A Rare Blue Bird Flies with Me Read online

  “The bus from Fez arrives at the station at nine,” he says.

  “Yes, it usually arrives at nine, but now, when’ll it arrive now?”

  “Nine, as always.”

  “But it’s late.”

  “How’s it late? It always comes on time.”

  “But it’s past the scheduled time.”

  “What scheduled time? It’s never past the scheduled time.”

  There’s no way to come to an understanding with the ticket seller. There aren’t a lot of travelers at the station, as I said. I ask one of them: “Has the nine o’clock bus come?” Just to be sure. I try to calm down. I sit on the curb and close my eyes to collect my thoughts and see more clearly. Did the news make me happy? Before, my heart would beat violently and my nerves would get upset whenever I heard news about Aziz. Simply imagining I’m getting news about him being somewhere, even if it’s somewhere that doesn’t exist at all, as happened a number of times. Just the idea would make me uncomfortable, whether I’m sitting or standing. My blood would pump wildly through my veins. As if it had lost its mind. Now, though, I have the feeling that my anxiety has subsided. That my previous energy has begun to dissipate. It’s as if I’m sorry for Aziz. I was expecting a bigger flare-up in myself. Why didn’t I take the news as I expected? It came to me just like that, in passing, without an effect, without a trace. Maybe it’s the last four years I spent drowning in work, imprisoned in Stork Bar. Four years without a single piece of false news.

  2

  Aziz

  10 p.m.

  1

  TIME PASSED WHILE I WAS having a lot of fun watching life in the corridor. When I was in good health, I could move to the door. Life’s moving from side to side a few steps from me. Cockroaches play. They move behind each other like a drunken train. Their long wings move in every direction like finely made radars. Near them are scorpions with tails erect, waiting to ambush them. The cockroaches dance around them, indifferent to their threatening weapons. Rats surprise them and they flee. Some are saved in the cracks while others spread their wings to land on the highest point on the wall. The rats that think they’re playing, they too attack them, pouncing on them, biting, sinking their teeth into the flesh of some, producing horrible noises, and eating others. Then the snakes appear, so the rats surviving the massacre are now forced to flee. After a while, you don’t know who’s running after who. Who’s hunting who and who’s eating who. A whole life near the cracks in the door.

  I don’t care about snakes. They’ve got plenty of provisions in the corridor. More than they need. It’s the scorpions that concern me. Their poison, to be exact. They’re peaceful creatures. I used to play with scorpions on my uncle’s farm. They didn’t sting me. I’d spread my palm out to them and let them crawl on it however they wanted. When a scorpion stung my uncle, I saw him make a wound at the site of the sting and let his blood flow. Scorpions sting when forced. The scorpion doesn’t know my intentions, but I have a clear plan. My idea is to surrender a finger to it, to spare myself from future stings and the stings of everything like it. If a scorpion stings you once you become immune to its poison. That’s my intention. I won’t waste my blood like my uncle. There’s no blood left in me to shed. Forty-eight hours of delirium, then a week in bed. When I get up, my body will be immune to scorpion poison. And snake poison. And all poisons. My plan’s clear to me. But the scorpion doesn’t have the same idea.

  There’s a gap at the bottom of the door. Between the door and the ground, where dishes and a pitcher of water are pushed in. The scorpion peers out through the gap now, raising its tail and waiting for I don’t know what. Then it moves, holding onto the wall, like something fleeing a trap, and stops. It looks at me and I look at it. It doesn’t make any movement to betray ill will or a desire to cause me pain. I reach my palm out so it can stretch out on it, as I used to do in the countryside when I was a child. It skirts my palm with cunning generosity, avoiding me entirely. It doesn’t pay me the least bit of attention. I can’t say: Come here, scorpion, dig your stinger into my flesh so I can save myself from your coming poison. It has to understand this on its own without me explaining it. But it didn’t do that before, when we were young, so why would it change its behavior now? It lowers its tail and begins climbing the wall.

