| The Frog That Flew
Day Ten
Today, and after the fall of night, and
after all sane people had gone to sleep, I got transformed into a rabid dog and went
roaming around the empty Damascene streets, in search of some hapless victims, some
hapless memories. It didn’t take me too long to find the first one. I found it in the
entrance of a nearby building, in the darkness under the stairwell.
One day, when I was fifteen years old, I
passed by this very entrance, it was late then, way passed midnight, and I was on my way
home from one of my secretive late-night walks. I used to take many such walks at the
time, and I still do. But, when I passed by the entrance this time, I encountered Lida,
the half-Cherkessian girl, who just happened to be the prettiest girl in the neighborhood
by popular consensus. She was standing alone by the entrance smoking nervously. Now, being
famous for being a nice and homey girl, it was indeed very surprising for me to see Lida
out at such a late hour, and of all things, smoking.
I had heard about Lida’s beauty for
years without seeing her, until Muzna invited her to our house one morning to have a cup
of tea with us before they both had to go to school, for they had gotten enrolled in the
same school that year. After that, I had several brief encounters with her in the streets
of our neighborhood, and we got to exchange some pleasantries a few times, and that was
the extant of our...relationship then. But things were about to change that night, once
and for all.
“You’re Mustafa, right?
You’re Muzna’s brother?” She had already thrown her cigarette’s butt
on the ground and was busy stumping on it with her foot as she talked to me.
Lida then went on to talk to me about all
different sorts of things, without even giving me the opportunity to say anything, not
even a simple Hello. Then she began to inquire about my health, my father’s health,
my mother’s health, Muzna’s marriage plans, and son on and so forth, then...
"Yeah, yeah, why not. She should get married. Let her get married. There
could be salvation in marriage you know. Or what do you say?”
“Salvation from what?” I asked her with all the innocence and stupidity
in the world.
“Salvation from what? Yeah, maybe
you’re right. Maybe there is no salvation. Marriage might even be worse for her. Who
said there is salvation in marriage? Can you guarantee me that? Can you?”
Lida was now talking very fast and very
neurotically; it was very hard for me to distinguish her words. Moreover, I could now see
very clearly that she was drunk, very drunk. I could smell the alcohol in the air around
her, not to mention her breaths. She was very drunk, and that really surprised me. Nothing
I know about Lida could have prepared me for this, for seeing hr like this. At the moment,
I wanted to leave, I really wanted to leave, for frankly the whole situation frightened me
and disgusted me. Yes, yes, it frightened and disgusted me. No. No. wait a minute. She
did. She did.
But at that moment, at that very moment that
I was about to leave without saying a word, without even excusing myself, I noticed
something, I suddenly noticed something about Lida. I noticed a dark blue bruise around
her left eye, a big bruise, a very conspicuous bruise that I had somehow failed to notice
a the beginning of our encounter - Lida’s nervous gestures had drawn my attention
away from it, it seems. I stood in place frozen when I saw it, I did not want to leave
anymore, but I also did not know what to say or do. For quite a while we both stood
silently observing each other. Her gaze was sure and getting more sure, mine was hesitant and getting more so.
Suddenly, Lida turned around and walked
towards the darkness under the stairwell, until she was completely engulfed in it and I
could see her no more.
“All this doesn’t really matter
now. Nothing really matters. Nothing. Come over here, won’t you? Come on, don’t
be afraid. I won’t eat you.”
There was a
certain sarcastic tone now in Lida’s voice that made me obey her command without
thinking. And when I, too, became engulfed by the darkness, Lida jumped at me, pulling me
into her bosom, kissing me violently on the lips sending her tong deep into my throat.
But, hers was not an enjoyable kiss, for
Lida’s breaths were laden to the saturation point with the taste of alcohol and
tobacco, and I hated tobacco, and drank very little. This is my want t this very day, I
don’t think I’ll ever change. Still, I didn’t push Lida away from me, for
some odd reason I couldn’t, that is not until she began to loosen my belt, for at
that moment...
“Hey, what’s wrong with you? What
are you afraid of? Or, are you...a virgin? Oh, my God, you are a virgin, aren’t you?
Well, believe me, you won’t be after tonight. You are in the right hands, I assure
you, I’ll take care of you. I’ll take good care of you.”
