The man sitting in the wicker chair brushing the ground impatiently with his feet listens to the familiar roar, the roar of the judge’s car engine. He’s passing by in his Oldsmobile on his way back to his house, his office, and his family. It’s Sunday then. He’s returning to his other life, which he had left behind when he moved to the city. The judge lives in the city. He comes to his farm on Saturday nights when he wants to get drunk with one of his many mistresses. Barbed-wire fences separate the man’s field from the judge’s vast land holdings. He could walk in them for three days without covering all of it. He passes by in his old American car so no one will recognize him, just like he did yesterday when he was coming from the city. On his farm he drinks alone and in silence so that no one sees him getting drunk. But he doesn’t walk the courthouse hallways silently, and he doesn’t skirt the walls to avoid attracting attention. The judge is everything in the courthouse. The courthouse is his kingdom. He sends whoever he wants to prison and he pardons whoever he wants. On his way back from his farm he sits with the man and they spend some time exchanging news about everything under the sun. He’s a mysterious man. Secretive. The man doesn’t know why the judge likes sitting with him on Sunday afternoons before he returns to his family, his house, and his office. Every Sunday afternoon he waits for him to tell him why he sits there. The judge says he likes talking with people. He likes the bread the man’s mother-in-law bakes, and the breeze that blows in the late afternoon. Instead of bringing bread, the mother-in-law brings boiled eggs with oil, olives, white cheese, and two forlorn cups. And the bread? The mother-in-law forgot the bread. The two cups remained forlorn until the judge poured their share of whiskey into them. It was an exceptional day. Maybe he came to ask about the newborn. This was also possible. But he didn’t say a thing about the woman in labor or the baby. Nor did he say anything about the land. Was he planning on taking ownership of his land? If that idea occurred to the man, it certainly occurred to the judge too. Or not. The judge didn’t say what he was thinking. The man knows he doesn’t count for anything next to whatever it is the judge is thinking about; next to all of the ideas that emerge from the judge’s brain, or from that of the gendarmes—any gendarme, with or without epaulettes on his shoulders. His life is empty. It doesn’t amount to anything. It hasn’t known anything worth mentioning. There’s only one story in his head and it is named Farah. There might have been other stories. He could have gone to the Gulf to join his brother Suleiman. He could have become a skilled carpenter or a famous thief (but all he had stolen in his life were some silly copper pipes not even worth thinking about). He could have been anything. But now he’s nothing. Nothing to his wife, who’s ready to swap his life for a pup that will come out into the open soon. He’s nothing to the judge, to the thought that hasn’t yet emerged from the judge’s head. He’s nothing to the plastic bag. The judge is fifty, but from so much use in courtrooms, his voice has come to resemble that of a seventy-year-old. The judge said, “This is Najat.” He forgot that he introduces her every time. “This is Najat,” and she got out of the car with some difficulty because she’s fat. The judge doesn’t like beef. At his farm, in order to stay thin, he only eats lamb that has had the fat removed in order to avoid the cholesterol. However, his passion for fat women remains. She got out laughing loudly, her djellaba pulled up above her knees so it didn’t rip. Her lips were bright red, as were her fingernails and hair. Her pocketbook was tucked under her arm and her mouth was filled with laughter. Sounding like an old lady, the judge asked, “Do you know the story of the man who was stung on his penis by a bee?” The woman laughed, showing all of her teeth, and the judge threw an arm over her shoulder. The man wondered what wind blew him in on Sunday afternoons. Why did the judge love to sit with him every Sunday afternoon? The country was his country. The borders were his. Rusted wire that had long ago lost its ability to intimidate anyone separated their lands. The thought that the judge was planning on taking over his land made the man grow larger in his own eyes. The thought that the judge was interested in him and his land made him feel his own presence. He was happy to be with the judge whether he spoke or not. He felt protected. No harm could come to him while he was with the judge. Harm had been left behind, praise God. Harm is the judge himself, praise God. Harm, when it comes from the judge, is a blessed form of harm. But the judge didn’t say a thing about why he had come. The judge turned to Najat and asked her to retell the bee story without omitting any of the details. She couldn’t speak because her mouth was full of olives. Afterward. Maybe he came for another story. Then the mother-in-law brought some bread. The judge said that he had seen the gendarmes’ car by the dam. The man told him that they were searching for cattle thieves. The judge replied that they were chasing after a young man and his lover who had been caught in the act. No one had seen cattle thieves in these parts for at least two years. The woman with the red hair knew all the stories about thieves that were in the judge’s head, and on the judge’s desk.
