Second Person Singular, by Sayed Kashua

BED

“Tarik can forget about Faten finding him a match,” the lawyer’s wife whispered, mindful of the baby in the nearby crib. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, rubbing cream into her hands while the lawyer took off his clothes, stripping down to his boxer shorts. “What was that about?” she asked her husband, “I thought Tarik was a nationalist.”

“He’s all right,” the lawyer said. “They just didn’t get what he was saying.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s a bit of an anarchist,” the lawyer said, knowing his wife wouldn’t understand him. “He doesn’t buy into the system. He’s not willing to play the nationalist game.”

“Maybe, but I don’t think they liked him.”

“It’s probably better that way,” the lawyer said, heading into the bathroom to brush his teeth. He had known all along that the assistant professor at the teachers’ college would not be the one to find Tarik a bride. He knew Tarik well, and he knew that he was in a tight spot as an Arab-Israeli bachelor in Jerusalem, where there were few matches to be found for those no longer in school, and Tarik had been out of school for five years. Nor was he in the habit of frequenting the humanities department cafeteria, as the lawyer’s wife had advised. Which all explained why, when the lawyer saw that three of the best candidates for the internship in his office were female, he had immediately hoped they were pretty and decided that he’d hire the one who seemed most suitable for Tarik.

“Are you coming to bed?” his wife asked as he left the bathroom. The lawyer was expecting the question, even though he was hoping, on account of his exhaustion and the book that awaited him downstairs, that he would be given an exemption. But it had been two weeks since they’d been together, and the wine she’d drunk during dinner was surely having its effect.

The lawyer shut the bedroom door, fearing that their daughter would wake up and stumble in, and then slid under the covers beside his wife. He knew that she was embarrassed about her body and that even on the hottest summer nights she preferred to conceal it beneath the blankets. They kissed quickly and without passion, and the lawyer set himself to the task at hand.

It would be wrong to say that the lawyer did not enjoy sex, but there was something about it that always bothered him. He found the whole thing to be more of a burden than a pleasure, a situation he knew to be perverse.

In some articles it said that sexual partners had to learn one another, give their bodies time to get acquainted, to achieve a natural harmony, but the lawyer blamed himself. After a few months of failed attempts, he tried to increase his endurance by summoning sad images from his youth. This worked, and he could tell by his wife’s moaning that some progress had been made.

He recalled the early days after their marriage, during their honeymoon. He had been twenty-five but it was the first time he had come into physical contact with a woman. He remembered the feeling of shame at the speed with which it had all happened. He knew that something was wrong, and that his wife had not been fully satisfied. She never mentioned it, never said a word about it, but he knew that this was not how it was supposed to be. He remembered his apprehension at the time, the articles he had combed through, the sex-advice columns. After thoroughly researching the matter of premature ejaculation, he had tried to put the techniques to use, relaxing his muscles, pulling his testicles back, dulling his senses with alcohol, even smoking marijuana before coming to bed, but none of it helped. In some articles it said that sexual partners had to learn one another, give their bodies time to get acquainted, to achieve a natural harmony, but the lawyer blamed himself. After a few months of failed attempts, he tried to increase his endurance by summoning sad images from his youth. This worked, and he could tell by his wife’s moaning that some progress had been made. It didn’t happen all at once but he felt, at last, that he was moving in the right direction.

The first time he was sure that his wife had been fully satisfied was after he had screened the footage of his grandfather’s funeral in his mind. The lawyer was eight years old when he saw his grandfather’s dead body. Years later, he lay on top of his wife, thrusting gently, eyes wide open, trying not to be distracted by the sounds of her pleasure. He recalled how the entire family had shown up at his parents’ house and how the body had arrived on the back of an orange pickup truck. He recalled how he had stood off to the side while the adults washed his grandfather’s corpse, which lay prone on an elevated wooden plank. He thought about the prayers the sheikh had intoned and the way the men had shaved the pallid body. And he remembered his grandfather’s wrinkled, flaccid penis and the white sheets with which the men wrapped him as they called out “Allahu Akbar.” He saw himself running in order to keep up with the brisk pace of the funeral procession, saw them raise the coffin up in the air, saw the opening on one side and the way it was tilted down till his grandfather’s white-robed body slid into the grave. He recalled the sound the body had made upon impact, and realized that he had just given his wife her first orgasm. She clawed his back and planted warm kisses on his face while he remained above the grave, aware that he would never again be the boy he had been.