The Clothesline Swing. Ahmad Danny Ramadan
on beautiful red-haired women’s balconies, and where we met, has been devoured by the war.”
I exit the room and I find you standing, depressed, in the hallway. I realize that I pushed you further down the rabbit hole of memories. “You will keep it alive,” I say as I come to your rescue and hold you closer. “We will keep it alive together.”
Death, from a corner, smirks before examining the ears of the sleeping dogs. It’s not their time just yet.
As you enter the bed, and before you turn off the light, you welcome the cold sheets on your body and then turn to me. “Will you bring flowers?” you say. “To my grave?”
“No. I will bring my stories,” I say, and you adjust your head on my shoulder. Before you ask, I begin telling you a story. Like the sultan, you know your wishes for entertainment are my command. “Once upon a time there was a man who went far away from his beloved land, and when he returned, everything was changed.”
In the name of Allah, the merciful! One! Two! Three! Four! Five!
He was still half-asleep when they broke down his door and entered his room. He didn’t move from his bed as they searched his apartment; he honestly believed that he was dreaming. They ignored him as he sat on his bed, scratching his head with his fingernails, trying to understand what was going on around him. He did not try to resist them until they grabbed him and started to pull him through the door. He saw them climbing the stairs to the roof of his little house. He used to carry canvases up to his rooftop, where he had turned a small, abandoned room into a studio. He used to close the black curtains and work in his small studio until the early hours. He realized that this was not a dream when the reality sat upon him that one of them was carrying a bluish painting under his armpit, and the sweaty armpit was mixing the colours, adding an artistic touch to an unfinished work.
As he was pushed inside the trunk of a car, witnessed by women in scarves wallowing on balconies, the morning sun was still at ease, but its rays promised a long, hot day.
Six! Seven! Eight! Nine!
When he arrived at the police station, he couldn’t tell what they were arresting him for. He never showed his paintings to anyone, so he knew they must have come to his house for a different reason. He tried to understand their problem, and what led them to this anger. He tried to grasp his mistake; he knew that he must have made some sort of a mistake. He was afraid and he started to recall the events of the previous week, only to find it uneventful. He might have offended a member of the royal family unintentionally; maybe he cut one of them off while he was driving his car. He squeezed his thoughts and tried to remember, but his efforts were in vain. I knew this car would lead me to a catastrophe one day, he thought. He knew his ability to drive was laughable, but sometimes he would just jump in his car and drive as fast as he could. It allowed him the sense of escape that he always longed for, allowed him to feel that he was in total control of his life, and maybe also his death.
When the investigator entered the room carrying one of his paintings, he knew that whatever the original reason they came for his arrest, that was no longer the problem.
Ten! Eleven! Twelve!
He didn’t know that after they delivered him to prison, they spent some time talking about his paintings, about the naked women drawn in the strangest positions, while calling for Allah’s mercy because they glimpsed these paintings while they were arresting him.
He knew better than to draw the women’s faces; he wanted to protect the identities of his muses. The men could see that he had mangled the faces of all the women in the paintings. The eyes were the hardest part; they were full of hopes and dreams. They had demands and aspirations. While painting those women from memory, he painted their faces in full and then used a small brush to mute the eyes, the noses and the significant facial features.
A week or two later, the police storage officer was doing inventory in his facility when he realized that all of the paintings were missing but one. He stood there, puzzled by the disappearance of the paintings, and took another look at his papers. There were supposed to be seventeen paintings in here!
The officer took a step away, preparing in his head the list of paperwork he had to fill out, but then flipped the painting around to take a look at it.
The painting portrayed a young naked girl from the back, standing inside a house, gazing from the cracks in of a closed wooden window to the world outside. The officer gazed as well; his eyes were eating the well-drawn corners of her full buttocks and her naked back, drawn like the stretch of a violin.
As he headed back to his little office, the officer had the painting hiding under his shirt. When he was in the safety of his office, he pulled it out, opened the lower drawer and encased it inside, before locking it with a key. He had his key inside his pocket as he headed toward the makeshift kitchen in the storage area to make some tea.
Thirteen! Fourteen! Fifteen! Sixteen! Seventeen!
The artist’s lawyer slipped him the ointment underneath the table, so the police guard wouldn’t see it. He told the artist that he would be deported the next day. The artist didn’t understand why and asked the lawyer if he could keep his job. “You got fired,” the lawyer explained. “Your boss fired you when he heard about the paintings.” The lawyer said that someone had reported him for reckless driving, but when the police found the paintings they decided to jail him for his indecency. Without his job, he didn’t have grounds for a working visa anymore, and he would be deported.
He gazed for a second at the ointment in his hand before he slipped it into his underwear. He thanked the lawyer before he headed back to his prison cell.
In his way back, as the door to the prison cell opened for mere seconds, the eyes of the other prisoners gazed at the small circles of light that entered the darkened room. The door closed, leaving them without a hope of light, and he searched with closed eyes for an empty spot on the floor until he found one.
He slipped his tired body on the floor; the cold, moist stone floor felt nice on his back, easing the burning he felt there. The smell of shit and vomit filled his nose for a second, oozing from the bucket in the corner of the cell, but he ignored it. The smell gradually became familiar, before it disappeared into the back of his mind.
He felt the heavy breathing of the many prisoners on his forehead. A week ago, when he came to this place for the first time, he had feared the other prisoners. Rapists, thieves and murderers were gathered in one room, and he was a weakened man. He tried to hold his urge to piss for so long, shying away from their gazes, knowing that the only release he had would go into that bucket. Then the call of nature overwhelmed him and he had to walk slowly to the bucket, avoiding eye contact with anyone, and relieve himself. The smell that exploded on his face made him dizzy and he almost fell to his knees.
Eyes wide open, he turned around looking at the other prisoners, waiting for a rapist to grab him or a gang to kill him. Instead, he saw them avoiding his eye contact, looking in different directions. He suddenly realized that they feel equally naked, and that he was safer in here than outside, in the hands of the guards.
He was on his back, and he could feel the pain there. It felt like a V-shaped burn rotting away on his back. He imagined it as a bird, carrying him away from this place, taking him back to his homeland. Out of nowhere, a hand reached for his chest, causing him to jump back in agony, but his eyes, now capable of seeing in the dark, managed to see a young boy, fifteen or sixteen. The face of the boy was covered in dry blood, and it seemed that his nose had been long broken. The artist smiled a weak smile and got closer to the boy, allowing him to touch his chest once more; the boy rested his head there, wet drops of tears raining endlessly.
Eighteen! Nineteen! Twenty! Twenty-one! Twenty-two!
He was hoping that Amal would be waiting for him in the airport, but she wasn’t. Only Abdul-Salam, his high school friend, and Bassem, his brother, were there. He looked them in the eyes, and didn’t ask, and they