The Mountain

Originally published in the literary journal Copper Nickel, 2016

Osma’s wife, Nadine, approached silently in her sandaled feet and salmon-colored shift with a glass of fresh, iced lemonade in one hand.  It was hot already.  The heat had come early this year and the hills surrounding the city shimmered in the haze of midday.  As he did most days, Osma dozed in a dusty armchair under the shade of the blue awning that fronted the brown brick house.  The chair was always turned to face the eroded hips and shoulders of Jabal Sabir.

Why? Nadine had asked him one day, wondering what he saw in the barren, rust-colored promontory.  “Why do you stare at that mountain? What do you see there?” The view, he replied.  Of course, it was more than that, although he lacked the energy to explain it.  If he were to try, he might say something about the majesty implied in such a long existence.  Jabal Sabir had risen in that spot even before God created man or beast.  He could tell her that.  It was one of His first and grandest creations.  It did his heart good to know it was there and that he sat at its feet, a pure thing with no sin or evil in it, its eye always filled with the presence of God above.   But he did not say any of that.  Nadine would only shrug and accuse him of being a dreamer, wasting his time.  The mountain was hot and dusty, she would say.  An old man would never be comfortable on its rugged slopes.  Even if he could get there.

She meant well, Osma knew.  She loved him and wanted to spare him pain.

A fan buzzed beside him, pulsing the stifling air and creating a cooler current.  He heard the door slam shut as Nadine came out of the house again.  She had been cooking and placed a steaming bowl of saltah on the table beside him.  She meant to tempt his elusive appetite with the spicy aromas of meat stew, scrambled eggs and freshly baked flat bread, hot from the oven.  She had learned not to ask him if he was hungry.

That was one benefit of dying; he was never hungry.  Food was unnecessary to the culmination of that process, already well advanced in his case.  And on those rare occasions when he was tempted to eat as he once did, his body reminded him that he needed little or no sustenance by expelling the excess from his stomach.

Osma’s body ached with fatigue.  His clothes hung on him and a nagging, persistent cough came and went on its own mysterious schedule from some place deep in his lungs.  On his last visit to the hospital in Sana’a he’d learned that his kidneys were failing.  But he did not feel sorry for himself.  It was Nadine who filled his mind with worry about the future.  She was the reason he sat facing the placid mountain.  Of course, he did not say any of this.  He did not wish to alarm her.  But neither would it be right to indulge her in the comfortable pretense that he would recover, as many of those who came to visit were apt to do.

You are looking better, such people would say, lying with the best of intent, to cheer him up.  It was they who needed comfort, however spurious, in the presence of death.  But they were not to blame.  He did not regret that he might have lived another twenty years.  He had already experienced all that was fit for a man to know and do.  More important to Osma now was the knowledge that his death would count for something.  That was more than most men could say.  “It is for the Ummah that you aided us.  For God.  Remember that,” Dr. Ansari had confided to him, after the work and the damage had been done. “Your name will live forever.”

Almost two years had passed since the mysterious Dr. Ansari first appeared at his door, in the company of Osma’s brother-in-law, Nijad.  Dr. Ansari was a Saudi, tall, thin, with graying hair and thick eyeglasses.  He was a little stooped over, perhaps an old back injury that still plagued him, as all men were subject to accumulating wear and misfortune.  The two men refused the offered black tea or coffee with many apologies and Nadine took it back.  It was not the custom here to reject hospitality, nor to conduct business without first meeting each other as men.  “We are enroute to another destination and already late,” Dr. Ansari explained, aware of the breach of custom.  Could he see the workshop?  He had a project that he wished to discuss.

Osma had been at pains to conceal his surprise.  In retrospect it was the first of many signs that this was not like other business he had won in Ta’izz.  But he was eager for work and proud to show the two men the half-cylinder aluminum structure that housed an array of precision German metalworking equipment ranged around its perimeter.  As the men followed Osma, he explained the functions and capabilities of the ovens, casting and bending machines, drill presses, metal lathes and precision grinding equipment.  Along the walls he showed them his work benches, full of neatly stored hand tools.  Bins and overhead storage held raw lengths of steel and aluminum awaiting the reshaping that gave them purpose.

Dr. Ansari listened carefully and respectfully.  He looked at everything, his eyes wide open as if to absorb and remember.  He asked what kinds of work Osma did here.  About Ta’izz and the customers who came here to have metal fabrication work done for them.  It is not Sana’a or Aden, Osma admitted, but a large city nonetheless and there was enough work to support such a shop.

“Do you do such work for the authorities of Yemen?” The question was delivered gently, but it was unexpected, odd.  When Osma hesitated, the doctor resumed quickly, without waiting for an answer.  “I am too curious, I know,” he apologized, smiling.  “It is not important.” He did not say so, but Osma concluded after many unusual questions and answers that Dr. Ansari was not an engineer, and certainly not a metallurgist.

