Текст книги "Gate of the Sun"

Автор книги: Elias Khoury

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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

What if I couldn’t open my eyes again? What if I slept and didn’t get up? What if they came here and killed me? I’m scared.

No, not of them, nor of the rumors, which I don’t believe. I’m scared of sleep, of the distance it erases between my dreams and my reality. I can’t tell the difference anymore, I swear I can’t tell the difference. I talk about things that happened to me and then discover they were dreams.

And you, do you have dreams?

Scientists say the brain never stops producing thoughts and images. What do you imagine? Do you see your story the way I paint it for you?

Anyway, I’m scared. There are rumors all over the camp. They say Shams’ gang will take revenge on everyone who took part in her murder. I’m ready to explain that I had nothing to do with it, but where are they?

Is it true they killed Abu Ali Zayed in the Ain al-Hilweh camp? Why did they kill him? Because he whistled? Can a man be killed because he whistled? They say he was standing at the entrance to the Miyyeh wi-Miyyeh camp and that when he saw Shams’ car he put two fingers under his tongue and whistled. And the bullets rained down.

They’ll kill me, too.

I didn’t do anything. They took me to court, I gave my testimony, and that’s it.

I’m sure they’re just rumors. Dr. Amjad and the crippled nurse think I’m hiding in your room because I’m afraid of them, and two days ago I heard Nurse Zainab telling Dr. Amjad she wouldn’t try to stop them if they came. I gathered she was talking about me.

You know I don’t live here out of fear of Shams’ ghost or her gang. I’m here so you’re not on your own and I’m not either. What kind of person would leave a hero like you to rot in his bed? And I hate being on my own with no one to talk to. What kind of days are these, enveloped in silence? No one knows anyone else or talks to anyone else. Even death doesn’t unite us. Even death has changed; it has become just death.

I lie on my bed, open my eyes and stare into the darkness. I look at the ceiling, and it seems to get closer, as though it were about to fall and bury me beneath the rubble. But the darkness isn’t black, and now I’m discovering the colors of darkness and seeing them. I extinguish the candle and see the colors of the dark, for there’s no such thing as darkness: It’s a mixture of sleeping colors that we discover, little by little. Now I’m discovering them, little by little.

I won’t describe the darkness to you, because I hate describing things. Ever since I was in school I’ve hated describing things. The teacher would give us an essay to write: Describe a rainy day. And I wouldn’t know how, because I hate comparing things. Things can only be described in their own terms, and when we compare them, we forget them. A girl’s face is like a girl’s face and not like the moon. The whiteness and the roundness and everything else are different. When we say that a girl’s face is like the moon, we forget the girl. We make the description so that we can forget, and I don’t like to forget. Rain is like rain, isn’t that enough? Isn’t it enough that it should rain for us to smell the smell of winter?

I don’t know how to describe things even though I know a lot of pre-Islamic poems. Nothing is more beautiful than the poetry of Imru’ al-Qais – king, poet, lover, drunk, debauché, quasi-prophet, but I have a problem with his descriptions. “Her breast smooth as a looking glass”. . How, I mean, can a woman’s breast possibly be like a mirror? It won’t do. Isn’t he saying in effect that he’s not seeing her, he’s just seeing himself? And that he’s not making love to her but to himself? Which would lead us to a terrible conclusion about our ancient poets. Of course Imru’ al-Qais wasn’t a sodomite, nor was al-Mutanabbi; it’s the description that’s at fault.

All the same, I love ancient poetry, and I love al-Mutanabbi. I love the melody that makes the words turn inside their rhythms and rhymes. I love the rhythm and the way things resonate with one another and the reverberation of the words. When I recite that poetry, I feel an intoxication equaled only by the intoxication I feel when I listen to Umm Kalsoum. It’s what we call tarab. We’re a people of an exalted state, and tarabis beyond description, so how can I describe things to you when I don’t know how?

I don’t sleep, and I don’t describe, and I don’t feel tarab, and I don’t recite poetry. Because I’m afraid, and fear doesn’t sleep.

Tell me about fear.

I know you don’t use that word. You’ll say that you withdrew, because you use words to play tricks with the truth. That’s the game that you play with your memories – you play tricks and say what you want without naming it.

I know you want me to leave after this night of weariness, insomnia, and darkness. I’ll go; just tell me how Ibrahim died.

