“That’s an easy one,” I say, and we head toward the sand dunes, sink into them, throw sand up high, put more than a few grains in our mouths, then spit them out and descend doing somersaults all the way down.
Today, Olivia has removed the bandages from his face.
“How do I look?” he asks.
What do you say to a little child with a disfigured face? Your thoughts freeze, your words melt, you look for them in the depthsof sorrow only to prove that you can’t find them, what’s down there isn’t even silence, but something worse: a fractured noise.
“I see you’re improving rapidly,” is my cowardly, evasive reply. I once heard of a five-year-old girl who became blind in an accident, like him, and the next day said to her mother: “Mom, I can’t wake up.”
Fahed runs his fingers along the web of scars that wrinkle the skin around his empty sockets.
“How ugly!” he says. “I’ve turned out very ugly.”
Olivia takes her own sunglasses from her bag and gives them to him. They’re expensive, futuristic in thatMatrixstyle, as stylish as Olivia herself, who somehow manages to look fashionable even out here, in the hardship and severity of this desert. In Europe, theseMatrix Reloadedglasses must be trendy, I suppose, knowing little of such things; the only thing I know for sure is that when Olivia wears them, they cause a sensation among Yemeni youth of both sexes.
Fahed puts them on immediately.
“Now I’m handsome,” he says.
He’s received his medical discharge, and tomorrow he and his mother will go to a UNHCR camp where his grandfather and siblings await them. The trip is absurdly long and risky, but his mother doesn’t want to spend any more time away from her other children. I tell Fahed that we’ll miss him. He says he wants to draw my portrait so he won’t forget me.
“You have a beard and long hair.” He runs his hands over my face and head. “And you also have hairy arms. Is that how people in your country are? I only have hair on my head.”
I tell him the story of two twin brothers, Esau and Jacob.
“Esau, the older one, was really hairy, like me, and Jacob, the younger one, was hairless, like you.”
I keep going, this and that, until I reach the part where Jacob, the hairless one, covers himself in the skin of young goats to pretend to be Esau for his aged father, who is blind.
“I know!” says Fahed. “The father is confused when he touches Jacob. But your hair is actually real, Bos Mutas, it’s not from some young goat.”
“Your hand says my skin is real?”
“Yes, my hand says that.”
He leaves today. From now on, in his new blind condition, he’ll have to confront the life awaiting him and his family, which was already hard, not to say impossible. But he’s an intelligent child, and strong, and that will work in his favor. Case in point, around here he’s got everybody wrapped around his finger, and the whole team has come out to say goodbye and see him off. As a parting gift, we give him a little ebony cane made to his size by a local craftsman who at his own inspiration carved a swan’s head and neck into its handle. Fahed has never seen a swan, and before getting into the van that will transport him, he comes back to ask me what swans are like. I guide his hand and help him draw with the cane’s tip in the sand: the beak, eye, long arched neck, gathered wings, feet. It doesn’t come out too well, it looks like a winged elephant, but Fahed is satisfied.
“What color is it?” he asks.
“In general, swans are white, but on special occasions a black swan is born. Since this one of yours is made of wood, it’s a black swan.”
“But this one of mine doesn’t have wings or feet,” he says, moving his hand along the handle to carefully inspect it. “This isn’t a swan, it’s half a swan.”
Fahed gives out hugs, pulls on his cap, and dons the futuristic glasses Olivia gave him.
“You’re going to miss them,” I tell her; here the glare produces persistent headaches and no protection is enough against a sun that bores down on people, makes them burn with fever.
“He’d miss them more,” she replies.
Olivia is right. Those glasses suit Fahed, because they’re so curvedand wide, with black polarized lenses, that they completely hide the damage to his face.
“You’re more popular than a rock star, Fahed! Goodbye, goodbye!”
“Come back when the war is over, Bos Mutas!” he shouts at me, and he leaves, brandishing his cane like a sword with one hand, clasping his notebook and box of pencils with the other.
Green Horse
Yemen’s night sky pulses and ripples like the sea, the copious stars so compact that it’s understandable why Azophi, the tenth-century Persian astronomer, claimed they touched each other as if forming a necklace of light. We’d been temporarily transported to the MSF mission in Al Hudaydah, on the Red Sea, and on a serene night, with no drones or dis-asters, only Schwob’sfluid sky and its stars are alive,1 Zahra Bayda and I went out after work to walk the shore.