This time, I let Lida unloose my belt, I let
her pull down my zipper, and I let her run her fingers on my underwear along my
rebelliously erect penis. She kept on kissing me, and her kisses were still unenjoyable,
but now she started to continuously stroke my penis. Then, and with a sudden and quick
movement, she slid her hand under my underwear and pressed it firmly against my penis. I
jerked a bit in the beginning, but then I calmed down and tried to enjoy the sensation.
“Hmm, that’ll do. Oh, yes, that will do. It will be really nice.” She
wasn’t really stroking my penis anymore, she was rather pressing and unpressing her
hand with a slight movement up and down. The whole thing was getting maddeningly exciting
for me in spite of her unseemly state.
But by now, my eyes had gotten used to the
dark, and I could see Lida as she kissed me, I could see the mad and frantic look in her
eyes. I could see the fear. Yes, I could see the fear, she wasn’t sure of what was
taking place anymore than I did. In fact, I was probably raping her. No, I was actually
raping her. The certainty of that in my mind, and the taste of tobacco, and the alcohol.
No, I couldn’t help myself, I couldn’t. I couldn’t. I pushed Lida away from
me with a sudden burst of violence, her back hit a bit hard against the wall, but I don't
think she felt any pain, or perhaps she just did not care. Or I didn’t care. I
don’t know. I don’t know. How could I know? nothing normal about that night.
There was nothing normal about that situation.
“What now?” she said impatiently.
“What is it? Wasn’t it good enough for you?” Then, amazingly enough, she
smiled. She laughed. “Oh, I see. I understand. You’re shy. You’re just too
shy. Or, perhaps, you think, someone will come and see us. No, wait, wait, don’t pull
up your pants, why would you want to do that? Just wait, wait and look.”
And with a quick movement, too quick to
grasp, Lida had taken off her white cotton blouse and thrown it on the ground. She now
stood in front of me bear breasted, and I could see the robustness of her breasts and the
erection of her nipples very clearly, because she was not standing in the dark anymore.
No. She had taken a few steps backward and was now drowned in the street light cascading
into the building.
“What do you think now? Aren’t
they beautiful?”
And
shrugged her shoulders and let breasts bounce in all directions. “Aren’t they
really beautiful? You can do with them whatever you want you know. You can play with them,
suck on them, or even bite them if you want, it doesn’t matter to me, I can take the
pain. If it pleases you, I can take it. Believe me, I can. Now, here I am, bare-breasted
and willing, and the streets are empty, and they will stay empty. Even should we get
caught, you’ll be the stud and I’ll be the bitch. You can tell everybody in the
neighborhood how Lida, the most beautiful girl around, wanted you so bad, she let you fuck
her under the stairwell of her own building. So come on stud, fuck me, fuck me, I am all
yours.”
And with another quick movement of hers,
still too quick to grasp, - or was it me who was just too slow to react, too frozen by
lust? - Lida took off her jeans and threw it outside the building into the middle of the
narrow the street. Again she wasn’t wearing any underwear, and so now she was
standing completely naked in front of me. Naked, confident, smiling. In the entrance of a
Damascene building, in a well-known traditional Damascene neighborhood, there was standing
a naked, yet otherwise traditional, girl in front of me, her clothes strewn all over the
place, inviting me to take her, to fuck her, I, the typically untraditional Syrian young
man.
“Now, I am pretty sure of
what’s going on in your mind, but don’t worry, because it will happen.
Everything you’re thinking of will happen. You will never hear me say no. Now, do you
want our experience to be illuminating, or shall I join you in the dark? I see. Well, take
a good look at my body now, so you know exactly what you’re having, so you can
describe it in exact details later to your friends.” And Lida began to turn
around as she came towards me.
When Lida was completely engulfed in the
darkness once more, my penis began to jerk in anticipation. I had already dropped my pants
without realizing it, and my underwear proved to flimsy to contain my erection and was
already halfway down. A simple tug from Lida’s fingers freed my frenzied erection,
and as our bodies were about to touch, I glanced rapidly at Lida’s eyes and managed
to detect the fear that was still there and which, once
more, belied her show of confidence.
That, and the stink of tobacco and
alcohol that were still enwrapping her, and that untraditional streak in me as well…suddenly,
there was absolutely nothing sensual about the situation. I pushed Lida away from me
again, though less violently this time, then I pulled my underwear and pants back on
again, my erection having suddenly subsided, and hurried towards the entrance of the
building.
