“Try, you can do it!” He makes me laugh, because he’s using the same formula on me that I use to keep his spirits up.
Sedentary activities aren’t enough, it’s time for Fahed to learn to get around. Over and over, hand in hand, we walk around the place, its buildings, tents, and vacant areas, counting the steps from one side to another.
I’m startled by his intuitive perception of space; after a few days, he can orient himself on his own, with the help of a broomstick I’ve given him for a cane. It seems to me that the taps of his stick as he walks transmit a certain visual representation of space, and a physical sense of distance and depth; something like what bats achieve with radar. He makes us all laugh, because he wields his stick as though it were a sword, with so much energy and exuberance that anyone who isn’t careful gets a beating.
“Last night I saw her!” he tells me.
“Whom did you see?”
“Amira, my older sister.”
“She came to visit you?”
“No, she stayed back to take care of my siblings.”
“But you saw her . . .”
“Yes, she was in my dreams.”
“You saw her in a dream . . .”
“Yes. But she was transparent.”
Can the transparent be seen? Fahed presents me with serious epistemological dilemmas. Can the transparencies that appear to him in dreams give him back images of what he saw before, and no longer sees?
“Transparent like what?” I ask. “Like glass?”
“No. Not like glass.”
“Transparent like . . . a ghost?”
He doesn’t understand me. He doesn’t know what a ghost is, and I can’t find a way to explain it. Olivia is there, listening to our conversation.
“Those are Christian things,” she cuts in. “Ghosts only appear to Christians.”
“Christian things?” I protest. “But there are many ghost stories inOne Thousand and One Nights.”
“But Fahed hasn’t readOne Thousand and One Nights.”
This woman defeats me with her play of words, her illogical logic. Olivia makes fun of what she calls my bookish culture, though she herself is an avid reader; last night I saw a Hanif Kureishi novel on her nightstand.
Pau has relieved me of part of my logistical and office duties, so I have more time for Fahed. I thank him for this change and take advantage of it, the bond between the boy and me has deepened. I try to imagine that transparency he says he sees. It must be the idea of something that springs to mind, even though you can’t see it. The transparent image of his sister in the dream, for example. I reread Whitman’s verses on memories of a transparent summer morning. What’s this? a boy said to me, showing me a fistful of grass. What could I answer? I don’t know what grass is either.
We’ll see whether old Whitman can help us. Early in the morning, I take Fahed out to the vegetable garden, where among the tomatoes, cucumbers, and onions a few blades of grass grow.
“This is grass, touch it,” I tell the boy, giving him a handful. “Can youseeit?”
“A little.”
“It’s green, can you tell?”
“It’s green and also transparent,” he says.
“Yes, Fahed, that’s it! Remember it always, what youseeas transparent can also be green. What’s transparent can be of any or all colors, whatever colors you want.”
I search the bazaar and find a box of colored pencils, a gift for him. I make little notches on each pencil so he can recognize them, a horizontal notch for black, two for blue, a vertical one for red, two horizontal notches and two vertical for yellow, and so on, for all of them. He learns to use the notches to identify the colors of all his pencils.
I take him up and down so he can touch what surrounds us, and name it; from now on his hands and words will be his eyes. We’re going toseethe baby camel that was born the night before, and the kitchen pots, the pond water, the fire in the hearth, the toy truck someone gave him. Ishowhim what’s happening in the encampment, the people who come and go, the whirls of air, the twilight that brings in the cold, the unbearable midday sun. He asks me toshowhim the desert.
