“We’ll meet again, Olivia,” I assure her, “one day, somewhere.”
“Yeah, I’ll see you around, Bos Mutas, it’s a small world, or the world is a handkerchief, as your people say.”
We hug, long and tight. The mutual company is doing us good, and it’s a relief to exchange doubts and fears. The drama of the wounded children is more than anyone can bear alone, and she and I have the necessary closeness; I suppose we’re connected by our shared love for Fahed.
I don’t know whether the proposition comes from her or me, but in any case it happens naturally, without flirting, or guesswork, or shyness, it simply arises on its own, and without another word we shut ourselves into her room to make love.
The boy, who has shown an almost unnatural courage and stoicism, now lets out a moan. He moans because he can’t cry. Along with his eyes, he also lost his capacity to weep, and he wails very softly, without words, without tears, without stopping, the long, lonely lament of a small, inconsolable child. His mother comes in; she’s a silent woman who hides her agony behind the niqab that covers her face. She sits beside her son and repeats a single phrase like a litany: All pain has its balm, my sweet child, all pain has its balm. Another empty formula, more mute language, without meaning. All pain has its balm, the woman says again, but her voice is so gentle, her way of stroking the boy’s hair and kissing his hands so tender, that he calms little by little, until his moans trail off. Maybe she’s right. Maybe there is a balm for this boy’s pain: his mother’s voice.
Fahed barely eats, his mother goes out of her way for him to accept each bite. On the other hand, he loves to draw. He spends hours at it, despite the loss of his eyes. I’ve found him a notebook and suggested a technique that more or less works for him, that consists of moving the pencil with his right hand while using the left as a guide across the paper, so his figures don’t spill out or overlap.
I keep him company and encourage him; I suspect it might be good for him to try to record images of his lived world before they’re erased from memory. Or would it be better for him to dothe opposite, let the loss of visible images feed the flourishing of something new, the images of dreams? Just in case, I ask him to draw his grandfather’s sheep. My suggestion doesn’t interest him; Fahed is more inclined toward matters of war. He scrawls some circles and says they’re grenades, and inks some horizontal lines that are bazookas. He draws the outline of a plane.
“That plane of yours came out very well,” I say.
“It’s not a plane, it’s a supersonic delta canard aircraft, an intelligent monster,” he explains. “It knows how to find the enemy.”
Then he draws some sticks that are rifles that can shoot from up to seven thousand feet away. Nothing to be done about it, Fahed is a battle artist; his knowledge bewilders me. Better put, it terrifies me, but I say nothing; when it comes down to it that’s his reality, the one given to him by fate.
“You know what this is?” He gestures at a more sophisticated set of lines. “It’s a Eurofighter dropping cluster bombs.”
Cluster bombs, like the ones that blinded him. He asks me whether I like it and I can’t hold back, this has gone too far.
“I don’t like it,” I say, and he seems surprised. “It looks like a ridiculous duck laying rotten eggs in the air.”
“Then let’s destroy it,” he says, yanking the page from the notebook.
I ask him to draw someone he loves very much, his mother for example, and he agrees. I help him add eyes, nose, and mouth on the oval face, and hair around it, but very long, the way he’s described to me. When he’s done, at the bottom he writes the word‘um, mother.
“Does it look like her?” he asks me.
I say yes, though the truth is that I don’t know, I’ve only seen his mother’s eyes, the rest of her is concealed by the niqab. Inside, I’m glad that Fahed doesn’t remember her covered but with all her features, her smiling lips and long loose hair, as he must have always seen her at home.
“She’s very pretty, my mother,” he says; she’s sitting right besideme, and stirs uneasily. It seems nobody should look at her or know what she looks like either, not even through the little portrait her son has drawn.
I ask him to draw his father next, but he shakes his pencil in the air, as if in doubt.
“I don’t remember what my father is like, it’s been so long since the last time I saw him.”
“Did your father die?” It’s reckless to ask. Around here, such matters are not to be probed.
“The war took him,” the mother cuts in quickly, as if to stop the boy from saying something he shouldn’t. “My children’s father is a soldier.”
With that, the subject is closed; she won’t say more, she’s extremely cautious. Like all Yemeni women, she hides all expression behind the veil and keeps her mouth closed. She knows that to walk means any false step could set off an antipersonnel mine and that to talk means a single mistaken word could mean death. Both she and the boy are wary of any actions that could implicate them. The great war in Yemen, orchestrated from abroad, explodes internally like a cluster bomb, dividing and subdividing the population into a labyrinthine proliferation of partial wars. It’s risky to clarify whether Fahed’s father fights with the government troops or the Houthi rebels, whether he’s Shiite or Sunni, Salafi or Takfiri, whether his battles are regional or tribal. It’s enough to say he’s a soldier, which gives little information; the war has put an end to farmers, builders, teachers, camel drivers, and shepherds, turning all men into soldiers.
“I could draw my grandfather for you,” Fahed offers, and he draws a figure with a beard and turban.
I assure him that it came out quite well, anyone would see that this is his grandfather, but he’d want to correct the left shoe because it ended up far from his leg.
“Would you like to put it closer, so they match?” I suggest.
Fahed attempts it, but ends up putting two shoes on the right leg; it’s hard for him to understand that this left isn’t the same left on the grandfather he’s drawn.
“Don’t worry,” I say. “Put the shoe on the leg that’s onyourleft...”
“Let’s just leave it this way,” he says, resigned. He puts down the pencil and closes the notebook.
I made another mistake. I shouldn’t have forced him. I would like to have been a therapist, or psychologist, to be able to guide him appropriately; Fahed is relying on me in these first decisive weeks of his life as a blind person. He’s already been cured of what can, in these circumstances, be cured, he’s out of the danger zone, and aside from Olivia the doctors are focused exclusively on the children who are still in critical condition. I ask Fahed to forgive me for being unable to help him more.
