Sheikha Helawy
A story from her Prize-winning collection Order C345

A Smile on His Face

Translated by Raphael Cohen

A month ago during the last air raid on our neighbourhood, a shell landed on our street. The shrapnel hit the roof of the bird man Abu al-Tir’s house, who went into the coop to serenade his birds and let them peck seeds off his head every time there was a raid. This time the coop was smashed to smithereens, bird parts and blood were strewn everywhere, but we could not find him or his head. One of the neighbours put it plainly: “He lost his head a long time ago, since he abandoned people and started talking to the birds.”
He talked to me also, or (to be more accurate) I didn’t stop talking and he was content with a very few words. I would go up to the roof to say hello when he was in the coop feeding his birds and cleaning up their droppings, and very occasionally he paid attention to me. I would ask how he was, then relate to him my daybook of fear and war.
“What matters is that fear does not creep into your heart and soul. Fear is war’s demon. When it creeps into your soul, it takes you over. It becomes the way you see.” He said this with authority, as he carried the droppings out of the coop.
But I was afraid. Afraid of the empty alleyways, the gloomy bar, the faces of the departed, the laughter of Death.
I was afraid of my face in the mirror as it lost its features.
When I listed my departed friends to him, he said: “Come here and let’s list those who’ve survived.” I told him about my terror of security checkpoints, and he interrupted me: “Forget about military checkpoints and jump over the barriers of fear.” I told him about my latest girlfriend, and he said: “You’re lying. I can still see the first one in your eyes.”
That was before I made a smiling mask for my face.
One morning, three years into the war, I discovered that the smile my face had produced so well over the previous years would no longer obey me. The facial muscles stretched and the lips parted, but it looked nothing like a smile. A hybrid expression that did not suit the look of terror fixed in my eyes.
I mostly looked like a sad clown.
I made myself a soft leather mask that looked like me, with a fixed smile in the middle. An inanimate mask with an endless grin.
Abu al-Tir, who very occasionally paid attention to me, said, before I started talking: “Don’t talk to me from behind a mask, man! You look ridiculous and miserable.”
I took the mask off and it became my mirror that spat in the face of the war and mocked fear. I sang and danced and stood at the edge of the roof spreading my arms in preparation to fly. I looked at the ruins below and laughed till it brought tears to my eyes.
He turned to me and said: “One day we will soar over these ruins, but only if we decapitate fear.”
I went down the stairs of his house to go back home. Fear crept out of a neglected corner and followed me, so close it could almost touch my shoulder. I put the smiling mask down and wheeled round towards him. He was rooted to the spot, then vanished into the darkness of the alleyway.
I did not dwell on Abu al-Tir’s fate. Days were the same, just lacking another madman; the war was the same, still licking the remains of its wounds; and people were walking around with unrecognisable features.
To satisfy some unknown need, I began repairing the coop until air raids started pounding the neighbourhood again.
I put on the smiling mask and went up to the roof with a bottle of watered-down arak. I slipped inside the coop, where there was no company apart from one dove that had escaped the massacre. She pecked at my head at times and drank from my glass of arak at others.
“Come on, lonely dove, let me tell you the news about my latest girlfriend.”
She flapped her wings and flew off out of sight.
I took off the mask and soared behind her over the ruins.
In the corner of my eye I spotted Abu al-Tir rising from the ground at the bottom of the building carrying a severed head.