“You’re drunk, and you don’t
know what you’re doing or saying. I advise you to go back to your house and go to
sleep, and I promise you to forget about what has
happened. Believe me, you’ll thank me in the morning.”
“Thank you. Oh, really? You bloody
idiot. No. No. I am sorry. Please don’t go. I’ll do anything. I’ll suck it
for you, I am really good at it you know. Please come back. Don’t abandon me.
Don’t abandon me. Oh, what’s the
use? You are a coward. You are all cowards.”
At this point, Lida stopped shouting, for
she was shouting by now, and I stopped running, for I was running somehow without
realizing it. I turned around probably just
to take a final glimpse at Lida’s nakedness, and perhaps also to see if indeed the
streets were still empty. They were. And Lida was still naked but she was now returning
slowly towards the building having picked up her pants from the ground and thrown it on
her shoulders. She didn’t seem in the least concerned about her nudity and the
possibility that someone, having heard her shouts, might go out to investigate and end up
seeing her like that.
What was wrong with this girl? I
wondered.
Despite her drunkenness, her nudity and her dirty talk, she never felt like a
whore, so what was wrong with her? What made her behave like she did?
Just before Lida got into the building, and
having already put her right leg on the stairwell, she suddenly stopped, looked at the
ground, then she knelt and picked up something, tossed it into the air, then picked it up
again. She looked at it, whatever it was, then at me, then she smiled.
As she stood like that, still naked, with an
angelic, yes angelic, an angelic smile on her
face, and the street lights shining between her legs, I, my system having been invaded
with a sudden hormonal rush yet again, and my penis having suddenly regained its erstwhile
erection, couldn’t help but take a few steps towards her, wanting to embrace her,
wanting to make love to her right where she stood, and all through the night. Lida, too,
seemed about ready to run in my direction, but then, I once more regained control over my
biological system, turned my back to Lida and ran all the way home, all the way to my
room, straight to my bed, where I spent the entire night wetting the sheets with my semen.
Three months after this incident, Lida was
seen standing on the edge of the roof of her building looking down at the passersby in the
neighborhood calmly, quietly, with that angelic smile of hers drawn on her face. It was
two o’clock in the afternoon, and the employers and students were on their way back
home. Naturally, many of them stopped to see what is going to happen, some of them shouted
asking Lida to come down, but she, it seems, was not about to disappoint her public.
And so Lida began to take her clothes off
one piece at a time, throwing them into the air, performing perhaps the first ever public
act of striptease in the entire Abrahamic history of Syria. The studs of the neighborhood
began to whistle and encourage her on, while some of them started to fight over the
various clothing items which were falling to the ground, until finally, Lida threw away
her underwear and stood stark naked on the edge of the roof. The studs, then, began to
applaud, so Lida took a couple of bows to her adoring audience, then dove straight into
the street as one would dive into a swimming pool.
Lida’s life could have been saved, you
know, had, at least, one of the people watching her chose to go to the rooftop instead and
grab her, there was enough time for that really, considering the fact that the
“strip-show” had lasted for a whole ten minutes. But it is probably better for
Lida’s life to have ended the way it did. Well, one hopes.
Hisham was one of the people who got the
chance to see Lida’s naked body before it was picked up by the ambulance. This is
what he had to say about it:
“Ah, if only you could have seen it,
Tuffy, it was so beautiful, so clean, so pure, there was not a single zit or a blemish on it. Believe me, had it not been for
the crowd and the blood, I would have fucked her right then and there.”
Hisham was so into his narration, he did not
notice mother as she came from behind him and slapped him as hard as she could right as he
uttered his final words. “These are the words of monsters not studs.”
This was mother’s comment on the situation, which must have awakened Hisham from his
“drunken stupor”, how else can I describe his ridiculous excitement, for he
shook his head to mother in acknowledgment, and went back to his room without saying a
word.
As for the reasons that drove Lida to commit
suicide, the official investigation proved that she was pregnant in her first month, and
that she must have committed suicide to hide her shame. The would-be father was never
identified. And Lida’s family moved to a
different neighborhood.
