By Ibtisam Abdallah Like drops of concentrated acid falling on a piece of metal and beginning to etch onto its surface, in just this way does depression act on the soul, advancing relentlessly all over it. That was what I had been thinking about since morning. This idea persisted with me just as sometimes some musical phrase from a song stays with me: I hear it early in the morning and I continue to hum it throughout the day. I feel irritated by it yet I continue to hum it. "Like drops of concentrated acid...." I do so when on my way to the school where I work, and on my way to the house, while cleaning the bundles of celery which are now stacked up in front of me and watching, from time to time, my young son as he dashes round in front of me, with the small dog my husband bought him before he emigrated rushing after him: "He'll guard the two of you and Ahmed will be able to play with him." It's approaching one o'clock in the afternoon and I know that the boy is hungry, for in the morning all he munched was a piece of bread with a glass of tea sweetened with a little sugar -- we've begun to use these days the word "little" for anything relating to food. I know about preparing food for him and me and I know too that our allotted ration of rice has run out except just enough for a single helping, and because of this I was trying to put off producing the meal so that it might become both lunch and dinner. I bend over the mounds of bundles of celery, cleaning them of dirt and weeds. I get paid for this work and I add the money to my meagre salary, thus making ends meet for us through giving up many things we need and which a short while ago seemed basic and have become marginal, things that have even become a kind of luxury which, as a human being, I don't deserve. Has the requirement of food these days become a kind of luxury? Today I am living with my father after having moved to take up house with him in this nursery garden. Before going away my husband sold most of the furniture and possessions we owned in order to pay for his travelling expenses -- his dream -- while I moved with my father and son into this small house composed of two rooms at the rear of the garden. My father acts as the overseer of the garden and waters the plants and flowers during the day, while in the evenings he works in the restaurant that occupies the front portion, serving its customers -- people with flash cars -- with various sorts of grilled food. The pile of bundles of celery I'm bending over, cleaning and cutting them up for a couple of hours a day, are for the restaurant, whose lights twinkle at night -- like drops of concentrated acid falling on a piece of metal and beginning to etch onto it. Thus depression operates, nothing stands before it when its waves of black drops penetrate the soul. During the last few years I resisted them strongly, reciting to myself anthems of forbearance and singing songs to them: no despairing of life, smile and the world smiles with you, work and you shall receive, and I grew optimistic, and I smiled and worked, but the black drops, which to begin with were small, expanded and evolved into holes that disfigured me. The young boy with the wan face and protruding bones grew sluggish in his playing. Does he know the true nature of life in this time and place, or is life for him merely a coloured ball to play and leap about with in a large garden? I look around the whole place. Autumn is casting its deep shadows over it, making it look desolately gloomy, and the trees have lost their greenness, their leaves covered in a thick layer of dust. The past harvest was a disaster. Water, like everything else, was in short supply and the many waterwheels scattered around the garden were as good as stopped up, with piles of leaves and dried tree stumps heaped up all around, accumulating whenever we'd finished with them till we came to fear that the day would come when we'd be buried underneath them. To this nursery garden I went with him at the first meeting between us. I'd met him at the dentist's clinic and I'd exchanged a few words with him when he insisted on making my acquaintance. Then one day he told me that there was an exhibition of flowers in a big nursery garden and that he'd paid it a visit a couple of days ago to buy some flowers and that he'd remembered me over there, without knowing why. "Maybe you too would like to buy some plants. You have to see the show -- it's beautiful, and when you wander round it you'll realise the meaning of spring." I didn't answer him. Then, smiling as though to conceal his embarrassed diffidence -- for these men feel embarrassment but cover it up by affecting daring -- he said: "Let the flowers bloom. Don't kill off a flower that's about to bloom between us." For some moments our glances met. I realised what he meant but I ignored the suggestion concealed within his words. "I don't undersigned what you're getting at," I told him, "and I have no desire to visit flower shows." He answered me with stubborn insistence: "We'll visit together. What about tomorrow?" He said: "Because I went on thinking about you as I wandered round it, I couldn't get you out of my mind for a single moment. This hasn't happened to me before. I don't know what happened. Forget it if you don't feel any response to what I've said. Even so, I'll be waiting for you here tomorrow morning at ten." The nursery garden we went to was more like paradise. This is what I told myself as I roamed round the large flower show: leafy trees in various shades of green, waterwheels overflowing with bubbling water and little birds chirping cheerfully as they moved from branch to branch, and flowers of various colours, and radiant faces and upright bodies, flashing eyes and smiles and laughter and smart new clothes. "Life will be easier in the future," he said to me. "We'll get married -- don't deny that there's love between us -- and we'll work and we'll be a small family and we'll never be parted." And yet, two summers ago, he went away when hunger loomed up in front of us. "I'll send you all you both require once I get settled over there." However, he didn't get settled over there but moved from place to place, squandering himself in bits as I'm doing here. I try to bring to mind his features which I've forgotten. In my imagination he appears like a picture that has lost its colours; he's completely remote from me, with nothing linking me to those sensations that blazed up that day in the garden and united me with him. The silence surrounding me disperses with the approach of my son's footsteps. He stands in front of me with his pallid face to tell me he's hungry. I know of his hunger, for I too am suffering from it. Shall I put some pebbles in a pot of water and go on giving him hope that the food will soon be ready -- just as a Bedouin woman did with her children hundreds of years ago in the Year of Ashes? With us the years of ashes have lasted a long time! "I'm hungry. When are we going to eat?" Pretending I'm busy with the bundles of celery, I tell him, without raising my gaze: "Soon...soon. Just as soon as I finish this job." The time's now nearly three in the afternoon. I finish cutting up the celery and I gather it up and put it into a large, deep container. I get up and make my way into the house. I take up the rice that's left and the boy hurries after me, following in my footsteps. I wash the rice and place it in a small pot of cooking butter and water. "You'll be eating soon. Here's the rice on the fire and I've squeezed some tomato over it. You love red rice, don't you?" "But when are we going to eat?" "In a little while. In a little while." I take up a metal dish and pour the rice into it. The boy's face glows and he follows me, clapping his hands, with the dog following him. I place the container on a small low table in the garden. The two of them, the boy and the dog, spring at it as they advance on the food. The container overturns and the rice is instantly spilled on the ground. I stand there aghast at the scene and momentarily life becomes frozen before my eyes: the dusty garden, the rice scattered on the ground, and the boy with his tense features and increased pallor. The next few minutes pass slow and heavy with each of us standing where we are -- I and the boy and the dog -- just as certain scenes in films are frozen. But the black reel turns in the projector and the scenes follow on, one after another. Slowly the dog moves, eyeing us as it approaches the spilt grains of rice. I chase it away as it occurs to me to collect up the grains, but the dog resumes its progress, drawing closer to the scattered rice. It puts out its tongue and raises some of the grains to its mouth, and the boy shouts at it : "Go away -- you've got plenty of bones." But the dog's tongue still gathers up the rice. Hungry myself, I am aware of my boy's hunger. Like someone under a spell, my eyes shift between him and the dog. With the instinct of a hungry human, the boy understands what I am about to do so he squats on the ground, puts out his tongue and begins gathering up the grains of rice begrimed with dirt and dead leaves. My movements become sluggish and the garden swims in front of me. I collapse on the ground, my eyes still veering between the two of them. Hunger has exhausted me and I feel an iron fist pressing against my chest and almost stifling me. Didn't I tell you that drops of concentrated acid...? "Fi'l-Bustan", Heena Yahzan Al-Atfal Tatasaqat Al-Ta'irat, Cairo: Dar 'Ashtar, 1998: 155-161. Translated by Denys Johnson-Davies
