Rawi Hage - Cockroach

IN THE MORNING Shohreh cooked me breakfast and got busy brushing her hair, moving from bathroom to closet, from dresser to eyeliner, digging in her bag, changing blouses. Then she stood at the door and said, Are you ready to go? You can take the coffee with you. Here. She poured the coffee into a plastic cup.

I walked her to the metro station and then turned back and walked towards my home. The coffee kept my fingers warm for a while. The steam that escaped the cup danced against the backdrop of the grey roads, the grey buildings, the leafless grey trees, the grey people, the Greyhound buses, and then it lost its energy and turned cold — the fate of everything around me.

I decided to walk all the way home, and on my way I stopped at the Artista Café to get warm. A few North African men surrounded the professor, who sat in his usual chair. He always managed to dazzle those newcomers with his stories and grand theories. For some reason that I do not understand, he always managed to impress his compatriots. But I know the charlatan is in it for the free coffee and to bum cigarettes from those nostalgic souls. He would suddenly, in the middle of a story, ask one of the men to bring him a cup of coffee, and he would take a cigarette from someone else’s supply, and then he’d nonchalantly continue his stories about simultaneous escape from the Algerian government and the religious “fundies.” He claims that both militant groups wanted his death because he exposed the Algerian dictatorship for what it was, and also exposed the plan of the bearded ones for a theocratic state. He would pull articles from old Algerian newspapers and read them aloud to those naive souls, dipping his finger inside his lip as he flipped through the pages.

That cocky intellect interrupted me all the time. He always dismissed what I had to say. One particular day, when I tried to tell him that a grand change is coming, a fatal one that is brewing from underneath the earth, he chuckled and dismissed me again. He pissed me off so much that day, I decided to follow him and find out where he lived. It turned out that his paranoiac tendencies were more developed than I had thought. Maybe that is how he’d survived the executioner’s bullet and the fanatics’ knives. How often had he said, Only the paranoid survive, my friend? As I was following him, he looked back and saw me. I pretended to stop and look at a car meter and count my change, but the eccentric professor ran and crossed against the lights, jaywalking the red, the green, the yellow, the purple sky, the blue people, the pink dogs, the squirrels, the wet pavement. He was almost run down by a taxi. He ran like he had never run for his life from dictators or prophets. I was too conspicuous to pursue him further. And really, I just wanted to know more about the suave beggar. I wanted to steal his reading glasses while he was asleep. I tried once to do it at the café, but he hung his glasses around his neck with a rope that dangled below his ever-shifting eyes.

Salaam, I said today, as I pulled a chair from the next table.

The men in the café all nodded briefly and kept on flipping through the newspapers.

I waited a little, and when the waitress came and asked me if I needed anything, I told her I was leaving. And so I did, without saying a word to anyone. On my way out, I looked back and saw the glasses of the professor emerging from beneath the news like a crocodile from a swamp. The bastard watches me all the time. I will get him one day!

AT HOME AS I WASHED, I saw long pieces of Shohreh’s deep blue hair swirling in the waters around my feet like eels. And as I was getting out of the bathtub, some force pulled me back. It was as if gravity was magnified; the soles of my feet felt heavy with the weight of iron and chains, my ankles felt anchored in water, I moved sluggishly. I felt heavy, but also a part of me had become light and fleet. I tried to move myself by hanging off the shower curtain, then the towel rack, but instead I became more immobilized. A deep, deep sense of fear and sadness overcame me. I felt I was the last human on the planet. I heard the sound of water, like synchronized drumming, going down the drain — an army on the move with chariot and horses. I saw the mirror shifting and meeting my face, and in the mirror I saw fuzziness and an elongated face that was still mine, but it was as if I had grown whiskers from my forehead. I am going to shave it, I thought. I should shave it. I grabbed the razor and passed it across my forehead. Then the sadness intensified, which made me drop the blade. I wanted to ask for help, but no one, no name, came to mind, and I was certain that no one existed anymore. Perhaps everything had been destroyed by some bright light that had flashed and levelled all that was on the surface of the earth. I reached the door but felt paralyzed, as if some poisonous fang had bitten me. I also felt light, and fragile, so fragile, so weightless that I could be swept up and pulled under by anything. An insect or a shaft of light could carry me; the water could equally sweep me down towards the noise made by armies of galloping horses, flying beneath sabres, helmets, and bright flags held by boys, and villagers turned archers. And I panicked, thinking I was the only naked one in the battle. I somehow managed to partially cover myself with a towel and clung to the bathroom door, but then the door shifted back and forth in front of me. All I wanted was to cross it, to get to the other side and throw my carcass on the sheets of the wounded and the dead. And a part of me felt thin, as if I were on top of a spear and fretting like a banner in the wind. I watched myself, conscious that another me was escaping.

At last I rushed into the bedroom and violently closed the window and pulled myself onto the bed. Maybe I am just hungry, I reassured myself. Maybe I am just tired. A part of me was still thinking clearly, though. I was split between two planes and aware of two existences, and they were both mine. I belong to two spaces, I thought, and I am wrapped in one sheet. I looked at the ceiling. I felt it shifting for a very brief moment, sideways, then down and up. And then that terrible sadness came back into the world like an omnipotent blinding cloud, and tears dropped from my eyes for no reason, as if I was crying for someone else.

IN THE AFTERNOON, Reza knocked at my door. I buzzed him in.

Your building always smells — cooking, curry or meat, or something, man. You look like shit. What were you doing? You cut your forehead? Did you fall?

I went back to bed and covered myself up. Reza, there is tea in the cupboard above the stove, I said. Boil some and bring it here.

I do not want tea.

I do, I said. Could you please make some?

He went to the kitchen. And I could hear him, squeaking complaints. He came back with the teapot. There are no clean cups, he told me. You need to do your dishes, man. It is dirty in there.

I stood up, went to the kitchen, washed two cups, and came back.

Oh, I don’t want any, he said.

What do you want?

Money, he said.

You must be kidding, right?

Well, I got you the job at the restaurant, didn’t I?

Fucking asshole, I said. Leave my house.

But he stayed and did not move an inch. He had a smirk on his face.

Leave, I said. I am serious. I am not feeling well.

He opened the curtains and said: Why do you live in the dark like that? Open some windows; you need light and fresh air, brother.

Leave, I said, faintly. Leave now.

Reza walked down the stairs, cursing the trapped smells.

I flung the door closed behind him, and drew the curtains.

THE NEXT DAY, I went to the welfare office to fill out some papers — a routine procedure. The bureaucrats want to make sure that you move your ass out of bed once in a while, that you shuffle your feet in the snow to prove that you are alive and willing to lift your legs to the fourth floor of the old monastery-turned-government building. You have to sign here, here, and there before you get your money.