, slow song I brood and let my long eyelashes reach to the floor. When my sister used to dance she would wrap a scarf around her waist, make me sit on the bed and watch her shaking her hips, barefoot. Once there was a song on the radio that she liked, and she stormed into our room and in the little space that was available between the beds she danced. That was when I realized how grown-up she was, how pretty and how attractive she had become. It saddened me, but also in my confusion and in her presence I felt an embarrassing erection. After that day, and I do not know why, we fought over everything: the bathroom, the water, the radio knob; at night we were quiet, and our fantasies collided on the bedroom wall.

I have had many lovers in my life. But what man has not? Mine all suffered, but what woman has not? Frankly, like I said, I do not feel comfortable with happy women, those who are obsessed with what my shrink calls intimacy. You have an intimacy problem, Genevieve had said, in one of her rare assessments of me.

Intimacy, I exclaimed. What intimacy? I do not understand you.

Like expressing love.

How? For whom?

Like saying something nice to a woman, or bringing her flowers.

So the day before our next meeting I stole some flowers and brought them to her.

She did not know how to react. She was uncomfortable. She laid the flowers on the table, without saying a word.

I stole them, I said.

You stole them?

Yes, I stole them for you.

That is interesting, she said, dismissing the act of theft and changing the subject: Do you want to tell me more about your childhood today? If we do not move forward, if we do not improve, I might have to recommend that you go back to the institution. Frankly, you do not give me much choice with your silence. I have a responsibility towards the taxpayers.

Tax prayers? I asked.

No tax payers , people who actually pay taxes. Some of us do.

So, I will tell her stories, if that is what she wants. It’s better than going back to the madhouse and watching robotic people move between iron beds, pacing the floor, lost between the borders of barbed wired on the windows and the hollow hallways, drooling, laughing, crying, and exchanging life stories with their own private audience. I would look at those people and see them watching their own little stages. Some of the performances, I thought, were genuine, spontaneous, and exquisite. Abstract, even a little esoteric, but nevertheless worth a peek. And frankly, I wouldn’t mind seeing again that beautiful lady with green eyes who came for a few days. God, she was so pretty, even when she took off her clothes and ran naked through the room, leaking fluid down to her ankles and through her lovely toes, screaming at the top of her lungs, Freedom! Freedom! I followed her and then I lost her. Like a trapper, I tracked the little patches of urine that had gathered, like islands, on the hospital floor.

What do you want to hear? I asked my shrink.

Let’s talk about your mother, she said.

My mother dragged my sister by the hair off our balcony and told her to stop parading her legs in front of the men down the street. Those low-life men leaned on parked cars, smoked, and laughed loudly. They obsessively cleaned and waxed their cars, and like a horny pack of wild dogs they smelled my sister’s wetness and pointed at her breasts from behind their erect car hoods.

My sister was beautiful. I used to peek through the bathroom window and watch her in front of the mirror, playing with her wet hair, kissing the towels and brushing them across her face. She would put her hands under her breasts and twirl around. Holding her hairbrush to her face, she would sing to a large audience who came from all over the world to hear her tender voice, oblivious to her topless chest, her naked shoulders, because she, naturally, enchanted them with her graceful moves, her sparkling eyes, and her profound, sentimental voice. She was so enchanting that no clergy cared to object, no man in her presence had indecent thoughts about her, and no woman in the audience was jealous of her firm breasts, her generous, curly pubic hair, her long, wavy locks that covered her buttocks, her radish-coloured nipples. Not even my father cared that his daughter was naked on a stage — he knew that what was important was that she could sing, that she was respected, that she would never be preyed upon by some military man who would deflower her, eject sperm into her belly to inflate her uterus, swell her ankles, fill her bosom with milk.

But one of those men often stood below our balcony, dressed in his military uniform and boots. He carried a gun, and I could see him looking our way, smiling at my sister, stepping on the gas to make his sports car roar and fume. In return, my sister played with her hair, and on her way to the store she swung her hips, stopping in the middle of the street to look back in the direction of our balcony before walking towards the store again. The man with the sports car followed her. In the store he stood close to her and her timid smile, smelling her soapy hands and her hair ointment, examining the lines of the blade on her shaved legs. He pulled some change from his pocket and paid for the bag of goods in her hand. She hesitated and refused at first, but he insisted, calling her Madame . So my sister accepted his money, and he followed her home, inside our building and up the stairs, talking to her about beaches and fast cars. He asked her name and offered her a cigarette. She, beaming like headlights, agreed to meet him again, in secret, below the stairs, above the roofs, on a moon with little alleys. And eventually, when she ran out of excuses to go down to the street for fresh air, to meet her girlfriend, to buy sugar, to chase the cats in heat in the middle of the night, she eloped with the military man. He picked her up one night and drove straight to the priest. The priest refused to marry them; the girl is underage, he said. The man pulled out his gun and threatened the priest, made him sign the paper, and drove my sister back to his mother’s house. There, after he finished his drink, he deflowered her, and when she asked for money to buy food he beat her.