The man is stretched out on his bed. He’d rather not know who the woman is whose body is underneath it. It’s been a while, a long while, since the man has had any dreams, unsettling or otherwise. He usually wakes to a chirp from the magpie sitting on one of the posts that stretches the barbed wire around the field not far from the railroad tracks. The magpie is black during the day, white at night. Its beak is gray regardless. When it lets out its lone chirp, its tail moves to the same rhythm, as if it is singing with its entire body. It always lets out just one chirp. This bird comes to sing a song just for him, so the man waits for a few moments—savoring or rushing them depending on his mood, and on what the bird expects, so taken it is with this exceptional attention—so that he can respond with his own drawn-out note: tweeeet. Just like that. This time, the nightmare wakes him up before the bird sings, so he gets out of bed wondering what time it is. It is close to three in the morning. He hasn’t been asleep for more than two hours. He tiptoes across the hall. The light burns in the next room. He stops for a moment and looks in through the crack of the open door. His wife, expecting their first child, isn’t sleeping. Her mother is sitting on the edge of the bed holding her hand and wiping the sweat from her forehead. There’s a wicker chair in front of the house. The man collapses into it, weighed down by this recurring nightmare. The field is in front of him. The moon spreads a greenish turquoise glow over it. The field stretching out before him pulses with nocturnal life. The field does not sleep. Because of this, the nightmares don’t completely overwhelm him. Once in a while, the flapping of a bird that has just woken pierces the silence. The bird hasn’t woken up because of a nightmare or a calm dream, or because of a drop of dew falling gently to the ground; rather, it’s woken up because that’s what birds do. So, let him forget the nightmare that has so unnerved him. His mind is occupied with what minor worries the new day may bring. Daybreak is coming, and he still doesn’t have a story to tell the judge when he arrives. And the baby that’s on its way? He also asks himself whether he’s happy with the baby’s imminent arrival, but he doesn’t wait for his own response. He wonders for the sake of wondering, just to pass the time, so that he doesn’t have to go back to the corpse. He hopes to go back to the dream without the corpse. But there it is, waiting, in the brightest part of his thoughts, underneath the bed. Her name is Farah, meaning “joy,” if you didn’t already know. Burns obscure the features of her face. Her hair is blue. In the dream, in the moonlight that streams in through the window and envelops them—him, the bed, and the dead girl underneath the bed, dressed in a sheer purple robe—in the dream the man is always frozen in place with his legs stretched out in front of him, a distorted image of what’s under the bed ever-present in his mind. He tells himself that the only thing for certain is that he killed her and threw her body underneath the bed so no one would see it. This is a fact. Still in his dream as he lies stretched out there in the same position, nervous and unsettled, with the dead body underneath him. Imagining the hubbub that will rise up outside in a little bit while he wishes for the day not to come, so they won’t discover the body. He also wonders whether he has seen this dead body before. He doesn’t dare look too closely at the face to determine whether he had had a previous relationship with her. Her name is Farah, if you still had any doubts! What are these burns on her face and arms? Is there a knife or a cleaver lurking next to her, or any other weapon that might tie him to the victim? He doesn’t dare look underneath or around him for blood, or the deep wounds the sulfuric acid left behind. Still in the dream, he opens his eyes and realizes he has dragged a part of the nightmare along with him, so right away he closes them again, because he isn’t sure whether he has actually woken up. And now, sitting in front of the door, having seized upon this story, he remembers the judge who loves stories. This is a story that deserves to be told. It will amuse him. His friend, the judge, loves to listen to stories on Sundays.
Farah. He used to sit for hours contemplating her small feet with their perfectly arranged toes, elegant, like fishes brimming with life even out of the water. Once he’d asked her to get up on a chair to grab a hammer from the shelf. She laughed because she could see in his eyes how much he wanted to stare at her white toes. This happened twenty-three or more years ago. They met and they parted in a game the meaning of which neither had understood. She appeared when he had least expected, only to disappear after a day, or a few days or weeks. Like the chaos that was filling her head at that time. The man tries to gather the scattered pieces of a life that had not been lived for very long. Farah used to love blue, the color of the dress she appeared in the first time he saw her. And she loved to sing. Once she said that she liked the sound of Naima Samih’s voice. Afterward, when they were in the carpentry shop he and his father had built in order to construct one of the ceilings that would furnish the mosque, she said she had come to Casablanca to sing. While waiting to become a singer like Naima Samih, Farah used to love to roam between the mosque’s towering columns, walking around the marble fountains, listening to her singing echo all around: “There’s no one, no use in calling, there’s no one . . .”
