5

AT FIRST, I REFUSED TO enter the villa, but Farida insisted I accompany her. I’d come as far as the gate, she said, and it made no sense for me to wait outside in the street.

She was very anxious. She had never visited a patient at home before, and said that meeting someone who’d lived with this disease for fifteen years would be tough for her.

I had always thought of Farida as the strongest person I knew, but recently she’d weakened. She’d stopped organizing anything, had asked the Ministry of Health for unpaid leave, and had been told that her leave was approved without reservation. That had been easy, but her final job would not be. I told her that she could excuse herself, that she could spend her last month going to work as usual without any outside visits, but she said she didn’t want that. She wanted to go and see the case. She was prepared to visit her once, even twice, but it would be tough.

I’d told her that I’d come with her. She could say I was her husband or her friend; a doctor or a nurse, even. I wouldn’t be able to make it any easier, of course—but I’d be there, and maybe that would help. She didn’t hesitate—she agreed on the spot—and it struck me that if I hadn’t offered to come she would have asked me herself.

The street was narrow. Despite the line of parked vehicles on both sides of the road, it was clear that cars hardly ever came down here. There was a row of small villas all joined together, and a little garden outside each one. We found the place after asking for the street name, and Farida hesitated for a moment before pressing the bell mounted next to the metal gate. Grasping one of the gate’s railings, I found that it was hot from the sun, and suddenly I felt the sweat gather on my forehead and brow. I saw Farida take two paces back into the street, then turn and take two paces toward the gate. Her brown feet looked bare in her flat sandals, and I imagined what she’d look like walking barefoot over the scorching asphalt: hopping about and breathing hard as the ground burned the soles of her feet. She was nervous, waiting for someone to come and open up. I saw their shadow. I saw the arm stretch out behind the gate to swing it open, and then I saw the face of a woman in her sixties. She smiled, greeted us, and asked us in. We walked through a neglected garden, shaded by tall trees that seemed older than the building itself.

There were two entrances to the villa: a higher entrance, reached by a short flight of stairs, and a second, down below, where we went. We descended two stone steps and walked into a wide hall with a low ceiling, that felt strangely familiar. The first thing to catch my attention was the seated body, small and pale in the far corner.

Farida had talked to me a lot about what the disease did to them—how their eyes and mouths were sealed—but I had never met one face to face. The girl’s skin covered the entirety of her hairless skull. There were no features. All I could make out by way of a face were two small, dark nasal openings. When we entered the hall, she turned her face toward us. We’d paused for a moment out of respect for the silence that filled the space, but the girl’s turn in our direction startled us. All we could see was her head slowly revolving, sweeping the hall with its missing eyes until it came to rest, calmly pointing in our direction.

The woman invited us to approach the girl. She sat down beside her, and Farida and I sat facing them. My eyes fixed on the blank face—a statue, a mannequin in a shop window—and when her head swiveled slowly around I held my breath and asked myself how she could be alive. What was the purpose of her being here with us in hell?

The woman said she would translate what the girl said. She’d lived with her for many years and could translate back and forth quite easily. All we had to do was ask a question and wait for a reply. Then she held out her hand to the girl’s lap and unfurled her palm. The girl took hold of it and lightly tapped it with her fingertips, then started tracing them over the palm as though tickling her.

“Zahra bids you welcome,” said the lady. “She says that talking like this might seem strange, but she hasn’t spoken for years—ever since she fell silent, I have helped her. She is now ready to answer any questions you may have. Perhaps, with her answers and a medical examination, you’ll be able to find some cure for her condition.”

The girl was pressing delicately at the woman’s palm, her four fingers sketching what might have been the shapes of letters, maybe emotions, hints, opinions, expressions.

“Zahra would like to be introduced to you both.”

I couldn’t think what to say. I’d come to keep Farida company. I hadn’t imagined I would be getting caught up in something like this, and the shock of the face-to-face encounter had robbed me of words. Farida, however, said: “I’m Dr. Farida. I called a couple of days ago to set a time for our meeting. This is Ahmed, my friend.”

The hands switched—the girl’s palm now lay open, the woman’s fingers gently tapping away—and then switched back. The girl traced and traced, a great outpouring of words, and at a certain point the woman began to speak even as the girl continued to touch her palm.

“The symptoms first appeared fifteen years ago. All I remember is a lot of visits to various hospitals trying to get treatment, but nothing came of it. My father and my aunt were like this as well. They both developed the same symptoms when they were in their twenties, and I’m only a little younger than they were. My father died right before my symptoms appeared, my aunt died four years ago, and now I live with Aunt Fawziya. I don’t know anyone else.”

