Translated from Arabic by Thoraya El-Rayyes
You? she asked.
You? he asked.
Do I . . . know you? It’s as if . . . I’ve seen you somewhere.
As if . . . I know you. I know you. Maybe not. No. I don’t really remember if I’ve seen you before today. But it seems to me as if we’ve met, and spoken.
But I’ve been here, in the station, since morning. I didn’t see you. I was waiting for the train whistle and grabbed my bags, so your voice appeared. Maybe you were a train in a past life. Won’t you become a train? The train must take me away from this place, to somewhere where dust doesn’t lodge in the nose and noise doesn’t spin around your head, pressing down on it like a cork plug. Carry me away. Aren’t you a train? Didn’t your whistle just blow?
I carried you, don’t you remember? You were a child who suddenly grew bigger in my arms as I grew younger. I would call you ma petite fille and touch your face with the tips of my fingers, as if I didn’t want to pollute you with the things this world stained my fingers with. But you left me in ruin, a complete wreck. I am still in pain. The knife-thrower from the circus still stands in front of me, throwing his knives. He throws them, and they pierce my flesh one by one, but I don’t die, I just keep spinning on the board he has tied me to with that thick rope. When my wife arrived and shot me with a hunting rifle, I was very grateful. I was grateful. She was tender. But you, you are cruel. Why were you cruel?
Now I remember. Behind the water tank on the building rooftop. Now I remember. You took off your trousers and underwear and showed it to me. It was my turn when you gasped, yelling, “You don’t have anything!” Afterwards, I kept thinking to myself: I don’t have anything. Totally flat, you said, and felt it with your fingers. Flat. I kept thinking to myself, did someone forget to attach a piece of my body? Was there a piece that fell off of me? I looked for it all over the house, in the closet, in the fridge, and under the bed—where I was when I decided to spy on my father and brothers. They didn’t have anything missing. And my mother, I saw as she dried herself after a shower, that she had something made of hair. I was the only one who didn’t have anything. It pained me.
Damn memory, coming and going like a bad TV signal. Like a Turkish soap opera with episodes so similar that the new one makes you say: I’ve seen this one before. I have seen it before. Like my life, an endless series of rings, circles. Sometimes they come as a chain and sometimes put themselves one inside the other, as if trying to become a point, to condense into a single point or liberate themselves from the point. But it’s no use, inside every point there is space for another point, and around every point, there is space for endless circles. Memory is exhausting. My head has been worn out and sapped, but I catch a glimpse of you. We were at university together—right—at university. You played for the basketball team—running, dribbling the ball. But my eyes were fixed to two other balls bouncing. Those bouncing balls that joined me in my thick, sticky dreams. What a cliché. But that is how it was: they ate away at me and afterwards I would go to my lecture with red eyes and a clenched heart. I was your most loyal fan, but you didn’t speak to me, not even once. You didn’t look at me, not even by accident. I memorized you like the back of my hand. Every indentation of your muscles. Every quiver of your soft flesh. They were all mine in my long, sleepless nights. I once waited for you at the door of the basketball court after a game. I pretended to press the buttons of my silent phone and answer messages I hadn’t received. When you appeared with your wet-haired friends, my face became moist with sweat and I ran. I ran from my embarrassment, but that bastard kept chasing me. Chasing me, catching me, fixing his suffocating grip on my neck. The bastard.
