Zuhour

She was wandering from room to room. Stuck sometimes in the margin between two rooms, in the shade, where the reflective windows couldn’t meet her with the winking stares of the jeweled window and porch lights, the city as it drew itself to sleep, and the lumberous lists of names, of father’s and mother’s names, of place of birth, of type of car, of annual salary, all these names, filled inside the stenciled biro lines set out for them, which formed part of the old groan of the city now, as it dimmed in the smog light, in the weakening glow of its old pragmatic, mechanical hum.

When she closed her eyes, she thought she could hear the working of some factory or hospital, and un aware of the location of one, she attributed this to the inner belly, the grumbles that issued from the institution of the city itself. Its networks, its fence-like possibilities for connection. The relationship in which its name was used.

She telephoned the teacher once again. She let her fingers fumble bloodlessly at their tips as she typed the number, stuck to a flittering piece of note paper (no doubt, taken from her husband’s office, where the numberless inhabitants of this city were listed, statisticised and undescripitively, again by hand, notwithstanding the brilliance of the very sleek laptop that crowned the surface of his desk). Perhaps a man was safer than a machine, she had always thought this upon seeing the crumpled lists on her father’s desk, and his great, box like computer with the black screen and the green type, untouched, yet endowed, by the ministry.

She hadn’t saved this number, she only did that for those people whose attachments somehow reached into the realm of trust with her. It was like saving the Philipino maid’s number, instead of tacking it carelessly to the kitchen pin board, where it too, could be victim to the tearing wind.  Which hit like an unexpected visitor at the boards of the doors and the weak casements of the fan’s plastic wings. Again there was no answer. She felt as if she were sinking into a deeper and deeper hole, from which return would not come, from which resolution could not issue. She felt as if she were getting further away from the world.

She muttered a habitual line putting her trust in God against the evil forces. She felt them enjoying a large banquet now in every corner of the room, gaze directed at her, in the middle. Un accommodated for, without a plate and that reassuring regularity of the chew, the dicing of your sustenance in a perceptible cavity, that which was yours, and yet could open its self to the world, could still be heard, despite her woman and motherhood, and the increasing predictability of what must be heard from her lips to pass as acceptable.

Until this point, she hadn’t allowed herself the gap, the break, to dote on the one she was calling. Instead, she consisted merely of the apparition of a name on her screen. But now, the feeling in the girl’s presence raced back. This brown haired, sooty eyed girl, whose purpose, whose presence, had never been ascertained. Who amused her husband in her novelty, her youthful assurance, the sort of assurance you strove at in a daughter, but would cringe at in a wife. They talked about football with an abandon that Zuhour could only sigh and raise her eyes at. That girl, whom she relied on for a certain kind of privileged knowledge, which she at once wanted and tried to throw off, that girl, alone in her own happenings. Too thin for a daughter, too distant for a sister, beautiful only in her foreignness,  Zuhour found it strange to have met a woman she felt she could not open her mouth freely to. Whom she couldn’t relate to in that unspoken realm of impulse.