Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic If a tiny baby is submerged beneath the water, it can breathe. Through hard training and psychological determination, it is possible to breathe there again. That is what his father told him long ago. He believes, without even an instance of doubt, that humans evolved from aquatic apes who did not hunt on the plains but gathered oysters, urchins, mangrove crabs and periwinkles from the shallows. This evolution explains the hairlessness of humans, their webbed fingers and toes, their preference for copulation lying down. Within each person there is hidden aquatic potential. The water is soft and white with limestone, the bed of the quarry has cracked open, and it is possible to swim down and down and down, although they do not know how deep it goes. The morning light is waxy and yellow. The sides of the quarry rise like skyscrapers and along the stony beach the film crew occupy tents and portacabins. For the diver, there’s a green houseboat on the surface of the water; it is here that he sleeps. In the mornings he can be glimpsed atop the flat roof, near to naked, moving through his paces, steam rising from his chest; from his feet where they touch the freezing roof; from his curved open mouth, misting the glass of the goggles atop his head. A morning god, capable, they say, of swimming down 200 meters without air, into the freezing depths where no one should go, where no one but he dares to go; and he will do it here, for the film, if only they can catch it. He comes, afterwards, in his frayed, white dressing gown, to the catering tent. There are men in hats and black parkas breaking the ice on the water with long poles. There are metal trays of steaming baked beans and over-easy eggs, conveyer-belt-machines of toast, urns of coffee. If the aquatic ape were among them, suddenly, there, at the plastic trestle table — beside the costume designer sewing even as he cuts his omelette, the actress painting her creamy toenails, the assistant director going back for thirds, the teenage bride with her sunken eye hollows creeping in and then out again — what would he eat from the strips of congealing bacon, the rows of sausages? The diver, unembarrassed, eats like the dolphins. Off menu. Knuckling the spines out from sardines, leaning thoughtfully forward to sever the muscle holding the oysters in their shells. In the long vase of his throat there is the truth of this doomed place, this accursed film. The assistant director gazes at the diver’s exposed neck as he eats and does not see the future, sees only the beauty of the diver’s skin, translucent and silvery, and feels a crashing of lust, almost too much to bear. The actress watches the diver too and is revolted by the column of spine and gullet. Who wants to swim? Who wants to be able to breathe in the darkness? She wants to run through the doorway this film will open for her into the world. She does not care about the water, she does not care how far he can swim down, she does not care, even, if he comes back again. No one speaks directly to the diver. He sits in a little cave of silence and they look at him and wonder what he is thinking. Is he thinking about the water? It is said he thinks only and always about the water. The catering tent becomes busier and busier. They eat their breakfast and they stare openly at the diver whose dressing gown has parted at the collar, revealing the smooth ceramic of his skin, they lust after him, they dream of becoming him, they are glad they will not be called upon to swim.Without warning the clouds tumble out of the sky and cover the quarry. The air is wet and seething. It is possible to see only the flash of lights, sudden expulsions of human forms colliding with one another. Even sound seems muffled in the density, voices far away and then, slap, bang, up close. The director comes out of his cabin where he has been working all night, writing feverishly, eating nothing. He puts on his thin glasses but there is nothing to see. He calls out into the fog. To me, he calls, to me, his voice becoming vicious with necessity. To me, to me. He is the lighthouse now. They stumble their way towards him, linking arms with other lost souls, following the beacon of his words. He puts his hands in his pockets to keep his clever important fingers safe from the moistening air. There is a conference. How has this happened? It was not forecasted; we could not have predicted. The director does not believe in randomness, in chaos, in a life unknown. He believes in the power of his own voice to cleave aside this sudden derelict fog. To me, he calls, and the film crew keep gathering closer. To me, he calls, and the actress comes to his side, takes his outstretched hand. We will persevere, he says to them, and then, casting his eyes out to the place where he knows the crevice opens up beneath the surface: tomorrow. There is nothing to do but wait. It is possible that the film camera can see inside of them, can discern their thoughts and worries, perhaps even their souls; but it cannot see into this fog. The director gathers a close crowd in his personal rooms and turns the lights up high to banish the unease among them. The director is a cautious man who has had many violent stalkers and so there is an elaborate locking system on the trailer doors and windows, a series of codes, which he activates now. They drink wine from his own fridge and listen as he speaks quietly from the centre of the room, turning to take in their gazes. At times he calls upon the actress to rise and act out something that he wants to make