She looked to be just ten years old. So slender and wan: more a skinny kid than a grown woman. I could barely make out the shape of her body beneath her baggy, concealing clothes, and just for a moment I forgot all about hell and its torments. In this hell, Zahra was the very acme of torment.

Farida asked her many questions. I didn’t hear any of it; I was staring at the slender body and the butterfly-light hand, and trying to puzzle out the system of delicate strokes she was tracing on Fawziya’s palm. Sometimes the strokes came quicker, sometimes they’d revert to their lazy curves. She moved her fingertips off the palm to touch the lady’s fingers—the pair’s fingertips often touched, but never linked together—then they moved away, still in motion, back to the palm, then retreated as far as the wrist and brushed the forearm with silken softness. A second slipped by and the hand dropped, to settle in the girl’s lap. Her hand and fingers were like a separate being under orders: independent, but unable to abandon her. And with every minute that passed, she grew closer and closer to me. She was reeling me in, at an imperceptible pace that couldn’t be fought, couldn’t be escaped—or rather, it wasn’t that I couldn’t leave her, but that I didn’t want to. If there was anyone in the world closer to me than Farida, then beyond doubt that person was Zahra. And suddenly I longed for her fingertips to stroke my face.

Fawziya took out a briefcase containing a considerable number of documents and handed them to Farida. These, she said, were the test results, the names of the medicines and doctors, and images of every inch of Zahra’s body spanning the years. She said that she had prepared these copies especially for Farida, and that Farida must find a cure for the girl’s condition. She said that Zahra had lost hope long ago, but that she did not want the disease to spread through the population and was ready to welcome Farida around at any time.

I could sense Farida: a body without a soul. Asking questions and not listening to the answers. Forever on the verge of bitter tears, like the man I’d seen months before in Sharif Street. She wasn’t confused, but rather in a state of abject surrender. “Yes,” she was saying. “Sure.” Mechanically, without thinking. Where was the butterfly I’d met trotting upstairs at that brothel?

The conversation between the three of them dragged on. I was waiting for Farida to ask me to check Zahra’s pulse or put the stethoscope on her chest, but instead it was Fawziya who asked Farida to give her an examination instead —she’d felt pains in her hip that morning and didn’t know what the matter was. The woman got up and begged my pardon; Farida rose to her feet, too, dazed and empty-headed, and the pair of them went over to a door at the side of the hall and pushed through it, revealing a flight of stairs to the first floor. Farida told me she wouldn’t be gone long, and Fawziya asked me to wait there with the girl, because she couldn’t be left alone. I thought to myself that I made a poor guardian: I wouldn’t be able to help her if anything happened. But then again, what could happen to her that would be worse than this?

She looked terribly gaunt, as though her companion’s absence had revealed her true dimensions: her head the size of a smooth coconut on her stalk of a neck. She was silent, but I knew her mind was raging with thoughts.

Calmly, she held her hand out to me, palm heavenward, her fingers so very thin with pink, translucent nails. I waited, not sure how to proceed, though what was being asked was clear enough. I reached out and took her whole hand into mine: a tiny, docile bird in my palm. Would she say anything with her fingers? Would she talk in the language I didn’t understand? However, what came wasn’t speech. Zahra didn’t say a thing. I didn’t hear her breathe a word. And yet she spoke to me, speechlessly. She spoke secret words, unheard but perfectly understood: clear not in my ears, but in my head. If humans could impart revelation to one another, then this was revelation:

“I know that this is hard. . . .”

I snatched my hand back and leapt to my feet in fright. An unanticipated jolt of electricity had run through me. What had come into my head hadn’t been a voice but words, clearer than any voice—what I’d experienced beneath the metal sphere hadn’t been half so clear—and though it felt as though these words had come from within me, they were hers, no doubt about it. And then, while I stood facing her, fighting back a shudder, she spoke without touching me.

“This is the first time anyone’s talked to you this way. It’s frightening, of course, but you’ve seen much that is frightening, Ahmed. You would never have known we were in hell if it weren’t for the terror that possessed you. This is the essence of hell, its alpha and omega: terror upon terror.”

I froze completely. In that instant, I was a statue made of stone.

“You keep your knowledge to yourself, because you must. No one who knows what is happening ever speaks of it. But you have abandoned your post, and you must return. Don’t feel bad on account of what the people suffer—for it is justice, and you are the instrument of mercy. Why did you lay your weapon down and stop killing?”

What to do? Should I scream to rid my mind of this thing that was devouring it? Should I run outside?

“You have penetrated the veil. It seems that you do not know everything, and in this there is good cause, though I myself am presently ignorant of it. But it is your duty to go back and kill. You are not yet aware of your importance: this hell cannot function without you.”

