Rafik Schami - The Dark Side of Love

Unfortunately the experienced Dr. Salam was right when he said he doubted whether Rana’s friend would comply with her wish. Dr. Bishara had been more optimistic, but her phone call to Dunia was a disappointment. Dunia wasn’t going to visit a psychiatric hospital; like many Arabs she seemed to be afraid of them, although she didn’t say so. But still, she was ready to talk to her friend on the phone.

Rana smiled quietly when the doctor said that, sad to say, Dunia couldn’t visit her. “I ought to have known it,” she murmured, “but I was being silly.”

284. Liking

“Would you like to go into the garden?” she asked. Rana looked up, and was surprised to find the doctor reading her own thoughts. A little later she was walking in the garden with Dr. Bishara, shyly exchanging greetings with the other patients.

No, she had certainly not been a highly gifted girl, Rana thought, before carefully answering that question from the doctor out loud. She’d just worked hard, that was why she had done well in school and passed all her examinations without much difficulty.

Had she been popular, Dr. Bishara asked? No, she replied. The doctor did not press her further. That was kind of her, but the way Rana had answered at once, as if “no” were the answer only to be expected, alarmed them both.

Rana fell silent. The doctor felt as if she were standing in a dark wood, and must grope her way out of it laboriously. Her questions were probing fingers. Rana replied briefly, with long silences in which she often seemed to have entirely forgotten both the doctor and herself.

But then a moment came when their conversation reverted to mothers. Rana remembered moments in her childhood when she had felt something like affection for hers.

“Did your mother kiss you often?”

“Kiss me?” Rana actually laughed for the first time. “My mother’s mouth isn’t made for kissing. She could never bring herself to do it.” She felt silent again and ignored all further questions. The doctor sensed deep sadness behind her withdrawal.

Hanna Bishara, said the male nurse Adnan, was Dr. Salaam’s right hand. She came from a rich Christian family, and was the first woman doctor to work in this mental hospital. He liked her. Head Nurse Kadira did not. That was another reason to like Hanna Bishara, though Rana. She herself disliked Kadira and her cold manner.

Head Nurse Kadira was not tall, but she was strong, with masculine features and fiery red hair. She wore shoes with crescent-shaped iron reinforcements at their toes and heels, so that as she walked down the corridor she sounded like a soldier on the march, but with a curiously teetering step. She said little, and her eyes were windows with no curtains over them; you looked straight into a void.

There was a lot of talk about the head nurse. People said she was wedded to the hospital, and crazy herself. One woman patient told Rana that she had seen Kadira urinating, and she was a man below the waist, female only from the waist up.

285. An Outing

Had Rana been particularly afraid of being with boys, the doctor wanted to know. Hesitantly, she said no, and then preserved a long silence. Thinking about it, she decided her answer was not quite right. Then she remembered the incident in the summer of 1954, when she was fourteen. There was to be a family outing, with a picnic on the river, one Sunday in July. At first it seemed a delightful idea, but then she found out that Jack had been allowed to ask two friends, the Interior Minister’s twin sons. Rana suspected that her mother was trying to ingratiate herself with their powerful family by inviting the boys. Or perhaps she only wanted to be able to mention at her coffee mornings what good friends her son was with the Minister’s twins. Rana would have preferred to stay at home. Then she could have phoned Farid, or gone to the cinema with Dunia, but neither her mother nor her father would allow it. Her father waxed enthusiastic about the beautiful river that flowed into a lake. “Water as clear as glass, just the thing for a little fish like you.” He knew that Rana loved to swim.

But during the outing something happened that she couldn’t forget. The twin brothers were nice boys, but they kept looking at Rana in an odd way. The day was hot. Her father invited her and the others to swim, and soon she had left everyone else behind. The lake was deep, and her father had been right: the water was clear as glass and refreshing. Her mother was already setting out the picnic in the shade of a tall oak tree.

When her father was tired of swimming he climbed out of the water and told the boys to keep an eye on Rana. All three of them laughed, and soon they were playing catch and diving under the water. They formed into two groups, Rana and Jack against the twins, but before five minutes were up all three boys were chasing her. She was surprised, furious with her brother, and tried to get away. But Jack held her firmly by one hand, and one twin by the other. Suddenly she felt the third boy’s fingers under her swimsuit. He was grinning at her. Rana saw in his face that he knew exactly what he was doing. He boldly squeezed her nipples. Rana couldn’t defend herself. Pleading, she turned to her brother. “Let go of me!” she cried. But Jack pretended not to hear her. The boy’s hand was now sliding down over her stomach to her vagina. “No!” cried Rana, kicking out at both her brother and the other twin, and finally she managed to free herself. She dived down, swam through the waterweeds in the depths of the lake, swallowed water, and came up again a long way from the other three, coughing and crying.

The boys went on playing. They laughed. But Rana swam far out, to keep a safe distance away from them. When she finally came out of the water, they were already sitting by the camp fire lit for the picnic, laughing. None of them took any notice of Rana.

That was over fourteen years ago, but suddenly it seemed like yesterday. Her throat felt tight. She said goodbye to the doctor, who had borne her silence patiently.

286. Brightly Coloured Birds

Of all the patients in the hospital, Sami was the strangest. He kept raising his hands and announcing his name and job to some invisible inspector. Then he would assure his unseen interlocutor that he was innocent, and wasn’t a bird. But he was a completely different person when someone in a white coat appeared, even if it was only the porter. Then he spoke thoughtfully and reasonably, and you might have thought him completely sane. Sometimes his “reasonable” manner intrigued strangers, who took him for one of the staff until he began telling them about the experiments being made underground here to turn human beings into birds and fish. He had told Rana in confidence that Dr. Salam was giving him pills so that in due course he would be able to fly like a bird. It was being done for the benefit of the air force. But he only pretended to take the pills, said Sami. As soon as the doctor turned his back, he spat them out again. “And one day the pill hit a worm, and what do you think? It sprouted wings and flew away.”

But Rana found it difficult to draw the line between being crazy and acting crazy in other patients as well as Sami, and sometimes even in herself. It was a balancing act. At least, she reassured herself, the part of her brain where Farid lived was still sane, and that was a large part. She checked every day when she got up to see whether she could recall every detail of a given meeting with Farid, and always felt better when she found that it worked.

And in some ways she felt that the world of this hospital was more honest than the sane world outside. Rana thought of the women in her neighbourhood who gave up all their own desires out of fear, and just did what other people expected them to do.