The Patience Stone Page 4

  She can be heard inspecting the other rooms. She stops when the neighbor’s rasping cough comes near the house. She rushes into the courtyard and calls out to the old woman, “Bibi … Did someone come here last night?”

  “Yes, my daughter, the king came …” She coughs. “He came to visit me … he caressed me …” She laughs, coughing. “Do you have any bread, daughter? I gave all mine to the king … he was hungry. How handsome he was! To die for! He asked me to sing.” She starts singing. “Oh, King of goodness/I weep in loneliness/Oh, King …”

  “Where are the others?” the woman asks. “Your husband, your son?” The old lady stops singing and continues her tale in a sad voice. “The king wept, as he listened to me! He even asked my husband and son to dance to my song. They danced. The king asked them to dance the dance of the dead … They didn’t know it …” She smiles, before continuing: “So he taught them, by cutting off their heads and pouring boiling oil on their bodies … Well that made them dance!” She takes up her lament once more. “Oh King, know that my heart can no longer bear your absence/It is time for you to come back …” The woman stops her again. “But what … my God … your house! Your husband, your son … are they alive?” The old lady’s voice becomes shrill, like a child’s. “Yes, they are here, my husband and son are here, in the house …” She coughs. “With their heads under their arms.” She coughs. “Because they are angry with me.” The old woman coughs, and weeps. “They won’t talk to me anymore! Because I gave the king all our bread. Do you want to see them?”

  “But …”

  “Come on! Talk to them!”

  The women walk off across the rubble. They can no longer be heard.

  Suddenly, a howl. From the woman. Horrified. Horrifying. Her footsteps stagger over the flagstones, stumble through the ruins, cross the garden, and enter the house. She is still screaming. She vomits. Weeps. Runs around the house. Like a madwoman. “I’m leaving this place. I’m going to find my aunt. Whatever the cost!” Her panicky voice fills the passage, the rooms, the cellar. Then she comes back up, with her children. They flee the house without stopping to check on the man. The sound of them leaving is accompanied by the old woman’s coughing and chanting, which makes the children laugh.

  Everything is absorbed into the man’s silence and passivity.

  And this continues.

  For a long time.

  Once in a while, flies’ wings sweep through the silence. At first their flight is decisive, but after a tour of the room they become engrossed in the man’s body. Then leave again.

  Occasionally, a gust of wind lifts the curtains. It plays with the migrating birds frozen on the yellow and blue sky studded with holes.

  Even a wasp, with its ominous buzzing, is not able to disturb the torpor of the room. It circles the man again and again, lands on his forehead—stings him or not, we shall never know—and flies off toward the ceiling, presumably to build itself a nest amid the rotting beams. Its dreams of nesting come to an abrupt end in the spider’s trap.

  It wriggles. And then nothing.

  Nothing then.

  Night falls.

  Shots ring out.

  The neighbor returns, with her singing and her lugubrious cough. And immediately goes off again.

  The woman does not come back.

  Dawn.

  The mullah performs his call to prayer.

  The weapons are asleep. But the smoke and smell of gunpowder maintain their presence.

  It’s when the first rays of sunlight pierce the holes in the yellow and blue sky of the curtains that the woman returns. Alone. She walks straight into the room, straight to her man. First she takes off her veil. Stands there a moment. Looking around, checking everything. Nothing has been moved. Nothing has been taken. The drip bag is empty, that’s all.

  Reassured, the woman comes to life. She walks unsteadily to the mattress on which the man is lying, half naked, as she left him the previous night. Stares at him a long time, as if again counting his breaths. She starts to sit down but suddenly freezes, crying “The Koran!” Once more her eyes fill with dread. She searches every inch of the room. No sign of the word of God. “The prayer beads?” She finds them under the pillow. “Has someone been here again?” Again the doubt. Again the fear. “The Koran was here yesterday, wasn’t it?” Unsure, she sinks to the floor. Then suddenly cries, “The feather!” and starts scrabbling around in a frenzy. “My God! The feather!”

  From outside comes the sound of children’s voices. Local kids, playing in the rubble.

  “Hajii mor’alé?”

  “Balé?”

  “Who wants water? Who wants fire?”

