Percussions (3)

Part Two: The Pantomime (final installment)

Previously on Percussions here

Thwack-thwack-thwack.

It’s a butcher. He raises his cleaver high up in the air and brings it down on the thin-fleshed bones of a goat littered on his table.

The driver disappears around a corner and I quicken my pace after him. I follow him into a poorly lit bedroom. We move from room to room, rooms that wreak of the cheap camphoric perfume locals like to wear. We pass several doors and enter a windy alley that leads to a courtyard, which I can tell, from the pots stacked on one side and the aroma of atayef, is an open-air kitchen.

Something snags my neck. A washing line. I step back and duck under it. The courtyard looks recently swept: there are fresh broom-marks on the floor and a heap of peanut husks in one corner. A hen clucks to warn me I’m getting too close to her brood. The driver ushers me into yet another room, a parlour. A giant-size cathode-ray TV sits on a low desk, and on top of it is a VCR. A desk drawer juts out just enough to reveal its contents: videotapes. The driver signs ‘wait here’ and disappears behind a curtained door.

Taffy strolls in minutes later. From the sand on his forehead, where he has a slight prayer bump, I can tell he has just finished saying his Salat al-Fajr. He hugs me and calls me ‘Sweet Marion’, the pet name he gave me. I hug him back, surprised at my stiffness. I’ve never been like this when I’m with him. I’m nervous and I fear he can sense it too, so I say, “My luggage. They took my luggage.”

He assures me I have nothing to worry about; my things are safe. He asks why I’m leaving so suddenly, and I reply that I’ve finished my documentary and since I hadn’t heard from him, I feared something might have happened.

He asks if I met with the informant.

I swallow before I reply, “I did. But it was one of Zee-zee’s men warning you to flee Syria for your own good.” What’s wrong with me? Those are not my words.

He cusses in Arabic. He pulls me close, kisses me on the forehead, and then lightly on the lips.

He asks if we discussed anything, if he showed me anything. Jamal didn’t say how to respond to that.

“Like what?”

He says I should think hard.

“No.”

He cradles my face and lets his hands slip to my neck, massaging my throat and communicating glimpses of their strength. He asks me if he showed me anything, anything in a brown envelope.

“You had me followed?”

He slaps me. Grabs me by the hair and flings me onto the couch.

“He showed me pictures,” I yell, “pictures of you and your family. You lied to me. I can’t believe you lied to me!”

He stops and stares. His eyes glaze over with new awareness. He asks if I’m hungry.

“No thank you.”

My left ear sings like a tuning fork. He comes to my side and kneels beside me. He rubs my burning cheek. I push away his hand. He says he’s sorry.

“I want to go home. It’s not safe for me here, not safe for us. I’m not mad at you anymore. I wish you a happy life.”

I don’t think he hears me because he starts telling me how much he loves the hazel colour of my eyes, and how much he loves being with me. Finally, he talks about his wives.

He married both on the same day. They were gifts from a sheik, his daughters. He had to accept or else it would have been a slight. He doesn’t love them, he says, never loved them, will never love them as much as he loves me, he says.

“Why did you lie?”

He says he planned to tell me about them, eventually, but first, he wanted me to fall for him so hard that I’d consider being his third, so I’d consider living the life of the wife of a Mujahedeen.

I shake my head. I hope my gesture says it’s so wrong to do that to people.

He says he’s ready to leave his wives if that’s what I want. He says he loves me. Only me.

“And your kids?”

He says he loves his kids too and smiles at his joke.

His kids are still very young, he says. They need their mothers more at this age.

“I want to help you find Zee-zee, but after that, I’m done.” I sound convincing, even to myself.

He asks if I’m still leaving for America.

Really? Is he really asking me this? Look at the time. Has it crossed his mind that I might have missed my flight? “I don’t know.”

He says he’s sorry in Farsi: Maazerat mikhaam.

He hugs me. It’s settled; he thinks we’re good. He tells me he has news that will blow my mind. He says it’s better if I sit down. I remain standing.

Two days ago, he says, his men captured five American soldiers fighting on Zee-zee’s side. Zee-zee is an American spy, he declares.

“You’re kidding,” I say and cup my mouth to hide my mechanical expression.

