Dreams of Water

by Nada Awar Jarrar

  Samir has bought his father a wheelchair to take him out for walks in the park. The first time they go out, Salah asks to wear his suede jacket, the camel hair scarf that goes with it and the gloves that Aneesa gave him. Samir wraps a woollen throw around his father’s legs just before they step outside the front door.

  The cold is bearable, Samir thinks as he pushes the chair on to the pavement and prepares to go across the road. There aren’t too many cars driving past but he nonetheless waits until the road is completely empty before going across it and then up the ramp that leads into the park.

  ‘Not many leaves left on the trees, are there, baba? Still, it’s nice to be out again, isn’t it?’

  It rained earlier in the day and the cement path is still dark and wet. Samir stops and bends down to pull Salah’s scarf up around his ears. He looks into his father’s eyes for a moment and smiles.

  ‘You look like I used to when Mum wrapped me up in all those clothes on our trips to the snow. Do you remember, baba?’

  Salah nods and smiles weakly back at Samir. Then he points ahead and they begin to move again. Samir leans into the chair and pushes hard. Salah has lost a great deal of weight but the wheelchair is heavy. There are no children playing in the park because it is still relatively early in the morning. The two men go past the green field that footballers use as a pitch at weekends and over the stream and the small bridge leading to the other side of the park. Salah points again.

  ‘Do you want to go and sit by the pond, baba?’ Samir asks. ‘It might be too cold but we’ll try anyway.’

  They move leisurely down to the water and when they get there Samir stops and puts on the wheelchair brakes.

  ‘It’s a beautiful view, isn’t it, baba? Look at those geese over there. They’ve come all the way from Canada, you know. And there is a duck diving into the water.’

  The pond is dark and still except where the birds are quietly moving across its surface and leaving a faint ripple of light behind them. A squirrel scampers up to the chair and sits up on its luxuriant tail.

  Salah looks up at Samir and Samir nods with a smile. Salah hangs his head and frowns. He holds out his hand.

  ‘Bread?’

  ‘We didn’t bring any bread with us, baba. Did you want to feed the animals?’

  Salah continues to look at Samir.

  ‘I’m sorry, habibi. I’ll be sure to bring something for them next time we come. I didn’t think of it.’

  Salah turns his head away to look at the pond once again. Samir steps up behind him and places a hand on his father’s shoulder. The park has turned suddenly quiet and Samir decides it is time to go back home.

  His parents took him on trips to the mountains when he was a child. They would get into the car, Samir sitting up on his knees by the window in the back, and drive up winding roads, past hills covered in trees and bush. If he opened the window just a little and lifted his head towards it, Samir could feel the air that came through, changing and emptying him somehow, so that when he breathed it in it created a big hollow inside him that was impossible to fill.

  As soon as they reached a village, Samir’s father would slow the car down so that they could look at the houses, stone with red roofs, on either side of the street and further up in the hills.

  ‘Look at that one, habibi,’ his mother would say. ‘Can you see it all the way up there? It’s so well hidden behind the trees, isn’t it?’

  And Samir would strain to see what had fascinated her so much, feeling a familiar disappointment when it proved to be just another old house among the tall umbrella pines.

  ‘Can we go get some water from the spring now?’

  They would drive around looking for the spring that most mountain villages had and Salah would stop the car as soon as they found it, motioning to Samir to come out and help. In the trunk of the car, Samir would pull out the big blue plastic container with a red top and make his way down the stone steps of the spring with it.

  ‘Don’t worry, baba. I’ll do it on my own. You don’t need to come with me.’

  He unscrewed the top and placed the container underneath the spout. The water came out in a constant stream and was somewhere between a trickle and a gush. What didn’t go into the container poured into a stone bowl and down a drain at the side. He wondered where it went after that.

  As the container filled up, the sound the water made going into it changed, echoing loudly and becoming deeper. Samir bent down, cupped a hand over the spout and brought it to his mouth. The water was cold and very good.

