The Grave

Repeat the words over and over again. Someone hands you a small booklet, the Arabic words printed in beautiful, woven calligraphy, letters dancing so gracefully, but you are not. You repeat the words, mumbling them as the voice of the sheikh recites clearly through the microphone.

You stare at your feet, awkwardly covered in oversized flip-flops; not entirely appropriate for a funeral, but you don’t care. The black you’re wearing is mismatched, your fingernails are bitten and rough, your hair is losing the battle against the humidity, but you don’t mind.

Next to you, a row of girls sniffle and mumble their way through the verses they are reading. If we all read different parts of the Koran at the same time, this will help us finish the Koran in one day in her name. This will help her be safe.

She is not safe. An image flashes into your head of her lying motionlessly at the bottom of the staircase, but you shut your eyes hard and hold your breath to make it go away. You pinch yourself hard, at least once every ten minutes, and the soft bruises along your wrist and up your arm prove that you do it all too often and far too eagerly.

You recite the part about the grave, the darkness, the silence as the body is carried down and nothing and no one but God. You stop reciting. A girl next to you lets out a sob, as the fear in your stomach reaches your lungs.

There is nothing worse than the feeling of helplessness; knowing the one you love is in pain and there’s nothing you can do to save her. So you pray. You pray harder, you pray faster, you talk to God in Arabic, in English, muttering under your breath that you’ll strike a deal with him: you’ll never sin again, you’ll never sway or cuss or hurt or steal or lie or anything else haram; in return, please make sure she’s okay.

You’re driving with your sister to a friend’s place in Gleem. It’s 11AM on a Monday morning. Christmas Eve is tomorrow.
A friend calls you up, let’s call him Ahmed. You pick up and cheerfully coo hello. Ahmed doesn’t answer. You wonder why.

‘Did you hear about R’s building?’ he asks. It’s still hard to write her name, so let’s just call her R.

‘No,’ you say and wave off your sister’s pleading to stop talking while driving.
‘Her building collapsed. This morning,’ he says.
You gasp. ‘That’s terrible. Where is she? What is she going to do?’

There is a pause.

‘She was inside when the building collapsed.’

There is a blur, life slows down a little in that nanosecond as you park your car to the side of the road, and the expression on your face makes your sister take off her seat belt to reach out to you. You remember every moment that follows in painstaking, boring detail for the next few months, to the point that you start writing a journal to get the perfect details out of your overcrowded head, to the point that two and a half years later, the fear in your stomach is still there and you still have trouble breathing, biting the inside of your cheek as you type.

The crowd pushes you back against the wall. There is dust in the air and desperation so shrill; you can smell it. The worst part is the silence, where one hundred people packed into a tiny space in front of a crumbled building hold their breath in anticipation and a fear that chills your bones.

You remember the faces watching you in naked fascination, just like neighbours do when they lean over their balconies to watch a fight below. Here, they watch you watch the soldiers as they awkwardly shuffle through the piles of rubble. It’s not their fault, you try to remind yourself, they’re not trained for rescue operations, but still you’re furious; at them, at their commander, at the bastard workmen standing by idly and watching family after family scream as another body is dragged out.

Fury and fear blend, and every now and then the crowd breaks into an almost unified gasp of horror, women unleash their fierce lungs onto the sky and scream an emotion so ragged, so real; it’s almost animalistic. A sudden silence fills the air again as they carry another body in a bag out, and you catch a glimpse of a fuchsia blanket peeking out of the rubble.

She loved the colour in everything she wore, in the scarves and bags she carried, the feather boa she would throw around her neck while singing ever so charmingly and off-key. She even had a fuchsia pen and a blanket on the tip of her bed that she would wrap around her knees when watching a late-night movie.

Now you watch the tip of that blanket; transfixed, cold, as suddenly the crowd pushes towards you up against the wall. Men are grabbing onto your friend Sherif’s hand, begging him, pleading him to go identify the body; see if it is her.
All her family is dead with her, and now only the male friends can help. They pull at his sweater, he tries to resist, he turns to you and starts crying, says he cannot do it, please don’t make me do it.

There is nothing more gut wrenching than the sight of a grown Egyptian man, a proud tall man, crying openly, nakedly. You blank. You will not cry. This is not happening.

You lie on the grey couch wrapped in your white robe. The lights are dim, the TV is on; you think. Outside, the doorbell rings, your cousins are here to visit; you don’t want to see anyone. You pace the carpet back and forth check your phone again, try calling her again. Still no answer. Maybe she’s ok. After all, miracles do happen. People do survive. Remember that earthquake when that man was pulled out of the rubble after five days? Or the miners trapped in the mine for months? Or the child in Pakistan…

You send Ahmed a text, a simple question mark. In the first few messages, you had asked for news, if they had found her, if there was any update. Now, hours later, you simply send a? and he answers back no. At midnight, he texts that her grandmother has been found. The next morning, it’s her father. The next night, it’s her mother. Slowly, one by one, everyone in her family is being carried out in a body bag, except for her. It’s been four days, and you are still holding onto a desperate, very thin string.

Noise, and cars, and sunlight in your eyes. You sit on the terrace of the coffee place, watching the cars pass on the Corniche. Somewhere, a car slams on the brakes, there is a crash, you jump out of your skin. Someone has been hit. Ahmed, unaccustomed to displaying any affection for you, reaches out and engulfs you in his arms, your face sinks into his chest , and you distract yourself by breathing in his cologne.

They call you to come to the house, where a wise woman is here to supposedly bring solace to everyone’s hearts by reading from the Koran and talking about death and the afterlife. She succeeds up until the point that she suggests you take the veil so as to guarantee R a place in heaven. Then she suggests you sacrifice a sheep. You feel the fury building up again, you want to hit her, call her a liar, a conman; you cannot save a life by wearing a veil or sacrificing an animal; this isn’t witchcraft. You want to walk out of this room full of weepy women, get on a plane and be as far away from here as possible. Somewhere safe.

For years later, you avoid watching horror films and you feel baffled by people obsessed with blood, gore or pain and torture. You cannot understand why anyone would enjoy a film about death, when reality itself is so much more terrifying.

You know that moment when your mind goes numb, every nerve in your skin is alive and there’s a buzzing noise in your ears as the fear builds up slowly through your lungs?
Your breath is short, your body paralysed and you cannot escape the numbing fear; no matter which room you run into, how many lights you turn on, how often you hit your hand against the wall to see if you’re awake; if you can feel the painful impact of skin against concrete?

That night, you dream of her. She calls you from her fuchsia Motorola razr; you get out of your bed and tell her you will come save her, stay where you are. She is at the bottom of the staircase, she has two heavy suitcases and she is smiling. Don’t worry about me, she says, I am fine. I am okay. You begrudgingly relent.

Two days later, they pull the last body out of the rubble.