  The woman goes over to the window, parts the curtains and calls to the children: “Did you see anyone come into this house?” “No!” they all shout at once, and carry on with their game: “I want fire!”

  She leaves the room, inspects the whole house.

  Wearily she comes back and leans against the wall between the two windows. “But who is coming here? What do they do to you?” Worry and distress are visible in her eyes. “We can’t stay here!” She falls silent suddenly, as if interrupted. Then, after a brief hesitation, continues: “But what can I do with you? Where can I take you in this state? I think …” Her gaze falls on the empty drip bag. “I’ve got to get water,” she says to give herself time. She stands up, goes out, and comes back with the two glasses of water. Carries out her daily tasks. Sits down. Keeping vigil. Thinking. Which allows her, after a few breaths, to announce almost triumphantly, “I’ve managed to find my aunt. She’s moved to the northern part of the city, to a safer area, to her cousin’s house.” A pause. The habitual pause, waiting for a reaction that doesn’t come. So she continues: “I left the children with her.” Again, she pauses. Then, overwhelmed, mutters, “I’m afraid, here,” as if to justify her decision. Receiving no reaction at all, no word of agreement, she looks down as she lowers her voice. “I’m afraid of you!” She searches the floor for something. Words. But more importantly, courage. She finds them, grabs them, and hurls them at him: “I can’t do anything for you. I think it’s all over!” She falls silent again, then talks quickly, firmly. “It seems this neighborhood is going to be the next front line between the factions.” She adds, furiously, “You knew, didn’t you?” Another pause, just a breath to gather the strength to say, “Your brothers knew, too. That’s why they all left. They’ve abandoned us! The cowards! They didn’t take me with them because you were alive. If …” She swallows her spit, and her rage as well. Continues, less fiercely, “If … if you had died, things would have been different …” She interrupts that thought. Hesitates. After a deep breath, decides: “One of them would have had to marry me!” Her voice shakes with a silent snigger. “Perhaps they would have been happier if you had died.” She shudders. “That way, they could have … fucked me! With a clear conscience.” Having said it, she stands up suddenly and leaves the room. Paces nervously up and down the passage. Searching for something. Calm. Serenity. But returns more febrile still. She rushes at the man and gabbles it all out in a rush: “Your brothers have always wanted to fuck me! They …” Walks away, and back again. “They spied on me … constantly, for the whole three years you were away … spied on me through the little window in the bathhouse while I was washing myself … and … jerked off. They spied on us too, at night …” Her lips tremble. Her hands move feverishly through the air, through her hair, through the folds of her dress. Her footsteps stumble on the faded stripes of the old kilim. “They jerk …” She breaks off, and again storms furiously out of the room, for a breath of fresh air and to purge herself of her rage. “The fuckers!” she yells in exasperation. “The bastards!” And can immediately be heard weeping and begging: “What am I saying? Why am I saying all this? Help me, God! I can’t control myself. I don’t know what I’m saying …”

  She walls herself up in silence.

  The children who were playing in the rubble can no longer be seen either. The
y have moved off at last.

