Chapter The Eyes of a Child #2
I don’t know whether the proposition comes from her or me, but in any case it happens naturally, without flirting, or guesswork, or shyness, it simply arises on its own, and without another word we shut ourselves into her room to make love.
The boy, who has shown an almost unnatural courage and stoicism, now lets out a moan.
He moans because he can’t cry. Along with his eyes, he also lost his capacity to weep, and he wails very softly, without words, without tears, without stopping, the long, lonely lament of a small, inconsolable child.
His mother comes in; she’s a silent woman who hides her agony behind the niqab that covers her face.
She sits beside her son and repeats a single phrase like a litany: All pain has its balm, my sweet child, all pain has its balm.
Another empty formula, more mute language, without meaning.
All pain has its balm, the woman says again, but her voice is so gentle, her way of stroking the boy’s hair and kissing his hands so tender, that he calms little by little, until his moans trail off.
Maybe she’s right. Maybe there is a balm for this boy’s pain: his mother’s voice.
Fahed barely eats, his mother goes out of her way for him to accept each bite.
On the other hand, he loves to draw. He spends hours at it, despite the loss of his eyes.
I’ve found him a notebook and suggested a technique that more or less works for him, that consists of moving the pencil with his right hand while using the left as a guide across the paper, so his figures don’t spill out or overlap.
I keep him company and encourage him; I suspect it might be good for him to try to record images of his lived world before they’re erased from memory.
Or would it be better for him to do the opposite, let the loss of visible images feed the flourishing of something new, the images of dreams?
Just in case, I ask him to draw his grandfather’s sheep.
My suggestion doesn’t interest him; Fahed is more inclined toward matters of war.
He scrawls some circles and says they’re grenades, and inks some horizontal lines that are bazookas. He draws the outline of a plane.
“That plane of yours came out very well,” I say.
“It’s not a plane, it’s a supersonic delta canard aircraft, an intelligent monster,” he explains. “It knows how to find the enemy.”
Then he draws some sticks that are rifles that can shoot from up to seven thousand feet away. Nothing to be done about it, Fahed is a battle artist; his knowledge bewilders me. Better put, it terrifies me, but I say nothing; when it comes down to it that’s his reality, the one given to him by fate.
“You know what this is?” He gestures at a more sophisticated set of lines. “It’s a Eurofighter dropping cluster bombs.”
Cluster bombs, like the ones that blinded him. He asks me whether I like it and I can’t hold back, this has gone too far.
“I don’t like it,” I say, and he seems surprised. “It looks like a ridiculous duck laying rotten eggs in the air.”
“Then let’s destroy it,” he says, yanking the page from the notebook.
I ask him to draw someone he loves very much, his mother for example, and he agrees. I help him add eyes, nose, and mouth on the oval face, and hair around it, but very long, the way he’s described to me. When he’s done, at the bottom he writes the word ‘um, mother.
“Does it look like her?” he asks me.
I say yes, though the truth is that I don’t know, I’ve only seen his mother’s eyes, the rest of her is concealed by the niqab. Inside, I’m glad that Fahed doesn’t remember her covered but with all her features, her smiling lips and long loose hair, as he must have always seen her at home.
“She’s very pretty, my mother,” he says; she’s sitting right beside me, and stirs uneasily. It seems nobody should look at her or know what she looks like either, not even through the little portrait her son has drawn.
I ask him to draw his father next, but he shakes his pencil in the air, as if in doubt.
“I don’t remember what my father is like, it’s been so long since the last time I saw him.”
“Did your father die?” It’s reckless to ask. Around here, such matters are not to be probed.
“The war took him,” the mother cuts in quickly, as if to stop the boy from saying something he shouldn’t. “My children’s father is a soldier.”
With that, the subject is closed; she won’t say more, she’s extremely cautious.
Like all Yemeni women, she hides all expression behind the veil and keeps her mouth closed.
She knows that to walk means any false step could set off an antipersonnel mine and that to talk means a single mistaken word could mean death.
Both she and the boy are wary of any actions that could implicate them.
The great war in Yemen, orchestrated from abroad, explodes internally like a cluster bomb, dividing and subdividing the population into a labyrinthine proliferation of partial wars.
