Cockroach

RAWI HAGE

Copyright © 2008 Rawi Hage

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This edition published in 2011 by
House of Anansi Press
Inc.
110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801
Toronto,
ON
,
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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Hage,
Rawi
Cockroach / Rawi Hage.
e
ISBN
978-0-88784-850-6
I.
Title.
PS
8615.
A
355C62
2008       
C
813'.6      C2007-907558-4

Jacket Design: Bill Douglas at The Bang

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing
program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the
Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

For Ramzy, Jenny, and Nada, who bring me smiles; for
my brothers; for Lisa, as once promised; for Madeleine, who loves the East; and for
my exiled friends: may they go back.

What we call species are various degenerations of the
same type.

— Isidore Saint-Hilaire,
Vie d'Étienne
Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire
(1847)

Then Satavaesa makes those waters flow down to the seven Karshvares of the
earth, and when he has arrived down there, he stands, beautiful, spreading ease and joy
on the fertile countries.

—
Avesta
, the ancient scriptures
of
Zoroastrianism

I AM IN LOVE
with Shohreh. But I
don't trust my emotions anymore. I've neither lived with a woman nor
properly courted one. And I've often wondered about my need to seduce and possess
every female of the species that comes my way.

When I see a woman, I feel my teeth getting thinner, longer, pointed. My
back hunches and my forehead sprouts two antennae that sway in the air, flagging a need
for attention. I want to crawl under the feet of the women I meet and admire from below
their upright posture, their delicate ankles. I also feel repulsed — not
embarrassed, but repulsed — by slimy feelings of cunning and need. It is a bizarre
mix of emotions and instinct that comes over me, compelling me to approach these women
like a hunchback in the presence of schoolgirls.

Perhaps it's time to see my therapist again, because lately this
feeling has been weighing on me. Although that same urge has started to act upon me in
the shrink's presence. Recently, when I saw her laughing with one of her
co-workers, I realized that she is also a woman, and when she asked me to re-enact my
urges, I put my hand on her knee while she was sitting across from me. She changed the
subject and, calmly,
with a compassionate face, brushed my hand away,
pushed her seat back, and said: Okay, let's talk about your suicide.

Last week I confessed to her that I used to be more courageous, more
carefree, and even, one might add, more violent. But here in this northern land no one
gives you an excuse to hit, rob, or shoot, or even to shout from across the balcony, to
curse your neighbours' mothers and threaten their kids.

When I said that to the therapist, she told me that I have a lot of hidden
anger. So when she left the room for a moment, I opened her purse and stole her
lipstick, and when she returned I continued my tale of growing up somewhere else. She
would interrupt me with questions such as: And how do you feel about that? Tell me more.
She mostly listened and took notes, and it wasn't in a fancy room with a massive
cherrywood and leather couch either (or with a globe of an ancient admiral's map,
for that matter). No, we sat across from each other in a small office, in a public
health clinic, only a tiny round table between us.

I am not sure why I told her all about my relations with women. I had
tried many times to tell her that my suicide attempt was only my way of trying to escape
the permanence of the sun. With frankness, and using my limited psychological knowledge
and powers of articulation, I tried to explain to her that I had attempted suicide out
of a kind of curiosity, or maybe as a challenge to nature, to the cosmos itself, to the
recurring light. I felt oppressed by it all. The question of existence consumed me.

The therapist annoyed me with her laconic behaviour. She brought on a
feeling of violence within me that I hadn't
experienced since I
left my homeland. She did not understand. For her, everything was about my relations
with women, but for me, everything was about defying the oppressive power in the world
that I can neither participate in nor control. And the question that I hated most
— and it came up when she was frustrated with me for not talking enough —
was when she leaned over the table and said, without expression: What do you expect from
our meeting?

I burst out: I am forced to be here by the court! I prefer not to be here,
but when I was spotted hanging from a rope around a tree branch, some jogger in spandex
ran over and called the park police. Two of those mounted police came galloping to the
rescue on the backs of their magnificent horses. All I noticed at the time was the
horses. I thought the horses could be the answer to my technical problem. I mean, if I
rode on the back of one of those beasts, I could reach a higher, sturdier branch, secure
the rope to it, and let the horse run free from underneath me. Instead I was handcuffed
and taken for, as they put it, assessment.

Tell me about your childhood, the shrink asked me.

In my youth I was an insect.

What kind of insect? she asked.

A cockroach, I said.

Why?

Because my sister made me one.

What did your sister do?

Come, my sister said to me. Let's play. And she lifted her skirt,
laid the back of my head between her legs, raised her heels in the air, and swayed her
legs over me slowly. Look,
open your eyes, she said, and she touched
me. This is your face, those are your teeth, and my legs are your long, long whiskers.
We laughed, and crawled below the sheets, and nibbled on each other's faces.
Let's block the light, she said. Let's seal that quilt to the bed, tight, so
there won't be any light. Let's play underground.

Interesting, the therapist said. I think we could explore more of these
stories. Next week?

Next week, I said, and rose up on my heels and walked past the
clinic's walls and down the stairs and out into the cold, bright city.