The judge grabbed the bottle, but rather than open it, he asked the man what time the afternoon prayer was. The man looked up at the sky as if he understood things such as prayer times. He didn’t add a thing, as if this gesture was enough. Without moving from where he was, the judge said, “Prayer comes at its appointed time.” The judge was well versed in religion. The man held him dear for this reason too. He enjoyed matters of religion simply because they came from the judge’s mouth. Because the judge—in addition to his jokes, his saucy stories, his drunkenness, and the lovers that he exchanged every four months—was always happy to dive into matters of religion with rare enthusiasm, with all of his friends, lawyers and defendants alike. These are the things the world should revolve around. The noblest form of knowledge is knowledge of God. Attaining it should be the goal of all people, animals, inanimate objects, and every creature on the face of the earth. Always with new additions. The judge is a religious scholar and the man holds him dear because of his knowledge too. “A time will come when everything will disappear, with nothing remaining except for His exalted face. And this time has started to manifest itself. Don’t you see that God is stronger than everything? Inside and outside. Stronger than walls, cars, and storefronts. Hands, foreheads, and mouths. Perfumes and clothing. Humankind has disappeared because time belongs to Him, the Exalted One.” The man listened, nodding, so the judge would see that he realized the importance of what he was hearing. No longer was he that child who would walk naked into the hammam, not caring what people said, or the one who, along with Kika, used to steal the babouche slippers that those praying had left on the mosque’s doorstep, running away with them and laughing. No, the man had become serious. He listened to the judge. He listened to the gendarme. He said, “Amen.” He was tolerant. They could enter his house anytime they wanted, and leave anytime they wanted. They used his kitchen. They used his cookware. They used his bed for their afternoon naps, and when they left, their smell remained behind in the house. Deep down, he realized that there was no other way. Deep down, he knew that he was prematurely older than his forty-three years. Praise God, his life had passed with hardly any problems. He was comfortable.
Following the afternoon prayer, and after tossing back half a glass, which allowed sufficient time for his veins to swell up and his face to become flushed, and after a long fit of coughing to cover up his sudden lapse, he took out a small camera and asked Najat to take a picture of him like she always did on the Sunday afternoons they spent together—one time with a thick beard, another time with a short beard, once with a moustache and once without one, wearing sunglasses and with no glasses at all, with his judge’s robe on and without it. The judge hadn’t yet found the right look. After the photo session, Najat leaned over the judge’s neck to search among the hairs on the back of his head for the black spot. She knows just where it is, when it first appeared, and the stages of its development. She couldn’t find the black spot because of the grease, the sweat, and the strong smell. She told him that his hair smelled like a goat, and this comparison made him laugh for a while. Then the judge fell silent, his head comfortably resting on Najat’s thigh in anticipation of the pleasure he’d been longing for, saying, “I’m your goat,” and scrunching himself up like a cat does when you pet its head. His face had disappeared between her thighs and, with eyes closed, he waited for the erotic purring that would start at the knees and move ever so slowly upward through his tendons and veins until it reached his nostrils, putting him at the edge of bliss. He’d ask her to slow down a little bit so as to savor the pleasure drop by drop before it faded away. Najat knew all of this. And she knew where the other black spots were on the judge’s body. Here was one on his shoulder, and on his buttock was a bigger one. And two above his rump. When she got to this point, she’d tell him that the flesh was fatty, which made it difficult to grab onto the two black spots, as he waited for her hand to move down to that place that was closest to his heart.