  I look at the scorpion on the wall. I know the hilarious conclusion to this expedition. It’ll go up until it thinks it’s reached the ceiling and then fall, because it’s not a cockroach or a bat. What’s the connection between scorpions and walls? I like the echo its fall makes. Baf! I then see it frozen in its spot, and it looks at me as if it’s ashamed. That’s another pleasure. It gathers itself, trying to guess what’s going on in my head. I think that maybe it’s finally understood my idea and it’ll move to my palm. The scorpion keeps watching me. Instead of moving forward, it starts climbing again. When I hear the sound of it hitting the ground a second time, I let out a loud chuckle so it can hear me clearly. So it knows I don’t need its poison. I hope its back is broken or its tail is smashed. I hope from my heart something horrible that happens to scorpions happens to this one. Its poison is enough for me.

  My health is as good as could be, but my head doesn’t have hair any more. Its surface is dug out like a pen where hungry pigs play.

  2

  The scorpion didn’t sting my palm, as I’d hoped. As I was returning from my hopeless anticipations a rat bit a toe on my right foot.

  Before the rat bite, I was passing time: enumerating the advance of time in different ways. These are some of the stages I passed through.

  The first stage I imagine might have lasted for eight years. When it was difficult for me to remember the number of years I spent in this kitchen, when I lost count of how many, I found myself using a map to follow the escape of time. It became clear to me that time is a single expanse without day or night. Since that realization, my idea changed away from a sun rising or a day beginning or a night falling. All this is only present in the mind of human beings. Do you know when something begins and when it ends? Can you determine when something has ended and something else has taken its place? I understood that what human beings think about everything in existence is wrong. Nothing begins and nothing ends. Day doesn’t follow night. And night doesn’t follow day. Both exist at the same time as you embark on each consecutively. They’re intertwined behind you, if it’s night. Then raise your eyes a little, raise your eyes just enough so you can distinguish the rays of the day filtering between the cracks of the wall. It’s not completely daytime. Maybe a sign indicates daytime is present somewhere. And memory is what you see before you.

  The matter is simpler in this kitchen. A thick multilevel gloom, extending from darkness to darkness. There’s no dawn for me, and no noon or late afternoon. A long line of nights of varying blackness. When I thought about it like this, I made a dawn and a dusk for myself, so after a while I could say this is the last bit of the day’s light. My daytime. This is the beginning of nighttime light, my nighttime. I discovered that my days and nights in this respect have become full of all kinds of entertaining adventures. My new way of grasping time seems complicated and charged to me.

  The second phase, when my activities were varied, might have lasted the same number of years. I spent part of it interpreting my dreams. I see myself in the bedroom with my mouth full of hair and I spend a long time trying to crack this riddle as if I were pulling apart a ball of tangled hair. There’s another way to spend time: Counting the raindrops falling incessantly from the ceiling. They fall on my head even after the rain has stopped. There are days when I reach dizzying numbers, hundreds of thousands. When I think I’ve reached a state of delirium, I replace the number of raindrops with the total. Calculating for the purpose of calculating, without needing the raindrops. It takes about half an hour to count from zero to a thousand. I’d make a mistake deliberately so I’d have to count again from the beginning. Then I trace the number on my palm so I remember it. This is another link I use to bi
nd time so it doesn’t escape.

  Then prayer. Not because of faith. Since I’m in this hole, I think I don’t owe God anything. Why pray? Am I thanking Him? For what? Does the blind man thank the one who gouged out his eyes? Even if he does, I don’t have the strength to fathom this kind of behavior. I pray as a kind of exercise in this narrow kitchen.