Nahilah told the story two ways, and you believed both.

The first time around, she lied to you because she was afraid you’d do something stupid. Then she told you the truth because she could tell from your eyes that you were going to do something stupid anyway, so she preferred you to do something meaningfully stupid.

Yunes went into the cave, the sun burning his sweat and fatigue-rimmed eyes, and he saw her. She was a motionless shadow in the back of the cave, her back turned to the entrance, and she was motionless. She heard his footsteps and smelled the smell of travel, but she didn’t turn around. Yunes went toward her and saw that she was staggering, as though she had waited for him to come before falling to the ground.

He saw her shoulders, outlined by shadows, shaking as though she were weeping. He went up to her, gasping for breath as if all the distances he had traversed and that had been imprisoned in his lungs were about to explode. When he tried to grasp her by her shoulders, she started moaning and let out a single name.

Yunes tried to make her explain, but she wouldn’t stop repeating “Ibrahim,” which had become a part of her moaning. He tried to ask about his father, but she didn’t answer and burst into a long fit of weeping that grew louder before being choked off.

She said the boy died because she had been unable to take him to the hospital at Acre.

“His head fell forward while he was eating. He said his head was ringing with pain.”

She tied cloth around his head and rubbed oil on his neck, but the pain didn’t stop. He held his temples as though hugging himself and writhed in pain. So she decided to take him to the hospital in Acre.

Nahilah went to the headquarters of the military governor to ask for a pass and was subjected to a long interrogation. When she returned to her house without a permit, she found her son in the throes of death with the blind sheikh whispering the last rites.

“They didn’t put the sack over my head, but they threw me into a darkened room,” she said, “and left me there for more than three hours. They then took me into the office of a short man who spoke with an Iraqi accent. I told him my son was sick, but he wouldn’t stop asking about you. I wept and he threatened me. I said the boy was dying and he asked me to cooperate with them and questioned me about the border crossers. Then he said he couldn’t give me a permit if I didn’t bring him a medical certificate to prove my son was sick.”

“There’s no doctor in the village,” I told him.

“Those are my orders,” he said. “If you don’t cooperate with us, we won’t cooperate with you.”

WHEN NAHILAH finished her story, she saw how calm your face was. Your panting had stopped, and you looked at her suspiciously, as though you were accusing her. She saw how calmly you took the news as you sat down, lit a cigarette, asked about Salem and told her you’d be away for a long time.

She understood you’d never come back.

You asked about the new Israeli settlement that was being built near Deir al-Asad. Then you stood up, said you’d have your revenge and walked out. She grabbed you by the hand, brought you back into the cave and told the story over again.

She said Ibrahim had been playing with the other children.

She said the new settlement had sprung up like a weed, and they’d fenced off the land they’d confiscated with barbed wire while everyone looked on, seeing their land shrinking and slipping out of their hands, unable to do anything.

She said, “They took the land and we watched like someone watching his own death in a mirror.”

She said, “You know how children are. They were playing close to the wire and talking to the Yemeni immigrants in Hebrew – our children speak Hebrew – and the immigrants were answering them in an odd Arabic; our children know their language and they don’t know ours. Ibrahim had been playing with them, and they brought him to me. God, he was trembling. They said a huge stone had fallen on him. I don’t know how to describe it; his head was crushed, and blood was dripping from it. I left him in the house and ran to ask for a permit to take him to the hospital in Acre, and at the military governor’s headquarters they made me wait for more than three hours in a darkened room, the Iraqi threatening to beat me during the interrogation. He said they knew you came, that their men were better lovers than you, and that they’d kill you and leave you in the square at Deir al-Asad to make an example of you. And he asked for information about you while I pleaded for the permit.

“And when I got back to the house, Ibrahim was dead, and your father was whispering the last rites.”

You sat down, lit a cigarette, and put a thousand and one questions to her. You wanted to know whether they’d killed him or he’d died accidentally; had they thrown the stone at him, or had he just gotten in the way of it.

Nahilah didn’t know.

You got up and said that you’d kill their children as they’d killed your son. “Tomorrow you’ll trill with joy, because we’ll have our revenge.”

For three nights you circled the barbed wire. You had your rifle and ten hand grenades, and you decided to tie the grenades together, throw them into the Jewish settlement’s workshop, and, when they exploded, fire at the settlers.

