by Sinan Antoon
11
The truth is I never really came back from the hospital. That is what my mother said. I just wasn’t the same Maha anymore. A part of me had died and been buried with the baby. Even though I didn’t wear black, my heart was shrouded in mourning and two dark clouds were lodged behind my eyes, ready to burst at any moment.
Every day was like running the long and arduous laps of a marathon against my will. I did what was required as a student, going to lectures and studying. I looked after Luay and tried to be nice to him.
Even though he and I shared a bed, my body was in another world; it was as if it were visiting the part of me that had died—to grieve over it, so that I too could begin to grieve. Whenever Luay tried to approach me playfully, I would shrink away like a petrified flower. I realized how much I had changed and admitted as much.
“Your blossom has wilted,” I told him when he took me in his arms, whispering, as he always did, that I was his flower.
He would comfort me, as he kissed my forehead, and say, “My flower doesn’t wilt. It’s just bruised.”
12
I became hypersensitive to noise after the bombing incident and the slightest sound would startle me. I felt better after we moved to the apartment in Youssef’s house because it was quiet there, and once my mother had left, I really enjoyed the quietness. My mother felt that I had made a good recovery, at least physically, and that she could go back to Ainkawa to her job and the rest of our family. Unlike my in-laws’ place, Youssef’s house was on a quiet side street that had little or no traffic since one of its exits was blocked by large concrete barriers that only allowed pedestrians through. Other than for the maqams which Youssef listened to occasionally, and the sound of the door to the backyard opening and closing, I rarely heard any noise coming from downstairs when I was home from school.
Occasionally, the faint sound of the satellite stations that Youssef watched drifted upstairs and punctured the solitude of my evenings, and I would sometimes hear him talking back and arguing with whatever the newscasters were saying, but none of this bothered me. I had gotten used to the earplugs that the doctor had given me when I was having trouble sleeping at the beginning, and I used them a lot because I craved silence. I even wore them on my way to and from school to mute the din of cars and people.
I almost died once when I was crossing the road engrossed in my thoughts. I heard what sounded like a loud squeak and looked up to see a woman on the sidewalk with her hand across her mouth and a man next to her raising his hand in the air as he looked at me.
When I turned around to look behind me, I saw a white car not more than a meter from where I stood. The furious driver leaned out of the window and began shouting.
“Hey, what do you think you’re doing walking in the middle of the street? Are you blind? What are sidewalks for?”
His lips looked like they were slapping against each other as he screamed.
I felt terrible and apologized repeatedly, gesturing with my hands, but the words must have been inaudible; I could tell neither he nor anyone else heard them. As he drove off, he twirled his index finger back and forth on his temple in a gesture telling me I was crazy.
13
My spirit found solace in another world in which I looked onto the torment of the saints and the agony of the Virgin Mary and her son. As soon as I was done with the reading I had to do for school, I would turn to the Bible which my grandmother, Nana, had given me, and to a couple of books I’d found in Hinna’s room. I had gone in to clean the room one day because it had become so dusty and I found Treasure of Worship and the Marian Month there.
I’d always loved Jesus and Mary, ever since I was little, but after the incident, I felt that I had discovered a deeper dimension to the Virgin; I now understood what she represented for those in distress.
I became obsessed with Fairouz’s religious repertoire, especially the Easter hymns. I would listen to her on my headphones or turn up the volume really loud and let her chants fill the house, after I had to stop using the earplugs when they started to cause an allergic reaction and became painful from overuse. I would close my eyes and visualize Fairouz’s voice as a flight of angels picking up the shreds of my heart and stitching them together.
They would gather me up and take me with them to the eternal garden of sorrows. I didn’t feel the need to say anything to anyone, not even to myself—Fairuz voiced all my pain and conveyed perfectly how my heart was encased in a wreath of thorns, along with everything else.
I am the mother of sorrows, with no one to console her, May the death of your son be a life for those who seek it, The mother of Jesus wept, and her onlookers wept.
I pity a nation that kills its shepherd Doves cry over the scattering of its people Come to Mary, his mother, let us console her.
O beloved, O beloved, what has become of you?