  As for the rat bite, hunger is the reason. I’d given up thinking about eating a long time ago. Just as the rats and other annoying animals gave up hope of discovering a piece of stale bread among the heaps of my accumulated filth. Until the moment when I felt the rat gnawing on my toe. It started like that: With some idea in the rat’s head about a piece of bread. Then the idea turned into a real rat bite. Before the rat bite, I’d been passing time in a number of inventive ways, as I said. But now I spend time counting the pulsating beats of my foot as it swells up. Tak tak. Tak tak. Tak tak. Tak. Three and a half beats during the night. A stench of rot rises up with the swelling. The stench doesn’t spread all at once. Little by little. Followed by violent shaking in my foot and sharp stinging. A disconnected pain, but without the stench at first and then, little by little, with the stench as it starts rising from the toe that looks like a festering wound.

  “What’s this stench?” asks the cook from behind the door. I don’t respond. I don’t tell him it’s me. The stench of my big toe that the rat bit because of stale bread he thought I was hiding from him. Then I don’t smell any stench. I don’t see the toe because my foot, which has swollen up too, is blocking it out. It’s blown up completely and turned blue. A shining spot has appeared on the skin. It’s hot to the touch. As if something’s cooking inside it.

  Since the stench began spreading in this disgraceful way, not a day has passed without me thinking about death because there isn’t anything else for me to think about. I’ve gone through everything else. This is something new: I spend time thinking about death. My death in particular. And then death in general. About the disintegration of the body, its decomposition, and all the stenches it gives off during its life. These stenches erupt all at once, dragging an earthquake behind them. I don’t see the cook’s face. I hear his mumbling and his disgust. Sometimes his raving. Is he the same cook? Sometimes he pretends like there are many of them. Sometimes like he’s the only cook. There’s no way to know for sure.

  Here’s another idea: Does anything remain from the body after death except the stench?

  Tak tak. Tak tak. Tak tak. Tak tak. Tak tak. Ta. Five and a quarter pulsating beats during the night.

  Am I okay? I now have this new way to classify time. I wonder if I’m okay. I measure the stench of my inflamed toe, the stench of my pain, beat by beat. The lack of oxygen has begun to affect my nerves. I’m touching death. I’m moving alongside it. Hunger, bitter cold, germs, poisonous animals of all kinds. Disease in my leg, rising up. Death maturing. Pain throbbing with life. The body resisting. As if it lives upside down.

  I cross the only possible path I have: From the door to the right corner. I limp. The line of life. My leg hurts. Or is it my thigh? I sit. I raise my thigh in the air to let the pain get its balance. Then I raise it up high so the pain will ease a little. My limbs fascinate me, so I raise my hand. I extend and raise my thighs together so I can see the difference. I repeat the motion seven times, but I count only three. I play with my hand a little. I raise my knee and press on my ankle. I know it’s my knee and I say it’s my ankle as I play with it in the air. Other than that, I don’t know it. Daylight doesn’t come into my kitchen. I listen to my body. I listen to its light beating. I seize the slightest vibration in it. I observe its continuous change. I don’t smell the stench. It’s mixed with other stenches anyway. The stenches of ten years. The cook smells it because he’s on the other side of life.

  The cook’s the one who pointed out my raving when, from behind the door, he asked who I was talking to. I told him maybe I was talking in my sleep.

  “No, two people were talking and making noise as they were moving around.”

  “Cook, maybe I was raving.”

  “No, two separate voices. The voices of two different people. The steps of two different people.”

  “What were we talking about, me and the person you think was visiting me, cook?”

  His response doesn’t clear up the mystery. He only insists someone else was visiting me at night to share the kitchen with me. I then hear what sounds like rattling. Rattling of anger? Or is the cook crying? I limp over to the door cracks and extend my neck. I can’t see his face. A tear falls on the ground. Yes. He’s crying. It’s incredible. This hasn’t happened in all the long years I’ve spent here, and they are many.

  3

  Baba Ali

  10:15 p.m.