WHEN I GOT HOME
, I saw that my sink was filled with dishes, a
hybrid collection of neon-coloured dollar-store cups mixed with flower-patterned plates,
stacked beneath a large spaghetti pot, all unwashed. Before I could reach for my deadly
slipper, the cockroaches that lived with me squeezed themselves down the drain and ran
for their lives.

I was hungry. And I had little money left. So it was time to find the
Iranian musician by the name of Reza who owed me forty dollars. I was determined to
collect and I was losing my patience with that bastard. I was even contemplating
breaking his santour if he did not pay me back soon. He hung out in the Artista
Café, the one at the corner. It is open twenty-four hours a day, and for
twenty-four hours it collects smoke pumped out by the lungs of fresh immigrants
lingering on plastic chairs, elbows drilling the round tables, hands flagging their
complaints, tobacco-stained fingers summoning the
waiters, their
matches, like Indian signals, ablaze under hairy noses, and their stupefied faces
exhaling cigarette fumes with the intensity of Spanish bulls on a last charge towards a
dancing red cloth.

I ran downstairs to look for the bastard at the café, and god behold!
Two Jehovah's Witness ladies flashed their Caribbean smiles and obstructed my
flight with towering feathery straw hats that pasted a coconut shade onto the gritty
steps of the crumbling building where I live. Are you interested in the world? they
asked me. And before I had a chance to reply, one of the ladies, the one in the long
quilted coat, slapped me with an apocalyptic prophecy: Are you aware of the hole in the
ozone above us?

Ozone? I asked.

Yes, ozone. It is the atmospheric layer that protects us from the burning
rays of the sun. There is a hole in it as we speak, and it is expanding, and soon we
shall all fry. Only the cockroaches shall survive to rule the earth. But do not despair,
young man, because you will redeem yourself today if you buy this magazine — I
happen to have a few copies in my hand here — and attend Bible gatherings at our
Kingdom Hall. And afterwards, my handsome fellow, you can go down to the basement and
listen to the leader (with a cookie and a Styrofoam cup in hand) and he will tell you
that transfusions (be they administered through a syringe, a medical doctor, or
perverted sex) are a mortal sin. Then and only then will you have a chance. Repent! the
woman shouted as she opened the Bible to a marked page. She read, The words of the Lord
my son:
Therefore will I also deal in fury: mine eye shall not spare, neither
will I pity: and though they cry in mine ears with loud voice,
yet will I not hear them
. Buy this magazine (the word of the Lord included), my
son. Read it and repent!

How much? I asked, as I liberated my pocket from the sinful weight of a
few round coins sealed with idolatrous images of ducks, geese, bears, and magisterial
heads. They were all I had.

Give me those coins and pray, because then, and only then, you will have
the chance to be beamed up by Jesus our saviour, and while you are ascending towards the
heavens, you can take a peek down at those neighbours of yours who just slammed their
door in our faces. You can watch them fry like dumplings in a wok, and I assure you that
our Lord will be indifferent to their plight, their sufferings, their loud cries of
agony and regret and pain — yes, pain! And may God save us from such harrowing
pain.

I kissed the Jehovah's Witness ladies' hands. I asked them to
have mercy on me in that sizzling day to come. Dying from fire is a terrible thing. If I
had to choose, I would certainly want something less painful, quicker, maybe even more
poetic — like hanging from a willow tree or taking a bullet in the head or falling
into a senseless eternal slumber accompanied by the aroma of a leaky gas stove.

I left the ladies and ran down to the Artista Café on St-Laurent,
still hoping to find Reza in a circle of smoke and welfare recipients and coffee breath.
As my feet trudged the wet ground and I felt the shivery cold, I cursed my luck. I
cursed the plane that had brought me to this harsh terrain. I peered down the street and
hesitantly walked east, avoiding every
patch of slush and trying to
ignore the sounds of friction as car wheels split the snow, sounds that bounced into my
ears, constant reminders of the falling flakes that gather and accumulate quietly,
diligently, claiming every car windshield, every hat, every garbage can, every eyelid,
every roof and mountain. And how about those menacing armies of heavy boots, my friend,
encasing people's feet, and the silenced ears, plugged with wool and headbands,
and the floating coats passing by in ghostly shapes, hiding faces, pursed lips, austere
hands? Goddamn it! Not even a nod in this cold place, not even a timid wave, not a smile
from below red, sniffing, blowing noses. All these buried heads above necks strangled in
synthetic scarves. It made me nervous, and I asked myself, Where am I? And what am I
doing here? How did I end up trapped in a constantly shivering carcass, walking in a
frozen city with wet cotton falling on me all the time? And on top of it all, I am
hungry, impoverished, and have no one, no one . . . Fucking ice, one slip of the mind
and you might end up immersing your foot in one of those treacherous cold pools that
wait for your steps with the patience of sailors' wives, with the mockery of swamp
monsters. You can curse all you wish, but still you have to endure freezing toes, and
the squelch of wet socks, and the slime of midwives' hands, and fathoms of coats
that pass you on the streets and open and close, fluttering and bloated like sails blown
towards a promised land.