The Nightmare

The Nightmare

It could never be a matter of doubt that Rilke had meant no harm. That could never be doubted. No! He had neither meant to break nor to smash anything. It was only the intoxicating effects of a wild joy to be met with his mother at the other side of the playing field that had rendered him completely oblivious to the exact direction of his steps. All in all what's done is done; or rather what is done cannot be undone as the ancient saying goes. Malik's toy, a red and yellow plastic truck, and no more in size than an infant's fist, was laying in a heap of useless pieces upon the soiled ground. Rilke had smashed it beneath the heavy leather of his sandals; but, he had not meant any harm whatsoever. Indeed he was instantly thrown into a freezing posture the moment the first crackling sounds of the toy being crushed beneath his feet reached his ears. He was as horror-struck as a luckless deer whose feet had been suddenly caught between the teeth of some monstrous trap buried deep, to the absolute disadvantage of its unsuspecting vision, underneath the sands. Yet, again, what is done is done. There was nothing he could do that might cause the already splintered truck to be resurrected to its former mould again.

''I... I... I didn't mean to. I... I... I'm so very sorry.'' Rilke stammered in an attempt at apology.

The unfortunate Malik, who had only avoided his right hand being smashed along with his ill-fated toy by the narrowest of margins, gave absolutely no sign of reaction whatsoever. One might rightly suppose that no soul inhabited his frame anymore. His entire body, except for an insignificant rise and fall on the level of the lips, as that normally given rise to by excessive cold, was utterly divested of all sense of motion. The sudden pallid hue that came to overspread his swarthy face, the stark fixation in his hazel eyes, and the now and then twitching of his ashen lips all combined to produce the impression of one overtaken by a heart-attack. The whole world sank into a profound silence and darkness around him. He neither heard nor saw the myriads of other children as they laughed, shouted, and danced all over the field in their ecstatic playing; none of them had any more existence for him than the thousand crawling lice carefully concealed inside the thick brown fur of the bitch laying asleep beside his knees. An unspeakable grief over the splintered toy had swallowed him entirely, had blinded him to all else. His whole vision was restricted to his spoiled treasure, at which he stared with the sombre face of grieved mother mourning the death of her deceased child.

Nonetheless, Malik did not feel even the slightest prickling of rage or anger against the hopeless Rilke. He knew the kid had meant no harm. He was sure of it. The horrified face of the latter left him no room to think otherwise. Only pity he could feel; pity for his own self, for all his hopes gone up in smoke, and particularly for a long insufferable waiting wasted in vain. It was pity alone that raged and tore at the walls of his heart.

If only he could tell all the terrible sufferings he had endured before he could lay his hand on the toy! If only words could describe how painfully long he waited to have it in his possession! What all the miseries of the soul he had to go through before he could play his toy on the field as all the other children did.

He was very much on the verge of bursting off into a bitter sob when he was suddenly overtaken by a peculiarly strange sensation; it started from the top of his head and slowly reached down to his nape, and very much resembled in its obtrusive effects the maddening feeling usually produced by some giant monstrous insect crawling across one's body underneath a ton of clothes. He tried to get rid of this nuisance, very unbearably annoying in its nature, by a repeated shaking of his head to and fro, but he only caused it to grow in intensity. Soon irritation gave way to freight and he began to deliver a train of short successive slaps with both his hands to his nape and head while his eyes remained shut and his feet jerked frantically on the ground; the malignant feeling persisted all the same. He was about to let out a mighty scream of terror when he finally reopened his eyes to the blurred and lean figure of an old woman stooping down over him. By degrees, as he reestablished more and more command over his senses, he at last managed to distinguish the old familiar face of his grandmother, Papagina, staring right into his eyes. He had been dreaming. The maddening sensation had merely been the old woman's shakes and taps over his head and shoulder so as to wake him up. His tangled black hair was clinging to his cheeks from excessive perspiration, his breath was short and rapid, and a dozen rivulets of sweat trickled down his face as though it had been submerged in water.

''The toy must still be intact after all!'' was the first thought that crossed his mind after his winning back the kingdom of consciousness. He immediately jerked his body inside the blankets and turned his face around to the other side of the room where he had lain the toy before he went to sleep; and, as he had rightly anticipated, the little red and yellow plastic truck was still standing on the brown wooden stool where he had took leave of it the night before. ''It was only a dream! It was only a dream!'' he shouted in an overjoyed tone and then leapt to his feet and laid his hands around the grandma. Papagina patted his tousled hair and said: ''I have no idea what hell of a nightmare you had, but I'm well glad it's gone. Now get you to your sister and wake her up as I go to bring your breakfast.'' She said this and left the room.

