Sonallah Ibrahim - That Smell and Notes From Prison

I was sitting next to him, my hand cuffed to his. We were in the back of the van with the rest of the vans behind us. He knew what would happen but said nothing. He hummed snatches of an old love song over and over. The wind was stinging and there was nothing to protect us from the cold. I began shivering and my teeth chattered. We couldn’t see the road. We talked about Hemingway. In the darkness, I saw him take a comb from his pocket and run it through his hair, which was going white. I knew he dyed his hair to hide the white. Silence fell over the car. In front of us, Ahmed had wrapped his head with a towel. He was moaning. Whenever his guts shivered, his head ached. It was dawn when we arrived and they forced us out with sticks and we sat on the ground, shaking with cold and fear. He was the tallest one. I heard a voice say, There he is, and they beat him on the head and said, Put your head down, you dog. They began calling people in, then they called him in, and that was the last time I saw him.

She said, You know, I got a letter from him before that where he said the whole thing would blow over soon. I said to her that he’d told me he’d never been able to sleep with Mona in his arms and that he used to smack his hands together and say, I’ll get out before the rest of you. He wanted to get out at any price. Mona’s mother looked around helplessly and closed her swollen eyelids over her eyes. She dropped her head onto her short, fleshy body. She signaled for me to come close and whispered, Did he really love me? And I said to her, Of course.

What could I say, what was the point of going into it after it was over, and who knows what goes on inside another person anyway? They say some people are made for love and some aren’t. Others say love doesn’t exist except in novels. As for him, he told me once about a woman whose family chased him away with clubs because he was from a different religion. There was another woman, but she died unexpectedly. He discovered that a third had agreed with her husband to have a child no matter what. The husband was more than forty-five, approaching fifty, and he wanted a child. One day we were out in the sun together and he was distracted by his thoughts. I chatted away while he sank into his thoughts, ignoring me. Maybe he was working it out in his mind. But once I was walking next to him down some stairs and we reached the ground floor when we heard a sharp, quick, continuous sound on the stairs. Then a tall young woman appeared, standing in front of the elevator. Sunlight fell from the staircase windows onto her face. She looked at us and she was laughing for some reason and her hair was wild and her cheeks were red. She wouldn’t stand still. He stepped down next to me and his eyes were on her and I heard him give a hot sigh.

She got up and went to her room and came back carrying a little wallet from which she removed a few sheets of paper and handed me a worn sheet of paper and said, He wrote this poem for me before we were married.

She was always lost in thought and when he asked what she was thinking she said: About life and death. And he wrote:

I am sad, child

sad and alone

I lie in my bed

my cold dead bed

with no one to speak with

with all the books read

with no one to laugh with

with no tears to shed

this is death

but more terrible

for the dead have no thoughts

unless the worm has thoughts

but the lonely man thinks

and desires and gazes and chases

without knowing what he chases

it is life and death

it is not life at all

though I haven’t died yet

quiet! here are steps

human steps

coming closer and closer

are they real? yes! no! maybe!

yes! they ring the bells

I hear the human steps

I hear the human voices

alight with laughter

a friend? more than one

many friends, child

I am not sad anymore, child

but afraid

they will go and leave me again

to life and death!

And the bell rang and Sakhr came in and he had shaved his mustache and combed his hair and carried all the morning papers under his arm. The bell rang again and a well-dressed young man came in. Mona’s mother said, pointing toward Sakhr, This is a friend of my husband. And the young man said, I know him. Sakhr leaped up and put on his glasses and began pacing the room. There were some English and French books on the shelves and he began leafing through them, then placed a hand on his hip and carried one of these books over to the window and began leafing through its pages while observing the well-dressed young man from time to time over his glasses.

It must have been one of his happiest moments to discover there was someone who knew him for some reason. In the past he thought everyone knew him, then gradually he discovered the truth. The first time I saw him he was bare-chested, walking with slow steps and occasionally raising a finger to fiddle with his mustache. In those days, world leaders sported a variety of mustaches and it was no accident that each was distinct from the others. These mustaches turned out to be a trick. The men who wore them were gone and so was their fashion. They left nothing in the heart. They never had. And he began to beat his head against the steel door until it nearly split, crying.

Through the window I saw a girl in the house opposite embrace another girl, kissing her on the lips. Then a girl who was blind in one eye came into the room and cried and while she cried, Sakhr stroked her hair with his hand. And Mona’s mother said that the girl was like that, that as soon as she saw a man, she cried. Finally, Mona came home from school. I said to her, I’m a friend of your father and she gave me a suspicious look. I took her to the club. There were other children there and I asked them to take her into the water with them, since I didn’t know how to swim, and they took her away. She ran and played and was happy. There was a piece of wood that helped with swimming and she grabbed onto it. But another little girl, a fat girl, took the piece of wood from her and floated on top of it. Mona held on to the piece of wood. The little fat girl grabbed her hair and pushed her away from the piece of wood, taking the piece of wood and swimming on top of it. Mona was a long way from the edge of the pool. I ran quickly toward her. She was bobbing up and down in the water and gasping for air and her eyes were wide with fear and I called out to her but she sank beneath the water and didn’t reappear. One of the swimmers swam to help her and dragged her up, carrying her to me, and I took her home. While we were climbing the stairs, she said, If someone is there, I’m going to say you’re my father. Don’t say you aren’t. We went into the house. Her mother was getting dressed, so I waited. Then my eyes fell on the wall clock. I jumped up and rushed for the door and rushed into the street. The policeman would arrive at any moment. I reached my room, gasping for air, and found a letter waiting for me. I checked to see who had sent it. It was from Nagwa. I read the letter slowly, then I lit a cigarette and stretched out on the bed and read the letter again. She was wondering if we might meet again after all these years. I closed my eyes to see what I could remember of how she looked: her affectionate eyes, her tender mouth. The bell rang and I got up to open the door. It was the policeman. I asked him to wait and came back to the room with the notebook for him to sign. He left and I kept the notebook in my pocket for next time. The bell rang again. When I opened the door Nagwa was there. I embraced her. She hugged me back violently, pressing her whole body against my body. But I didn’t press against her, I pushed her away to look at her. Then I led her into the room and turned off the light and sat on the bed and pulled her down next to me. Then I pulled her toward me and kissed her on her lips. She pulled her face away and said, Talk to me. I didn’t want to talk. I stroked her face. It was hot and soft. She pulled her face away, saying, Talk, say what happened. I put my hand over her mouth and pulled her head toward me and kissed her, gripping her lips between my lips. She bit me back in the same way, rough and unpracticed. Then she pulled away.