It was night.

The spotlight revolved, tracking the wire fence, and Yunes hid in the olive grove close by. He started moving closer, crawling on his stomach. He got the chain of grenades ready and tied them to a detonator, deciding to throw them into the big hall where Yemeni Jewish families slept practically on top of one another. He wanted to kill, just to kill. When you described the event to Dr. Mu‘een, you said that during your third pass you imagined the dead bodies piled on top of one another and felt your heart drink deep.

“I was thirsty; revenge is like thirst. I would drink, and my thirst would increase, so that when the time came and I began to crawl, a refreshing coolness filled my heart. When everything was about to happen, the thirst disappeared, and I set out not with revenge in my mind but out of a sense of duty, because I’d promised Nahilah.”

Yunes never told the story of what actually happened.

He said later that it was impossible to carry out the operation successfully, that he had realized the huge losses the villages would incur as a result of the predictable Israeli response.

He crawled toward the fence, and after the spotlight had passed over him a number of times, heard the sound of firing and dogs barking. He flattened himself to the ground. Then he decided to run, not paying the slightest heed to the spotlight. Bullets flying around him, he disappeared into the olive grove, and instead of hiding there until morning, he kept going until he reached the Lebanese border.

He said later that he decided not to go through with the operation because it was an individual act of revenge and because the Israelis would take it out on the Arab villages. But he never spoke of the fear that paralyzed him or why he fled all the way to Lebanon.

Now I have a right to be afraid.

But not Yunes; Yunes wasn’t afraid, his heart never wavered. Yunes “withdrew” because he was a hero. I, on the other hand, am hiding in his room because I’m a coward. Have you noticed how things have changed? Those days were heroic days, these are not. Yunes got scared, so he became a hero; I’m scared, so I’ve become a coward.

When Yunes returned to Bab al-Shams, he didn’t tell Nahilah about the revenge that never happened. But me – the crippled nurse looks at me with contempt because she’s waiting for me to justify my stay at the hospital. Shams was killed, and I’m expected to pay the price for a crime I didn’t commit.

I don’t sleep.

And you – could you sleep after you postponed your revenge?

^*Koran, Surah III, 169.

^*A soft, yogurt cheese.

YOU WANT A STORY!

I know you’d like to change the subject, you don’t agree with my way of telling the story of your son’s death and your revenge. You’ll ask me to tell it a different way. Maybe I should say, for example, that the moment you got close to the barbed wire, you understood that individual revenge was worthless and decided to go back to Lebanon to organize the fedayeen so we could start the war.

“It wasn’t a war. It was more like a dream. Don’t believe, Son, that the Jews won the war in ’48. In ’48, we didn’t fight. We didn’t know what we were doing. They won because we didn’t fight, and they didn’t fight either, they just won. It was like a dream.”

You’ll say you chose war instead of revenge, and I have to believe you. Everyone will believe you, and they’ll say you were right, and I’m trying to camouflage my fear within yours.

You weren’t afraid that night of March 1951.

And I’m not afraid now!

When Yunes told how his son Ibrahim died in 1951, he spoke a lot about Nahilah’s suffering. He never spoke of his own suffering, only of his thirst for revenge.

“Didn’t you feel pain?” I asked him.

“Didn’t you want to die? Didn’t you die?”

“I don’t understand, because I’m only afraid of one thing,” I once told Shams, transported by our love. “I’m afraid of children.”

When we made love, she’d scream that it was the sea. She was next to me and over me and under me, swimming. She said she was swimming in the sea, the waves cascading from inside her. She would rise and bend and stretch and circle, saying it was the waves. And I would fly over her or under her or through her, flying above her undulating blue sea.

“You are all the men in the world,” she said. “I sleep with you as if I’m with all the men I’ve known and not known.” I’d soar above her listening to her words, trying to put off the moment of union. I’d tell her to go a little more slowly because I wanted to smell the sky, but she would pull me into her sea and submerge me and push me to the limits of sorrow.

“You’re my man and all men.”

I didn’t understand the expanses of her passion and her desire to control her body. She would massage her body and grasp her breasts and swoon. I’d watch her swoon and it was as though she weren’t with me, or as though she were in a distant dream, a sort of island encircled by waves.

I didn’t dare ask her to marry me because I believed her. She said she was a free woman and would never marry again. I believed her and understood her and agreed with her, despite feeling that burning sensation that could only be extinguished by making her my own.