  When the container was filled up, he screwed its cap back on, stood up and lifted it with both hands before making his way up the steps. It was very heavy and hung low close to his feet. Samir had to lift both his elbows up so he wouldn’t trip over the container as he climbed up the steps again and past the people who were waiting their turn. His parents stood at the top of the steps watching him and, for a moment, Samir could almost hear them urging him on though they said nothing. He tripped and heard his mother’s gasp. Then he straightened up and started up the steps again.

  ‘Here you go, baba,’ he said once he reached the top.

  ‘Well done, habibi. I’ll put the container in the back and you two get in. We’ve got a long way to go yet.’

  Then they would go to have lunch in a restaurant in one of the larger towns in the area and on the drive home later in the afternoon, Samir would imagine he could hear the water sloshing back and forth in its container in the boot of the moving car.

  It is autumn and the beaches, long and white, are deserted. Samir has made a trip to the south to visit the cities of Sidon and Tyre that his father had always loved. The sun appears reluctantly from behind clouds to warm the sand and here, surrounded by sea and verdant valleys, his heart lurching as he walks, Samir thinks of death: his mother’s passing and Salah’s sudden demise.

  Where do they go, he wonders, those who die? It is impossible for him to think of anywhere that is not a place, and impossible too to imagine that those he had known so well could suddenly disappear.

  When his mother died, he had not been there, had not seen her slowly weaken into something else, something not so strong or enduring, so that he has never quite been able to believe her absence. She appeared to Samir in a dream on the night his father told him of her death, not a shadow of the woman he had known, but an evanescent being that he instantly recognized as Huda before and after death. They sat together, Samir and his mother, in that quiet time between lives, and spoke of everything that had happened between them, without urgency and with complete acceptance. In reminding him of their life together, she had also intimated that he was everything she had ever wanted in a son. When Samir finally awoke early the next morning, he had felt almost happy with relief.

  But with his father, Samir suddenly realizes, there had been no acknowledgement of parting and Salah has already slipped into a shapeless past, an essential part of the man Samir has become but elusive nonetheless.

  He is surprised at the extent of his pleasure in the feeble sunlight. The sand makes his feet heavy as he walks and he has to bend forward with the effort. It is Sunday and he is in shorts and a T-shirt with a sweater over his shoulders. He stops and looks down at his legs, at the light covering of dark hair against white skin. I am fading too, he mutters, rubbing his hands roughly back and forth along his thighs before straightening up again. He wonders what it would be like to have someone with him, a woman, perhaps. He thinks of Aneesa again. She is dressed in a long shift dress and bare feet and is walking towards him across the sand, one hand up, waving, the setting sun behind her. The horizon stretches outwards before him, a grey-blue emptiness above a distant line of water. Samir nods in approval and moves on.

  Aneesa has not yet arrived when Samir returns to the house from work.

  ‘Are we sitting at the table in here?’ he asks his father as he walks into the kitchen.

  ‘I think it’s friendlier, don’t you?’ Salah replies. ‘Besides,
Aneesa doesn’t mind. She likes it in here.’

  ‘I just thought that since we hardly ever use the dining room …’

  ‘Exactly.’ Salah turns away to stir something in a pot on the stove.

  ‘All right, then,’ Samir says after a pause and goes up to his room to change.

  When he comes downstairs again, Aneesa is seated at the island in the middle of the kitchen. She does not stand up this time.

  ‘Your father won’t let me help,’ she says, ‘so I thought I’d just make myself comfortable.’

  ‘I’ll open a bottle of wine and join you,’ says Samir. ‘I’m no good at cooking so I’d better keep out of it.’

  He hears himself speak as he takes out a bottle of red wine, opens it and fetches some glasses. His voice sounds distant in his head but she seems to be reacting appropriately to it, nodding, smiling and glancing towards Salah every now and then.

  They sit down to eat, Salah at the head of the table and Aneesa and Samir on either side of him. Salah picks up a large spoon and serves them the roast chicken and potatoes.

