بحر الرمل قصة قصيرة
A Sea of Sand
Written by : Fatima Al Nahidh
Translated by : Dr. Abdallah Altaiyeb
We disregard; I emphasized every syllable of the word. Times change, we change, grow up, and start looking the other way to stay alive. But he said one sentence only, while staring at the horizon stretching endlessly before him; if only those who said this would experience what I had been through
It hadn’t been easy for me to know, in those moments whenever we reached that edge, the sun would drown in a well of darkness, and we would part with heartache. But I could swear that we, as creatures blended with myriad lusts, tended to forget our traumas so we could go on. Our enemy, the time, deliberately awarded us one motive after another to jostle forward with our pains and broken dreams on the road to the terra incognita of oblivion, only to lose them there and go back to perhaps resume the same sins and harvest desire and agony
It was neither a confession session nor a sudden strike of transparency, let a lone a planned one. We just walked and let our feet take us towards calmness, and silence walked kindly between us like a mutual friend
He stopped for a while as if trying to ascertain the place, so I stopped as well. He then marched on, and I walked next to him and the silence
There was nothing but sands across the land. They rose a bit to form a dune, rose more to look like a hill, rose more and more to perhaps become a mountain, but then went flat like a sea spreading mercilessly, and then leveled some more like an infertile dry valley
There were only sands, and nothing else! The astronomical moon seemed extremely close, much like a shield ornamenting a wall, sprinkling glistening silver on the peaks, and leaving us in a peaceful unknown
We shall have a rest on top of that dune; he clarified when we got closer to a sandhill about fifty steps away. I sensed that he said so because I had started panting with the effort of disentangling my bare feet from the softness of the sands with each step. I felt my back stoop a little as the walk upward towards the dune got steeper, as if the desert had been tilting
We walked a distance immeasurable with any decimal system ever since we left the camp an hour ago, going silently most of the time through silken sands, content merely with the company of each other
When we finally reached the top of the dune, we emerged onto a large open area of green meadow, with grass springing from the sands and extending to an end unknown to us. I screamed childishly: O God, why didn’t we camp here; my God where did this grassland come from? Is this your secret hideout
We sat down, silence along with everything before us bathed in an ocean of silver. He was looking at the far horizon, my hands were playing with the soft and juicy grass, not believing it was filling the spaces between my fingers, caressing it, touching the little flowers that glowed with sweet dew under the moonlight, forming circles, stars, lines, letters, and unlinked points
Then, like reading from a book, he said
We cannot continue looking the other way. Our pasts don’t die; we are prisoners behind no bars, we foolishly think we left them behind, but they rise in their due time, to announce their barbaric presence
My hand was still holding on to the coolness that was slowly slipping through my fingers; he was not waiting for a reply, and continued reading
That stormy night, they put us in the prison bus after covering our heads with sacks. I cannot remember how long we traveled, but it sure was a long drive, the only sound we heard was that of the squeaking joints of the bus. Sometimes we heard the sound of air ripped by a car speeding like an arrow, and every so often a coughing sound from the end of the bus broke our anxiety. We finally stopped, they got us down, uncovered our heads, and we found ourselves on sands like these
He held his arm high with a handful of sand from the heart of the grass and started slowly scattering it in the wind away from my face. He then took a deep breath
We didn’t know that there was another truck behind us, they brought from it excavating tools, piled them in front of us, and told us to get to work
Our hearts were gripped with terror. The first thing we thought, while digging under the threats of the loaded guns and the slowly growing sandstorm that had been stroking our spines, was that they were going to bury us in mass graves dug by our own hands. They didn’t talk much; they were just prompting us to dig faster, but we stalled fearfully for more time to live, and slowed down the digging
We consumed about all the time we could stall for; after all how much time do you need to dig a hole your size, and in a sandy area? We were around fifteen prisoners but they asked each of us to dig two holes
Our hearts were roaring violently, and maybe their tumult reached climax as we stood in front of our open holes waiting for orders. Some of us struggled to keep standing straight, with knees knocking in fear, before destiny gave us a break; each one of us was ordered to bring a corpse from the truck and bury it in a hole. Just then, we realized that the covered truck was carrying a load of dead people too
We walked to the truck with steps heavy like iron. Each one carried a corpse on his shoulder, headed towards his two holes, buried it hurriedly, and ran again to the truck to bring another one. I guess we were just afraid they would change their minds and ask us to jump into our second holes
We couldn’t believe when we finally got back on the bus that we had actually survived, just like that. We didn’t talk on our way back but when we reached our cells, the dawn was approaching, so we just collapsed on our bunks from tiredness and restlessness. Those of us who had dozed all through the journey continued the rest of their nightmares till sunrise
For seven nights and in the same manner, we labored in burying countless corpses. By then, we had known the exact location by calculating the distance, but we had become like machines that failed to recognize their own parts. It didn’t matter much, because we had lost forever our humanity along with our dreams
I buried fourteen people, dug their graves with my own hands, and carried them on my weary shoulders. I laid them in small holes and large holes all the same, and covered them with sands. I still could feel their smell in my lungs. Some of them were lightweight and petit, some had fresh wounds, and some had broken jaws or limbs; one of them dropped one of his eyes on my hand
In many instances, our shovels hit corpses that we had previously buried because we were so disoriented from stress. Many times, we found the graves and the corpses uncovered by the blows of the passing winds and we had to rebury them again. Sometimes the dead were actually not completely dead
He suddenly stood up and looked far away, as if to seek refuge in the stretching horizon
The dead used to visit me in the night, looking the same way they did when I buried them, and ask me, why? And honestly, all I could remember was fourteen corpses; after that I got mixed up and could not distinguish between what was real and what was mere optical hallucination. After the fourteenth corpse, whenever they got us out of the bus, we would see a large area of corpses thrown out of their graves, waiting for us, as if the sand sea spat them out to float on its waves again
Illness then rescued me from the burying rituals. I was admitted to the prison hospital for a long time before they eventually pardoned a group of us old prisoners, those whose opinions were a threat to no one any more, not even to stray animals. We were finally free of our obsession of being buried half-alive by our friends one day
I saw him clearly in the moonlight, my throat was dry, and my stomach was churning. I was afraid he would hear the beating of my heart or hear my soul fighting not to wail. He was looking straight at me and pointing to the moonlit grassland, when he said
We … buried them here
رد باقتباس