Still, the riddle got finally resolved less
than a month ago, when Lida’s Shamite father was beaten to death by the brothers of
his Cherkessian wife. He was sexually abusing his second daughter it seems, but this
particular daughter, perhaps drawing strength from what had happened to her sister, chose
to speak out. She was twelve years old. And despite the fact that her mother was denounced
for marrying a non-Cherkess, her maternal relatives listened to her, and believed her. And
while Lida had been denounced by our local Imam as a whore and an apostate, her sister
would be better off it seems, we hear that she would soon be married off to one of her
maternal cousins.
One last point about Lida’s suicide.
The police found a button in her hand, she had died, it seems, while clasping to it; the
police at the time, not knowing of the “special relationship” that had existed
between father and daughter, concluded that this button must have belonged to the would-be
father. I have reasons to believe otherwise.
At this point, I could have probably began
to bark waking everybody in the neighborhood and bringing out the hunger hidden inside.
But I couldn’t. The night hasn’t been over yet, and there was still another
memory to hunt down not too far away from where I was, an older memory, no less bleak,
that goes back to when I was still nine years old.
So, possessed with this intention of mine, I
left Lida’s building leaving behind much urine, feces and saliva, in addition to the
dead body of a cat whose head I had bit off.
Few minutes later, I was stretching in the
entrance of another building chasing after my second victim for the night.
One day, in the cool hours of the summer
afternoon, in this selfsame entrance, being much larger than that of Lida’s building,
I was playing football with some of the neighborhood’s kids. I was playing in the
position of the goalkeeper for both teams and was completely focused on my task. I
hadn’t let a single goal in yet, although we had been playing for more than forty
minutes; I was planning to keep things this way, and force both teams to resort to penalty
kicks. That had always been my goal as a goalkeeper, but today, for the very first time
indeed, I was really close towards making it happen. I could feel myself ready to finally
make it happen.
But, at one a point, and as I was watching
the ball traveling from one foot to another, and from one side to another, slowly getting
nearer and nearer to me, all players suddenly froze in place, then everybody, except me,
started running away from my general direction that, within seconds, I was left standing
all alone in the building staring at a motionless ball without a single idea of what was
wrong. Suddenly, I heard the sound of steps
behind me, I turned around to see who it was, and wish to heaven that I hadn’t and
had simply run away like the rest.
It was a tall and bald girl dressed in a
thick dirty white robe. She was looking at me in a very mad way, with a sinister smile
drawn on her face. Her insistent gaze made me tremble in my boots. Still, I did not run
away, don’t ask me why though, for I don’t really know why. Perhaps I had
thought that it was my duty to try and prevent her as well from getting into my
goal. I don’t know. I don’t know.
I stayed then, I stayed and I stood up to
her mad gaze, and somehow managed not to turn and run away as she approached me. For she
did approach me you know, ever so slowly, perhaps because she could sense that I was
afraid. Then she began to talk to me, to ask me some general questions about my name, my
age, my family and the like. And I answered all her questions as calmly and truthfully as
I could manage. Then the girl began to pat me on the head, “oh, my brave
hero,” she said, “you’re not scared of me, are you? Are you?”
She kept on saying this over and over again, while continuously patting my head, until I did become afraid and was about to run
away even. But just as I was about to do it, I noticed something. I noticed something that
made me stay. I noticed that I could quite easily see the girls bare breasts through the
opening of her robe as she was bending down to get closer to me, most clearly wanting to
kiss me. Curiosity made me stop and stay in my place.
As the girl got closer and closer to me, and
was about to kiss me, on the mouth I think, but I am not too sure about that, she was
suddenly pulled back from behind very violently. A look of sheer terror was immediately
drawn on her face, her face that by this time had looked very kind to me, very childlike.
Then the man who pulled her away from me started slapping her, and punching her, and
kicking her, and the girl began to shout over and over: “Forgiveness. I won’t
do it again. I won’t do it again.” But the man kept on hitting her and
pushing her and roughing her that at one point her head hit hard against the wall, and she
fell down.
When the girl fell down, the man finally
stopped hitting her. Slowly she tried to stand again, but she was unable to do it, so she
leaned on her hands and knees and crawled slowly on all four towards the door to her
house. But just before she got in, she turned her head towards me and gave me a wide
smile, then she started barking as a puppy extending her tong in and out. I was about to
smile back at her, but at that moment, the man kicked her again, very hard, between her
legs.
