Days of Ignorance by Laila Aljohani Read Free Book Online Page A

smiled when she thought about the satellite photographs that have been taken of rivers on Earth, since there was no difference between the rivers on Earth and the rivers on the human skull.
    Oh, God.
    How had Malek’s blank face made her think about three rivers on a skull? She studied him for a bit, then reached out and placed her hand on his face. She let her index finger slide gently over the place where his palate bone was located: ‘the lizard’s body’, as it was referred to in the Sobotta Atlas . She knew she was touching the spot over his parotid gland, right below the ear. Then she passed over the condylar process. Finally she paused near the mandibular foramen. Meanwhile, Malek was slumbering, oblivious to the rivers atop his cranium, the two openings at either end of his jaw, and the blood that flowed through his jugular vein and his sciatic artery. He was oblivious to everything, and she alone sat before him, removing the skin, the muscles, the fascia, the veins and the arteries from his cranium in order to stand on the banks of its three rivers. She hoped against hope that he would wake up – just wake up – even if he didn’t know her, the one who had known him to the point of sorrow.
    She was terrified of his dying, of his turning into a corpse like the ones she’d seen when a friend of hers had insisted on taking her to the autopsy room at King Abdulaziz University’s Faculty of Medicine. There had been nothing but death there: faces submerged in a long, l-o-o-o-o-n-g slumber, and washed in medical solutions that would slow down their rate of decay. Decay, decay, decay!
    The decay might be retarded, but it was bound to happen. She’d been trying for years to escape it. But when she’d gone to the autopsy room that day, she’d suddenly realized how weary she was of resisting it. She came to this realization as she was pondering the lifeless body of an unnamed little boy. According to her friend, a student had managed to facilitate his purchase from a man who worked at a certain hospital morgue. The six-year-old boy had been brutally raped and had been dead on arrival. He stayed in the morgue for months without being identified by anyone. Then . . . he was sold.
    ‘My God, how could raucous laughter and hilarity have turned into a lifeless corpse that’s changed color from all the time it’s spent in a refrigerator? And how is it that no one identified him?’
    ‘Maybe his family was afraid of a scandal,’ her friend replied.
    She felt as though he’d died two grievous deaths. She couldn’t bear to look at his face, so she just looked at his plump little fingers and the black filth under his long fingernails. How strange, she thought, for a person to die, and for his fingernails to keep on growing!
    She looked at Malek’s fingernails. They weren’t long. It occurred to her to trim them from time to time to keep them from getting long. It’s only the dead who don’t have anybody to trim their fingernails for them. But he wasn’t dead. No, he wasn’t dead.
     
    8 p.m., the hospital
    One time Malek had said to her, ‘You’re really stubborn about your ideas.’
    She smiled impishly, raising her eyebrows. He acknowledged that there was nothing wrong with being stubborn if there was something worth being stubborn about. However, it turned into something offensive when somebody was just being stubborn for the sake of being stubborn. All right. Why was she thinking about her stubbornness now, in this room that was so unfamiliar to both of them, with Malek slumbering in his place of in-between-ness? What should she think about? About the first time he met her, weary and self-conscious, in order to tell her, ‘I love you’? When had that been?
    Oh, God.
    She’d been an insomniac for long nights after that. It had seemed strange to her to sense everything that was developing deep inside him, to feel the words teetering on his lips every time he called her, yet without his saying them, and