clear to them. Look, he says, I am the actor and she is the camera, look how she is high now and then low down, look how quickly she moves, this is how we will film it. He kisses the actress on the cheek in thanks and speaks to her in her mother tongue, praising her. The teenage bride is beneath the bed, where she has hidden often before. She can smell the spilt wine, the director’s potent, horsey sweat. She can feel the actress’s body as if it were her own: the tightening of her waistband, the slight pull as a strand of hair becomes invisibly caught around the director’s gold wedding ring. Tomorrow comes but nothing changes. The diver floats alone on his boat. There is some comfort in this new whiteness, as when he descends so deeply into the water that the light from the outside world ceases. The catering crew rig up a pulley system and send his food over to him. He eats raw tuna and eel; swallows the ice they were bedded upon. Sometimes when he eats like this it feels as if logic is broken apart. That is all he wants. He just wants to break science in half and pull himself through the middle. He does not know what it will look like when it happens, only that it will be seismic. He takes off his clothes and climbs up onto the roof. There is nothing and no one to see and no one to see him. The edge of the roof is gone. He can make out only the space of one more foot beyond his own. He must move in an ugly way now, shuffling, to stop himself falling from the boat, keeping his legs bent and his eyes turned down to watch his feet. After a time, because of the cold, he cannot feel his own skin. He thinks of the first time. He lived with his father, the two of them alone, near Lake Silvaplana. His father was a gentle man who rode his bike and rescued dogs. One summer out cycling his father fell on the road and fractured his leg. In the hospital — the diver was 10, perhaps younger — he was cheerful and spoke about riding his bike again, how good it would feel. He described a particular view, the dark green forest, the curve of the lake; and then he fell asleep. When he woke there was something wrong. The diver watched from the corner of the room. Pressure had built up in the muscle and his father needed surgery. The doctors spoke calmly to the diver with a great confidence. They told him that his father would be fine, he would be better after the surgery. But he was not. At the house near the lake he lay in the corner of the dark room, unable to get up the stairs, and called out over and over for the diver. At times of lucidity he sat grey-faced at the table with the diver, his hands shaking, just able to lift the spoon with great difficulty from the bowl of soup, to his mouth. What’s wrong pa? the diver asked and his father told him that there was pain, that somehow secretly part of his body had been set on fire and it was burning and burning and couldn’t they put it out, couldn’t they please — again and again they went to the hospital and the doctors moved with their easy motions, so similar to the way dogs hunted when they were allowed to roam free, going for rabbits with great lunges; but they seemed to make no difference. One night the diver woke. The house was so cold, there was snow blown in across the sitting room and moonlight like spilt milk. The front door was open. He went out. Something was moving at the edge of the lake which was hard with ice at that time of year. The night was all around him and he could not breathe for the cold and was he dreaming and was it a monstrous thing, crawled out of the water, enormous, grasping? He went forward because no: it was his father. His father was in the shallows of the water, silent, bent, breaking the ice with the handle of a ladle, lowering his limbs in and letting his torso drop after. The diver rushed to him. The diver thought that his father was weeping with pain, that he was killing himself, but when he got closer he saw that his father was laughing. The ice water had, momentarily, taken away the fire. It was the diver’s job to prepare the narrow lane his father would swim in. He grew stronger so that he could do the job. There was a long toothy saw that he used to slice down into the thick winter ice and then a large pole which he pressed on with his whole entire body weight, forcing the piece of ice down beneath the larger sheet so that it was carried away with the current. It took him hours each morning to clear enough of a lane so that his father could swim. He sawed and then used his weight to push the ice down until the current caught it. His father sat in the window and watched him and when enough of the ice was cut and pushed away he came out and walked shakily through the snow and lowered himself into the water. The diver stood and watched his father. In the water some transformation happened. It was like the shark that was once caught by a fishing boat. In the water the shark was slick and perfect and shimmered and moved so fast but on land it flapped and drowned and guttered. On land his father could some days barely walk; he could not sleep for the pain. But in the water he was another creature. The ice water calmed the fire that burnt up and down his legs, torched the soles of his feet, and gave him relief for an hour, maybe more, afterwards. One day the diver helped his father back inside after the swim and then returned to gather up the saw and the metal pole. He was thinking of something. What? He doesn’t remember. He was distracted. His feet went where he thought there was ice but there was not. He fell into the water. The cold was the way he imagined dying must