I agreed with her because I was powerless and didn’t dare force her to choose between marrying me and leaving me, for the idea of not seeing her was more painful than death.

Then I found out she’d killed Sameh because he’d refused to marry her. They said she’d stood over his body and pronounced, so everyone could hear, “I give myself to you in marriage,” before fleeing.

That’s what they said at the interrogation, when they detained me. I was silent. I was incapable of speech because I felt betrayal and fear. It was there, in the eyes of the committee members, I discovered she’d been sentenced to die. The head of the committee was in a hurry, as though he wanted to use me as new evidence to justify the decision to kill her.

The committee eyed me with contempt as the duped lover, though I wasn’t duped – but what could I say? I used to smell the other men on her body, but it never occurred to me that she loved another man the way I loved her. There – with him – she would have said nothing and been on the verge of tears as she listened to him saying that with her he was sleeping with all of womankind.

I understand her, I swear I do: The only solution to love is murder. I never came close to committing the crime, but I did long for her death, because death ends everything, as it did that day.

Shams is a hero because she put an end to her own problem. But me, I’m just a man who grew horns, as the head of the investigating committee said, thinking he was making a joke everyone could appreciate.

I refused to answer their questions. All I said was that I was convinced she was “not a normal woman.” I know I was hard on her, but what could I say? I had to say something, and those words spilled from my mouth. As for all the other things I’m supposed to have said, they’re not true. Liars! I never said anything about orgies. My God – how could we have held orgies in my house when it was surrounded by all those other wrecked houses? They put words into my mouth so as to come up with additional justifications for killing Shams. All I said was that she was my friend and that she was a woman of many moods. I heard their laughter and the joke about my horns.

The head of the committee ordered my release because I was pathetic. “A pathetic guy, no harm to anyone,” he said.

Patheticmeans stupid, and I wasn’t stupid. I wanted to tell them that love isn’t foolishness, but I didn’t say anything. I left and went looking for Shams, and I was arrested again before being released and allowed to return to Beirut.

This isn’t what I wanted to say. I wanted to tell you that when I was caught up in that wave, I would dream of having a child and, at the same time, was terrified. I told Shams that the most horrible thing that could happen to a person was to lose a son or daughter. Even though I live amid this desolate people that has grown accustomed to losing its children, I can’t imagine myself in that situation.

Shams laughed and told me about her daughter, Dalal, in Jordan, and about how missing her was like having her guts ripped open.

And when I asked Yunes about the death of his son, he told me about Nahilah.

The woman almost went mad. All the people of Deir al-Asad said the woman lost her mind. She would roam the outskirts of the village as though chasing her own death – going into areas the military governor had placed out of bounds (almost everywhere was out of bounds). She’d roam and roam. Then she would return home exhausted and sleep. She’d never worry about her second son, Salem, whom his grandmother had smuggled out of the house.

It took Nahilah months and months to return to her senses after she gave birth to her daughter, Noor, “Light.” The girl’s name wasn’t originally Noor: Her grandmother named her Fatimah, but Yunes said her name was Noor because he’d seen Ibrahim in a dream reciting verses from the Surah of the Koran called “Noor.”

“Listen to what he was saying.” Nahilah looked and saw a halo of light around Yunes’ head as he recited:

God is the Light of the heavens and the earth;

the likeness of His Light is as a niche wherein is a lamp

(the lamp in a glass, the glass as it were a glittering star)

kindled from a Blessed Tree,

an olive that is neither of the East nor of the West

whose oil wellnigh would shine, even if no fire touched it;

Light upon Light;

(God guides to His Light whom He will). ^*

Yunes said he’d been able to bear his son’s death because he hadn’t believed it. “When you don’t see, you don’t believe. I used to tell Nahilah that Ibrahim would come back once he’d tired of playing with death. For me, I swear to you, Ibrahim is still alive, I’m waiting for him.”

