loose and framed the face, played against the skin. She held her hand still and inhaled, reached the cloth’s corner below the bandage and cleaned behind one ear and then the next, circled their grooves and ridges. Even now you tickle me, ya Zaynab. She could hear the low giggle that clambered in pitch and tumbled into a steady roll, the sounds coming closer together, the depth of the final laugh that allowed her to exhale. When she moved on to the feet, she put the cloth down and with her wet hands washed one foot at a time, reached between the toes, and massaged each sole.
The men should do this, they had insisted while waiting for the van to arrive.
And who are they to me, these men? Or to him?
Still they persisted. You will need more people. To lift and turn and wrap.
I have lifted him before, she had hissed. I will remember how to do it, inshallah.
The bucket again cleaned and re-filled, she dropped from her palm the ground lote leaves they had given her. She watched the green powder float on the water’s surface. Will you be dust now, ya Hamoud? She stood beside the table and looked at his face. When they were children he would sometimes lie still while they took turns playing surgeon and patient and whoever moved first when poked with plastic knives or tickled with cotton swabs would lose.
Let’s wash you.
Upper right side and then upper left, she knew, then bottom right and left. Head to toe. From his body the water trickled into the table’s grooved perimeter, ran down to the opening that drained into a second bucket placed there. She held her breath as she loosened the bandage and paused to watch the mouth. When she saw that the lips stayed closed, a sound left her own mouth, a sigh that escaped from the floor of her chest and burst the stillness of the room. She would not lift the bandage completely, would not with her hands touch where she knew the bones would give, where tissues and nerves like sponges would sink beneath her fingers. From the cloth she squeezed enough water to wet what hair was visible, from her palm dribbled more over the back of the head. Around the neck and over the shoulder she worked the cloth, across the chest and down to the navel. When she tilted him onto his left side so she could reach his back she was surprised at his weight and felt the muscles in her arms strain to keep him from slipping.
The last time she had picked him up he was ten and came only to her shoulders in height. Their father had not come home from work and their mother sat in the kitchen whispering into the telephone in between splintered sobs and breaths that dissolved in the cold air. She had found her brother on the living-room carpet, shaking. He had wet his pants and a silent panic had pinned him to the floor, would not let his body do anything but tremble like the final leaf on a winter tree. She hoisted him up, her arm around his waist, and asked him to walk. But his legs continued to quaver and she knew then he could not stand. In one move she lifted him and wrapped her arms around his legs. In the bathroom she undressed him and sat him in the bathtub, and only when she made the deep low sounds of a freight ship and splashed her hands like fish pirouetting out of the water did the shaking stop.
Keeping the sheet over his torso she reached beneath it, cloth wrapped around her fingers, and cleaned underneath and between the legs again, down the right leg to the toes and then the left. Thoughts of unknown hands that might have touched where she now did, their intentions different and beyond the things she knew, she forced from her mind. A strangeness remained in their place. She knew she would have to repeat it all. Three times, five times, nine. Until you smell like the seventh heaven, like Sidrat al-Muntaha itself. But with each repetition, her movements became less certain, and she glanced several times at the face in reminder as she wiped.
When she filled the bucket one last time, the colorless camphor dissolved in the water and released a smell that reminded her of mothballs and eucalyptus, of rosemary and berries. She removed the sheet still covering him and left only the small cloth spread from navel to knees. In the fluorescent light his bared body looked long and broad, and she thought of once-smaller hands she had cupped in hers, narrower shoulders she had held. From head to feet she poured the water and inhaled the scent that rose as it ran along the table’s gutter and splashed inside the plastic bucket.
I saw a butterfly with my eyes
flitting
it wasaround
me
I ran trying to catch it, but itescaped
from my hands.
Where is the butterfly?
It flew
away.
She unfolded one of the large towels and began to dry him. Gently she lifted his head, dried his hair one lock at a time, felt the water soak through the cotton and onto her hands. The skin of her fingertips had shriveled from so much water. They might never dry again, ya Hamoud.
The day they returned her father, with clenched fists her mother had beaten her own chest, pulled handfuls of hair from her scalp until the neighbors came. Her brother screamed for doctors until someone pulled him away. She was old enough to know that no doctors were needed, that what now lay in the courtyard, covered in burns and cuts and skin that curled back to reveal shredded muscle and blood clotted and congealed, was a body she no longer knew.
She stepped back and looked at the body before her now, clean and damp. She scanned for places she had missed, where she might again pour the water and run the cloth. At the sound of the door opening behind her she moved closer to the table before turning to see the same older man from before, the only one who had spoken to her. A younger man followed and between them they wheeled another table, smaller and without grooves. She stepped aside and stood silent as they positioned it next to where he lay, but when the younger one began to unfold the stacked shrouds, she drew closer, placed her hand on his and made it still. With eyes wide he pulled his hand away and stepped back, but when he opened his mouth to speak, the older man leaned toward him and whispered words that kept him quiet. Wallah, they don’t know what to make of this, ya Zaynab. She could hear the amused tone, the smile in the voice.
Two large sheets she unwrapped and placed, one atop the other, on the empty table. The smaller sheet she carried to where he lay and unfolded over his body as they watched. Her hands hesitated when the sheet reached his neck and she could not lift all of him at once, she knew. She drew back enough to allow the men to move to either side of her, her fists tightening at her sides when with gloved hands they reached for him. As they lifted him the neck gave way and the head tilted back and she pressed her feet to the concrete floor. After they lowered him onto the second table and the head again rested flat, the older man reached beneath the sheet and removed the cloth covering the thighs. The younger man gripped the sheet’s corners and began to pull it higher. She moved toward him. Stood close enough to feel the youthful swell of his belly protrude and recede with each breath, to make out the nose hairs that shivered as he drew air. Again the older man intervened, held the younger by the elbow and led him toward the door.
With the soil still new on her father’s grave, they had come for her brother. Men with masked faces and heavy boots who slapped her grandfather across the face and threatened to tear off her clothes as her mother watched. And like a good boy you sat so quietly. In the kitchen cupboard behind pots and jars and sacks of rice and flour. When they left they took her grandfather with them, and the blood drops from her mother’s nose spread like petals on the tiles.
She stood now at the counter mixing the sandalwood paste in a small bowl. Over and over she inhaled the scent and tried to keep her hands steady.
