The Traffic Policeman

From "Fragrances and Wounds" — a collection of stories now in press

A strange story that happened to one of my friends with a faithful public servant who stands long hours every day, upright on his feet within a narrow, confined circle, to perform his sacred duty; with a patient citizen who works to preserve order and the safety of lives, exposed to the blaze of the sun in summer and the bite of the winds in winter for the sake of earning a few counted liras... exposing himself to the various ailments that usually result from long, fixed standing, and exposed as well to the rudeness of pedestrians and drivers of weak conscience and stony heart.

Yesterday, while I was picking a few flowers from my garden to adorn the house with them, the sound of a car stopping reached my ear. I turned toward the street and saw my friend Alya step down from the car, slam its door hard, and come toward me. Sadness was plain on her features, as usual. I called out to welcome her:

— Welcome, Alya! What is this sweet surprise? Do you come like this without telling me?

— I was sure I would find you, since I know you rarely leave the house in the morning. Shall we go in?

And we went in together. I did not suggest that we stay in the garden, because I was certain she would refuse. For nearly two years she had forbidden herself everything pleasant, even the enjoyment of the open air. Often I tried to persuade her of the need to bow to God's will and accept what had happened, but my attempts went with the wind. This young woman is the dearest to me of all my school companions, my most cherished friend. My heart aches for Alya! The merry Alya of yesterday, whose ringing laughter and echoing jests reached the very stars, has become today — though she has not passed her twenty-third year — a gaunt specter wrapped in black, a pale face in which burn two beautiful eyes that fill with tears at the slightest cause. As for her charming mouth, which was scarcely ever without a smile, it has turned against her ever since it ceased to call the beloved's name.

I wondered at her sudden coming and realized it had some important motive, for she had not visited me since her grievous calamity befell her. At first I used to go and console her every day; then I came to visit her once or twice a week, until she volunteered to serve a small orphanage and began attending daily to the running of its affairs. That was about a year ago. My visits to her grew fewer, because she began going every morning to the orphanage, driving her car herself, then returning at noon to her parents' house after spending four hours arranging the registers, entering the accounts, and writing the daily report. She smoked a great deal and refused to see anyone, except the president of the charitable association that supported the orphanage, if she happened to come before noon to look into its affairs. Often she would bring home with her handwork — sewing and embroidery — with which she amused herself, then presented it to the association, which sold it, the orphanage benefiting from the proceeds.

I offered her the tobacco box and sat down before her, gladness flooding my soul, expressing my joy at her coming. She thanked me warmly and said:

— My condition is as you have always known it. I am not dead, to be counted among the dead, for I rise and walk and eat and drink... nor am I alive like the living, for I feel no working of life, no stirring of it within me; I expect nothing of my tomorrow, just as I care nothing for the pleasure of my today. Only, I wish my tie to the past never to be cut, so that I may live in it, with its delight and its pain, if there is no escape for me from living! I have come now, Da'd, to bring you a little of my new trouble. I have not seen you for two weeks — that is, since life tightened its grip on my throat once more. You know my story with the traffic policeman. He has vanished from his post, and I used to suffer and rejoice at once in casting a glance at his face and his figure once or twice each day from behind the dark glass of my spectacles — and you understand the worth of that glance and its importance to my thirsting soul and my deprived eye. That policeman's presence opened for me a way of living in the memory of the dear past; it spared me having to console myself with pictures and dreams, and it brought a great peace to my soul, as you know. What can have happened to him, I wonder? I must find him. I must know his fate.

I answered her calmly and hopefully:

— The matter is simple, Alya. Might he not have been transferred from his post in the "Salihiyya" quarter to another district? I believe the traffic regulations require that policemen be moved among the traffic posts of the city from time to time.

She shook her head and said gloomily:

— I will not hide from you that some days ago I drove through every street of the city in my car, searching for him, and did not find him. Is he ill, I wonder? Or has he died, his tender bough snapped off?

Then she burst into tears, saying:

— Is death, O Lord, decreed for the young men who resemble him? Why? Why? And what sin have I committed, that I should be stricken twice by the one I lost??

After I had managed to calm her distress, I promised her I would do my utmost to find him, and I swore to her that I would hide nothing from her of the result of my effort. Suddenly my face brightened with a flash of hope and I said:

— Be at ease! I have found the way that will serve. The brother of my dressmaker (Rose) is a commissioner in the police directorate. I shall go to visit her this afternoon and tell her a plausible story, then ask her to question her brother about that young policeman who spent a whole year directing traffic among the three traffic posts of the "Salihiyya" quarter. It is very likely that I shall bring you the true news tomorrow or the day after.

When I had finished speaking, Alya took me by surprise with this:

— You must know, too, that he signaled me to stop on the last day I saw him, as I was crossing the intersection where he stood in the middle, as usual. It was early morning and the traffic was light. I stopped beside his stand, lowered the window glass, and stared into his face in astonishment and wonder. He bent down, seized by a certain shyness and confusion, and then said, after gathering his courage:

— Good morning! Forgive me, Miss, if I intrude and ask you: why do you not change your black clothes? You are young, and life lies before you, awaiting your smile so as to answer it with a better one. I answered him only with a nervous twitch that drew the muscles of my face tight while redness rose over it, so he added, stammering:

— It is your kindness and goodness, which I see every day, that emboldened me to speak to you. I beg your pardon if I have behaved

badly... Please pass, please, I beg you, and make way for the car waiting behind you.

