Among Wolves

When Yamna comes to, Lhaj is sitting on his rock as always, a long, thin cigarette clamped between his long, thin teeth, watching the goats graze.

“That was a whole sack of potatoes I brought you on Thursday.” The curtain of flesh beneath his Adam’s apple trembles, but his gaze doesn’t stray from the goats. With his white dress shirt, black vest, and dusty black slacks, he resembles a vulture.

“Don’t tell me you ate them already.”

“No, Uncle Lhaj.”

“Then what did you eat? The lamb chops? The watermelon?”

“Nothing, Uncle.”

There’s blood on the dress again. Two specks of crimson. That’s why she keeps her extra bar of soap up by the spring, so that her mother will not know, but now she will be late. Even in the sun, it will take too long to dry.

“Well, you must’ve eaten something.” He flicks ash off the end of his cigarette. The limbs of a white poplar, disturbed by a failing breeze, sound as if they’re imitating him—with reverence, of course—as high and faltering and raspy as his words.

“An egg. This morning.”

“Then let’s pray for a chicken.”

“Uncle Lhaj,” says Yamna, “the nanny goat. She’s getting too far from the others.”

“Your mother,” he muses, “what does your mother say about me?”

“Let me get her back before she gets too far.” Scraped knees, aching pelvis—still, she runs. “Come back!” Her voice flies from her mouth and returns from the crags. “Come back! Don’t you know about the wolves?”

“Next time, why don’t you bring the dog?” She’s gone too far to hear him, but still he adds, “It’ll take care of the wolves.”

“Hey! Look, over here! I’m picking up your son!”

“My sons are the lucky ones.”

“He’ll be lonely if you don’t come!” warns the echo. “He’ll be hungry!”

“Those bicycles of theirs,” Lhaj muses. “Tell me, who else around here has a brand-new bicycle?”

“This way. That’s right, this way. Please, before they come.”

“Red and yellow. Just like those snakes, the venomous ones. You don’t mess around with the venomous ones.”

“Uncle.” She’s standing in front of him, holding the bleating, squirming kid—but why is she still here? Still standing in front of him? “Uncle, did you see? She almost got too far.”

“I told you.” He rubs what remains of his cigarette into the dirt with the toe of his long, thin, polished shoe. “Next time bring the dog.”

“I don’t like the dog.”

“You’re not a wolf, are you?”

There’s dirt on her face, and dust in her hair, and blood on her plain, white dress, two spots of blood. She shakes her head. The nanny trails after her, following the kid’s dry, mechanical cries.

“Then what’s the problem?” He rises, adjusting himself as he does, tucking his shirttail back into his slacks. The girl is not in his line of sight anymore, and the goats are not, either. Just the horizon, coppery scrubland crenellated like a row of chipped teeth. High above, a raptor circles. He says, “It only goes after the wolves.”

#

The dog is waiting for him in the courtyard, folded on the dusty tile, sleek and beige. It perks up as he approaches, but he ignores it as he always does. His mind is elsewhere.

He nearly trips over the bicycles, which lie tangled like a pair of snakes mating right in front of the door.

Inside, his wife is chopping vegetables. Ignoring her just as he ignored the dog, he goes into the living room, where his sons are watching television. He switches the television off. He doesn’t care for television shows, but he does like the way the screen, when dark, reflects his image, smartly dressed, straight as a ramrod, still handsome after seventy years. He likes the television.

“Next time I trip over those bicycles,” he says, “you both know what will happen.”

That gets them off the sofa. Heads bent, they shuffle from the room. If they keep leaving those bicycles out front instead of in the back where they belong, he’ll have the younger one, fifteen, beat the older one sixteen, with a belt, an olive branch, a fire poker. Then he’ll have the older one beat the younger one. He used to have the older one beat the younger one first, but with some experimentation, he’s discovered that they both go at it more savagely when he starts by giving power to the younger one.

He sinks onto the sofa. His wife brings in a tray of tea and cookies. As she sets it down, he catches an unwilling glimpse of her body, the curves that used to satiate him, reflected in the television. He hasn’t always been unwilling. Even after his second son, when she began to put on weight, he still enjoyed feasting his eyes on her flesh. Now, though, she repulses him.

