Days of Ignorance by Laila Aljohani Read Free Book Online

separated by snaking pathways. There was nothing but a cryptic silence broken by the sounds of the cars behind her. That day, after seeing how people end up, she’d thought she would be able to endure any tragedy that might come her way. But the waiting and the uncertainty had devastated her: the waiting for him to wake up, and the uncertainty as to whether he ever would.
    When she saw Malek that morning, he seemed to be asleep.
    She nudged him gently, saying, ‘Wake up. You’ve got a long day ahead of you!’
    But he went on sleeping, and didn’t smile. She gazed pensively at his gauze-wrapped head and his body enclosed in splints. His right leg, his right shoulder blade and two of his ribs were broken. He was on the verge of death, but he hadn’t died. It horrified her to think that anyone would have the power to inflict this kind of harm on anyone – anyone at all! It horrified her even more to think that the person who had inflicted the harm was her own brother. She’d seen his violent side, but had never believed it would reach this extreme.
    She went back to studying Malek again. She studied the scar that plunged so deeply into the flesh of his chin. She’d fallen in love with that scar, and many times had prayed to God that the children she bore him would inherit it. When she told him this, he had a long laugh, and asked, ‘How could they inherit something I wasn’t born with?’ Nevertheless, she’d always thought of that scar as being imprinted on one of his genes, and that she had reason to hope. She placed her forefinger inside the scar’s deep hollow. The moment she did it, she choked on her tears as she whispered, ‘O merciful God, let me die, or let me wake up from this nightmare!’
    She wiped her tears, then went back to pondering his still, expressionless face. It looked devoid of all meaning, as though it had been extracted from one of the dissection manuals she’d often looked at as she searched through the university library in the course of her studies. She remembered the Arabic translation of the Sobotta Atlas of Human Anatomy with its mustard-yellow cover and its reddish-brown title, and all the explanatory photos and drawings that filled its three volumes.
    Dead people. Dead people’s bodies and faces.
    As she leafed through the volumes, she knew they were dead by the way their eyes had been drawn and the positions they were in. Dead people who’d been dissected slowly and deliberately, layer after layer after layer. First the skin had been stripped away so that the muscles could be drawn. How beautiful and symmetrical they were! Then the muscles were removed so that the deep fascia beneath them could be drawn. The deep fascia looked supple, moist and slippery. And at last there appeared the bones, white and glossy. On the way to the bones, these dead people’s skin, muscles, glands, veins, arteries and nerves had been removed slowly and carefully in order to reveal the bones’ white blades and cylinders with their various sizes.
    Bones, bones, bones. How bones had fascinated her! The thing that fascinated her most was dissecting the human skull. She would always recall the appearance of the three sutures drawn on the human skull: the coronal suture, the squamous suture and the lambdoid suture. Never, since the first time she’d seen them, had she been able to look at anyone’s head without thinking of rivers: tortuous rivers on the surface of the skull. Two of these rivers – the coronal and lambdoid sutures – are parallel, one of them at the top of the skull and the other at its base, while the third – the squamous suture – runs between them midway along each side of the skull. Sometimes she would take her fingertips and try to feel the places where the rivers in her skull ran, and even though she’d never managed to do it, she kept trying.
    She loved God with a passion after seeing those sutures. She loved a God who would cause three rivers to flow over a cranium. She