My attention was caught momentarily by a squawking seagull that alighted on the roof of an Isobox. Slowly, the old woman lifted herself off the stone, stretched her back as if she had not a care in the world. She was shorter than us by almost a hand.
“You know, this is my son’s second wife. His first died twenty years ago. Oh, he mourned her, keened and cried, said he wasn’t going to be happy again, and married a much younger girl within three months. I found her for him, me, just so he would shut up. Did he ever visit his first wife’s grave? Of course not. He doesn’t remember what her face looked like. She has vanished with the dead. Now he wails because he has lost everything again. Even toddlers are smarter than him.”
“Help me understand,” Mazen said, still grinning.
“Help you understand that you’re stupid?” she asked impassively.
One should not generalize a single person’s behavior to the larger population. However, since she behaved so like my mother, I was tempted to conclude that all women from Deir ez-Zor were ornery and downright insufferable. Except Mazen was not only suffering her but enjoying her company. It was then I decided something was amiss in this conversation. The old woman started out feeling imposed upon but no longer. She was enjoying the exchange too. She could have walked away, but she remained standing, waiting for Mazen to get back to her.
“Yes,” he said, his face still set to impish. “Please tell me how come I’m stupid.”
“Well, at least you’re smart enough to ask for help,” she said. She actually reached up and pinched his cheek, and he beamed. She was pleased with him and immoderately pleased with herself. “I didn’t lose much now. I’ve been losing everything for as long as I can remember. So have you. My son weeps for his home, but he lost it a long time ago. It’s not the same one he was born in. Everything had changed, and he wasn’t paying attention.”
“The apartment we grew up in is still in Beirut,” Mazen said. “My mother still lives there.”
“She lives there alone, doesn’t she? Her children have left. You think that’s still her home, your home? That’s even worse. It’s a hollow shell. Not living, no soul.”
“True, but I would still feel sad if we lost it,” he said.
“Fool,” she said. “I’m telling you that you’ve already lost it.”
“You know,” he said, “my mother left Deir ez-Zor to get married when she was a young girl. She returned only once, for her father’s funeral. My father insisted she return for her father’s memory. She would have preferred never to set foot once she left. She’d wanted a clean break. She wanted to forget her past, bury who she was.”
“A smart woman, your mother.”
“This one here,” he said, pointing at me, “hasn’t been back to Lebanon. Not once has she come back to visit me. Giving up our roots is a family specialty.”
“Everything I grew up with is gone,” the old woman said, a touch wistfully. “The school I attended as a child is now a Pepsi-Cola factory. The house where I was married is now a supermarket. My home, the one where I had four children, well, my son decided to build two more stories on top of it and rent each to strangers. All the places I truly loved are gone, and countless people. The regime destroying my house can’t hurt me. I lost everything a long time ago, and I will outlive them all.”
Mazen agreed that she would outlive everyone but disagreed with everything else she said. She told him in no uncertain terms he was an unbridled idiot. Back and forth they went, she insulting him, he laughing it off, until she finally suggested that he help her carry her heavy bag up to the barracks.
I bet you wouldn’t have disagreed. In one of your gloomy essays you wrote, “What is life if not a habituation to loss?”
Loss of the Loss That Was
Miriam was one of the first refugees to arrive in Beirut from Homs, one of the first you interviewed. You told her she should have been a philosopher. She had no idea what you meant. She loved being a hairdresser—well, would have if only someone in Beirut would offer her a job. Everything she had ever worked for was erased overnight by the war: the home she had decorated, the plants she had loved and watered, the clients she had nurtured.
There must be a name somewhere for what’s not there, Miriam told you on her second interview. A few years had passed since you last spoke to her. She grieved for what she’d lost when she first arrived, her family, her apartment, her job. But one day she woke and the grief was gone. Poof!
She had lost too much, she had a hole in her heart, and grief had rushed in like a high tide to fill it.
In time, her grief withdrew.
She now had nothing except for the hole.
My Theory of Loss
Francine and I met Lubna when she married our friend Syl and moved to the United States to be with him twelve years ago. She was Syrian, from Damascus, and being fifty at the time, she found the transition to Chicago a culture shock, even though she’d always been cosmopolitan. She’d met Syl at a conference in Lausanne, and for the first eighteen months they followed each other at conferences in Europe, in South and North America. Living in America, however, surprised her. It was the little things, she told me. She couldn’t figure out why everyone went to bed early. That was her number one grievance. I explained that I did because I would be exhausted the next day if I didn’t have enough sleep, to which she replied that she would as well but she napped every afternoon. She couldn’t understand why siesta was not more popular in Chicago. She trained Syl to nap daily. They were both university professors and refused to schedule classes in the afternoon.
Yes, she was a woman after your own heart.