He says the worst is still to come: my father had uncovered the truth and my country had taken care of him by handing him over to radicals because they couldn’t trust him with such a secret, especially as he was a reporter.

I gape at him. A century passes. I don’t need to fake my surprise this time. My next words hang like a wattle on my throat: Are you sure?

He gives me a look that speaks volumes, and I crumble to the couch and bury my face in my hands. I scream. I cry. I spew out my pain until it hollows me. He sits down on my right and traces a finger up my spine. He uncovers my hair and runs his fingers through my thick silky tresses.

I nudge him away. “I’d like to be alone.”

He obliges me. His footsteps recede. The curtained door opens and I hear the clinks of cutlery in the next room before it shuts.

I miss home. I miss my mother. I miss the Madison skyline. I miss biking down State Street Saturday mornings. I miss eating Babcock ice cream while I’m biking.

I’m awake but I’m not here. I have blackouts when I’m scared. Something about the way I’m feeling right now reminds me of my first pantomime.

I was four. Nola Rae was performing. She was a giant toy dancing to percussions that dictated her mood. She looked like she was hanging by strings, the way she slumped forward and hooked her arms in the air by the elbows. She stayed in that position, jerking her arms up and down, mimicking a pull from above. At the end of her dance, she wound down like a piece of clockwork and remained motionless until the lights went out.

Her face, even though a clown’s, was rather frightening for a four-year-old: a whiteface that brought out the yellow of her teeth and the not-so-white white of her eye; the dark lips that grinned plastically; the punk-rock eye makeup that combined with the whiteface to make her look deathly.

I was standing near the stage with a group of other children roughly my age. I had seen Nola approach and seen the other kids running. And although I wanted to run (and there had been plenty of time to), I couldn’t move. I became a petrified volunteer in Nola’s next act. I looked on as she covered my nose with a hanky and plucked quarters from my nostrils, after a rude nose fart that had the audience laughing. Nola turned me into a vending machine and took out quarters from different parts of my body and handed them to me, much to my bemusement and the crowd’s delight. I had felt used. It’s the same feeling all over again. Except, this time, I’m not a vending machine. I’m more like Nola. I’m a giant doll being stringed by two puppeteers: Jamal and Taffy. I’m Marion the Marionette. It’s just as well if I were hanging from strings.

The desk drawer catches my eye. The videotapes. I go over to them. Running a finger along the length of a stack, I check the labels. Many of them are in Arabic. A few are in French. Nothing in the first drawer. I open the second. French and English names here: ‘Deschamp’, ‘Smith’, ‘Carmichael’, ‘Lisaresseux’.

‘Ashcroft’.

The name assaults my nervy composure.

Someone’s behind me. I spin around. Taffy. He’s watching me quietly. Going by the distance between him and the curtained door, he didn’t just walk in.

He asks what I’m doing.

“What’s this?” I hold the tape to his face so he can see the label on it. I wave it like a weapon, my arm shaking, my body language saying ‘don’t come near me’.

He says he made a copy of my film. “Why?”

He says he wanted it as a reminder of the time we fell in love.

The floor is suddenly uneven. My head hurts. I hear pantomime percussions. He’s giving me a quizzical look, watching me as if I were unwell. Another jolt rocks me. His image rolls sideways like meat on a skewer.

He asks if I’m okay. I don’t respond.

He says if I like, he can show me. He says it in that cool manner I’ve always found relaxing and reassuring. It was therapeutic then. It’s terrifying now.

He takes the tape from me, goes to the VCR, slots it in, and turns on the TV. He has his back to me. It’s my chance. I make for the door, dawdling at first before charging and slamming into it. I turn the knob. It won’t open. And there’s no key in the keyhole. I try the knob again. This time I pull it towards me. And it creaks. And opens. I don’t wait, I rush out. I run past onlookers who just stare at me as I bump past. I run for the life in me (run with the life I’m carrying), run in any direction that first catches my eye, a scream on my lips for anyone who might try to grab me. All I know is, if my legs carry me to safety, it’ll be about time.

Culled from How Hamisu Survived Bad Kidneys and a Bad Son-in-Law 

Check out It Happened by same author.