Lovers
29-05-2016, 11:00 AM
Story (11) By: Ibrahim S. Nadir
Lovers
Translated by : Qahtan F. AL-Khatib / Iraq

She closed the blackness of her eyelashes with spontaneous bashfulness and turned her looks upon the echo of his coming paces towards her across both sides of the window. Everyday she wailed for a long time.
With him she bathed, in a waterfall of memories, of a time drowned far away in the stamps of false pupils of the eyes, interweaved quarrels and clamorous uproar appearing by gathering kids among the humid street twists. She forgot how long her emotion conflict lasted as she was looking forward to eagerly listening to the new morning love greeting. Her younger sister’s tips of the fingers were jesting with childish levity her hanging locks away over the shoulders.
She has made love to him by her two ears and by all her senses since his arrival at the street renting an upper room from which a dark green window overlooked and at which she looked inside the damp corner clasps. Despite the mother’s screams and the father’s reprimand, she felt abundance of killing magical delight when the young one’s fingers pinched her drawing her attention whenever he sighted her, with various smiles coming from between his congested eyelids in front of reading the morning newspaper.
Ten dinars, like the sky blueness, imposed by the house old widow are to be paid every thirty days, even during his summer holiday. But, now, he felt coquetry and delightful fever when his eyes were painted with her fine face lineaments and its quiet features in dark black color, overflowing agitating waterfalls from the eyes inside, increasing her enchantment. A good smell of nicely arranged hot loaves emanated while the kids collected, in a childish race, the scattered pieces of chalk inside the ruin curves whose collapsing wall was adjacent to the antique school wall.
She kept on arguing in a hoarse audible dialogue and then it faded away in the empty range.
He remained for a long time monitoring her from far away through the worn-out curtain holes having a conversation with her sister as a worried and afflicted girl, executing hardest tasks of her life, behind the fog of pale things she was talking of him in details, listened sadly. The young girl’s comments discovered saying :
- “Learn of what I describe to you of things.”
He paid attention to the falling splashing water and the sound of a bucket turned over by the house widow.
On the day of his usual weekly going to his village, her memory remained following his imagination with enthusiasm among the elegies collected by his hard daily way across the yellow wheat fields.
He was watching her features scattered on every spike and muddy wall. Her shadow followed him wherever his feet were placed as if she were slaughtered by his sharp broken eye edges. He was drowned in the fog filled with splinters that could neither be gathered by the dark country-side greenness nor by the fade curtain holes.
Thousands of entries passed in front of him successively : the street, the window, the flat dome crowns, her sister, her childhood, her early old age and the endless old woman’s requests.
The afternoon was departing between the village dogs’ bark and its sheep’s bleating. When he arrived at his upper room, the night was heavy and sticky from inside and the ordinary odor caused his congested nose cold. His sight rose to the sunken in darkness ceiling; his body contracted under the retted quilt; listened to a chanting song from a radio not far away from the window; stood erect and his heart beating. He overlooked the street space with his lean neck. There was a prolonged young man staggering near her window. His right hand embraced a small radio. He kept still in his place not knowing what he would exactly do. He stuck his ear on the window wood to pick up a human voice that might be existing. After a while, he was able to distinguish her father’s voice reprimanding the drunken young man and his bad deeds cursing the home that contained him.
From far away he heard the sounds of light knocks on the door. Then he felt a soft hand shaking him lightly. There was someone awakening him. He opened his eyes and rubbed his congested eyelids. She was the old woman landlord. He did not identify her cruel wrinkles under the lines of light coming from somewhere in the porch.
- “It is time to get up.” said she faintly.
He listened to her heavy feet rhythm. He was caught unawares by various feelings and suspicious doubts from the female landlord. He felt sudden alarm and scared at curtailed screams bursting out of her window. Then he got up restraining his nerves as if he were avoiding falling. He leaned his back to the wall whereas his sight was penetrating through the rectangle of her window. She met him with a questioning leap, and on her pale face features of distracted panic were discovered.
- “Don’t be afraid. It’s merely an errant cat.” said her father in an imploring voice.
In front of a mirror hung at the fore part of the porch framed by yellow wood, he stared his black eyes, soaked his brush inside the steel can stained his cheeks and chin with soap foam. The razor slipped on his right cheek and a choking sigh came from him. Then a drop of blood fell down and it scattered into small fragments inside the tub bottom. The soap foam on his face was painted in an alluring purple color. His look was a wonderful artistic painting, through its folds the evening twilight was at the point of death, mixing with the soft soap viscosity. He washed his face with cold water and moaned for the lotion vehemence. He put a piece of newspaper on the cut. Then he put on his clothes and went down cautiously on the plaster stairs. The female landlord met him with curiosity and surprise. She remembered the last night incident and kindly said:
- “This poor one ........... despite her misfortune, she is exposed to the oppression of kids and their silly disturbances.”
- “What’s wrong with her ?” asked he curiously.
- “Don’t you know that she can not distinguish anything. She is blind.”
The old woman entered the house cellar. Her feet patter was absent during the heavy darkness. He was still bewildered with his mouth wide-open like a ( shining ) fish. At the door step, the wet morning sun glittered in his worried eyes. He wanted to knock at the closed window but he abandoned his desire and went away disturbed in breathing, pouring out all his tortures and his chronic scattered up to the university open space worry, hiding among her blocked dialogues, choked by (Sadiya’s) decorated face wherever it arrives amid all views surrounding him, on the roofs, walls and used trodden roads, moved by a fruitless erring breath of air among the emotions of stray, generating therein a holding misgiving through a dry autumn wind filling up the mouth with an arid manure odor.
He woke up late unknowingly, hurriedly and confusingly put on his clothes, brushed up by overflowing delight in such a way that made the female landlord stare at him foolishly so that it filled out her distorted house porch.
- “Where are the eggs and fat that you promised me with ?” asked the old woman.
As usual, every day morning, he passed by her lowest part of her open window.
- “Ahlam ........... Good morning.” He murmured in a special tune.
When she was about to respond to his greeting, he reached the end of the street.