The little things she missed. Even though she was Christian, she missed the adhan at dawn, what she considered the most beautiful symphony as one mosque after another called the devotees to prayer. She missed the smell of verbena. Why did few buildings in the United States have balconies? She wanted to drink her morning coffee on a verandah. With neighbors. She’d lived in the same building downtown for years and the neighbors hardly acknowledged each other in the elevator. They were too busy staring at the floor numbers lighting up one by one. She was grateful that she’d been in Chicago for years when her city was bombed mercilessly, but why couldn’t she find cotton candy that didn’t taste like chemicals?
We were going to cook lunch together one day, and we visited Whole Foods to do our shopping. She told me that the first time she tried to make kibbeh, she bought the wrong kind of mint, since in Syria, there was only one kind.
“Here I was trying to show off to my husband and his friends, and instead of making kibbeh, I ended up with Chiclets.”
I remember that Whole Foods excursion because she saw small jasmine plants at the entrance, about twenty in all. She quickly grabbed two and began calling her Syrian friends in Chicago, and her friends called friends. By the time we left the store a little more than half an hour later, there was only a tired one left. A Syrian contingent had descended upon the store. She insisted that I buy the last plant, as droopy as it was. Didn’t I miss the scent of jasmine?
Of course I did. Of course I bought it. Of course I killed it within two months. Jasmine in Chicago?
What’s That Smell?
What were your father’s last words? In the hospital bed, before he passed on, he told you he smelled cardamom. Within that sterile room redolent of disinfectants, his mind conjured memories of the magic pod.
I too dream of cardamom. I don’t think of using it while cooking. None of the recipes require it. I no longer drink Turkish coffee. But in bed, after a long night of dreams, I sometimes wake up with nostrils inhaling the spice’s soft scent.
It is not just the land that binds us, not just the red earth, the fig tree, the lemon, or the olive. It’s more than the city of Beirut, the surrounding mountains, or the Mediterranean. You and I are bound together with the aroma of cardamom.
And cloves.
/> Saffron.
The Faculty of the Mind
Emma was able to expedite the application of Sumaiya’s family. They could take the ferry to Athens as soon as they were able to and then all the way to Malmö, not far from where she lived. The problem was that Sumaiya had been deteriorating rapidly ever since she settled in the medical tent. Her children were visiting her that morning when she had multiple nosebleeds, which terrified them.
The medical tent in Kara Tepe was not one. There was canvas, but it covered the structure, two windowless rooms constructed out of sturdy wood. In the bracing cold of late morning, it looked like an unassuming chapel on some back road. Sumaiya lay on one cot; her husband sat on the one next to her. Between her right arm and her hip, she held her imitation crocodile handbag, mustard colored, now matching her skin tone. She was already using a nasal cannula and an oxygen ventilator. In some ways, her husband looked worse. When I first saw him on the landing beach, I thought he looked much younger, frail and wispish, as if he carried an eternal boy within him or a serious, studious college student. Before us, on the cot, the boy looked lost. Sammy seemed morose, his heavy head in his hands as he mumbled quietly to himself. He didn’t notice that the four of us had entered the tent.
And what a foursome we were, Rasheed, Emma, Mazen, and me. The two nurses quickly walked over to adjust Sumaiya’s breathing tube, which was askew. Rasheed was there first. Sammy stood up when he saw us, bowed his head, both as a greeting and a display of respect. Emma, using Rasheed as a translator, began to explain to Sammy about “the next part of their journey,” as she called it. They spoke in soft whispers.
And Sumaiya blinked her eyes open. Her first reaction upon seeing me was a wide grin. She never ceased to surprise me. Her eyes sparkled, as if all this were some cosmic joke that was beyond her yet she’d enjoy it nonetheless. She reached out for my hand.
Have you ever considered the phrase “out of one’s mind”? As if someone who was confused, addled, or angry would no longer be using her mind. Was one in one’s mind only when rational with full faculties? Well, Sumaiya was out of her mind for sure. It was more than encephalopathy; the pain medications had her higher than Mount Olympus. She stared at me with strangely inattentive eyes and began to speak, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying. I stared back, noticing the slight oblique fold of her upper eyelids. Beautiful eyes. I figuratively slapped myself. I would be more attentive to her needs. I knelt toward her. She looked at me as though I were far off on a distant horizon. She blathered incomprehensively. I did hear her daughter’s name, Asma, but couldn’t trace it to anything rational. Before I could reply, she suddenly said, “We are not going back.”
“No,” I said softly. “No one is going back.”
“Yes,” she said and went quiet for a minute, looking at the heavenly ceiling of canvas. “You will take care of my girls. Asma, really. He will be fine with the younger girls, but she’s willful. She will need guidance.”
She closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep. She did not need me to agree or confirm.
I turned on the table lamp, which was a replica of the Eiffel Tower but looked more like a lonely oil derrick in the middle of a desert doily. What was that anomaly doing in the medical tent of a refugee camp?
How to Write to a Young Girl
You were able to visit Asma and her family in Malmö, not me. You had a speaking engagement at the university there last summer, and you dropped by. I loved that she had to squeeze you into her busy schedule. Even though school was out, her off-season was filled with numerous activities, organized and not. She suggested that you take her and her scout troop out for ice cream—seventeen double-scoop cones!
