Voices of the Lost

by Hoda Barakat

  Brother, I did not kill my mother. I did not kill that woman, either. I left both of them knowing they might die, but that is not the same thing. In fact, they might have died even if I had made some effort to save them. I am not a murderer. This is the will of the Creator, it is His judgement. Why should I not accept His judgement, when for a brief moment He is showing me a little sympathy, between one blow and the next? A moment when life’s harsh gaze turns away, when its eyes blink shut and the sentence it has given me seems briefly lighter.

  My mother was my killer and I am also that woman’s victim. That is how I see it. I did not hurt anyone. All I did was raise my arm, ready to ward off the blows. That is not murder.

  But I miss my mother very much. I miss her and I long for her. In the night I talk to her, and I cry. ‘Mother, why?!’ I ask her in my head. If a mother doesn’t love her daughter, then who will she love in this world? Mother, why did you change so much as you got older? Didn’t I obey you enough? I obeyed you without question, always. Why did you become so harsh, both with me and with my daughter – the girl you snatched straight out of my womb and took away from me, pressing her to your heart? And why did you detest me after my divorce? Why did you want to forget me and erase me from your life? You knew very well why I fled from that man into your embrace, and why I demanded a divorce. Through it all, did you really have to endure more than I did? Why did you find it so easy to see me living a life of evictions and vagrancy, sucked down into the mire of servility, and all but choking to death in the sludge? Was I supposed to seek some kind of absolution? What was my sin?

  I can’t believe that it was all simply about money. And your greed.

  What I keep saying to myself, in my head, is that the man who wrote that letter still hopes to meet his mother, and he’s trusting in receiving her forgiveness now that he’s made a full confession, telling her about his criminal history, all those things he has done with his own two hands. In his letter, he admitted he had no one else, anywhere, and he was standing before her as if he were facing the Creator, submitting willingly to his fate, not shielded by any lies… And so I hope you can hear me from the other world you’re in. I hope you will forgive me. I am a mother too, and I know that you love me, that you loved me when I was a child. And then the world treated you harshly. The hardships accumulated, as they did for me, and the bitterness of it all weighed on your heart. This is what life does to us, how it determines things. Life unleashes its storms on us and we are no more than feathers whirling in hurricane winds.

  But is it life itself that does this, or is it poverty? Sometimes I have the feeling that God created some people unnecessarily. Beings who live exhausting, useless lives, unneeded by anyone, just like the biting, stinging, harmful vermin the Creator made, who carry diseases and lay their eggs on corpses. The Creator’s wisdom, no doubt. Flies, cockroaches, despicable creeping insects, like the man who wrote the letter: harmful and loathsome. Like me too.

  Service broke me. I became a servant of everything and for anyone. If the servants of this earth had an anthem, I would have memorized it long ago and I would never stop chanting it. God’s other creatures, whom He created us to serve, can bite into the sweet fruits of life with their strong white teeth. We don’t envy them. We have no hope of ever being like them, in spite of our mouths watering when the juice runs down their chins. But when life treats us fairly we simply become obedient servants, thanking God that we are fit to serve the others.

  I look at my daughter, there in front of me. She is alone in this world, as I am too. I have felt more isolated, more a stranger, since she came to be with me. She watches television but her eyes are vacant and wandering. I don’t believe she is truly unable to speak. She just wants to torment me, because she hates me. She despises me for what my mother told her: that I had left her. That it was I who caused this situation, that I had abandoned her and wasn’t sending enough money for the two of them, even though – my mother said – I was lounging about in luxury. That I lived a life of sin, working as a whore. That is why my daughter wrapped her head in a hijab as soon as we came here. There’s no doubt she blames me for bringing her into this world that she hates so much.

  I go into the kitchen. I make tea and stand at the window, looking out at the night. I stare into a night whose air is strange and alien, with no home country where it can land in safety. It’s a thick, heavy night out there, with droplets of mist that cling to one’s eyelids and hands. This is not my life, and I don’t know how I slipped into it. I don’t know who pushed me into this night, entangling me in this destiny where I have closed all the doors behind me.

  My beloved brother, I’m still hiding those stolen things in a secret place. It’s a safe place. When you come out of prison, you must put an end to all those doubts and suspicions you have about me. You must stop forcing your harsh words on me. Because now I’ve told you the truth. All of it. You have to help me dispose of the goods. I’ll give you your share of the house and of everything we manage to sell. I have to take care of my daughter, get her into treatment. We’ll conduct ourselves as brothers and sisters do, because I don’t have anyone else now. On my own, I can’t manage things.

  I’m not going to send my letter to you by post. Of course not. I’ll find some way to get it to you. Or I’ll pass it to you in prison during the visit I’m planning to make, a few days from now, or a few weeks, inshallah. Or maybe I should just erase this idea from my head, because it could expose me to serious danger.