He who sees you cannot but grieve for you, the Redeemer, O beloved, with what sins did the Just one burden his children?
Upon you they inflicted wounds that cannot heal, That night, when God the savior prostrated in the grove, praying, All of creation prayed for the one who enriched us with prayer, The olive trees weep, and lips call out to him,
“O my beloved, whither do you go? Is faithfulness forever lost?”
. . .
Speak to me, speak to me, O beloved son!
How can I see you thus and not weep for you?
Your wounds sear my entrails,
Your agony pierces my heart,
What life for you mother, after your death, O my son?
And from death’s cradle, I would hear Bashar calling out: O Mary, my mother, your keening my tears has multiplied.
Have mercy and cease! Leave me, go back.
O Father, why do you forsake me in my pain?
My moans are suffocating me, my ribs are rent apart.
Luay was patient and devoted but his patience gave out one evening when he came back and found me listening to those chants with my eyes closed. He too enjoyed them from time to time, and especially on the Feast of the Resurrection—Easter—but not every single solitary day, as he put it.
“Come on, honey,” he muttered. “Enough already. . . . Every day has become Good Friday!”
He couldn’t understand how I could wallow in such grief. Nor why—
it’s not as if we’d lost the baby after he was born or that I couldn’t get pregnant again. That’s what he told my mother. I don’t know why he didn’t speak to me directly. It was his son, his own flesh and blood, too. More than once, he urged me to see a psychiatrist, but I wouldn’t hear of it. I hadn’t gone crazy, I told him.
I did some Googling and found several sites which said that depression after a miscarriage might last as long as three years and not resolve even after a successful pregnancy. When I sent him the links, he apologized for being hard on me, and I thought he’d finally understood, but not a month passed before he started again, reminding me that even Christ’s anguish came to an end and that Good Friday was followed by Holy Saturday, after which there was Easter Sunday. “You’re locking yourself up inside the Good Friday part,” he said.
The only hymns I’d listen to were Mother of Sorrows , Alas My Beloved , and Mary Is Risen , and as soon as they’d finish, I would go back to the beginning of the CD. “Why not let Fairuz also bring you her tidings of hope and redemption?” he asked.
I had tried to listen to some of the other Easter canticles, but I didn’t like them as much as the songs of sorrow. They didn’t mean anything to me.
O, Virgin who is pure, rejoice, I say also rejoice For your only son rose from the grave on the third day O New Jerusalem, light up for the Lord’s glory unfolding Rejoice now and celebrate O Jerusalem And you, pure Mother of God,
Be gladdened by the resurrection of your son
Christ has risen from the dead and has stamped on death with death
This is the day the Lord has given us to rejoice and celebrate.
The Son of God
rose from the dead every year, but the son of man, my son, went to his death before even being born and he would never rise again. My womb was a tomb and my body its graveyard—
one that I could visit at any time without going anywhere.
14
I began to visit the garden of sorrows, where Jesus prayed for the last time with his disciples, on a regular basis. I would kneel down every Friday evening to pray for an hour and read Christ’s message to me in the Treasury of Worship . I would accompany him in the agony that he suffered in Gethsemane as he tried to soften the bitter blow of his disciples forsaking him when they were unable to stay awake with him even for one hour.
I now believe what my grandmother used to tell me when I was little. She said that olives had been a sweet fruit and that they only turned bitter the night Jesus cried alone in Gethsemane and the olive tree drank in his tears. As a child, I tried to imagine how bitterness came to be lodged in the olive tree that had imbibed Jesus’s grief. How had olives in the rest of the world become bitter? Did the tree tell the other trees in Gethsemane of Christ’s pain? Had its branches breathed out his tears in the form of dew? Did the roots of the tree whisper to those of its neighbors? And how had the news spread throughout the olive groves of the earth?
15
I’m carrying my infant, he is crying from thirst. All around us is the desert. There’s just one cloud above our heads, it’s moving with the wind, and a voice from the sky says, Run after the cloud! Soon, it will burst and release its waters. Run, run that your son may drink! And I run, naked and barefoot, but the cloud doesn’t stop, and it doesn’t burst. I run and run, panting, as my child cries. The cloud moves faster and I cannot keep up with it. It disappears on the horizon. I shush my baby and try to give him my tears to drink but all he does is cry. I wake up crying and my baby isn’t there.