I was still standing, trying to free myself from what was happening, but then I collapsed onto a chair in complete submission.

“People assume that hell is a place, but they are wrong. We are presently in a long and unbroken passage of time, an era out of which many have passed and within which but a very few remain, so few that you and I will see their end. And after this, another hell will begin, in which the people shall be tormented—the ones who will be here forevermore and who shall never leave. These you shall not kill. They shall not be burned in fire, they shall not die by drowning, they shall not leave this hell of ours but to another hell.”

Having frozen, my muscles now relaxed. I was like a sleeper, shoulders slumped, unable to move my hands in my lap. I was fully aware of everything she said, and I trembled in fear.

“Those that you kill shall go away. They shall face no path or journey, no obstacles of any kind—they shall simply be gone away from this hell of ours, and will find themselves, each one, in heaven. You send people to heaven.”

Terror upon terror, she had said.

“But you have stopped, and this is not permitted. You, who know that we are in hell, have broken off, while your colleagues, most of whom do not know, remain ever active. Many years ago, I cut all ties with you all. I never learned your speech and I do not know how it is that you describe yourselves, but I know that you are a mercy to all those you kill, just as your colleagues are a mercy to all those they have killed and shall kill shortly.”

I slumped further still and leaned my head against the chair’s back. I hadn’t realized it until now, but I was drooling; I could feel its warmth against the cold skin of my chin.

“I am here to make you and others understand what is taking place. I am here with you; one of you. I have seen my torment before me, so clear that I might reach out and touch it. Just imagine: I remember nothing but my torment. No images or sounds but those I saw and heard in my torment. This is what occupies my thoughts, and nothing else besides, yet I know that what is happening around me is terrifying, as befits a hell that is coming to an end. I smell it in the absolute despair of the people, just as I smelled it on you when you entered. You are in the depths of despair, and this is good. I have not smelled hope for so long now, you know.”

My head lolled to one side. My body was heavy, like a dead man’s. Slowly, I began to lose consciousness.

“I know that this knowledge brings you pain. You keep it in and are afraid to pass it on to others. But your knowledge is your own. You cannot pass it on, not even to Farida. What you know, many others like you know. They learned it the same way and all for different reasons, but no one ever speaks of it. Even I do not speak of it if I can help it. Be comforted therefore. Be at peace with what is happening.”

I woke to Farida shaking me by the shoulder, and immediately everything Zahra had said to me came rushing back. But Farida was looking at me accusingly. She asked how I could go to sleep, and her not gone ten minutes; how I could nod off in my chair, a guest in a stranger’s house. And for a moment, all Zahra’s talk seemed like a dream. Farida was telling me off for forgetting my manners, my duties as a guest. Silently, I got to my feet, Zahra’s words in my thoughts, at peace with everything.

At the end of the narrow street, I saw a dark-skinned man energetically addressing a woman selling vegetables. He was raising what remained of a right arm lopped off at the elbow, supporting it with his left hand and telling the woman she’d “done the girl wrong” by “consenting to the marriage.”

Farida and I stood side by side, waiting for a taxi. The street was empty save for a few pedestrians and passing cars, and in the space between the two cars parked next to us, I spotted three cats. A little kitten, barely aware of what was taking place around her; a second, bigger cat, clearly agitated; and between the two of them, a third, its mouth agape and tremors running through its body every few seconds. It was dying.

The kitten started licking itself, without a thought for the dying cat. The middle cat, meanwhile, licked furiously at the dying cat’s fur, at a speed quite out of keeping with death’s solemnity. I looked for signs of a wound or blood on the dying cat’s fur, but couldn’t see anything. Out of the corner of my eye, I kept a watch on Farida. I didn’t want her to see what I saw, but she was staring out in the direction of the approaching traffic, waiting for the taxi. As I turned back to the cats, the big one moved around the dying cat, stepped over its body, and resumed its licking; then, as the dying cat bucked violently upward, the big cat opened its mouth wide and closed it over the other’s head, then proceeded to take the head further and further into its mouth. The dying cat was shuddering, neck twisting as its head disappeared into the big cat’s maw, but then the big cat choked and coughed the head out. For a moment, the dying cat was still, then it started to tremble once again. A taxi pulled up in front of me, hiding them from view.

I sat in the back seat, struggling to keep the big cat in sight as it tried to get the dying cat’s head back inside its mouth. This time, it managed to get the whole thing in; and though it looked like it was gagging, it didn’t let it go. The dying cat was in its final throes, the big cat rigid as a statue, and the kitten still licking itself.