  They’re calling us back to work.

  I’ll give it all some more thought.

  Kisses.

  Beloved Father,

  We always found it hard to talk. I kept on believing that the love I felt for you would somehow loosen my tongue, even if I kept it to myself.

  I used to dream about sitting close to you, taking your hands in mine and leaning my head against your shoulder, telling you things, and then you would tell me things. But life seems to be treating us unfairly, increasing the distance between us, pulling us further apart than ever. What I dread most is the possibility of regret, sorrow over opportunities lost to silence or frittered away in denial, when we finally realize that it is too late, that it is no longer possible for the two of us to come together. May God give you a long life, Papa.

  I know how much you love me. After all, I’m the son you waited so long to have. Writing this letter to you today is my way of declaring, in black and white, that I’ve hidden nothing – you really do know me very well, whatever you might say. There are no terrible secrets between us, no shocking past that I couldn’t bear to tell you about face to face, that I could only bring myself to confess in a letter. Whenever I need to convince myself about this, all I have to do is study those photographs where we are close together, as if I were a little piece of your body. Photos in which you are playing with me, or feeding me, or lifting me high overhead, or bending over my bed. Photos where you are laughing, and looking so proud as you show me off to your mother and father; or where you are carrying my satchel on the way to school. Or where we are eating ice cream and I’m crying because it has melted, and it’s running all the way down my arm to my elbow.

  Ever since I found out about your illness – God willing you will come out of it safe and sound – I’ve had this recurring dream. My arms are around you, and either the illness is serious enough to put you in danger, or you are, in fact, dying. In the dream, I am twice my actual size and your body is very small, and naked, and curled up like a foetus or shrunken-looking like a large, featherless bird. And so, when I hold you in these dreams I can enfold you completely, bending over you as if I’m the protective barrier keeping some great peril from descending on you. I keep having this dream even though I know that your illness isn’t serious and that you’re improving steadily. These nightmares won’t leave me alone. If I’ve kept silent about them, it is only because I haven’t wanted to give you any more cause for worry than you already have. And also because I don’t want these nightmar
es of mine to lead to a conversation on a topic we have already been over so often. I mean, of course, my weak personality. And because, anyway, the more broken and disjointed our words get, the more we try to obscure or evade the truth, the harder and more complicated it is to hold on.

  What gave me some courage to write, finally, was a letter written by a woman who was all on her own, lonely and deserted just like me. It’s a letter I stumbled across a long time ago in my little storage locker in the bar I worked in. Yes, back then I worked in a bar here – not a restaurant. Most likely she was one of the girls who worked there as a cleaner, or she was a hostess type sitting with the customers. Maybe she stuffed it into my locker to hide it. Probably she was being followed, for reasons she talks about in her letter. But there’s no address, no signature. The letter also says that she hid a document belonging to someone else. Whatever it was she hid could well have given rise to further accusations against her. It is too late for that now. So much the better for her.

  The point…the point is, I reread that letter, though it’s been more than two years since I found it. I read it again and again, as if I knew that woman personally. Or as if I could actually see her in front of me, asking someone’s forgiveness but discovering she could not get it. And not just because her letter would never arrive. It’s about the need we all have for someone to listen to us, and then to decide they will pardon us no matter what it is we have done. I was a bit shaken when I reread this letter, and I felt some remorse about having forgotten it, there in my pocket, as if I had carelessly but deliberately neglected something that had been entrusted to me. I felt very badly even though I knew perfectly well that the chances of my ever getting that letter to where it was supposed to go were slim to the point of non-existence. As if this were some kind of betrayal, or abandonment. In short, what I did, without having any great hopes, was to go back to that bar and inquire whether anyone had ever asked to see me. No, they said. And the truth was that no one working there back then still worked there now.

  This letter was written by some woman to her brother in prison. She confessed that she had concealed many things from him throughout her life, and she divulged what she had hidden. Now she was telling him everything, because she was alone in this world. This letter, which didn’t arrive where it was supposed to arrive, was like a voice that no one has ever heard – never, not since the very beginning. From the day this woman was born her voice was lost. As I read the letter I felt how close that woman’s fate seemed to mine, and what similar paths our lives had taken. I asked myself – as though I were asking the question along with her – what use is it to resist, if our fates are all sketched out for us from the instant our tiny bodies slide out from our mothers’ bellies? Thinking about this, it was as though I could go back to that moment, to be there watching as I came out into the world, a tiny lump of flesh in the midwife’s hands; to feel, seeing that flesh, a fierce pity along with the pain shooting through tiny lungs suddenly forced to inhale oxygen. As if now, the person I’ve become could actually bend over that nursing infant, longing to take him in my arms and to run away, holding him close.