I had never seen, and hopefully will never
see again, a face so contorted by pain that you get the impression it was about to
implode. But that was the impression that got drawn on the girl’s face when she felt
the kick. Suddenly, the girl began to vomit continuously for several minutes, and I could
see blood coming out with the vomit. When the vomiting finally stopped, the girl crawled
back on her belly to the house, the man followed her in and slammed the door behind him.
A minute later, and I have absolutely
no idea why I waited there, still gazing at the door, at the wall, at the images that kept
on flashing through my mind, the door was opened, and a veiled woman showed up, she looked
in my direction with disdain, then went about cleaning the vomit. When she finished, she
gave me another look of disdain and went back inside the house and closed the door. She
hadn’t noticed the blood stain on the wall where the girl’s head had hit.
When I turned back wanting to leave this
hellish place, I saw the other kids coming, they had been observing the whole thing from
afar, and now they wanted to finish the match. They talked me into staying, telling me to
forget all about that “bald Jinn,” as one of them had put it, and I finally
relented. In the ten remaining minutes of the match, however, four goals were scored
against me. And never after that have I managed to keep my goal clean.
I later learned the story of the bald girl.
Her name was ‘Afaf, and two years prior to this incident, when she was only fifteen,
her brother had caught her kissing a boy in the entrance of the building. Her family was
very conservative, and this incident it seems, made them think that their daughter was in
danger of becoming a whore. So they stopped sending her to school, and began to beat her
up for every little mistake she made. She was
completely forbidden to leave the house, and her parents
sought to marry her off as quickly as they could, and were indeed about to do so at one
point.
For, through a matchmaker, ‘Afaf had
managed to get someone’s attention, and everything seemed to be going her
family’s way. But when the groom’s family made the official call to ask for her
hand, ‘Afaf got out of her room to receive them in the most natural state of complete
undress, after all, they had the right to examine the merchandise fully before buying,
haven’t they? After that incident, ‘Afaf was considered completely insane, or at
least possessed by some manner of evil jinn, and her parents treatment of her got worse
and worse as time went by. But, publicly, they spent a lot of money on holding mulids[1] and group
recitations of the Qur’an all for the well-being of ‘Afaf, their beloved eldest
daughter. To no avail, of course.
A year later, that is, a year after my
encounter with Afaf, she decided, it seems, to relieve her parents from all the huge
expenses they were incurring on her account. So one day, when they were all out, she
somehow managed to open the door of her bedroom, got out, went into the bathroom, locked
the door from the inside, and after having filled the tub with water and gasoline, she
slipped into the tub and lit herself up.
Not too many people showed up for the
funeral. Not too many people sympathized with the parents. Mother had showed me a picture
of ‘Afaf taken before the beginning of her ordeal, I don’t know where she got it
from, in it ‘Afaf looked very beautiful with her long black hair reaching down to her
hips. At that moment I realized something, something very important. I realized that the
beauty of a woman could very well be a curse in our part of the world. A curse. The cross
that she had to bear, as the Christians would say.
‘Afaf’s family moved out of the
neighborhood a few months after.
And so it goes that at two very important
moments in my life, two beautiful girls needed my help, my presence, my support, my love.
And I wasn’t able to give them what they needed. I wasn’t able to give them any
of it. I did not even understand then what was it that I was supposed to give, or how I
was supposed to give it. I can never forget that. Never. And I can never forgive myself
for my failure, no matter how justifiable it was.
Do you now know why it is so dangerous for
me to be making a woman out of every virgin in the neighborhood Hisham? Do you now know
why I could not take the first step?
Not that I am zealous about chastity though?
Not that I have ever been chaste really. Oh no, not at all. In fact, I hate chastity, and
I have shed it out of me the first chance I got. For isn’t it the real cause of what
had happened? Chastity? The show of chastity? The claim of it? The pretense of it? The
myth of it? The presumed relevance of it? At this point, I finally began to bark, I barked so loudly, so continuously, I woke up everybody in the neighborhood. But before anyone could see me, I shed away my dog skin and ran all the way back home.
[1] A Mulid is a celebration made in honor of the
Prophet’s birthday, but it could be held any time and not necessarily on the exact
day of his birth. It involves the reading of a special outline of his life emphasizing his
ability to intercede for the believers with God.
|
 |
|
|
|
|
lust for salvation, Brother, as though it were a woman, and I - a man.
|