The girl doesn’t repulse him yet, for she doesn’t resemble his wife in any way, but she will soon, and then he’ll have to find another girl. The prospect of this inconvenience irritates him. There are no other girls. Not around here, anyway. They’re all either too young or too old. Whatever people were eating thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years ago must have affected reproduction, brought them only sons—an inconvenience for Uncle Lhaj.

It was only ever a matter of time, of course, but still, he thought he’d have longer. He put a lot of work into that girl, taking her mother’s two hundred dirhams, which her good-for-nothing husband left before going and blowing himself up abroad, and assuring her that he would make it last three years. The idiot woman sincerely believes that those two hundred dirhams are still buying her groceries. Since then, she’s been grateful, and ever since he gave her six goats to replace the first two, the ones from America, the ones that were eaten by wolves, she’s been even more grateful.

“America might not have any more goats,” he murmurs, placing a cookie in his mouth, “but Uncle Lhaj does.”

When he speaks of himself in the third person, which is often, he always calls himself Uncle Lhaj. This is what everyone calls him, even though he’s never been to Mecca, and who is he to argue with everyone?

“Lhaj,” he’d said last year, when the nurse at the hospital asked for his name, and though a question mark formed on her face, she wrote it down obediently. Then she asked for his last name. He said, “Mazar.” She’d nodded and written that down as well before taking the clipboard into the other room. A little while later, the other nurse, the older one, came out of that room and stood before him, brandishing a plastic baggie containing three double A batteries.

“Uncle Lhaj,” she said, “did you do this?”

“No.”

“No?” She shook the baggie under his nose, eyebrows raised.

“I didn’t put them in that baggie,” said Lhaj, “if that’s what you’re asking.”

“But we both know where you did put them.”

“What sort of accusation is this?” he wanted to know. “There are so many batteries in the world. Am I supposed to recognize those in particular?”

“You could’ve killed her, you know.”

“You don’t understand anything, do you?” he said. “I was just teasing. Just entertaining her. Just playing with her a little, that’s all—like I’m sure your husband never does. She’s still young, you know. She still wants it. Can’t a man tease his own wife once in a while?”

“Lhaj Mazar.” The nurse had snorted. “Wants me to respect him, but he doesn’t even know his own name. You don’t have to say Mazar, you know. We all know you’ve never been to Mecca. Everyone knows. Everyone’s just too scared of you to tell you to your face, but do you think I’m scared?” She’d given the batteries another shake. “Your wife’s life is in my hands.”

From that day on, everything about his wife has been repulsive to him. Luckily, though, by that time he’d already put a lot of work into that girl. She was right there when he needed her, like a hot meal on a plate, ready and waiting.

“Uncle Lhaj always thinks ahead,” he murmurs, watching his lips move in the darkness of the television. “Yes, he does. Oh, yes, he does.”

#

Through the open door, Hnou spots her daughter leading the goats into the yard. Without breaking off kneading, she counts them—one, two, three, four, five, six—and exhales, relieved; but like a bit of fabric catching on a hangnail, something in the tableau snags. She looks again. One, two, three, four, five, six—then the seventh.

She often wonders what it felt like when the blast went off. Was there heat, or light, or pain, or was it all too fast? She often puts the question to him, though he never answers. “He can’t wait to see you in the afterlife,” the stranger had told her through the neighbor’s phone the morning of, but since that day, there’ve been no calls. She holds up her end of the conversations, but he never answers, never confides in her, never lets her in on how it feels when reality itself flies apart, and knees and nose and toes and vertebrae all go their separate ways.

Now she knows.

She watches her daughter cross the yard, her midriff almost indiscernibly distended, and in the un-girlishness of that curve, she sees the end of days.

It was hard enough for them together, married in the proper way: hard enough waiting every afternoon, nursing Yamna, while he stood by the road where the laborers waited, and sometimes the truck came, sometimes rich people were putting up buildings, sometimes he worked and brought home flour and potatoes for their table, but other times, there was no food. He’d been sixteen when they married, she almost fifteen. Next to Yamna, they were already old.