They came full circle to a cluttered desk near the door, piled with books, manuals, catalogues, and other materials.  Beside it was a flat, aluminum drawing table under a bank of overhead lights.

“May I?” Dr. Ansari asked Osma, reaching into a large briefcase and unfolding a set of drawings, then laying them flat on the table.  His open palms flashed an invitation.  He wished Osma to look at the drawings.

Osma pressed a rocker switch and four lamps cast a soft, consistent light on the drawings, illuminating a design that resembled a simple disc. A smaller disk was to be cored from the center, yielding a ring of metal.

“There will be five more like this,” the Doctor said.  Osma had already noted the quantity in the detailed specifications inscribed at the bottom of the page.  He nodded and turned the page to the second drawing.  This one depicted a rod–a “spike,” the doctor termed it–that would exactly fill the hollow centers of the six rings.

“The engineers tell me that there can be no gaps or cavities.”  He looked at Osma expectantly.

“Yes, I see that, Doctor.  The work will call for precision.”

Despite his answer, Osma remembered thinking how surprisingly simple the thing was.  The sequence of steps was as clear to Osma then as the terraced flanks of Jabal Sabir were now.  But this simplicity was in its own way a puzzle.  And one that he could not address directly.  He remembered wanting to ask why they did not use one of the many capable metal fabricators who served the giant oil companies in the eastern part of the Kingdom, far closer to Riyadh.  Perhaps the doctor expected to pay much less for the work here in Yemen.  Of course, he knew the reason now.  But on that day, he had been very eager to have the contract, too eager to let his thoughts stray or to ask awkward questions.

He had instead returned to the packet of drawings and methodically examined the rest in silence while his two guests waited.  These designs also called for fabrication of relatively simple shapes: two hollow cubes of different sizes and smaller parts that appeared to be brackets or supports, some he might be able to buy rather than make himself.

“It seems simple enough,” Osma declared at last.

“It is the fine tolerances that require your advanced skills,” Dr. Ansari amended pleasantly.  “As well as complete discretion.  I am sorry to emphasize that, and I mean no disrespect.”

The good doctor was a close reader of faces, Osma realized with chagrin.

“I understand,” Osma answered, careful not to freight his words or expressions with question marks or idle curiosity.  “But the project is well within my capabilities.” He did not have to say that he would be discreet.

“Excellent.  The work is yours if you want it.”

“I thank you,” Osma answered, smiling and relieved.

“We will be in contact when the materials are ready. As for payment, Nijad will agree to pay whatever you think is fair. You will name your price.”

That, he had not expected. Being told to name his price. Such a strange way to do business. But he had secured the work. They had shaken hands. That was the main thing.

After the visit of Nijad and Dr. Ansari, two whole months passed without a word from either man. Osma resigned himself to the fact that something had changed. Plans were modified, and budgets shrank. He had seen it happen before; the expansive dreams of men exceeding their financial reach. Or a project might fall to a competitor with better connections. But then the phone rang one day after dinner. Nadine answered, smiling broadly. It was Nijad. “I am coming,” he told them, “about the work we discussed.”

The very next day a dusty red Toyota pickup truck pulled into the yard. It was Nijad and he was in the company of two burly, unsmiling young men, Saeed and Samir–his assistants, he called them. Osma watched as the three of them unloaded a modest, but surprisingly heavy, wooden crate and wrestled it into the shop on a dolly. They closed and locked the shop doors.  Then pried off the crate’s wooden cover, sprung nails clinking haphazardly to the concrete floor.  Despite the gloom of the poorly lit entry space, Osma saw why the crate had been so heavy.  Layers of lead sheathing lined the interior. And at the bottom, bubble-wrapped, as if they had been delicate, fossilized dinosaur eggs, lay billets of a dark silver metal. Osma picked one up. It too was surprisingly heavy and thickly oxidized with a whitish rime. Even though he had not worked with this metal before, he thought he knew what it was.  He was surprised and a little frightened and quickly put the thing down.  But he made sure that his face showed nothing. If they had wished to invite questions on this topic, they would have done so before this. There was nothing useful to be said.

He set to work the same day. After the long delay, only a single week had been allotted to complete the task and fashion the components. While he did not understand the sudden urgency, he knew questions would not be welcomed or answered. Besides, he was sure it could be done in one week if he worked diligently. He drew up the work plan and reviewed it. It was still simple. and his approach was sound. He would first carefully clean the billets of oxidation, then fire and cast the basic shapes. Finally, he would cut, core, file and polish the major parts until they matched the exacting dimensions specified in the drawings. The subsidiary parts would need some bending, but there the raw material was plain sheet aluminum. A journeyman’s task.

