With the loofa, I’m just going to wash you with the loofa, I said, rubbing soap onto it. He sat there naked, so very thin that I had the feeling it could not be only his flesh and skin that had shrunk and thinned but his bones as well. He kept his gaze there, on whatever it was he was thinking about, and he remained utterly motionless.
We mustn’t spill any water on your easy chair, I said as I rubbed his chest with the loofa. He was so gaunt that his chest looked hollowed out, giving his belly in contrast an even more pronounced roundness, like a little toy ball. As I moved the loofa to his arms and then down to his hands and fingers, I realized that before he had become ill and I had brought him to my home, I had never seen any part of his body, not his chest, not his back, not even his arms. Maybe they had always been like that, as sallow as the arms of a chronic, bedridden invalid.
The respite that separated what I was now from what I would be after the operation was not fixed. It wasn’t a specific period of time set by the doctor. He did not tell me to come back in a week, for example, or in a month or in two months. He left that to me. He left it to me to measure the distance between who I still was and the moment when my illness would kill me. As for what I could rely on to form my own estimation, that came down to my sense of the words he had used with me and his manner of speaking; how he had said those things to me, all of this preserved in my memory, word for word. According to that language of his—and that little smile, from which he could not erase a touch of the cunning that was a mark of his profession—I could see that he was leaving it to me to subtract a little from, or add a little to, the period of time before returning to the hospital, which I had figured could be a month.
A month: and I could lengthen it a little, letting it eat into the next month. That way, I could reason that I was getting a little more benefit from the remaining time I had in which I could still think of myself as physically whole. What the doctor in effect told me was: Just take a month for yourself. That was so that I could compensate, in that one month, for what I would no longer be capable of doing afterwards. We use the days that remain to us profitably when we truly know that we have to use them fully. That was the doctor’s thinking, I reckoned. From some film I had seen once, I remembered the doctor who told his patient he had six months left. So we will go to the Bahamas, the man responded, turning to his wife who was standing there next to him. He had already prepared himself for this, even before he fell ill, and certainly before he knew he would die. Maybe he smiled, there in front of the doctor, or his wife smiled. For they—she and her husband—would spend the time that remained to him in the best way possible.
As for me, I would spend this respite—this one month for me—wondering whether it would be better for me to go the next morning to the doctor and offer myself up to him then and there. Because I wouldn’t be able to shake off the feeling that what would take place a month from now would be better taking place right now. I thought this way because I wanted to be rid of the worry and the fear of it all, but also because I couldn’t help being curious. Those feelings pressed on me, insisting that what I wanted most was to find out what I would be like after it, were I to survive the operation. Were I not to die.
I knew I must guard against showing any hesitation or indecision in front of my wife: saying to her for instance that I would be going to the hospital the next day and then not going. Instead of telling her I’m going to the hospital and then she finds me back in the house only an hour later, I thought, I will put my hesitation to the test on my own. So here I am, turning the key in the ignition and backing away from our house. Here I am going all the way out of the village, leaving the last houses behind me as I reach the main road. But there my fear gets the better of me, putting an end to my indecision by telling me to stop the car. I turn it to head in the opposite direction and it carries me back to the house. There, my wife will not ask, Where were you? She is accustomed to my comings and goings, from one hamlet to the next.
My wavering over what decision to make was not the only thing sending me down to the car and out on those little trips from which I returned before they were completed. What pushed me even more was my restlessness and my sense of irritation with the house, an aversion to sitting there at home. It got so bad that, with every return, the moment I arrived I felt instantly how much I loathed it. Even from the outside, not just when I was indoors. I despised the faded, badly leaning outside wall that hid the balcony and the high windows looking directly down onto the square and the passersby below. When I came back from Najaf, this house was already prepared. My father had said that it was the appropriate house for me. All I had to do was to respond that it would suit me, as though I had chosen it myself. What pleased him wasn’t just the privacy of a house set high above the road and walled in, but also its proximity to the mosque. If people didn’t find me there, they would find me here. He knew I would not be like him, always moving about, circling through the villages.
Just over there is the shop, it is very close by, he said, as the two porters lowered my belongings from the truck. He strode toward the shop certain that I would follow him. Here’s where he is, he said as he waved his cane at the shop owner. He didn’t complete this gesture for the man; he didn’t announce to the shopkeeper that from today, I would be the imam of this little place. He came out and began walking me through the narrow lanes he knew.
As-salaamu alaykum, people murmured as we appeared, greeting us before we could greet them, as was proper; standing up as we drew near and remaining on their feet as we passed, while all he did was to raise his stick as if it was acting on his behalf, responding to their greetings. It was clear to me how, in all of his dealings with people, he didn’t think ahead. He made these hazardous judgments of his about what to do. On the day of the confrontation with the soldiers, this was what had led to the deaths of the two men.
I wasn’t capable of getting my voice to respond—Peace be upon you as well—on behalf of the two of us. I just lifted my hand to my chest and then to my head, once and then once more: the first time for myself, and then again for him. He wouldn’t have seen me doing it, because he would have already stridden ahead. When we walked together he always stayed a step ahead of me.
Many years passed before I could explain to myself what he had meant when he said those words to me in one of those moments when he was giving me advice. A person’s faith is not mature until he knows that people are no better than animals. He said this to me in the days when I was first standing behind the pulpit, my voice coming out weak and tentative as I faced the people seated in the Hussainiya. I couldn’t feel satisfied interpreting that saying of his simply as an expression of scorn for human beings. I went on turning it over in my mind, reflecting on its various aspects, now linking it to Sufi sayings, now thinking it must have been pronounced by some orthodox jurisprudent, now deciding it had to do with the demands placed on anyone wholly immersed in his faith. On those days when he would emerge from his room—there in his house—crossing beyond the paved area before the garden to go out to the road where he stood—just stood—with his back to the door in the wall, his demeanor would make it clear that he was not a man to return the greetings of any man who might walk by. Those passing by understood this, and so all they did was to mutter their salaams without even raising their eyes to his face.
This is your house. This is your house and it is exactly the right house for you, he said to me back then. And he took me around to the people here as though he needed to show me to them but there was no need to do anything more than that.
I did not say to him that I would have preferred to choose my own house, or that I wanted to get to know people on my own, now that I had become the imam of their mosque.
Ahlan, ahlan. Welcome to the Sayyid, she said as usual. But she sounded surprised.
I didn’t move. I stayed standing in the doorway as though I needed to ascertain for myself whether I ought to go in.
I’ve been wanting to see Bilal. So I thought I would come by and pick him up, and take him to our house.
Please, come in. Come in, Sayyid, she said, standing aside to make room for me to enter.
The instant I was inside I knew that she