She’s out the door before she knows it, hands still white with flour, shouting for Yamna not to stray too near the empty well. The world isn’t steady anymore. The jinn who live down there could snag her white dress, pull her in.

Back inside, Hnou throws a stick of cinnamon in a pot with saffron, nutmeg, pennyroyal—whatever she can think of that might take this curse away. She’s grateful to Uncle Lhaj, without whom these herbs would not be in her pantry. There is still goodness in the world.

She asks when it happened. Her daughter says nothing. She asks who the man was. Her daughter says nothing. She asks why she did it. Her daughter says nothing. Her white dress shivers even though there is no breeze.

“Don’t you know that this will bring us shame?” she demands.

“But I haven’t done anything.”

Maybe it was the jinn who put the curse inside her, or maybe she’s only ever warned her daughter of one thing—one thing they both know she knows better than to do. She hisses, “How many times do I have to tell you, don’t go near the well.”

“But they’re safe,” whimpers Yamna. “They’re all safe. All six of them.”

Standing over the bottle gas, listening to the old pot chortle, watching steam form on the surface, Hnou doesn’t hear.

#

Yamna has never been afraid of the well. There’s nothing in there anyway—she’s looked: she knows—just a few pigeons, their guano, their eggshells, their feathers, their nests composed of twigs like bones. She used to jump and dance and clap her hands, perched on the lip of that well, and the pigeons would hurtle up out of the darkness. She loved the chaos of their wings.

Her mother believes that the pigeons are jinn. She warns her that because the well is dry, they will be thirsty. They’ll want to drink someone’s blood. Maybe hers.

If the jinn really wanted to drink blood, thinks Yamna, they would’ve drunk the goats’. The wolves had no difficulty tearing the first two goats to pieces after she fell asleep beneath the poplar, and jinn, it is known, are much stronger than wolves.

Ever since her father went away to fight, her mother’s been afraid, and has wanted her to be afraid in turn, of anything that’s far away—but what about what’s right next-door? Someday, her father will return, wearing his uniform, bearing honors from the war, but what, then, will he find?

What her mother doesn’t understand is that real monsters do not live in wells. If only, thinks Yamna, if only you could stick to one side of the yard and know that you were safe there. If only there were safety somewhere in the world.

#

“Please, my little glass,” says Hnou, “please, bowl, cookpot, table, and the One Above, I’m lost. Please, help me.”

Three days have passed, and still no blood, no sign that anything has been accomplished by the herbs. Her daughter’s sticking to her story—nothing, no one—and in her eyes, there is fear, but no shame, and that makes it worse, somehow. That makes it worse.

If only her husband never climbed into that truck. If he only said no to those two hundred dirhams—but, of course, he couldn’t have said no. She still remembers how they marveled at that single note, standing with their heads together in this very room. How they traced the outline of the king’s face with their fingers. “This should be enough for a few weeks,” he told her. “I’ll be home by then.”

If only he knew then that it would last them three entire years, thanks to the cleverness of Uncle Lhaj, who knows all about money, things they never dreamt of knowing—how to save, and how to spend, and where the best deals can be found.

If only he knew then that after three years, he would not be home.

If he were here, he would know exactly what to do about their daughter. He would know because he was a man. Such matters must not fall to women, not once herbs have failed—though, of course, she knows exactly what he would’ve known. It’s just that the thought of it curdles her insides. Perhaps it would’ve curdled his too, but at least he was a man.

Perhaps he used to hide his fears, just as he now hides his knowledge in the emptiness between her words. Perhaps, climbing onto the truck that frosty morning, he’d wished that he weren’t the one going abroad. Once, he’d mentioned that women were needed to pick fruits in Spain. “Think of what it would bring,” he’d said, but she’d just given birth, she’d never heard of Spain, and she would not be separated from her daughter. Not until the end of days.

“Please, my little glass,” she croons, “please, bowl, cookpot, table, and the One Above, I’m lost. I haven’t got the strength. Please help me do what must be done.”

#

The roosters haven’t crowed, but Lhaj’s prick announces that it’s time to rise and shine.

While his wife putters about in the kitchen, clanging pots and pans to make his tea, he sits on the edge of the bed, stroking himself absentmindedly. With any luck, the girl will be up already, doing chores.