As he worked, one of the twins–as his neighbors had taken to calling Nijad’s bearded assistants, even though they looked not at all alike–was always in the shop, watching his progress. They did not engage him in conversation but spoke softly to each other. The twin not in the shop would often smoke outside or take a seat at a nearby cafe. They were polite, but not friendly. “I cannot tell you,” they would answer a curious neighbor when asked almost any question about themselves or the work Osma was doing for them.  Beneath the politely delivered refusals those who asked also heard a muted warning that their questions were not welcome. The neighbors complained. Nadine called Nijad to object to such rudeness. “No insult is intended,” he assured her; “please apologize to your friends and neighbors, but the work is secret. They act only as they have been instructed to act. You must forgive them. We must protect the project from our competition,” Nijad explained. “They would steal it if they could.”

Despite the tight schedule, the work went smoothly, with only one minor difficulty. It was the mask and clumsy breathing apparatus Nijad had brought for Osma. For the dust, Nijad had explained. The equipment impeded Osma’s movements and the mask fogged over in the humidity of the shop. He could not see his tools or instruments clearly and thus risked making a foolish error and ruining the work. He had removed the elaborate breathing equipment and donned a simple cloth medical mask and goggles instead. Only later was the cost of that decision apparent.

When his cough began producing blood, long after the work had been delivered, he finally consented to be driven to the hospital in Sana’a by a neighbor. The doctor showed him the chest X-ray, pointing to the regular shapes of white rib bones obscured by irregular zones of opacity, as if tiny clouds had become trapped in his chest cavity.  The occlusions did not look dangerous to Osma, but the radiologist’s face reminded him of a day long ago, when his father had kneeled, eye-to-eye with eight-year-old Osma and informed him that his mother had died giving birth to his sister.  His father and sister had passed on, years ago. Now it was his turn.

When Osma broke the news to his wife that his illness was not a stubborn virus or some new allergy, she had cried.

“It is God’s will,” Osma said to comfort her.  But she continued to cry, even though it was God’s will.

Nijad scolded Osma too, sounding almost angry. “Why did you not use the apparatus?” he complained. And then, “You should have called me first. I could have taken you to a better hospital, in the Kingdom. Perhaps the cause is not what it seems. I will speak to the doctors in Sana’a.”

Against the terrible price he must pay, Osma should know that he had done something momentous.  Something that would change the world. That was what Dr. Ansari had said when he called. Osma took solace in those words. No man would remember him for his awnings or the fanciful gilded cages he had made for a rich collector of tropical birds, the doctor added, showing a much more detailed knowledge of Osma’s business than he had suspected.  But this work was larger than one man’s life.

But when Osma repeated these words to Nadine, her dampened spirits were not lifted, and the tears flowed again. He resolved not to speak of it. It was a hard thing for a husband or a wife to be left behind and selfish to expect complicity.

Nadine took away the dishes and the uneaten food and replaced these with another glass of sugary lemonade dripping with condensation. She could be stubborn, even fierce, in his defense. There was no point in refusing. He took the glass–heavier than he expected–and sipped a few drops of the bitter-sweet liquid while she waited. Only after that would she go.

Unlike many of his neighbors who had empty, soulless marriages bound by duty, Osma loved his wife and was heartsick at the pain he caused her. He trusted that Nijad would ensure that the shop and its contents sold for a fair price and that Nadine would have what she needed.  Of course, in the end, it was all in the hands of God. Nothing happened that was not His will.  Who was Osma to argue against this most fundamental truth of human existence?

And the mountain agreed with him. Not that it said so in words, but in its posture; never changing its complexion or hiding behind clouds when he needed it. A mountain was better than a man in this respect. It lacked the capacity for fear or regret, being whole and perfect. That was what he would tell Nadine if she ever asked him again about the mountain and why he looked at it.

Then it came to him. He would go to the mountain. Not today, but soon. He would say to her, this mountain is what a man would be if he were wise and strong enough. Perhaps it would speak to him in its own voice if he went there and listened carefully. He felt that close to it. It had been there his whole life, watching him, longer than his mother and father. But even as the thought came to him, inspired him, he knew he could not say anything of the sort to Nadine. That was a problem; it had always been so. There were things she would not want to hear. And if he persisted, she would plant her feet, put her hands on her hips. She would be thinking of smaller things. That he should die so young. That he would leave her, with little enough to get by on.  She would never think to ask him about the silvery white metal he had shaped. Or wonder if it had come from the earth of Jabal Sabir itself. Or what the mountain might think of that. The mountain that did not change and had always been the same.

The finely-honed rings and spike, now assembled into something with a purpose, must already be on the way, he thought. Of course, they would not tell him what or where or when, but everyone would know when it arrived. When that day came, and the silvery metal did what it was meant to do, he wondered if the mountain would approve or if it would maintain its stony silence and indifference to the doings of men. There was a chance that afterwards it would not welcome him as a brother. That it would say, you profess to admire my stillness and perfection, and yet you have introduced as great a change into the world as there has ever been, and all the changes that will follow this will also be yours to bear. We must remain ever distant henceforth. Man and mountain.

That was why he sat here. That was what he would tell his wife, if he dared. Perhaps he would leave her a note, so that she would not interrupt him before he was finished.  Bringing him more soup, a bit of gossip from the market.