  The woman reappears. Her hair in a mess. A wild look in her eyes. After a little walk around, she sinks down by the man’s head. “I don’t know what’s happening to me. My strength is deserting me, day by day. Just like my faith. I need you to understand.” She strokes him. “I hope you are able to think, to hear, to see … to see me, and hear me …” She leans against the wall, and lets a long moment go by—a dozen cycles of the prayer beads, perhaps, as if she were still telling them to the rhythm of the man’s breathing—enough time to think, to explore the nooks and crannies of her life, and return with memories. “You never listened to me, never heard me! We never spoke about any of this! We’ve been married for more than ten years, but lived together for only two or three. Isn’t that right?” She counts. “Yes, ten and a half years of marriage, three years of conjugal life! It’s only now that I’m counting. Only now that I’m realizing all this!” A smile. A short, false smile worth a thousand words of regret and remorse … but very soon, the memories take hold. “At the time, I didn’t even question your absence. It seemed so normal! You were at the front. You were fighting for freedom, for Allah! And that made everything okay. It gave me hope, made me proud. In some way, you were with us. Inside each of us.” She is looking back, seeing it all again … “Your mother, with her enormous bust, coming to our place to ask for the hand of my younger sister. It wasn’t her turn to get married. It was my turn. So your mother simply said, No problem, we’ll take her instead! pointing her fleshy finger at me as I poured the tea. I panicked and knocked the pot over.” She hides her face in her hands. In shame, or to dispel the image of a mocking mother-in-law. “As for you, you didn’t even know this was happening. My father, who wanted nothing more, accepted without the slightest hesitation. He didn’t give a damn that you weren’t around! Who were you, really? No one knew. To all of us, you were just a title: the Hero! And, like every hero, far away. Engagement to a hero was a lovely thing, for a seventeen-year-old girl. I said to myself, ‘God is far away, too, and yet I love him, and believe in him …’ Anyway, they celebrated our engagement without the fiancé. Your mother said, Don’t worry, victory is coming! It will soon be the end of the war, we will be free, and my son will return! Nearly a year later, your mother came back. Victory was still a long way off. It’s dangerous to leave a young, engaged woman with her parents for such a long time! she said. And so I had to be married, despite your absence. At the ceremony, you were present in the form of a photo, and that wretched khanjar, which they put next to me in place of you. And I had to wait another three years for you. Three years! For three years I wasn’t allowed to see my friends, or my family … It was not considered proper for a young married virgin to spend time with other married women. Such rubbish! I had to sleep in the same room as your mother, who kept watch over me, or rather my chastity. And it all seemed so normal, so natural to everyone. To me, too! I didn’t even know how lonely I was. At night I slept with your mother, in the daytime I talked to your father. Thank God he was there. What a man! He was all I had. And your mother hated that. She would get all wound up whenever she saw me with him. She used to send me straight to the kitchen. Your father read me poems, and told me stories. He encouraged me to read, and write, and think. He loved me. Because he loved you. He was proud of you, when you were fighting for freedom. He told me so. It was after freedom came that he started to hate you—you, and also your brothers, now that you were all fighting for nothing but power.”

  Children’s shouts ring out again on the rubble. The noise floods into the courtyard, and the house.

  She falls silent. Listens to the children, who are playing the same game:

  “Hadji mor’alé?”

  “Balé?”

  “Who wants the foot? Who wants the head?”

  “I want the foot.”

  They run off into the street again.

  She takes up her story. “Why was I talking about your father?” Rubs her head against the wall, seeming to think, to scour her memory … “Yes, that’s right, I was talking about the two of us, our marriage, my loneliness … Three years of waiting, and then you come home. I remember it like it was yesterday. The day you came back, the day I saw you for the first time …” A sarcastic laugh bursts from her chest. “You were just like you are now, not a word, not a glance …” Her eyes come to rest on the photo of the man. “You sat down next to me. As if we already knew each other … as if you were seeing me after just a brief absence or I were some tawdry reward for your triumph! I was looking at you, but you were staring into thin air. I still don’t know if it was modesty or pride. It doesn’t matter. But I saw you, I watched you, I kept glancing at you, observing you. Noticing the slightest movement of your body, the slightest expression in your face …” Her right hand plays with the man’s filthy hair. “And you seemed so arrogant, so absent; you just weren’t there. That saying is so true: One should never rely on a man who has known the pleasure of weapons!” She laughs again, but gently this time. “Weapons become everything to you men … You must know that story about the military camp where an officer tries to demonstrate the value of a gun to the new recruits. He asks a young soldier, Benam, Do you know what you have on your shoulder? Benam replies, Yes, sir, it’s my gun! The officer yells back, No, you moron! It’s your mother, your sister, your honor! Then he moves on to the next soldier and asks him the same question. The soldier responds, Yes, sir! It’s Benam’s mother, and sister, and honor!” She is still laughing. “That story is so true. You men! As soon as you have guns, you forget your women.” She sinks back into silence, still stroking the man’s hair. Tenderly. For a long time.