His house stands on the highest land in town, not far from the girl’s, but he hasn’t got a clear view from his window, for between them stands a blade of crag. With his tea hot inside him, he slips out through the gate and down the path. In the east, a faint light glimmers like the flame beneath a kettle. The air is mercifully cool. Through a tunnel of foliage, around a bend, and now he’s got a clear view of the cottage crouched beneath the hill. Through the hazy blue-black, he catches movement in the yard—the goats, he thinks at first, but no: two figures moving, one short, the other tall.

Where to at this early hour?

Careful not to make noise, he quickens his pace, closing the distance between them even as they near the trees. His prick wasn’t prepared for this hindrance. Given fair warning, it might’ve dug deep and found a bit of patience, but he expected an easy conquest, and now the fever will not cool until he has one.

The mother, he notices just before they slip into the trees, has something in her hand. In the gloom, it could almost be a serpent wound around her arm, but of course it’s no serpent. Just an old bit of rope.

Whatever does she want that rope for?

Momentarily confounded, Lhaj comes to a halt at the foot of the hill. If they look back, they’ll see him, but they’re not moving like two people on the verge of looking back. His hand strays to the front his slacks and pensively inscribes a circle around the fevered bulge. He’s waiting for something: a thought, a feeling.

Of course. He’s not the only one who’s seen the belly on the girl. The mother cannot possibly suspect him, or if she does, she’s buried her suspicion deep inside, but she’s seen what she’s seen. No husband, no father, no brothers, no sons—no man to take care of the dissolute daughter. There’s only her to do what must be done.

Still, why must she do it so soon? It’s appallingly wasteful. He could still get some use out of the girl—he was banking on a few more months at least—and it’s not as if anything he does now could make the situation worse. For that matter, why doesn’t she ask him to do it: him, the man who’s fed and clothed her for these past three years? The closest she has to a father, a husband?

When she returns, he’ll have a word. He’s not keen to start another rumor after the affair with the batteries, but neither will he stand idly by and watch someone take something away from him. He might as well take something from her in return. Everyone knows that the six goats are his, and those two hundred dirhams were spent a long time ago. Technically, she’s in a great deal of debt to him.

It’s too cold to stand around waiting, so he ambles over to the house and enters through the unlocked door. The rooms are small but clean. In the kitchen, he finds a plate of homemade cookies, which are not half bad. He eats one, then a second, then a third, pausing after each to lick his fingers. By the time he finishes the last one, his tongue is cottony and dry, but there’s no fridge, no running water, nothing to drink unless he goes out and milks one of the goats.

Perhaps he will.

Taking a glass from the cupboard, he heads for the door, then stops dead in his tracks on the threshold.

The mother is standing in the yard.

Somewhere, a rooster calls.

Her gaze is fixed ahead of her, rigid, unwavering—not on the house, nor on the trees, but on the tapering end of the crag. Without taking her eyes off the spot where the rocks meet the sky, she steps forward. Then vanishes. Just like that. Into thin air.

Lhaj doesn’t hear the glass shatter. He barely felt it slip from his hand. He blinks repeatedly, his old mind whirring like a cheap electric fan. Another rooster calls. There’s not yet any color to the sunrise, just a pale blue-gray, but the sun will be shining on everything soon.

Lhaj does not believe in ghosts. He does not believe in spirits. He does believe in jinn, just a little, but he’s confident that jinn can be bought off. Because it’s late in life for him to change his mind, he shakes off his paralysis and moves toward the spot where the woman was standing. Soon, through the dimness, he makes out the slightly raised lip of a well.

He keeps walking. Past the well. Into the trees. His hand slithers into his pocket, seeking and finding and squeezing his blazing hot poker, which knows precisely what it wants, which will not be appeased. Warm bodies are warm bodies, after all, until their warmth is gone, and that can take as much as half an hour.

The grove isn’t thick, maybe two hundred paces end to end, and it’s not long before he comes upon her, dangling grayly from a limb, ready for picking. There’s only one problem: in the darkness, in despair, the mother must’ve thought she was deep in the grove, but now, with the sun coming up, he can make out the town through the trees. He hopes the women gathering at the water pump will go away, but they do not go away. Several more join them and stand around chattering, taking turns filling their buckets. They haven’t noticed anything yet, but a flurry of motion would draw their attention to the grove.