I CAME INTO your room today laughing. Nurse Zainab had made me laugh by telling me how a woman had smacked Dr. Amjad. I’d thought that Amjad Hussein was a respectable man. I don’t know where they dug him up to play the doctor here. Some say Mme. Wedad, the director of the Red Crescent, got him the job because he’s a relative of hers. But he’s not one of us, because he didn’t fight with us and the Israelis didn’t detain him at Ansar. So where does he come from? Don’t ask me now why I didn’t go to the Biqa’ when our battalion withdrew from al-Nabatiyyeh during the Israeli incursion – that’s just the way it happened. I withdrew with the battalion and went to Ain al-Hilweh, and that’s where I was arrested. A month later they released me and I found myself going to Beirut. I’ve no idea, however, where you disappeared to. You told me that when you learned the Israelis had gone into Beirut, you fled to the village of Batshay and hid there with the priest.

“The priest’s an old friend of mine, he thinks I’m a Christian,” you told me.

Me, on the other hand, they tied up to a barred window that looked like a cage, blindfolded me, wound what felt like ropes around me, and took me to the Israeli prison before I was moved to Ansar.

I won’t tell you right now what I told everyone about our life in the detention camp. In Ansar, I lost fifty pounds, I was frail and sick. Everyone was at the camp except Dr. Amjad. Even Abu Mohammed al-Rahhal, president of the Workers’ Federation, left sick and died two months later. I haven’t told you this dream he used to tell us every day. I don’t know what happened to Abu Mohammed in the detention camp. There were thousands of us in the middle of a bare field surrounded by barbed wire, “treating our cares with our cares,” as we used to say – all of us except Abu Mohammed, who went from one tent to another, telling the same dream.

“Yesterday,” he’d say, “I had a dream,” and he’d repeat the same dream, until it became a joke.

“Yesterday I had a dream that I was, I don’t know how, standing on the pavement with my manhood (he used this odd term for his member) sticking out, and it was – and I apologize for mentioning it – long, very long, longer than the street from side to side, and an Israeli tank came along and drove over it.”

“Did the tank cut it off, Abu Mohammed?”

“Did it hurt a lot?”

Abu Mohammed would say he was afraid he was going to die, because “when a man sees his manhood cut off in a dream, it means he’s going to die.”

“Where did you get that from, Abu Mohammed?”

“I read it in Ibn Sirin’s Dreams,” he answered.

“And who’s this Ibn Sirin? An interpreter of dreams about reproductive organs?”

“God forbid! Ibn Sirin was a great Sufi and a great scholar, and his dream interpretations are never wrong.”

Anyway Ibn Sirin was right, because Abu Mohammed died. This Dr. Amjad, though, wasn’t with us at Ansar, and no Israeli tank cut off his manhood. But he’s here; a respectable man, obsessive about cleanliness. I’ve never seen such a clean man. He lives in the middle of this shit and streams of cologne flow from him. He washes his hands with soap, then dabbles them with cologne and turns his nose up at everything. I don’t know what to make of him. You haven’t seen him, so I’ll have to describe him to you (even though I don’t like descriptions): bald, short, thin, with an oval face, high cheekbones, small eyes. He wears glasses with gold frames that don’t flatter his dark complexion, and his pipe never leaves his mouth. He has very narrow shoulders, and he speaks fast, looking off into the distance to make what he says seem important.

He wasn’t with us in the war or the detention camp, and I don’t understand why he’s working in the hospital here. He says he’s half-Palestinian because his mother’s Syrian, from the region of Aleppo, and he doesn’t speak Palestinian Arabic but a funny dialect that’s a mixture of Classical and Lebanese.

Zainab told me today about a pious Muslim woman wearing a headscarf who struck him because he tried to make a pass at her.

“I heard the woman’s scream, then the sound of slapping. The woman came out, threatening to return with her husband, and the doctor started pleading with her in an embarrassed voice. Later the woman emerged with her husband, who was carrying a bag of medicine, and the doctor thanked the husband, practically falling over himself he was bowing so low.”

Today I’m happy. Dr. Amjad was humiliated, and I want to savor the thought of him bowing in front of the husband, groveling like a dog. I want to have a quiet cigarette and think about life. What more do you want from me today? I’ve bathed and fed you. We sucked out the mucus and everything else. Today I’m happy.

I DON’T KNOW any stories. Where am I supposed to get stories when I’m a prisoner in this hospital? Okay, I’ll tell you the story of the cotton swab. You’re the one who told it to me, I’m certain of that. You know, when I heard the story, I was very aroused, even though I pretended to be disgusted and went into a long tirade defending women’s rights, saying that such degradation of our women was the root of our failures, our paralysis, and our defeats. But when I fell asleep, I was possessed by the demon of sex. That’s all I will say.