Yes, yes. I remember you well. Or don’t I? That very blurry picture. Fogged-up glass that I wiped with my hand to see you sitting on the fence wall, next to the corner shop across the road. That motion of my hand was an attempt to say hi, to wave at you, you understood. When I came down, you followed me, then passed in front of me. I understood. You turned a corner, and I followed you. You turned a second time, a third time, a fourth time, and I followed. We arrived at a neighborhood where nobody knows us. You went into a building, so I went in after you, and under the stairs I threw myself into your arms and caught your lips with my mouth before I knew your name. I was thirsty for that delicious, forbidden shiver. Not allowed. Not allowed to go near the window. Not allowed to speak to the boys in the neighborhood. Not allowed to play in the street. Not allowed to go out with my hair uncovered. Not allowed to shake hands with anyone but my father and brothers and women. Not allowed to sit with my legs open. Not allowed to sit with my legs open. My honor is between those legs, they said. When I sit, I must hold my legs tightly together so it doesn’t fly out. Not allowed. And at the bottom of the stairs in that building that became ours, we consumed each other. My honor itched me, itched until it flew away, and I flew with it. I flew away with it, not hearing the sound of that man who caught us red-handed in pleasure. I awoke to a hot slap, to see hot, red finger marks printed on your cheek. Then I heard you whisper: run. So I did. Like a coward, panicking as I heard the man yelling, as I jumped out the building door and into the alley leading to the street. “Call the police, call the police.” And I kept waiting for you behind the fogged-up window, and my hand—whenever I remembered the hungry kiss at the bottom of the stairs—would stray to where I itched. There are heads that come out of the dark at me as I go to touch it: the head of my father, my mother, the teacher, the principal with the thin, stinging stick, the man in the building . . . They all look at me with rage, but I turn my face and flee, summoning a face I don’t know. A strange person whose gaze doesn’t carry their harshness but gives off sparks, and some dimwittedness. . . . It’s as if I’ve seen him before. Oh, he looks like you. Could it be you? But I haven’t seen you before, and we are in a train station where there is no flight. Nothing flies here, nothing.
Maybe, ah, memory, these points that flash then fade. I remember. I remember that I was a writer. I wrote a story about a man and a woman meeting at a train station. He thinks he might have seen her before, and she thinks she knows him, but where? Where? Are you the heroine of that story? Am I its author, its other hero? I remember that the censor’s face wrinkled up when he read it. This is whoring, not literature, he yelled at me. So you ran out of my head. You always complained that I wouldn’t let you say what you wanted: I am obscene, you said to me. I don’t beat around the bush, even when it comes to genitals. Literature and art are freedom, so set me free on the page as I want to be. I begged you. I told you about the censor. He sits in the office. He sits in the mosque. He sits in the police station. He sits in the street. The bastard. He dives after me when I try to dive deeper and pulls my hair. And when I did it that once—listened to you—they all attacked me. They said I was depraved, and you ran out of my head. I often tried to look for you: my pen a cloud that doesn’t rain, my papers crumpled and cracked like fallow land, the colors of the paintings you used to swim in clumped up and dried. All I have is the train station. But, but . . . there are no train stations in this city. There is no train to begin with, so I wrote one to find you there . . . a perfectly traditional one, like the ones in films—one that exists in a void. I thought we were in a city, but my station is in a void, as it should be. I went to it, and here you are. Come back. Come back with me. We will find a way to phrase it. You will curse in my head, and I will curse at them in my head. There, we will publish hundreds of stories then gather them and stuff them into a giant bottle that we throw into the sea. Someday you will find it—inevitably—on the beach of that country where the train is taking you. You will read it and chuckle. Come back, I beg you.
That’s right, oh, memory. Oh, these points that flash and fade. I remember. I remember I was an actress in a play about a story about a woman and a man who meet at a train station. She thinks she knows him, and he thinks he might have seen her before, but where? Where? The problem was that the actor was arrested before the first rehearsal. He used to go to demonstrations of that sort. Bringing down the regime. Please don’t tell anyone. I had to talk to someone in my head instead of the actor. In the beginning, the director tried to ask about him. He knows people of that sort. Please don’t tell anyone. But when he came back, it was as if we didn’t have a missing actor. He said we didn’t have an actor to begin with, anyway, this is a one-woman show, and you have to talk to someone in your head for the entire play. Is it you, that someone? Come back with me, I beg you. I’ll talk to the director, and he will talk to those others who pull the strings and slacken them. You will be reborn, with a new name, and we will have an actor and an actress, and the play will be complete. Come back with me, I beg you.
Come back, with you? Do I, do I . . . know you? It’s as if . . . I’ve seen you somewhere . . .
It’s as if I know you, too. Maybe, no. No. I don’t really remember if I’ve seen you before today. But it seems to me as if we’ve met and spoken.