What pleasure does illness derive from awakening our pain at night? When a person is sleeping, he is less resistant, less prepared. No more than a night had passed since Farah had come back from the hospital. As he sat beneath the window watching her fitful sleep, she let out a scream that made him jump and hit his forehead on the window sill, causing it to bleed. There’s nothing worse than illness ambushing you at night. Death and sickness swoop down at night for reasons that, to this day, are unexplainable. It wasn’t really a scream. Less powerful, yet more severe than a scream. It was more like a thick rattle in her throat, as if Farah had exerted a great effort to remove a rock that had been blocking her windpipe. He lit a candle. Blood covered the pillow. No, not blood. Rather, it was small black bits of flesh floating in a sticky mixture of blood and nasty chunks. Everything she had swallowed since this morning was now all over the pillow. She continued to sleep. The small piece of cloth that had been covering her face had slipped off, but she continued to sleep. It was as if the burns caused by the acid had cut through not just her skin, but her internal fibers as well. The burns, after having caused so much external damage, were now attacking her insides. His testicles contracted with a sharp, quick sting that made him jump. Was she asleep? He might have been able to forget all of this. He might have been able to forget the shock he felt in his testicles. He might have been able to forget the thunderous rattling that came with the nerve-wracking images. He might have been able to forget the face sleeping in a pool of dirty blood. However, the crow and its chicks that were perched over the gap in the window—what was he supposed to do with them? He went over to the door to fetch a bucket of water, and even before lifting the bucket up, he wondered where the sound of rustling wings was coming from, and he also wondered who had opened the window after he’d closed it. They were craning their necks from the window opening, the black bird and its three chicks, surrounded by a halo of translucent light. It was only then that he realized dawn had taken him by surprise. The light gave their feathers a purple sheen, which made them look a little less gloomy. Even now, after the passing of all of these years, he didn’t remember whether it was really a crow or that bad-luck seagull that had lost all of its color the day he had gone with Kika to steal the pipes. The bird hopped onto the pillow and proceeded to peck at the bits of flesh, bringing them back to its three chicks as they hopped around it chirping ravenously, their wings flapping boisterously, their beaks opened cavernously wide as if they were smiling, gladdened by the rare feast. They flitted around their mother’s open beak with childish impetuousness. Then the sound of birds chirping rose up all around. Birds of every color thrown into the first feast of the day by the rising dawn. All of a sudden the workshop was filled with their noise. Did they want their share of the feast? Or did they just want to provide their own musical accompaniment? They flew around the workshop without landing on anything, flying over the crow and its chicks. Over the pillow that was, little by little, going back to how it had looked before. Over a sleeping Farah. Was she really sleeping, and was what he was seeing actually her dream? The reflection of the dawn’s first rays of light on the flapping feathers gave the workshop and everything in it additional color. When he went back to stand beside her, everything was over. There were traces on the pillow, the pale remains of blood, some spots that were no cause for concern. She was looking at him with quizzical eyes—or what remained of them—leaning on her forearm, which had put a small indentation in the pillow. “When did you wake up?” He no longer needed the bucket that was still dangling in his hand. Even before he put the bucket down, even before he thought of putting it down, everything had ended. Except for the silvery smile that continued to shine between the two of them.
