Rawi Hage - Cockroach

I started laughing, and was soon laughing hysterically. I found it funny that the professor’s place looked like a neat Oxford student’s room. His pencils on his little table were sharpened and aligned. There was no TV. I looked for a radio, and when I found it, I mischievously changed the dial. That would throw off his routine. I imagined him coming home and hanging his coat in his usual place, turning on his radio to hear the news in French, and then mumbling to himself and complaining about the world. But, ha ha! his world was going to change. A new house order, my friend! I chose a hard-rock station and turned on the radio and blasted the volume. His drawers held a bunch of knick-knacks, objects he must have kept from his stay in Paris — a Paris subway map, a few postcards he had received from an old acquaintance, a woman by the name of Lydia, who must have visited Provence and walked through the romantic streets with their old stores, colourful windows, and the wooden doors of French cafés. This must have been the professor’s grand amour . Then I found a wealth of correspondence. A treasure! I stole some of his letters, thinking that later I would sit on my bed and smoke a joint and read his love life and I would get even higher with the smell of ink and the faint scent of her fingers’ residue in every line. In the professor’s closet I found an old green suitcase that provoked in me images of departing trains, trench coats, and a beautiful woman in a head scarf and pointy shoes waiting on a platform. I opened it in no time. The locks, almost rusty, sprang upward like eyes opening from a bad dream. Inside, papers and envelopes were organized in bundles, bound tight with thin strings that joined in bows at the top. Under each knot there was a piece of paper with a label. I chose the one on top: “Immigration” said the label. I untied the bundle. The first manila envelope contained the professor’s Algerian passport, thick and green. In his photo he looked like an intellectual revolutionary, although his long sideburns also made him look like a sixties-era Third World lady-tourist-chaser.

The second envelope had a word written on it: “Torture.” It contained a few X-rays, an official letter of amnesty addressed to the professor, and other documents in Arabic. The other bundles contained photographs and bank documents, and the very last one had newspaper clippings.

I closed the suitcase, put it back on the shelf, and walked into the bedroom. I slipped my hand under his mattress and found a couple of Playboy magazines. I opened these, and found some of the pages stuck together like glue. Masturbator! I shouted, and jerked my head boisterously to the music of the rock band on the radio. I put the magazines back and went straight to the professor’s bathroom, washed my hands, and looked in his cupboard. I beheld yellow plastic single-blade razors, Aspirin, and a few prescriptions. Then I went back to the bedroom and slipped my hand under the bed again, pulled out the magazines, tore out a few of the clean pages of naked women, folded them into my pocket, and slipped back outside. I walked away, my hand seeking warmth and swirling and fumbling what had happened to fall into my pocket.

THAT NIGHT AFTER WORK I slept with the photographs of naked women, photos that I drew from my pocket like a magician who draws birds from his hat to hand to his beautiful assistant, who, no matter how many times the magician tries to saw her inside his magic box, always comes up intact, in one piece, happily smiling on the stage, under the light. Applause, applause! But I, unlike that sloppy professor, made sure that none of the scum that squirted under my quilt touched the glossiness of the pages or those X-rated bodies.

How crazy it was, I thought, that even when the beautiful lady sat on my bed at the hospital, all I wanted to do was to cover her with my quilt and dry her wet hair with the cotton sheets that softened the harsh metal beds. It must have been the deflated neon light that made everything flat and shadowless in that lunatics’ house. And it must be the harsh lights and dramatic shadows in these photographs that make me agitated, make me rattle and shake with images of slimy snakes wrapped in my hand, and then make me repulsed by what splashes and stains the inside of my bed.

I stood up and walked straight to the bathroom and washed. Then I wrapped myself in a purple towel and faced the day. I pulled open the curtains and waited for the harsh theatre light to blind me onstage while I waved and bowed to the cheers and the applause of the ghosts of an audience, but to my surprise, a soft, even light diffused and flattened the mountains in the distance and the grey streets below my window. There was no shadow to be seen in the world today. I thought, It is the perfect day to go and see that woman from the hospital again. I will ask her to come outside and sit on a bench, and to hum if she doesn’t feel like talking, and to sway back and forth if she is cold, and to let her hair get wet from the snow.

The woman smiled when she saw me entering the store. I knew you would come today, she said.

How did you know?

I saw you.

Where?

She pointed at her forehead. And I kind of remembered your bed in the mental hospital. You are the one who thought that you were a bird.

No, I protested, not a bird. I’ve never flown. I’m always walking on the ground. No illusion of flying. I stick to the ground.

I walked around the store. The woman was alone, and well-dressed. She followed me. The store had very little merchandise and all of it was expensive. Everything was hung on a few racks and the store had a feeling of emptiness.

You are surrounded by clothing, I said, laughing.

Yes, she said, and she laughed in turn.

I thought you hated clothes.

I do, she said, and we both laughed again.

Heavy and oppressive, isn’t it? Tissues and rags?

The woman nodded and looked me straight in the eyes, smiling.

Like gravity, like the sun, I said.

She nodded. Then she held my hand and said, Do not swallow, do not take it.

The sun? I asked.

No, those little colourful things that they will offer you when they come near you wearing white aprons.

The pills?

Yes. Never take them. They will transform you into what you are not. They will make you fat, and sick, and green like vegetables, and yellow like the sun. And if you complain they will just pull something off the rack with a designer’s name on it and give you another size, another colour to try, and that will make you happy and slow, and you will believe that you don’t exist unless you look at yourself in a mirror. You will disappear, and the only thing you will be able to see is your clothes.

I have to go, I said. The underground is waiting for me.

Come back sometime, in any way or as any creature, she said, as I passed through the door and back into the blue city.

THAT EVENING, MY BOSS asked me to clean his car. Clear out all the papers that are inside, and take a cloth and wipe the dashboard, he said to me. He hates to see an employee standing around doing nothing. He is a real pain in the ass. So now, when the restaurant is not busy, I dry the dishes three times, arrange and rearrange them, mop the clean floor, flush the toilet and clean out its bowl, or hold the broom and swing it across the floor, singing Italian tunes in my head. One night there was blowing snow outside and he came over to me and with his low, menacing voice asked me to clean the windows on the outside. I did not see the point really, in the middle of a storm, but I did it. Then two customers showed up and he left me alone.

Usually his teenage daughter showed up and stayed at the place until around six. Then her mother would come by in the family van and pick her up. When it was safe and no one was looking, I rolled my eyes at her, or even winked, and once I wiggled my backside at her. She loved it. She liked the attention. This evening I was in the basement, arranging the napkins and filling sauce bottles, when I saw her coming down the stairs. She went straight to the bathroom and stayed in there for a while. When she came out of the bathroom, the light from the lamp in the corridor illuminated her face and gave her a dramatic shadow, making her look older. I was on the dark side of the corridor where the dim rays of the flickering fluorescent light were blocked by the metal fridge. She did not notice me. I saw her adjusting her pants, and then she slipped her hand quickly below her blouse to her breasts and adjusted her bra. I froze in the corner, curled up and hunched, and watched. She stopped and stepped back, away from the stairs. Then she quickly turned and went back to the bathroom and locked the door.