And while I was preparing to move the car, I found myself saying harshly, in a trembling voice:

— And you — what business is my affair of yours? I shall not change my black clothes so long as they are in harmony with my soul. I lost the dearest thing I had, and the edifice of my life fell in ruins, on the ill-omened day I lost him... And he resembled you in every way... even your voice, which I have just heard, is exactly his voice.

My tears streamed down and I sped off in the car like a madwoman... And from that day the traffic policeman disappeared from my sight, and with his disappearance I lost a human being the sight of whom eased my anguish and stirred in my heart the pulses of life and memory... It made me happy to renew my precious memory by some prompting of the senses, some tangible spur. How wretched I am!

My stricken friend Alya went away and left me sorrowful, digging among the folds of the recent past. She appeared to me as she was two years ago, on the day her marriage contract was signed, radiant with beauty and gladness, dancing for joy. And she had every right that day to rejoice and dance, for she had won her cousin, the companion of her childhood and the beloved of her youth, despite the influence and the rivalry of that foreign girl who had lost her heart to him while he was completing his studies in Paris. I remembered the day I saw her driving the small black car he had given her after teaching her to drive. Then her image came back to my memory from the day I came upon the two of them strolling together in the reaches of our beautiful valley near "al-Hama"; and I remembered too the day I accompanied them, with their two mothers, to Beirut to fetch the wedding gown, and I pictured how she paraded in it before the great mirror, glorying in her slender figure, her heady dark complexion, and her jet-black hair, while the bridal gown, with its whiteness and its majesty, set off her charms and her lovely coloring.

After that, her image rose before my eyes wrapped in black, her back bent, her bones protruding, shedding tears in silence, while I talked to her and looked at her insistently; but she would not answer, would not lift her eyes from one small square of the carpet stretched beneath her feet... For the airplane that was bringing him from the West had crashed, and all its passengers burned, three days before the wedding... The terrible pain produced no reaction in her during the first ten minutes; she was lost, stunned by the horror of the news, her gaze dazed, her feeling numbed by the enormity of the blow. Then the frozen stillness that had come over her turned into a violent fit, a terrifying frenzy of madness, followed by a weeping silence and a perpetual downcast stare that possessed her for six whole months. And at last I pictured her on the day, a year ago, when she spoke to me in her broken voice, saying:

— Do there exist in this universe, Da'd, people who resemble one another completely? I ask you because I glimpsed a traffic policeman at one of the intersections in Salihiyya, on the tram line, and I assure you that the resemblance between him and the one whose death clipped my wings is frightening! I turned my gaze from him and told myself that I was surely deluded. And when I returned home at noon — and this is my only way there — I found him standing, performing his arduous work, and I heard the beating of my heart grow harder and stronger, and I longed to leave the car, to draw near him and make certain of his identity... but I quickly returned to the bitter reality, and I reached home with my strength spent and my nerves in shreds. The next day I wished not to see him — not because my wounds had healed and I feared their being torn open, for the wounds of the heart leave traces that never fade, but to avoid the painful trembling that had seized me when my eye fell on him the day before. But when I reached the same point, I found him standing there before me, busy watching the traffic, working the green signal and then the red in turn, whistling at offenders when need be, his fresh face expressing pride, his earnest glances speaking of manliness and dignity. And it happened that he opened the green signal for me, and I passed, and it seemed to me that he smiled a gentle smile. It is not strange that he should smile at me and greet me, as he came to do whenever I passed him, for traffic policemen treat the few women who drive cars with a gentler courtesy. And so I grew addicted to the sight of this policeman, and his presence on my way became an utmost necessity — indeed a pressing need. I came to take comfort in seeing him, and to answer the customary smile that formed on his face whenever he saw me with a slight nod of my head. And I shall not hide from you that I came to feel a great desolation if I crossed that road and returned without my eye falling on his upright figure and his handsome frame... The sight of him, Da'd, stirs my inner torments and wakes in my soul a passion and a longing and a burning that cause me excruciating pain — and yet how great a comfort I found in that very pain!

★

The memories and visions that crowded upon my mind after Alya's departure wearied me and robbed me of my customary siesta. So the duty of friendship led me to the house of my dressmaker Rose, where I invented a little story for her to justify my interest in this traffic policeman who had worked a full year at the posts of the "Salihiyya" quarter and then suddenly vanished from sight nearly three weeks before. I gave her his description and asked her to question her brother, in the hope that he might guide us to him.

On the morning of the next day I received a telephone call from the dressmaker, in which she said:

— "You may tell your husband, Madam, about that policeman. My brother knows him, and declared to me that he is one of the finest men in the police department, and that some ten days or more ago he submitted a petition to the directorate asking for his annual leave and for the transfer of his work from traffic duty to administrative work. The directorate granted his request promptly, because he had refused to move from his tiring post — which he loved and had held fast to for a year — to other posts of lighter traffic and less fatigue..."

And so, after the passing of a year that was exhausting yet delightful to this policeman, in a place he loved and where he found companionship and consolation and a succession of varied pictures passing before him each day, he chose sacrifice and hid himself away in a corner of the administration, to perform monotonous work, where there are no signals and no faces, no smiles and no rebuffs...

Damascus — Salma al-Haffar al-Kuzbari