It’s risky to clarify whether Fahed’s father fights with the government troops or the Houthi rebels, whether he’s Shiite or Sunni, Salafi or Takfiri, whether his battles are regional or tribal.
It’s enough to say he’s a soldier, which gives little information; the war has put an end to farmers, builders, teachers, camel drivers, and shepherds, turning all men into soldiers.
“I could draw my grandfather for you,” Fahed offers, and he draws a figure with a beard and turban.
I assure him that it came out quite well, anyone would see that this is his grandfather, but he’d want to correct the left shoe because it ended up far from his leg.
“Would you like to put it closer, so they match?” I suggest.
Fahed attempts it, but ends up putting two shoes on the right leg; it’s hard for him to understand that this left isn’t the same left on the grandfather he’s drawn.
“Don’t worry,” I say. “Put the shoe on the leg that’s on your left . . .”
“Let’s just leave it this way,” he says, resigned. He puts down the pencil and closes the notebook.
I made another mistake. I shouldn’t have forced him.
I would like to have been a therapist, or psychologist, to be able to guide him appropriately; Fahed is relying on me in these first decisive weeks of his life as a blind person.
He’s already been cured of what can, in these circumstances, be cured, he’s out of the danger zone, and aside from Olivia the doctors are focused exclusively on the children who are still in critical condition.
I ask Fahed to forgive me for being unable to help him more.
“Try, you can do it!” He makes me laugh, because he’s using the same formula on me that I use to keep his spirits up.
Sedentary activities aren’t enough, it’s time for Fahed to learn to get around. Over and over, hand in hand, we walk around the place, its buildings, tents, and vacant areas, counting the steps from one side to another.
I’m startled by his intuitive perception of space; after a few days, he can orient himself on his own, with the help of a broomstick I’ve given him for a cane.
It seems to me that the taps of his stick as he walks transmit a certain visual representation of space, and a physical sense of distance and depth; something like what bats achieve with radar.
He makes us all laugh, because he wields his stick as though it were a sword, with so much energy and exuberance that anyone who isn’t careful gets a beating.
“Last night I saw her!” he tells me.
“Whom did you see?”
“Amira, my older sister.”
“She came to visit you?”
“No, she stayed back to take care of my siblings.”
“But you saw her . . .”
“Yes, she was in my dreams.”
“You saw her in a dream . . .”
“Yes. But she was transparent.”
Can the transparent be seen? Fahed presents me with serious epistemological dilemmas. Can the transparencies that appear to him in dreams give him back images of what he saw before, and no longer sees?
“Transparent like what?” I ask. “Like glass?”
“No. Not like glass.”
“Transparent like . . . a ghost?”
He doesn’t understand me. He doesn’t know what a ghost is, and I can’t find a way to explain it. Olivia is there, listening to our conversation.
“Those are Christian things,” she cuts in. “Ghosts only appear to Christians.”
“Christian things?” I protest. “But there are many ghost stories in One Thousand and One Nights.”
“But Fahed hasn’t read One Thousand and One Nights.”
This woman defeats me with her play of words, her illogical logic. Olivia makes fun of what she calls my bookish culture, though she herself is an avid reader; last night I saw a Hanif Kureishi novel on her nightstand.
Pau has relieved me of part of my logistical and office duties, so I have more time for Fahed.
I thank him for this change and take advantage of it, the bond between the boy and me has deepened.
I try to imagine that transparency he says he sees.
It must be the idea of something that springs to mind, even though you can’t see it.
The transparent image of his sister in the dream, for example.
I reread Whitman’s verses on memories of a transparent summer morning.
What’s this? a boy said to me, showing me a fistful of grass.
What could I answer? I don’t know what grass is either.
We’ll see whether old Whitman can help us. Early in the morning, I take Fahed out to the vegetable garden, where among the tomatoes, cucumbers, and onions a few blades of grass grow.
“This is grass, touch it,” I tell the boy, giving him a handful. “Can you see it?”
“A little.”
“It’s green, can you tell?”
“It’s green and also transparent,” he says.
“Yes, Fahed, that’s it! Remember it always, what you see as transparent can also be green. What’s transparent can be of any or all colors, whatever colors you want.”