  ‘Help yourselves to the salad,’ he says.

  ‘What is that wonderful flavour?’ Aneesa asks moments later.

  ‘Rosemary. I marinated the chicken in garlic, herbs and lemon before putting it in the oven.’

  ‘Rosemary,’ Aneesa repeats. ‘It translates as mountain laurel in Arabic.’

  ‘Ikleel al jabal,’ Salah says.

  Aneesa smiles and goes back to her food.

  Samir feels agitated at the ensuing silence. His knife slips from his hand and falls to the floor. He bends down to pick it up.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he says as he gets up and places it in the kitchen sink. He takes another knife out of the cutlery drawer and stops before returning to the table.

  Salah has his hand on Aneesa’s arm and they are smiling at each other. She lifts a hand to her mouth and shrugs her shoulders. Samir leans against the work surface. Salah turns towards him.

  ‘Will you fetch some water with you, habibi?’ he asks.

  Samir goes through his father’s things a few days after Salah’s death. Inside a dresser drawer he finds a piece of paper with Aneesa’s address and telephone number in Beirut on it. He realizes that he will have to either call or write and let her know what has happened but for some reason cannot bring himself to do it just yet.

  ‘She is here on her own,’ Salah had said when he first told Samir about her. ‘She is delighted at meeting someone from back home.’

  ‘Baba, she is only young, after all,’ Samir told Salah, worrying that his father was growing too attached to Aneesa.

  ‘Yes, she is, thank goodness.’

  Time to go home, Samir mouths the words silently to himself. He has just had dinner in a restaurant not far from home and is ready to leave. He places his drink on the table in front of him and reaches for his raincoat. When he gets to the door and sees the rain tapping at the window, he goes back to where he was sitting and picks up the umbrella he left behind.

  In the street, he steps into a puddle of murky water.

  ‘Now look what you’ve done,’ Samir mutters angrily to himself, gripping tightly at the open umbrella as he walks.

  Despite the rain, he decides to go home on foot and surges forward. With his head held down, all he can see are legs rushing past on the pavement and the inverted beams of car lights through water.

  He feels a time will come when one thing alone will turn his head; not the vagaries of wealth, nor beauty in a woman, but something else, something more like an end to regrets, a sudden, destined peace.

  When Mother reached out for me, Samir begins to no one in particular, my hand as she held it felt like a shell that had been wrapped in silk, so weightless was her touch. We would stroll along the pavement, stepping carefully off it when we had to cross the street, and I would watch our feet move, her stride slightly wider than mine and my own legs taking little steps forward, skipping when the pace demanded it, and if I tripped, I would feel the pull at my arm, my body being lifted for a moment, floating, before resting on the ground once again.

  He stops to take a breath and sees a poster of sea and nubile girls on the sand in a travel agent’s window. I have imagined myself, Samir says to the shifting multitude around him, on a Mediterranean land standing in the sun, where moments such as these flow like water and all through the valley trees grow like rivers where the river has once been.

  Samir and Aneesa continue to meet, once or twice for coffee and then at a restaurant near Samir’s office for lunch. He is aware of his attraction to her and also of a niggling desire to figure her out, the reasons behind his father’s fascination with a young woman who is in many ways unexceptional. Every time Samir has telephoned Aneesa and told her he wants to talk about Salah, she has agreed to meet him. Still, Samir is not certain she believes his excuse. Perhaps, he sometimes likes to think to himself, she is as interested in me as I am in her.

  Today, he is speaking more easily to Aneesa, feeling less nervous. He asks her fewer questions and and decides to talk about himself instead.

  ‘Sometimes I feel I lack insight,’ Samir says between mouthfuls of salad. ‘You know, the ability to see beyond the obvious, to read people.’

  Aneesa sits across from him with a frown on her face so that he feels she is really listening to him. He lets out a loud sigh and continues.

