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The father: laid on his back, closed his eyes a little, and then opened them…He looked at

my face anticipatedly without blinking... Small eyes with short scattered eyelashes,

surrounded by coarse, hard, and deep wrinkles, and thick gray eyebrows. Eye pupils are

frozen and lifeless. Does he see me? Does he read something in my face’s features? Perhaps

he was just waiting, with a steady look, without blinking… Is it courage? Or does he trust

me? Or is it just a cunning insinuation of trust? A simple compliment that carries deep

desperation for his naïve son? It’s okay… Do your job, and I’ll do mine…As for light… I

brought the dropper tube, pressed on it, then the liquid poured a drop into the right eye, then

a blink. Put his short flat index finger on the irrigated eye to open the second eye, a second

drop then a blink.

A dropper: the workers climbed on the roof of the building, tied the two planks of

wood with ropes, and hung over the square facade, two of them wipe the wall with burlap

and newspapers… and two others whiten the glass with plaster… No one from the passers-

by or the building residents cared about the workers.

On the third floor, a two-year-old boy was locked in a small room alone, sitting on the

ground, busy with two little strings extending from the closed window, his mouth open, eyes

fixed on the two white strings brimming with tiny white atoms. He stretches his right hand

to catch the two strings, distracted by looking at the shining furniture in the room, tears dry

on his cheeks, and forgets. Then he sees the two white brimming strings again… long, warm

and attractive, stretches his left hand… moaning in dim… touched them with his small
fingers and gurgles, then the glass turned black, he sees nothing anymore, so he started

screaming… screaming until the maid opened the door.

Vision: the eye only? Seeing with other senses? It’s all eyes…even the blind… the

deaf-blind...sees…it is not the present place which is difficult for him, he sees it well…the

far past is the one that darkens and disappears…he brings up in his mind things from the

past place without realizing their nature, without knowing are they sounds or pictures?

Tastes, smells, or thoughts? A thick gel, yet cold as a shadow, who controls the shadow’s

form? The soft brown tongue grows little by little until it becomes completely night, and

then shrinks little by little until it vanishes. Born in the middle of the day, and dies in the

middle of the day… The shadow of the silky tree, the shadow of the deep thick stone, the

shadow reflected on the roots in the depths of the forest... the shadow of the spike, herbs,

and the cloud. The shadow of the small and of the far that show pity and despair are like

children. The shadow of the big and of the close one that shows cold-like past… The

shadow is also light… The shadow is the light… The eternity of light, but it is thick, full and

gelatinous… the far call from there says: it was a sound, and the soft smell of burn comes

every summer and stays in his nose for several days, saying it was a picture…and this

surrounding silence whispering it was just an idea… God knows what that was and how it

was.

Esraa: At two in the morning… They went out together: the father from his house in

Mudashar to “Al-Rawdah” at the top of the hill for the Fajr prayer as close to the sky as

possible. And the son from his apartment in the building to the train station to be in the

capital on time… And when they came back, they were both happy with what they have…
The mind had no doubts about what it heard and the heart did not lie about what it saw.

Read, and tell me if you wish what that is, and how it can be.

The slap:

A nap accompanied him, and didn’t sleep, as a door slap or a gust of wind. A door slap

actually, from a gust of wind that woke him up. It was a white nap, lasted a few seconds,

and its seconds passed clear without external obstruction, without a dream. Only at the end

of the nap, the wind slapped the door of the room, the sound took only a part of a second to

cut the three meters between the door of the room and the bed on which I lay, it took for the

sound to reach between my inner ear and my attention from the passing nap in panic, a very

little part of a second, an atom of time. However, in this tiny atom, it happened. What

happened was a slap I took on my left cheek, a loud slap that shook the veins of my being,

and during it, I only saw two angry red eyes.

Was the slapper my dad? Grandfather? Faqih of the mosque? School teacher? President

of the province? Imam Malik? Mawla Idris? President of the United States?

I didn’t know what I was feeling at that moment, I only felt two red eyes, and a loud

slap that I can hear in the meatus, without any pain on the skin, no anger in the blood,

without even an intent to respond.

Did I feel I deserve this slap? Respect to the slapper? Afraid of him? Despise of him?

Was I surprised? Sagged? Paralyzed? Died?

 When I finally moved, my red eyes were gone. I only saw ascending stairs, its top was

entirely dark. I went up the stairs, up and up. The strange thing is that I was not feeling tired,

nor the sweat of efforts, nor the rapid heartbeat, nor even the need to hold on to the handrail.

It is just as if I was flying, without touching the walls with my hands, nor touching the

ground with my feet, except my fingertips.

And from the last steps, from what is last shown from the steps, rises, oozes, and a

black, sticky, muddy fear that flows at the speed of light. Once a drop of fear oozes from

there, it drips directly into my blood. It does not drip, but rises in my blood, evaporates, and

spreads to my knees, my chest, and my temples… trembling? Goosebumps? Or just a slight

weakness? And a complex contradictory desire to retreat in search of security, and to

advance in the search for knowledge at the same time.

Once I think about the decision, the face of the child appears to me at the top of the

stairs, he gets a little bit closer, and his face features light up and shows as gets closer.

The face of a child looking at me, staring at me, as if my face was colored, a television

screen, or a street under a balcony, or maybe a magic mirror in which the child could see his

face and see what was behind the mirror at the same time.

As if my face was behind a mask, a black African mask, in which the child hears me

without seeing my face, he feels the hot drumbeats, and with every beat comes a smell of a

heavy breath of the forest’s breath, a breath filled with the smell of rain, the smell of the

deep reaction between rain, leaves, dust and animals skins.

Is it my face behind the mask? Or the mask behind my face? As if my face was a

mask, and the black African mask was my real face.

 The child stares and reads as if my face was in front of him a page of a book, and the

child after a child has not learned the whole alphabet, or has learned it but not how to form

words, or perhaps he has already learned how to read, but writing on my face is still a

child… As if its primitive language rooted in the past, and every letter of it was a sacred

icon, a well of sealed secrets, but it was tempting to search, suggesting something like

meaning, and stops the child on the edge of understanding, keeping him on that edge no

going forward no backing away from it.

The child stares and meditates (remembers?) as if my face was familiar to him with a

kind of familiarity or as if he knew me before and forgot me, he squeezes his soft memory,

and flips between the faces knew in his short life but couldn’t find my face among them, and

yet he thinks he knows me, did he know me in a previous life before he was born? In his

previous lives, was it my son? Or my dad? Or mom? Was it me?

Suddenly, the child trembled in fear and retreated. Suddenly I know why. It was me

the slapper, and the panicked afraid child was slapped.