Knives Flying

Thinking about you is like thinking about a dagger sunk into one’s side.

Like thinking about the antidepressants that never work.

Like thinking about thirst instead of water.

 

A gentle executioner.

An affable judge.

A kindly jailer.

 

Your gentleness . . . while you put my hands in chains, place the silence in my mouth, push the pins into my wrist. Shhh . . . , you say. If you stay calm everything will be easier for both of us. Shhh . . . , you say kindly, while your warm, sweaty hand releases an odor of rust and iron, like a mask, over my face. My facial expressions are indecent; no one wants my misery to be exposed.

You held me and patted my hair while your other hand was busy inserting the needle, plotting a trap, poisoning a dream. You hurt me with utmost tenderness, between many kisses, in the endless desert expanse in your chest where I ran for a long time. Yours was an exceptional way of offering me pain and love together, until I no longer knew where the first ended and when the second would begin, if it was possible to distinguish between them at all.

You weren’t crude or boorish. Your voice was warm like winter stores and your hand was light as a circus clown, while you moved from one instrument of torture to another, begging me to let things go. You apologized as you sank the pins into my heart, a kind nurse.

I was your plaything. I was the ideal victim, confusing hurt for pleasure, pain for love. My body trembled under your wing, soaring outside the logic of things. Where does your love begin and the harm you inflict end? Where does your hatred begin and your tenderness end?

My ability to love, to both give and receive it, stalled. My senses were crippled, along with my femininity, my intuition, my intelligence, and everything I might have been. I could no longer understand love outside the cries of my pain. The pain of your presence and the emptiness of your absence. All love was suspect, all tenderness was a trick, every cleaver, every knife, every whip one of love’s faces. Your equivocal sadism cut me from inside. For every lashing I received from Saqr’s iqal I used to become deeply familiar with ugliness. With you, ugliness was beautiful and beautiful things were ugly. You killed my ability to look at things. The world was one big suspicion, a crime scene operated by silk threads and soft gloves. And I—I was center stage, receiving the blows and the kisses, the love and the pain, not understanding a thing.

The first time I told you I wanted to go back to school, you answered without thinking, saying simply that there was no reason to. You decided just like that, paging through the morning newspaper in your military uniform, ready to go to work. I don’t have the right to study. My eyes filled with tears. You promised to take me out for dinner. I didn’t understand.

Months later I told you that I’d gotten tired of sitting at home. That I didn’t have much to do. I told you I wanted to work. This time I was resting my head on your forearm on the long couch in the living room. We were watching a movie, Déjà Vu with Denzel Washington. I had my own déjà vu in turn. No, you said simply, and sighed. Then you squeezed me closer to your chest and started talking about the dust hanging in the air-conditioning vents, and that if I was suffering from too much free time perhaps it was because I hadn’t paid attention to the many things that could keep me busy here. Like the dust in the air-conditioning vents. Like the orange cake I hadn’t perfected yet. Like polishing the candelabras. Like the millions of little things that circle in your orbit . . . master. Everything your eye might fall on must be perfect, from the way I wear my hair to the carved tomato flowers in the center of the salad bowl. That’s fine, no problem. I can make tomato flowers and have a job, have a job doing anything. I could be a librarian, for example. And really I’m not interested in turning tomatoes into flowers. A tomato is a tomato and a flower is a flower and we couldn’t be more insolent in our desire to ignore the true essence of things and force them to submit to our whims. But no matter, if the tomato flowers are so important to you I’ll make them. You won’t eat them and probably won’t look at them for more than two seconds, yet if that’s the price Your Excellency is asking I will make the effort and create more and more tomato flowers—but I want to work! I want to do something that belongs to me alone. Will you allow it? It’s not possible. It’s not allowed. You say it in a low voice, contented and happy: No. Then what do I do? I get up from the couch and slam the door in your face and lie down in bed. What do you do? You pick up a comb and comb my hair for me until I fall asleep. I rest my head on my defeat and the gentleness of your fingers and it becomes impossible to distinguish just when your fingers end and when my wound begins.

Two months ago, you found out that I write. You found out that I was born to write, that I’d written my whole life, and that I, in one way or another, had started writing again after Saqr had drained those waters from my heart. It had come back to me with a surprising fluidity, bursting from inside and running over. Language was being born in my guts. I was pregnant with poetry, and I wrote. But you—you stood in your military uniform, your hurried stance, inspecting the papers with your hands until the letters trembled as you scratched at them with your fingers.

“What’s this?”

What a question.

“How long have you been writing?”

“I’ve always written.”

“I’ve never seen you write before.”

“I stopped for a while, started again recently.”

“Started again?”

“Started writing again.”

Yes, that’s how it happened. Like sunstroke, like a bullet in the forehead, like a jolt of electricity to the brain, like stumbling in the middle of the street. It was an accident, a real accident. I was trying to buy half a sheep from the butcher and I . . . I had my feet firmly on the ground when the sky snatched me up and carried me far away. I told the butcher, I’m sorry, I’ll come back later. It was hours before I came back. I searched for a place to hide. Writing must always be in secret, that’s what Saqr’s blows taught me. I went into a public restroom and took a pen out of my handbag, searched for a piece of paper, a napkin, a box of tissues! On the back of an old receipt I wrote the words that had started tearing through me again. I started writing again.

“What you write . . .”

You seemed to be having problems finding an appropriate way to finish. You coughed, scratched your forehead, tried.

“It’s completely new.”

“New?”

“I’ve never read anything like it. It’s strange too.”

“Thank you.”

“Does it make you happy to write strange things?”

“‘I am comfortable in the strangeness of words.’”

“Is that a joke?”

“Not at all.”

“Do you mean you’re happy because you write about ‘the gazelle head fixed to the wall, the nails groaning from the weight,’ and things like that?”

“Definitely.”

“But that isn’t what concerns me . . .”

“What concerns you?”

“That I can see you in the text. That scares me. Actually, it bothers me.”

“Why does it bother you to see me?”

“It bothers me for others to see you. So . . . so clearly.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean . . .” He swallowed. “I’m happy that you’ve found a way to express yourself, with such freedom, but . . .”

“But?”

“But this writing isn’t for publication. It would be scandalous.”

“How can writing be scandalous?”

“Your pain, your fear, your terror. Do you really need to hang out all this dirty laundry for everyone to see?”

“My poems aren’t dirty laundry.”

“Don’t argue with me.”

“Words have no life without a reader!”

“Then don’t write . . .”

“How can you say something like that?”

“Write if you want to, but don’t think about publishing these poems. I forbid you.”

The ideal husband. One who doesn’t hit or yell or drink or cheat, who smokes occasionally, watches movies, doesn’t ask much from his wife: just give up everything that might be attributed to her. The ideal husband, who investigates, forbids, and amputates with the greatest of compassion.

The circus can’t go on. I can’t stay like this, fixed to the wall waiting for the flying knives to land—with the force of mercy and mistake—on my forehead and finish me off. This suicidal act can’t go on forever. So I decided. I left.