be. The current took him and dragged him underneath the ice and he thrashed and panicked and then, suddenly, gave in. He thought of his father swimming like a new person in the freezing water, like someone just made, and he remembered what no one can remember, which is what it is to be a child in the womb, breathing water rather than air, swimming to life. He found his way out. After that when his father swam in the water the diver did too. The truth is that the diver swam and swam and he never stopped until the day at the cracked quarry where he was swallowed and did not come back up. The fog! The awful, seething, stealing fog that eats days and so much money, that swallows time. Life is short. Life is being eaten away by this wet blanket that hides everything. The fog instils in them all a floating sense of fatigue. The actress piles extra covers onto her bed and sleeps for hours at a time, gives up entirely on whether it is night or day. The sound crew play round and round of rummy in a fugue, abandoning any scoring, laying the cards down lightly onto the floor between them. The teenage bride slips between the tents and the portacabins which are unmoored from one another, hiding from her husband. No one else goes out alone into the fog. It would be so easy to get lost even in the short distance between one tent to another, it would be so easy to stumble straight into the icy water. They string themselves together, hand-to-hand, like Christmas decorations, edging forward. The teenage bride is not afraid. The fog wets the hair on her head, the soft down above her lip, the tangle beneath her lifted arms. She is glad not to be seen. Only the director is fed fury and energy by the weather. He calls members of the cast and crew one by one to his private trailer and stands very close to them, examines their faces. He writes and paces and sometimes dares to meet the cold and stands in his fur-collared coat, whispering up at the sky, maybe curses or maybe invocations. He calls for the sleepy actress to be woken and they run the script over and over, although she speaks little in the film. He takes her hand in the startling light of his trailer and tells her the meaning of the lines across her palms, that life line, cut off so quickly, and he laughs at her stubborn, beautiful face. Sometimes he remembers the teenage bride. Yes. Sometimes he remembers her and looks for her beneath the tangle of blankets on the sofa but she is not there. Members of the crew tell him that they can hear the diver’s heavy breathing as he exercises on the roof of his boat. The director goes out and stands and listens to it. When they first arrived here the director saw every single part of the film as if it had already been made. He saw the great genius of it, the enormity of its creation. He saw it the way he had seen the teenage bride before she was a bride, before she was a teenager. He saw the creation of her in her spindly horse legs and her tartan school uniform that she wore to the audition, the pleats she smoothed beneath her child hands. He took her to the café across the road from the building they were renting for the auditions — auditions for a film which would, through a series of bad money decisions, never get made. He bought her a scone, without asking. She ate quickly and there was jam on the collar of her school shirt and cream on her fingers. He knew that they would get married because he always knew. He knew with all of them, he knew with the actress whose hands were soft as a child’s. He had loved his mother, he cared for stray cats, when he was a boy he had got lost in the city and wept and been taken home and been held by his mother and as a baby he had dreamed, before he knew what dreams even were, of the particular colour of light on water, of summer light on water. The diver sits cross-legged on the side of the boat and waits for the food to be sent over. Sometimes they forget his stipulations and send him bread, cheese, little tubs of pickles. He drops them one by one into the water, washes his hands of them. Today when he leans forward and lowers a slice of cheese into the water he feels something reaching up and taking it from his fingers. He hesitates and then lowers in his whole arm. There is the tickling feel of little mouths. When he opens his hand a slim silvery fish swims right inside it and he closes his fist, brings it up into the air. He takes this as a good sign, a sign of ongoing transformation. Its round, black, reflectionless eyes have a clear clarity. He lifts it to his mouth, pushes it between his lips.The life of the quarry was such as this. It was land. Before that it was water. Before that it was nothing. After that it was water. After that it was land. Humans were slimy creatures in the water. They crawled out of the water and learnt to walk on two legs. Humans made weapons to cut the land. The land was hacked open, cut down deep and a process of great extraction began. Gods changed. Film cameras were invented and got better and better. Humans ate and ate and ate. Men were clever, often geniuses. Women wore school uniforms and ate scones in steamy cafés. They crawled underneath the bed to hide and no one knew they were there. The diver’s father died of a heart attack in his bed. The diver wept for the loss of his father and kept swimming. The teenage gymnast wore a lacy wedding dress. The director called the actress to his trailer and told her about his dream. It was a dream of owning everything that the world had touched. She heard the dream as if it were her own mouth saying it. Yes. That was what she dreamed. Everything. She