At that moment, the man got up. He walked toward the slanted door, but for the first time, he noticed that the door wasn’t slanted. It was because the man was walking with his head cocked to one side because of the strange footsteps that were attracting his attention. As if his ear were moving ahead of him. They weren’t footsteps that he recognized. Something more lively, with more vitality, brutality, and stubbornness, like the buzzing of a forest full of bees moving forward slowly, with an unbearable calm. Even so, they were still secretive. He stopped, waiting at the door. The blueness of the sky had become even more overbearing. The spikes of grain had turned completely yellow as if they had shrunken and faded. All the fertilizer that had been spread out had either been absorbed by the thirsty soil or evaporated. But now there was a cold wind blowing in the air. It might rain tonight. Little by little, the footsteps turned into what sounded like horses trotting in the distance, approaching insistently. The sound reverberated under his feet. Then he saw what it was. A human throng was coming toward him like a gray cloud creeping over the earth—with all of the contracting and expanding that distinguishes a cloud, and with all of the running, dashing forward, people racing with one another, pushing and pulling that distinguishes a human throng. He could see all of this, but not completely clearly. Then what had been a buzzing sound changed into a complex noise that was difficult to decipher, and what had been a cloud turned into thick swirling dust as it moved forward. The gendarmes’ car passed by first. Yes, before the human throng appeared, the car passed by, coming back from someplace or heading someplace. That was how gendarmes’ vehicles moved. You didn’t know which direction they were heading. The two gendarmes asked the man about the two rabbits. Had they shown up? They let out a piercing laugh, but the car didn’t stop. In their haste to rush out of there, their laughter didn’t have time to clearly express what it meant. The car disappeared, but the roar of its engine didn’t. That was because it was barely there in the first place. The whole area was filled with the other roar. The continuous roar. The human roar. But they weren’t approaching as quickly as the man thought. Crowds always move slowly. The dust dances above them as if swirling in place. Then a part of it began to move, the part closest to the hill. With its dust, its commotion, its jostling. His in-law Salih, the cistern guard, who had come back with the crowd, stood beside him, his rifle on his shoulder, clearing the way for the torrent so it could continue to flow and flood onto the dirt road. Then they all stopped at the same moment before crossing the railroad tracks, a blind sense driving them as precisely as a clock, definitive, even more intense in their silence. The cistern guard said that the children hadn’t slept since the previous night. They wanted to catch them. Jokingly, or responding to a joke he had heard before, the man said, “Maybe it has something to do with the two rabbits.” The guard responded, “None of them have slept, nor have their children, or their cattle, or their grudges.” Children’s grudges are blind. That was what betrayed them, at dawn, hiding in the thicket. Maybe they weren’t hiding there. In the same joking tone, the man said, “Or maybe it’s connected to the two thieves. No thief can remain hiding in the same place until dawn, especially not a cow thief!” The cistern guard said, “This has nothing to do with thieves or cows. A man and a woman. The woman is married and has children. And she does such a thing with a man younger than her children! And where? Out in the open like cats. There is no power nor strength save for in God.” They all turned around together like a single person and went back the way they had come, with the same enthusiasm, the same persistence.
He saw them now, gathering in a circular motion at the top of the hill. A mixture of colors, signals, riotous sounds, and what looked like hats flying in the air, as if the hats were doing the yelling. Then, at the bottom of the hill, the crowd appeared to be parting. Like two hills being pushed apart by opposing currents. There was only one prey. The first group disappeared behind the hill, but the second continued to move along the path it had been following. Then the two met in a more coherent current, one moving with greater conviction. The current flowed in front of him now like a river whose tributaries had finally come together. It flowed silently toward the same goal, toward the thicket where the children said they had found them at dawn—the young man and his lover, who was old enough to be his mother. Disheveled hair and dusty beards. Eyes white because of the suspense and excitement. Really, they were looking for the woman. Because Salih, the cistern guard, told him before joining the crowd himself that the poor young man was no older than eighteen and that the woman had seduced him. Women are devils, and she’s the cause. It was as if they had regressed decades in time. Mouths were opened by an explosion that hadn’t yet left their throats. Anticipating the moment they had been waiting for, the moment when the prey would bolt out of its hiding place. All feet were loudly crunching the dirt and stones on the ground with rare resolve. A single cohesive crowd with the image of the anticipated, coveted prey in its sights. The crowd was attracted by the smell even before it spotted and recognized it. The two lovers were out there someplace trying to elude their fate, eyes shining with fear, their faces betraying the same agitation, the same anticipation, in the thicket of trees or in the middle of the forest’s dense growth, or by the dam. They hadn’t yet determined their whereabouts. The children passed by them at dawn and taunted them with their sticks and stones. They might have thought that they were two young foxes waiting for their mother to come back. And the man? He stood by the gate picturing it all. The fate of the two lovers. Their corpses that would be ripped apart, and their skulls that would be crushed. The crowd disappeared momentarily, and along with it the threat it posed. The man went back to his chair, the judge still lying facedown, pressing his nose between the woman’s thighs.