  ‘Do you ever remember someone just as a feeling, rather than a face? It happens to me all the time, especially with the people I haven’t really figured out – you know, the mysterious ones.’

  He laughs and waits for her to do the same but she does not.

  ‘Like you, for instance,’ Samir says. ‘I feel a distant anxiety, something I know I have not quite grasped yet, and then I realize that I’m just thinking of you. Sometimes, I don’t realize this for several hours or even days, and all the time I’m experiencing this underlying fear. Strange, isn’t it?’

  ‘What are you afraid of?’

  But he has no answer to this. He shrugs his shoulders and looks down at his plate. She touches his shoulder with her fingertips and he watches a smile slowly lift the contours of her face.

  ‘I think of you too, Samir,’ she says quietly.

  He feels slightly flustered.

  ‘My father hasn’t told me very much about you,’ Samir says. ‘It’s difficult, isn’t it? To know just where to start, to work out what the important things about your life really are.’ He puts his knife and fork down and looks directly at her. ‘If you could tell me just one thing about yourself, what would it be? I mean, I suppose I’d have to say leaving Lebanon made me a different person, saved me in a way because it opened up my life and my horizons. Made me more flexible because I found myself in an entirely different environment. If you asked me the question, that is.’

  Aneesa’s face goes still. He had not realized that such a thing could happen, a sudden and certain freezing of movement in the eyes, not a ghostly look, but an immobility with certainty in it, clarity at the edges.

  ‘And I would say …’ she begins. ‘I would say that I once lost a brother.’

  He has left his father alone with the nurse for the first time since Salah’s illness and is surprised that he does not enjoy the freedom of it more. When he gets home, carrying bags of groceries, his first impulse is to rush to Salah’s bedside to make sure he is all right. Instead, Samir goes into the kitchen, sets the bags on the worktop and puts the kettle on before going to his father.

  Salah is sitting up in bed holding up the Arabic newspaper Samir bought him the day before, both arms opened wide. The nurse, a young man with a gentle manner, is standing beside him, pointing to different items in the paper. They do not notice Samir.

  ‘Can you read this headline for me?’ The young man asks.

  Salah speaks out loud, the words running into each other a little, but they are comprehensible nonetheless.

  ‘How about this one? What does it mean?’ The nurse points to ano
ther headline.

  Salah leans forward slightly, reads out loud and delivers a rough translation afterwards.

  Samir holds his breath and remains absolutely still. He has not heard his father put complete sentences together since his stroke and is afraid of interrupting the flow of words. Salah’s voice rises and falls rhythmically, the patient young man standing quietly beside him so that the two of them seem framed by the light coming in from the window, while Samir stands out of sight, trembling helplessly in the doorway.

  Samir sits at his father’s desk in the living room doing his homework when his mother comes in and looks over his shoulder.

  ‘You’ll have to work very hard to get into university overseas,’ she says, patting him on the back.

  Salah puts down the newspaper he has been reading.

  ‘Overseas?’

  Huda comes round the desk and sits next to her husband on the sofa.

  ‘He’s not staying here,’ she says firmly.

  Samir looks from one to the other of his parents and says nothing.

  ‘What’s wrong with our universities?’ Salah asks.

  ‘I want something better for our son.’

  ‘So do I, habibti, but we have an excellent university over here.’

  Huda shakes her head.

  ‘Salah, you know I’ve always planned for him to leave this country and have a proper future.’

  ‘But this is his home. This is where his future should be.’

  Samir feels sorry for his father. His mother, he knows, is bound to get her way in the end. Huda has always talked about him leaving once he grew up but now the idea seems more real than it has ever been before. The thought of being somewhere different where no one knows him excites him.

  ‘We’ll talk about this later,’ Samir hears his father saying. ‘Just get on with your work now, son.’

  Aneesa is looking flushed as she steps through the door.

  ‘I practically ran over here from the bus stop, it is so cold,’ she tells Samir, her voice slightly breathless. ‘This jacket is never quite enough. How are you, Samir? Is Salah upstairs?’