dreamed of owning everything. She does not tell him this. When the director touches the actress she cannot immediately feel it, although she can see his big flat hands like beaver paddles. The teenage bride is crouched underneath the bed and it is as if the director’s hands, moving across the actress, are instead touching her. When the director and actress leave the trailer, I climb out from under the bed and wipe the dust off my hands. I work quickly without thinking too much. If I start thinking I will never do it. I know all the codes. I lock the door and the windows and for good measure I pull the large trunk in front of the door and I sit on it and wait. I wait for what seems like a long time until I hear the director’s voice. He is coming through the fog, strung together with the actress and the sound crew and the assistant director. They weave through the fog, clinging to one another, calling out curses at the weather. They get to the director’s trailer and try and open the door. It is locked. There is a great fight with the door. The director begins to speak urgently in his quiet, raging voice. Who has got into his trailer? What sneaking creature has broken in and locked it? He comes close to the door and murmurs the name of his ex-wife, almost lovingly, asking her to open the door, my darling, our anger is so old, open this door. I put my hands over my mouth. He whispers the name of his mother who is dead but whose ghost he believes sometimes visits him at times of great stress. Leonora, he whispers, Leonora, go back now, go home. I stand up on the trunk. Hearing the sound he bellows, I hear you, I hear you shifting around in there. We will break this door open. That is not possible, I say quietly into the keyhole. The director grows silent at the sound of my voice. I can hear his hoarse breathing whistling in and out of his struggling lungs. The door rattles as he presses himself against it. He calls me all of the names that he invented for me, he calls me lupin and raisin and sweet child and little angel. This door is very strong, I say. He goes through his linguistic arguments. He becomes panicked at being separated from his space and his things; he lists the objects in the trailer which are of vital importance to him. His mother’s wedding ring, the first ever film camera he owned with the fracture across the glass from when Juliette Binoche dropped it, the soft kidskin gloves he wears to protect his hands from the elements, the photograph of his childhood cat, the very sharp razor he uses to shave his face in preparation for the day . . . He goes on and on and on but I am no longer listening to him. Before I met the director, I would go every morning and every evening to practice gymnastics. There were other girls and boys like me, stretched taffy babes in shined leotards and talcum-powder hands. The gym had a wet and mossy smell, the particular elastic give of young bones, the crackle of ice packs applied to tender skin. Beneath my spinning arms, the whoomph huff of the pummel giving up its breath, was my own breath, pummelled from me, from it. I always had a knack for feeling what didn’t belong to me. When that boy broke his elbow, I felt the snap in my own arm; when a cold or belly bug passed among us I had it over and over again. My father was friends with the director, had worked on his last film. We had gone to the cinema to watch it together. After the audition I went back to the gym and I spun and leapt and felt the great electricity of almost flying. I have forgotten what my dream of those days was. I think it was to never put my feet on the floor again. The crew and the cast gather in the catering tent to come up with a plan. Someone, stood at the doorway, says that the fog is getting thicker and everyone else calls out that it is true, the fog is only getting worse, how can it be possible. They press their hands and faces to the plastic windows. There is a rush of anguish and fear that spreads between them, passing from one to the other. The director is sat on a bench, holding his head. On the gently swinging boat the diver listens to the noise coming through the fog, raised voices, and licks the salt crystals from his fingers. He wants to tell them that their fear is misplaced. They should be afraid of the air, they should be afraid of the earth, they should be afraid of gravity holding them down. He lowers his hand from the side of the boat and into the icy water and the fish come to the surface to meet him. In the catering tent there are calls for escape, for abandonment, for cancellation. The director, submerged in thought, speaks rapidly into the ear of his nodding assistant: the door smashed, the windows pulled out, is there even a possibility of going up through the floor or in through the roof? In the kitchen the actress rummages in the big fridge, her mouth watering, her hands shoving aside bunches of carrots and soft, slowly rotting radishes. She is so hungry. The diver’s food is in plastic tubs, labelled. She pops one open and feels a wave of nausea at the little blackening prawn brains visible through the translucent carapaces. They look good, the assistant director says from behind her. He has a bloody nose. The actress tips his head back and squeezes the narrow snipe of bone until the blood staunches, slows, stops. They share the box of prawns between them. The actress can hear the sweet pop beneath his incisors, beneath her own. The panic ebbs back into exhaustion. Only the director, as before, retains an alert, hunter dog energy, pacing around and around the tables, dropping his