He crossed in lazy steps to the other side of the room, stopping once or twice to stretch his arms to the full of their length and give a soundless yawn, and then proceeded to wake up his sister by gentle taps on the shoulder. He then shuffled to the only window in the room and drew the shutters open. A shaft of light instantly broke in and fell upon the floor in a perfect formation of little squares and circles as it seeped in through the finely decorated iron grid of the window. It was very quite outside; the only sound detectable was the faint crowing of a rooster in some distant farmyard and the gentle rustling of the wind through the trees down in the garden below. He stood a while at the small window and squinted at the distant playing field down the valley; no child was there yet. He could still, however, make out the fogged figures of a bunch of stray dogs as they chased one another playfully upon it, stirring a cloud of dust as they came and went. Soon they all disappeared into a thicket leaving the field desolate again. He turned to the little toy that was still resting on the wooden stool, and picked it up gently between his hands. He stroked it several times and then looked at it with the contented face of a child overjoyed to see once more a long absent and beloved parent. He was about to act the madman's part and blurt out to the dumb thing his exceeding delight at the discovery that its breaking was only a dream when he was interrupted by the grandma who made her appearance at the door. She was carrying a silver tray with two large wooden bowls and a yellow tea pot which she carefully brought down at the small square table at the centre of the room, and then motioned the brother and sister to draw close with her hands.

After every five or four mouthfuls, Malik would cast a glance at the toy which he had rested right at the centre of the table before he crouched down on the carpeted floor for the breakfast. The glances gave much evidence of a profound veneration as that with which a zealous heathen would regard the idols of his gods. Malik loved the toy, adored and venerated it. After all, it was all in accordance with nature. For six months he had borne the bitterest of sufferings steaming from a dejected isolation and low-self esteem as the necessary consequence of his deprivation of it. His want for a toy truck had set him aside from the other kids, had tossed him aside to the margins, to the wretched circle of the insignificant and outcasts. For half a year he was forced to assume the sorry role of a passive spectator, sitting all alone on a secluded big brown rock at one edge of the playing field, mourning his wretched lot, while the other children played. For one hundred and eighty days he had been going to bed as soon as the last gleams of sunlight had receded from off the hill tops in the far west with the wish never to see the light of day again when another tomorrow dawned. And, O what unspeakable happiness! What joy of joys settled upon him and lifted him high when yesterday his father returned from the north and brought him the toy! He felt as happy and liberated as a caged bird set free to fly and glide across the sky as it pleased to do.

Malik was long engaged in the double process of dipping small crumbs of bread into the two bowls of olive oil and honey and then chewing at them with the avidity of a hunger-stricken mendicant while caressing the toy with his eyes, when he abruptly came to a halt. His sharp ears gave a slight twitch as would the ears of a guard-dog at the catch of a sudden voice; the faint sounds of the frenzied shouts and laughs of a dozen kids from the distant playing field were now flowing in through the open window into the room: the hour of gambolling had struck. ''You MUST first finish those crumbs!'' ordered the grandmother somewhat sternly, pointing with her forefinger at the myriad pieces of brown bread scattered across the table, fearing that he might be tempted to dash out the house too soon with an empty stomach.

In no time, Malik had cleared out the table, scurried across the room and picked up an old worn scarf which he wrapped around his neck about three times, snatched the toy from its place upon the table, and then hurried outside. ''Be careful to your steps! Be careful!'' the grandma, all wrapped in her black shawl and shading the sunlight with her right hand, kept shouting at him as she watched him with a troubled face descend the jagged hill leading from the house to the valley down below with the leaps and bounds of a frenzied goat, not giving the slightest consideration to the absolute catastrophe that could follow from the merest wrong step.

As he marched towards the field he thought about his father and how he had already gone back to the city. Peter, as is the name of his father, a lean middle aged man with a thick black beard, had only came yesterday evening, and by the dawning of today he was already gone again. His busy work as a cobbler in the city left him but little time in which to pay sporadic visits to his family in the village. He often came at the end of every six or seven months and stayed for three days at most and then hurried back to his drudgery. Malik would miss him greatly at times, even to the point of weeping, but this after all was a very rare occurrence.

As for a mother, Malik had none; Liz, for that was the name of his mother, Elizabeth actually, had passed away a long time ago when he was only one and a half or two years old. She had met her death in the extensive fields of barley outside the village at a time of harvest. It was a rattle snake, whose sight is not very rare at the whereabouts of the village, especially when the temperature gets a little out of hand in the summer, which delivered her left ankle a mortal wound. The women carried her home on the back of a donkey, and with nearest hospital being at least at a three hundred miles distance from the village, her wound was taken care of by an old woman who had inherited a humble knowledge of traditional medicine from her grandfathers; she administered her festering wound a mixture of herbs and bandaged it in fig leaves. All in all, with the aid of this specific, Elis managed to keep her breath for three more days before she gave up the ghost on the fourth. This account about the manner of her death, Malik had succeeded to coax out from the grandma by dint of a persistent sense of curiosity.