A child of four stands near the women, a finger jammed deep in its nose, round face turned blankly toward the trees.

Quietly cursing, Lhaj retreats into the grove.

Emerging again where he entered the grove, into Hnou’s yard, he hears a faint, unearthly moan rising up from the earth, like wind through crags, but not his crags, in whose shadow he’s lived for years, whose sounds he knows. The only creatures around are the goats, which gaze back at him stupidly, mutely. Gooseflesh prickles on his arms. The moaning fades, then starts again, growing louder as he nears the mouth of the well. Then he knows. The woman wasn’t killed by the fall. She’s awake down there, making that awful sound, broken-hearted, broken-boned.

He considers finding a stone and letting gravity do its work, but then he thinks better of it. She took something away from him, after all. Why show her mercy?

Besides, the townsfolk will find her there, sooner or later, and a stone will demand explanation. Best leave well enough alone.

On the trail back up-mountain, his poker throbs hotter than ever, threatening to ignite his slacks, to send him up in an infernal burst of smokeless fire. He grips it through the pocket wall, anxious to smother its smolder and get on with his day. “Patience,” he murmurs. “Patience, Good Sir. Uncle Lhaj will find you something sweet to snack on.”

The sun’s in the sky by the time he slips into the courtyard, but he can’t hear anything from the house: no pots, no pans, no television. His sons are off somewhere, probably on their early morning bike ride, and his wife must’ve gone back to bed. “Good-for-nothing,” he mutters, fumbling with the gate latch, “lazybones,” though, in truth, he’s pleased to have the morning to himself.

In the courtyard behind the house, where cultivars thrust their limbs over the walls, he takes his time choosing a peach, studying each one, examining stems and callipygous curves, finally selecting one, piercing its flesh with his long, thin teeth, savoring the spurt of juices. He nibbles his way toward the bitter pit, slaking his thirst this way, licking his fingers.

When he looks up, he finds the dog watching him.

Its tail doesn’t thump as it does when his wife approaches, but that’s because it sees her as a friend and not a master. It respects only men.

“Good,” he murmurs, positioning himself behind the dog. “Uncle Lhaj has found a solution.” In the palm of one hand, his saliva makes a foamy, viscous pool. Gripping the Sloughi’s rear end with the other, he grinds its haunches down into the tile. It whimpers, tries to squirm away, but he pins it with the weight of his frustration. Birdsong wafts down from the branches like petals of sound. He frees himself from long confinement with his wet hand, forces the dog’s tail aside, and presses bulbously into its musty, puckered opening.

A savage sound, a flash of motion, and the next thing he knows, the dog’s halfway across the courtyard. Its tail is tucked, its eyes defiant and reproachful.

No longer standing, on one knee now, it occurs to him that something may be wrong.

Yes. Something is indeed wrong. Something is no longer as securely attached as it once was. That something used to bridge the yawning space between the known and the not-yet-knowable, the irreparable and the imprecise, the past and future, but now that something’s hanging by a thread, a dark, slick link of sinew—nothing more.

The curse he wants to spit out boils in his brain, but his mouth no longer answers to him. It unleashes nothing but a moan. His heart turns over like a flooding engine as he tries to rise, and a crimson geyser spurts in the direction of the dog, which flinches away from him, pressing itself against the wall.

When he turns, he finds the backdoor open, his wife’s mouth covered by her hands.

Bring the tea, he wants to tell her, but his lips will not form words. His kneecaps crack like walnuts on the tile. More spurting. More crimson. Clots of darkness form around the edges of his vision. Shadows reach from every side like limbs burdened by fruits, sagging low. The sun is going down again, impossibly, absurdly, sinking like an old balloon below the wall.

The last thing he sees are two splotches of color, one red, the other yellow, materializing in the passageway that runs beside the house, connecting the front and rear courtyards: two splotches of color, one red and one yellow, and above them, suspended in the gathering eclipse like two astonished moons, the faces of his sons.

His lucky, lucky sons.