Another time, this happened: In Casablanca there is an old lighthouse not far from the mosque, at the farthest corner of the city overlooking the ocean. It’s a hundred years old now. Its stairs go way up. Farah was unable to make it all the way to the top. At the halfway point she went back down. When he looked down at her from the top of the lighthouse, she had gone back to the ice vendor’s cart where they had just bought some sweet-tasting scoops. He smacked his lips and the berry flavor flowed over his tongue. Lemon, berry, and apricot. All the fruits were drawn on the sides of the cart. He remembers all of this—the ocean, the wind, the lighthouse and its dizzying height, the seagulls flying around it—and he specifically remembers the moment when he heard her scream. A long, painful scream at the side of the road. She raised her head to the sky, not knowing where to put her hands. She stumbled around like a drunk, turning and turning with her hands over her eyes as if she had been blinded. Then she disappeared, swallowed up by the gathering crowd. Before rushing down, he could still hear her screams ringing in his ears, something between wailing and weeping. The passersby gathered quickly. Where had they been before? They hovered around her with every possible explanation, every possible insult, and every possible expression of hopelessness, coming over from every direction. He turned around, trying to cut a path through the growing crowd. He saw the men and their unsettling movements. With difficulty he broke through and finally looked at Farah on the side of the road, stretched out unconscious. Her face was badly burned, as were her neck and arms, cut deeply by the acid. The fiery heat of the sulfuric acid was eating away at her. The ambulance, and the sound of its siren—he hadn’t heard it until the vehicle stopped. A woman threw a towel over her face, and Farah disappeared. He can hear it now—the ambulance’s siren—as it moved into the distance, rushing off with its dreadful cargo. He doesn’t remember if he actually saw all of this—the woman who covered her face; the two paramedics who lifted her into their ambulance. He may have seen it all without realizing it at the time, like someone who finds it hard to ride the bus because he keeps thinking it will never come. He continued to search for her, for Farah. After the ambulance disappeared, he continued to look for her among the other cars and trucks that had stopped there, among the fruit sellers and shaved-ice vendors, in front of the lighthouse, then behind it. The passersby who were still coming took the place of those who had left. Summer lovers (in a summer that had begun unusually early) were coming from behind the lighthouse or up from the beach—relaxed, the sun’s gleam still washing over their tan skin—wondering what had happened, as if they were asking about whether the bus had passed by yet. And him? He still believed in miracles, imagining Farah sitting in a small blue car like the ones she loved so much, applying lipstick to her lips, or under the trellis near the lighthouse, singing, “There’s no one, no use in calling, there’s no one,” with the red, berry-flavored ice having melted and dripped over her hand.
The man sits on the house’s doorstep in the dark rather than wait in bed for the bird’s chirp like he usually does. Now he is sure he has a story worth telling. It is Sunday, dawn. He has a story that isn’t new, but he’ll tell it to the judge when he’s asked to. There is no longer a corpse or a dead person or blood or a cleaver. Farah has taken their place. As long as the sun rises. But why is daybreak so late to come? Farah is like a bird perched on a balcony looking out over the wide, verdant life spread out all around it, ready to jump. Farah remains at the ready, flapping her blue wings, prepared, all set to jump, but she doesn’t. She waits for a good wind—ready, trusting, optimistic, prepared to go. The only thing that happens, though, is that the wind never comes. Then the first traces of dawn shoot up. Not in the form of pale lights tracing their way across the horizon; not in the form of a captivating red that mutes the sharpness of a glaringly bright day. Rather, in the form of a chirp that comes from somewhere close by. Tweet. The man turns to where he is accustomed to meeting the eyes of the white bird, before it turns into a black bird. It’s there, on the same post, moving its tail as if singing with its entire body. A hymn comprised of one note. Tweet. As if written in letters known only by him. The man leans over a little and sees the grass glistening at his feet. He says to himself, “In a little while, another hot day will dawn. This is what its heat smells like.” He chirps as he always does in response to the bird. This time, for reasons he does not understand, its echo fills him with delight. Perhaps it delights the bird also—tweet—because today he has this story. He is looking forward to the judge’s visit so he can tell it to him.