  My dear father, I don’t want to wallow in my sufferings, so I’m not going to give you a blow-by-blow account. What I do want to tell you right away is that somewhere inside I feel so fiercely proud of you. Of your love for us, and your determination to protect us in times of stress, and how ready you were, always, to make sacrifices for us and for what you believed in, then and still. I try always to imagine myself at your age, to put myself into the times you were living through then. But what paralyses my brain is the question of whether I could ever do what you have done in your life. Anyway, it’s an impossible exercise to imagine such things, totally impossible. No one can put himself in another’s place. What I mean is, in another person’s exact place. And in my case there is a crucial detail, which is that my body – which has made me who I am, in my deepest self – is not your body. My body, which you see as a betrayal. I cannot be a fighter because I am not committed in the way that you are – or I am not a true believer, devoutly pledged to the issues you’ve spent your life defending. What I’m trying to say is that it isn’t because I’m a girlie boy, as you call me. There are plenty like me who have fought and killed and been killed, and they’re probably more savage than the rest. No, it’s because combat and killing aren’t my style. And in any case, I couldn’t do any of it if I wanted to.

  When my masculinity, my sex, slipped from my grasp, when I could see how the beloved body of the child I was began to abandon me, taking on the soft fragility and ambiguity that left it offensive, repugnant and unlovable in your eyes…these were the moments when I most needed (desperately needed) to see that you loved me. Or at least I needed to see that you were ready to give me some help to understand what was happening. You saw it as an illness, expecting me to recover fully, to come out of it free and clear with a little shove from the natural processes of growing up, or simply with a dose of time. An illness, but one without the sort of physical pain, for example, that would lead a dad to take his son to a doctor for treatment or to give him over-the-counter painkillers. My ‘illness’, you thought, was essentially an inadequacy or a deficiency, even if it was also a sign, in your eyes, that I was a depraved and sinful person. At the end of the day, my ‘illness’ was a punishment, or a retribution, and you searched high and low for what had caused it. A curse from heaven, a pathology, a punishment God brought down on you – on you – by visiting it on me?

  Your pain caused me pain, a lot of pain. I wished I could just disappear. I begged God, on my knees, to cure me. If it was God who had erred when he’d made me like this, then who else could I go to in search of deliverance? I started to fear you. I wasn’t afraid of the weapons you carried nor the guns your men surrounded you with. What scared me was the sharp click of your key in the door; your nakedness when you came out of the bath; your loud laugh; your crude, hurtful jokes and horseplay; your sick, underhanded mistreatment of my mother; all the ways you dominated us, on the pretext that you were just defending the homeland from danger. Every time you came by the house, the blood pulsed in my heart with terror and joy. Every time you left us to go to war, I breathed an enormous sigh of relief and immediately began to cry because you might die in the very next battle you entered.

  But I got older, and I got over being a curse or a sickness. Now, I am who I am. Because there are others who have loved me, people other than you. Once again, I began to feel good-looking, comfortable with myself, someone people liked and desired. I’ve seen God in His compassion, His tenderness, the largeness of His heart. The boy you shoved out of the house with your own hands, claiming it was the hashish – one single hash cigarette – what about him? You spat in his face and called him terrible things, blaming him for becoming a deviant. How old was I then? Deviance was your obsession, the spectre you began to see in everyone you encountered and in everything that went on around you. You, who called yourself ‘defender of the weak’, the outcast and untouchable, the exploited; you, who had fought against oppression and tyranny, as you always said over and over. How many deviants have you killed? How many betrayers have you murdered before they could betray anyone?

  Father, one day I watched a documentary about a people who lived in a remote region of Russia, under the czar, somewhere on the border with Siberia. Their creator, their lord, was the raven-god whom they called Kutkh. What was bizarre about this was that they treated their god like one of them. No particular reverence, no exalted status, no worship to speak of. They blamed their god for certain things and they mocked the world this god had created for its deficiencies. They called him ‘stupid’, because the universe in which we live could be a more agreeable place, our existence easier, and life less harsh and less mean. But still, they did consider him their lord and their creator, in all likelihood because he was close to them, he resembled them, and they could criticize him knowing he would not come back at them with revenge or count it against them
or punish them. When the czar’s knights – the Cossacks, mounted on their terrifying stallions – reached those people to bring them into the embrace of the Orthodox Church, they butchered and burned and destroyed, and they used the girls and women as oxen, since there were no such beasts in that region. They enslaved whoever was left and then they erected the Church of God under the exalted mercy and blessed benefaction of the czar.

  Father, is it the czar who represents God’s will on earth? Or might it be the raven? Do the people ever get to choose?

  Father, I did not leave because I was fleeing from you, or from the wars in our homeland. I didn’t leave in order to continue my studies or improve my future chances, or anything else like that. I fled from the czars, and I followed the raven. I loved the raven, and the raven was all that was left to me. No, I am not an angel. But nor am I a devil. I might be closer to the second, I suppose, if we were to explain what happened to me as some kind of retribution.