I skype with her once a month, and she texts me regularly, but my guidance, if we could call it that, is primarily through letters. That’s what she wanted.
“Send me a letter,” she said. “Once a week. Not more than that because that would be too much. One letter that tells me what you did that week so I will know what to expect as a doctor.”
Once a week, I write. I tell her what surgeries I did and how I performed them, what incisions where. I even go as far as telling her how many times I had performed the procedure and how comfortable I felt doing so. I tell her about my patients, both the easy and the difficult ones. I explain briefly each situation, how I talked to the family, what I said to the patient, what the nurses said. She is a dry sponge for medical information. She berated me in the beginning for writing to her as if she were a child, for explaining the diagnoses in simple terms. She did not appreciate that. I was to treat her like any physician. She wanted a full anamnesis. She could look up any of the difficult words. She was no dummy. She knew how to use Google, after all. I complied.
Her mother was right. Asma is willful. And I adore her.
Dream House Maintenance
Your father built the house of his dreams in his home village in the mountains of Lebanon, not far from the house he grew up in, the one his father had built. Before he broke ground, your father, though not very religious, did what every Druze man should when building or buying something new. He visited one of the Druze elders, a man in his late eighties who lived in a tiny village that was difficult to reach, hidden in a verdant valley encircled by high mountains. Your father asked the elder to bless his new home, which the man did by writing a little prayer on a piece of paper, which he folded and put in a small envelope that was essentially another folded piece of cardstock paper, a Lebanese origami. Your father placed that blessing, no bigger than a child’s finger, between the first two stones laid down for the house. The house of dreams was finished in 1974.
And what a house it was. Overlooking the city of Beirut, it was sleek and modern, distinct and sui generis, melding into the hills around it but unlike any other building in the area. In the middle of the house was the pièce de résistance, a glassed-in room with an open-air top, in which grew an old olive tree. But then your father covered the top with chicken wire and began to fill that room with birds, all kinds of birds. Canaries at first, for the song. Goldfinches to sing back. Then local larks, finches, warblers, and bee-eaters. When he included the first weavers, your father had to fill the room with dried grass and dead plants so those yellow things with feathers could build their intricate nests. He brought in nightingales, but they didn’t sing. From the Netherlands, he purchased imported birds of paradise with ridiculously long tails. The aviary became his passion.
Everybody loved it. Even you, cynical you. But were you cynical then?
You have often written that 1974, when you were fourteen, a year before the civil war started in Lebanon, was the single happiest year of your life. You found out that you could pass for normal for short bursts of time, after which you had a good hiding place: your bedroom with the never-ending bookshelf in the new house. You would be able to make it. Not a happy existence, but still—survival. Existence, in and of itself, was an accomplishment. But violence descended, only it wasn’t directed at you personally as you had expected. The Lebanese civil war erupted, and you were bundled up and sent out of the country for safekeeping, the young emigrant.
The house remained, though. Throughout the early stages of the war, nothing touched it. Pressed and flattened between the first two stones, that tiny paper prayer worked its magic. Every time you visited during those first few years of the war, and you did that quite a bit, you noticed that the house stood proud, not a scratch. Every house in the village had a pointillist array of bullet holes, but not your father’s. A missile would fall in the orchard, a grenade would explode on the main road, but the birds in your father’s house kept singing. A miracle if ever there was one. Christian militias, Druze or Muslim ones, they couldn’t harm your father’s house. The Syrian army, Palestinian fighters? The house existed beyond the ravenous cruelty of the war and its mundanity. Bullets, rocket-propelled grenades, missiles, they all bypassed it, swerved and detoured. The wonder lasted for seven glo
rious years. But then the Israelis invaded.
Would the Israelis understand paper prayers? Could the talisman protect against the evil eye of an invading army? Was Druze juju translatable into Hebrew?
A most definite yes, it seemed. Phylacteries were as common among Jews as they were among the Druze.
There were a couple of close calls. When the tanks arrived on the hill above your father’s house, a general’s megaphoned voice warned the village not to harbor any terrorists, the latter defined as anyone who was not welcoming the neighborly Israeli invasion with enough cheer. Fifteen thousand Lebanese were killed within the first two weeks of the Israeli invasion, which obviously meant they were all uncheerful terrorists. If the villagers did not want to be shocked and awed by having their homes bombed into oblivion, they should raise a white flag on the roof to indicate that there were no unfriendly terrorists in the house. Your mother stripped all the linens off the beds and hung the white sheets on the roof’s laundry lines. She worried that would not be enough. For two days, while the tanks loomed above her home, your mother ran back and forth along the laundry lines, shaking the sheets to make sure they were seen from above. Possessed by Lyssa, the spirit of madness and frenzy, your mother set herself up between the folds of each sheet and swayed her arms back and forth, then moved to the next sheet and the next, for forty-eight hours in a row.
The Wrong End of the Telescope Page 18