heavy hand onto shoulders that fold tiredly beneath him. He wants and wants and wants: who can get him — he needs — right now he could really do with — can someone find. But the fog. The fog is everywhere. There is nothing to find, they just have to wait. They cannot even rouse themselves to care about the teenage bride who has ambushed and taken over the director’s own private trailer. Suddenly, they do not mind. One by one they join the actress and the assistant director who have worked their way through the prawns and are searching among the other labelled boxes, uncovering slabs of raw fish and scallops and, enticingly, at the back, hidden, illegal slivers of shark and whale, the fatty white flesh of dolphin belly. They eat with their fingers, passing the boxes around, leaning over one another’s shoulders to grasp, filling their mouths, their throats. There is, finally, the epicentre of exhaustion: giving in. The fog is a blanket that has covered this shoot and cut it out from the continuous flow of time, of their lives. They find themselves giving in, also, to the belief of the diver. Of course. It is so clear now. There was land, there was water. They did not hunt on the plains but gathered and stood very still in the water, waiting for the fish to come up and nibble the backs of their ankles. When they were unmade in the womb they had breathed water and when they came out of their mothers and were released into this great darkening place it was a shock to be so separated from the water of life, the living water that held them. For a time, if they were put back into the water, they could breathe, it was true, they could breathe there. A voice, shouting. The shout cleaves through to them and startles them. It is not the director. He is at the table again, holding his head, moaning gently to himself. No one pays him any mind. The shout booms and crackles across the ice. In the quiet I open the door of the trailer and go out into the fog. I, too, can hear the voice of the diver calling through the white gloom. His voice is ecstatic, like God’s voice, like the voice of a drowning sailor, like the voice of the director’s mother who never did come to him as a ghost but sometimes came to me. She came to me the night of my wedding while I was trying to pierce my own ears with the earrings my soon-to-be-husband had bought me. I was alone in the hotel room, knelt on the soft carpet. I was not alone. In death she had lost her tuning and was all ages at once, a flicker of failing batteries and ebbing connection. I knew her from the photographs my soon-to-be-husband kept beside his bed. She couldn’t speak herself because she was dead and fading fast but she borrowed my own language, an echo, and turned it back towards me. Don’t do it, she said, don’t do it. They crash out into the fog, through the torn open doors of the catering tent, grasping one another’s hands before anyone can stumble into the deep water. The diver is shouting, his voice cracking, the bang of his fists on the hard metal of the boat. He does not need a film camera, what is he waiting for, he is going down, he is going down like he should have done many days ago, he is not doing it for the film, he is not doing it for anyone. They gasp and beg him not to, to wait for the fog to clear, to wait for another day, it is suicide. No, he shouts, no, it is life. Come with me, he says, come with me. The sound of the diver entering the water rings out, very clear. I drop on my hands and knees and go forward like a child, trying to find the edge of the quarry. Then I hear the splash and crack of more people entering the water, breaking the ice where it is thin enough to break. And I know that they are going in too, that we are going in together. The director stumbles out of the catering tent and stands heaving in the molten clouds. His words have failed him, he stutters and trembles and then roars after them. He is blind. His mother comes to him then, like a heavy, white bird, like an albatross, and lays her enormous deathly form over him and he smells the smell of his childhood.The diver is already gone. He is swimming down, holding with one hand onto the rope that leads into the depths. He is releasing the breath from his body which is beloved to him and then which is nothing, which is breath, which is releasing. Last to go is the grief for his father who he imagines, briefly, winnowing down beside him. His father who had taught him to swim in the mouldering swimming pool near home. The diver had dropped into the warm water like a stone and looked up through the shimmery surface to the mottled figure of his father, stood timing him from the side, and already he was a ghost, already they were all ghosts. He lets go of the rope. He goes down further than any human in our memory has ever gone before. He feels something around his body, a soft warmth, as of hands enclosing. I find the edge of the quarry with my hand and I drop onto the ice which holds my weight and I crawl. I hear the splash and silence of the others going in and then there is the splash and silence of me. The water is so cold I am erased for a moment and then I remember and I kick down. The water is a vast spiderweb, the silk lines trembling between us. I open my mouth wide and let the water in. I get bigger and bigger and bigger, filling, like a hot-air balloon rising momentously off the ground, until I find the edges of the quarry are the edges of myself and one by one by one I meet their thrashing bodies in the water and I swallow them.© Daisy JohnsonJoin our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café