  Then she continues, her voice sad. “When I got engaged, I knew nothing of men. Nothing of married life. I knew only my parents. And what an example! All my dad cared about was his quails, his fighting quails! I often saw him kissing those quails, but never my mother, nor us, his children. There were seven of us. Seven girls starved of affection.” She stares at the frozen flight of the migrating birds on the curtains. Sees her father: “He always used to sit cross-legged. He would be wearing his tunic, holding the quail in his left hand and stroking it at just the level of his thing, with its little feet poking through his hand; with the other hand, he would caress its neck in the most obscene way. For hours and hours on end! Even when he had visitors he didn’t stop performing his gassaw, as he called it. It was a kind of prayer for him. He was so proud of his quails. Once, when it was bitterly, freezing cold, I even saw him tucking one of the quails under his trousers, into his kheshtak. I was little. For a long time after that I thought that men had quails between their legs! Thinking about it used to make me laugh. Imagine my disappointment when I saw your balls for the first time.” A smile interrupts her and she closes her eyes. Her left hand strays into her own loosened hair, caressing the roots. “I hated his quails.” She opens her eyes. Her sad gaze loses itself once more in the hole-studded sky of the curtains. “Every Friday, he used to take them to the fight in the Qaf gardens. He would place bets. Sometimes he won, sometimes he lost. When he lost he would get upset, and nasty. He would come home in a rage and find any pretext to beat us … and also my mother.” She stops herself. The pain stops her. A pain that spreads to the tips of her fingers and digs them more deeply into the roots of her black hair. She forces herself to carry on. “He must have won a lot of money in one of those fights … but then he put everything he had into buying a hugely expensive quail. He spent weeks and weeks getting it ready for a very important fight. And …” She laughs, a bitter laugh that contains both sarcasm and despair, and continues. “As fate would have it, he lost. He had no money left to honor his bet, so he gave my sister instead. At twelve years old, my sister was sent to live with a man of forty!” Her nails leave the roots of her hair, and move down her forehead to finger the scar at the edge of her left eye. “At the time, I was only ten … no …” She thinks about it. “Yes, ten years old. I was scared. Scared that I too would become the stakes o
f a bet. So, do you know what I did with the quail?” She pauses a moment. It is unclear whether this is to make her story more exciting, or because she is afraid to reveal the next part. Eventually, she continues. “One day … it was a Friday, while he was at the mosque for prayers before going to the Qaf gardens, I got the bird out of its cage, and set it free just as a stray cat—a ginger and white tabby—was keeping watch on the wall.” She takes a deep breath. “And the cat caught it. He took it into a corner to eat it in peace. I followed. I stood there watching. I have never forgotten that moment. I even wished the cat ‘bon appétit.’ I was happy, thrilled to watch that cat eat the quail. A moment of pure delight. But very soon, I started to feel jealous. I wanted to be the cat, this cat savoring my father’s quail. I was jealous, and sad. The cat knew nothing of the quail’s worth. It couldn’t share my joy, my triumph. ‘What a waste!’ I thought to myself, and suddenly rushed over to grab what was left of the bird. The cat scratched my face and scurried off with the quail. I felt so frustrated and desperate that I started licking the floor like a fly, licking up those few drops of blood from my father’s quail that had dripped onto the floor.” Her lips grimace. As if still tasting the warm wetness of the blood. “When my father came home and found the cage empty, he went mad. Out of his mind. He was screaming. He beat up my mother, my sisters, and me, because we hadn’t kept watch over his quail. His bloody quail! While he was beating me, I shouted that it was good riddance, because that bloody quail had sent my sister away! My father under stood immediately. He shut me in the cellar. It was dark. I had to spend two days in there. He left a cat with me—another stray who must have been roaming around—and told me gleefully that if the animal got hungry it would eat me. But luckily, our house was full of rats. So the cat became my friend.” She stops, shakes off her memories of the cellar, and comes back to the room, and her man. Unsettled, she gazes at him a while, and suddenly moves away from the wall. “But … but why am I telling him all this?” she murmurs. Overcome by her memories, she stands up heavily. “I never wanted anyone to know that. Never! Not even my sisters!” She leaves the room, upset. Her fears echo down the passage. “He’s driving me mad. Sapping my strength. Forcing me to speak. To confess my sins, my mistakes. He’s listening to me. Hearing me. I’m sure of it. He wants to get to me … to destroy me!”