Malik often thought about her and many times struggled to have a clear image of hers reconstructed his imagination. It was especially at those times when some old villager chanced to make the peculiar remark that he had inherited his mother's brown eyes, or as is the case more often than not, her pointed nose, that he most thought about her.

But as concerns the tenderness and care of a loving mother, to which every child must have certain recourse if he or she is to travel down the streams of life without any extra detours, Malik had never really experienced any lack of. The grandma effectively supplied, or as could indeed be claimed without the least exaggeration, even surpassed the role of a tender mother. She made his meals, solicited him in times of sorrow, cleaned his snout and did him a myriad other things to which every child is ever in need. As for the dirty pants and shirts, which he always wore as he went about the village, and which were ever soiled and smeared with fading grey blotches from careless contact with olive oil, a substance that reigned supreme as the staple meal in the house, the grandma did not really possess any ready solution. The family was very poor indeed; the meagre wages of a humble cobbler could barely supply them with the basic necessities of life, and it was only at such rare annual festivities and celebrations did Malik receive any new clothes.

The beating of his heart escalated and his excitement mounted with each step as he approached the playing field, as the wild shouts and laughs of the playing children became more and more distinct. He felt immensely happy at the thought that he could finally join the band and play. He now had the key to the kingdom of infinite pleasures right between his hands. He shall no longer stand miserably by the gates and weep to hear the laughter and mirth of the dwellers inside while he rots and festers in loneliness on the outside. Now he shall be allowed entrance and be part of the big feast. Now he too had the key.

However, having made his very first step into the field, he immediately stood still as if thunderstruck. All his excitement vanished in an instant like a blazing fire suddenly put to sleep by a bucketful of water; the lustre was instantly departed from his eyes and his broad grin receded into the shocked gape usually affected by the devastating news of a deceased loved one.

It was not that the field was empty. No. If that had been the case he could still wait till tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow. The important thing is that he had they toy now and it could not be a matter of worry when he would be able to play with it at the field. The fact, however, is that all children were there, shouting and laughing at their play as ever, only not with plastic trucks any more; they had switched to a new toy now; it was spinning-tops that they all held in their hands now.

All that complex network of little roads, tiny parking-lots and garages of mud which the children had formerly carved out on the dusty face of the field for their toy trucks had been completely cleared out and replaced by a smooth and level ground for their new toys, their red and scarlet spinning-tops, to whirl and spin with every ease. The whole field was now ringing with the buzz and hum of a swarm of spinning-tops, much like the inside of a wild bee-hive.

Very late! It is too late now. Malik had only laid his hand on the toy when it is nothing more than a thing of the past, when its acquisition is of no more of profit than the possession of large hoards of delicious nuts when one has lost the use of all his teeth. He turned his eyes and gazed at the isolated big brown rock at one edge of the field and saw himself sitting there alone again like a miserable outcast while the other children played. He thought about how he would have to wait miserably for another half a year before his father could come back again from the city and bring him a spinning-top and he sank into a sweeping despair. He wished with all his heart that the dream had been true; that the toy had been in reality broken at play than get it when nobody cared about it anymore.

A kid, dressed in a grey sweater, a blue jeans and holding a scarlet spinning top in his left hand like a precious diamond, advanced towards him in slow steps. Malik had seen him from afar and hastened to hide his toy behind his back.

''Where is your spinning-top Malik?'' the boy in the grey sweater asked.

Malik felt ashamed; unbearably ashamed and embarrassed; his fingers trembled and his lips rose and fell without forming any answer. He felt an insatiable urge to cry, but he had to restrain himself. At last he gathered his courage and said:

''My dad will bring me one when he comes back from the city tomorrow.''

Of course he was absolutely certain that this will never happen, but he had to defend himself somehow, even if it required a slight deviation from his strict code of honesty and tell shameless lies.

''Alright!! And what is it you are hiding behind your back? Eh!'' the boy in the grey sweeter asked again with a cynical smile as if he had already known the answer to his question, and had only put it forth so as to make Malik feel even more embarrassed.

''N... N... Nothing. N... Nothing at all,'' mumbled Malik with great embarrassment.

''Are you sure it is Really nothing!'' Said the boy in grey with a perceivable stress on the word really, affirming the suspicion that he already knew what Malik was hiding behind his back. ''Anyway, see you tomorrow when you have a spinning-top of your own like everybody else,'' he added with the same broad cynical smile and then returned to his comrades.

Malik watched him sadly as he went away and then brushed a tear from off his right cheek.

A sharp cracking sound, as that of a snapped twig or bough, startled him from his nightmare; he turned his eyes towards his hand and realized that he had inadvertently, and in a bitter anguish, smashed the toy to tiny pieces within the formidably tight grip of his hand; a broken stream of red and yellow pieces of hard plastic started to flow through his fingers to the ground below like a flow of multicoloured grains of sand.