  WE’RE PLAYING CHECKERS, BENGHAZI AND me, although my mind is busy and my ears are focused on the outside. We’re playing in one of the two rooms on the other side of the casbah. It’s an old casbah of Pasha Glaoui, or some other pasha, with a number of wings, like a small city. Every wing has its own courtyard, rooms, and kitchens. The commander lives in the wing where the pasha used to live. He’s a soldier and doesn’t like to appear without his military clothes. Ben-ghazi and I occupy the slaves’ wing. There are a lot of ruined rooms crammed into it, some of them on top of each other. If you see it from above, it looks like a well. Our two rooms are at the bottom. Two old and ravaged rooms where we eat, where we sleep and play checkers, Benghazi and me. We’re not friends. Even though he tells me: You’re my friend and my brother. His words are sometimes unintelligible, like he never learned to speak. His sentences are incomplete, and even when he finishes them they’re meaningless. He says he speaks like this because he didn’t go to school. I say that’s not a reason. I’m also not educated but my speech is clear and understandable. That’s why I don’t trust him. That and other reasons. He’ll come to a bad end in any case. He’s a big gambler. He borrows money from everyone to bet on horses and dogs and to play the lottery. He borrows to pay back a debt and he doesn’t pay it back. This won’t end well. The people he owes money knock on his door and his wife has to tell them he’s traveling. And on top of this, he’s a salesman. He tells the commander everything that happens in the casbah, even though nothing happens. The commander barely leaves his office. He tells him what isn’t happening so he can stay with him in his office. The commander listens to him because they’re both from the same village.

  We play checkers but my mind’s busy with the sounds coming from outside. From time to time I hear what sounds like crying.

  I turn to Benghazi: “You don’t hear anything, Benghazi?”

  Benghazi’s absent. He’s busy too. He has a black-and-white checker in his hand and instead of playing it, he tosses it in the air, catches it, and says if it’s white side up, it’ll be a boy. If it’s black, it’ll be a girl. The commander’s dog, Hinda, comes in.

  Benghazi calls the commander uncle to endear himself to him. Benghazi loves to be submissive and meek. The crying continues outside. I ask Benghazi if he hears it.

  “You don’t hear anything, Benghazi? Like someone crying?”

  I listen closely again. But the crying has stopped. It’s as if Benghazi hasn’t heard what I said. He’s busy with the checker he thinks will indicate the baby’s sex. Instead of putting it on the board so we can keep playing, he tosses it in the air. The lamplight around the table dances back and forth. The features of Benghazi’s face are also dancing. Busy with his wife, who’s about to go into labor at home. He puts his hand on the dog’s back, as if he’s remembering his wife. And his son who hasn’t arrived yet. The dog moves away. She flees from his hand, which was about to touch her back. She runs out.

  This time, Benghazi looks at the checker, eying his future in its two colors. He puts it on the board.

  “Benghazi, you don’t hear someone crying?”

  “Where?”

  “In the courtyard.”

  “That Rifi, as they call him, who . . .”

  “The cr
ying’s coming from the courtyard. The Rifi died last week.”

  “Or Aziz. Even he’s got two cries left.”

  “It’s coming from the courtyard, Benghazi.”

  “Or the owl.”

  What’s the man saying? Owls don’t cry.

  “They sound like they’re crying.”

  “Someone’s crying, Benghazi. And it’s not an owl.”

  We play for a while. The light dances between us. The face of Sergeant Benghazi dances. I wait for the sound to return. His features are dancing. I see some of them. I wait for the sound to come back to see if it was an owl, as Benghazi said. Or something else. The sergeant starts laughing, in an unexpected way. His face, half lit up, keeps laughing. I tell him to play as he laughs. I’m talking to the dark half of his face while the other half keeps chuckling. The dog comes in and sits down, looking at him. Benghazi laughs to disturb the game. I know him and his tricks. He keeps laughing to confuse me. In the end, he says: “I beat you.” I tell Benghazi: “This time, whether you beat me or not, this time you’re the one who’s going to check out the prisoner, not me.”

  He doesn’t hear me. We play for a few more minutes.

  “You know my wife’s about to . . .”

  “Play.”

  “Tonight, I told myself. My wife’s going to give birth. Today or tomorrow.”

  “Play, Benghazi. You’re not going to confuse me.