In those days, as the story goes, in a small village in Galilee called Ain al-Zaitoun, Sheikh Ibrahim Ibn Suleiman al-Asadi decided his only son should marry. The boy had reached adulthood, his beard sprouting at fourteen. The blind sheikh urged his wife to find a bride for her son quickly, for the sheikh had one foot in the grave, and he wanted to see his grandchildren before dying.

The wife was of the same mind. She, too, wanted her son to marry so that he’d settle down, find himself work, and put an end to his long absences and his life in the mountains with the sacred warriors.

The story is that the young man, who was called Yunes, had no objection to the idea, and when his mother told him she was going to ask for the hand of Nahilah, the daughter of Mohammed al-Shawwah, he agreed, even though he’d never met the girl. He said yes because he liked her name and in his mind drew himself a picture of a fair skinned girl with long black hair, wide eyes, broad cheeks, full hips, and round breasts. He fantasized about a woman sleeping next to him and letting him into her treasures.

But Yunes got a surprise. His wife wasn’t a woman, she was a twelve-year-old girl. The girl wasn’t fair skinned; her complexion was the color of wheat, her hair wasn’t long but like tufts of black wool stuck to her head, and her hips weren’t. .

More than ten years later, when he was about to make love with her at Bab al-Shams, he discovered that he was mistaken. The girl was a woman, and fair-skinned, and her eyes were large, her hair long and black, and she was overflowing with secrets and treasures.

He said, on that occasion, that she’d changed.

And she laughed at him because he hadn’t seen what was in front of him. “Now, after I’ve had children and have become fat and flabby, you come to me and say I’m beautiful? Now, after all the hard times, you see that. . You men! Men are blind, even when they can see.”

But Yunes insisted, and embraced the roundness of her hips and saw the bright sky in her broad, high brow and ate Turkish delight from her long, slim, smooth fingers.

He told her he could smell Turkish delight on her neck. He would open his pack after making love to her and would pull out a tin of Turkish delight while she made tea. Then he’d sit hunched up inside the curve of her body as she lay on the rug, and she’d feed him, the fine white sugar falling onto his chest. He told her he loved eating Turkish delight from her fingers because they were as white as the sweet, which was the best thing the Turks had left behind when they left our country, and because her smell was musky, like the white cubes that melted in his mouth.

IN THOSE DAYS, as the story goes, the world was at war, and when there’s war, things take on a different shape. The air was different, the smells were different, and the people were different. War became a ghost that seeped into people’s clothes and walked among them.

Ain al-Zaitoun, in those days, was a small village sleeping on the pillow of war. Everything in it rippled. The people hurled themselves into the electrified air and tasted war. Nobody called anything by its real name, war itself didn’t resemble its own name. Everyone thought it would be like the war tales of their ancestors, where mighty armies were defeated, locusts ate up the fields, and famine and pestilence spread through the land. They didn’t know that this time the war without a name was them.

The blind sheikh told his wife that words had lost their meaning, so he had decided to be silent. From day to day, he withdrew deeper into his silence, which was broken only by his morning mutterings while he’d recite Koranic verses.

The blind sheikh told his wife that he could see, even though his eyes were closed, and he couldn’t explain why he had come to fear the water.

Weeping, the woman told her son that the old man had gone senile. She said she was ashamed in front of the other people and begged her son to come back from the mountains with the fighters of the sacred jihad to look after his father.

The blind sheikh told his wife he couldn’t bear to live any longer now that they’d appointed a new sheikh to be imam of the village mosque. He said an imam couldn’t be deposed and that he’d never abandon his Sufi companions in the village of Sha’ab. And he said that Ain al-Zaitoun would be destroyed because it had rejected the blessings of its Lord.

He explained everything to his wife, but he couldn’t explain to her why he’d come to fear the water. He said that water was dirty and that when he touched it he felt something sticky, as though his hand were plunging into dead putrefying bodies, and that ablutions could be performed with dust, and that dust. .

He took to using dust to wash with.

The woman would look at him, her heart torn to pieces. The sheikh would go out into his garden carrying a container, squat as though he were preparing to pray, fill the container with dust and go into the bedroom. He would remove his clothes and bathe with the dust, which stuck to his body as he moved and sighed.