I’d wake up from these nightmares wet with tears, climb out of bed and quietly go down the stairs to Hinna’s room. There I felt calm. I’d lie down on her bed and go to sleep. One day, Youssef came in, but as soon as he saw me he left the room. He must have heard me coming down. He never asked me why I had been sleeping there or said anything about it afterward.
16
Facebook became my window on the world, and I’d log in to get news of my sister, Shadha, and of our relatives in the Iraqi diaspora. I’d look at whatever new photos they had posted of special celebrations or visits they had organized, and would read their comments. I’d look for Shadha online and would chat with her there or through Skype whenever she was at the internet café close to where they lived because they didn’t have internet at home. I’d ask her about school, about our parents, and about Ainkawa. I knew what was going on in a general sort of way because my mother called me regularly, but I wanted another version than the official family news that my mother always gave, saying everything was going well, there were no explosions or car bombs, and no power cuts. Everything was quiet, Mama would say, they were safe and just waiting for our emigration papers to come through. Then my father would get on briefly, he’d ask after Luay and tell me to convey his greetings to him and to Youssef.
The news according to Shadha was more substantial. I missed her and felt that she needed me. Shadha wasn’t happy the first year they were in Ainkawa. She had a very hard time at school with her new teacher. Her grades dropped and she was no longer the outstanding student she had been in Baghdad. She complained about being lonely, she didn’t have any real friends, and the only friend she had made that first summer had left for Sweden after her own family’s emigration request had been approved. She said the atmosphere at home was depressing, that she was bored and felt suffocated because the three of them shared a bedroom.
Father insisted on watching satellite TV all day, only the news mind you, even though it was always the same news, as Shadha said. He’d smoke and say very little except to reprimand her when she stayed out late at the internet café. The last time she and I spoke, she told me that our mother had had an argument with a Christian woman from Ainkawa who was complaining that the arrival of all the Baghdad Christians in their midst had caused rent inflation—they competed with locals over everything, down to the air they breathed!
“Even Christians are prejudiced,” Shadha protested. She had to be patient, I said. Everything would be fine once we got to Canada.
There, she would have a room of her own and a lot more freedom.
I got a request on Facebook from my friend, Israa, with whom I was happy to reconnect. She had dropped out of school two years earlier and married a relative of hers from Australia who had come back to the old country to find himself a bride after divorcing his Australian wife. She’d moved to Sydney without bothering to finish her degree because Australia didn’t recognize credits earned in Iraq. She’d had to go back to square one and start from scratch.
I also found a Facebook group called Beautiful Iraq whose members exchanged photographs and songs from what they referred to as the good old days. There were rare and beautiful photos and the comments made by the members of the group reminded me of
Youssef’s accounts of the past and his lament over its ruination.
That past where everything was wonderful and pristine. The strange thing was that for these people the past didn’t begin or end in the same place. Some of them considered the Baath Party’s coming to power and the brutal way Abdel-Karim Qasim was put to death as the end of the ‘good’ times. Others felt Saddam’s accession to the presidency in 1979 was the beginning of the end.
The good times stretched to 1991 for yet others who regarded the sanctions as the turning point for Iraq, and then there were some who considered the 2003 invasion the end. Most were nostalgic about the time of the monarchy and they posted photographs of the former royal family, the subtext being that their brutal execution in the military coup was the beginning of the descent into the abyss. Whenever I read these jeremiads, I’d wonder about the time of the monarchy: hadn’t Assyrians been killed even during those halcyon days of royal rule? Hadn’t Iraqi Jews effectively been expelled from their country overnight after being collectively dispossessed? Hadn’t poverty been widespread?
And the regimes that followed—weren’t they soaked in the blood of the Kurds and the Shiites who were slaughtered and thrown into mass graves?
Beginnings and endings were all jumbled up. As they each cried over their own Iraq, I felt that I had no happy time to look back on. I looked at those pictures and the comments accompanying them and concluded that my halcyon days were yet to come. Maybe they would happen over there, in Canada, far from death, far from car bombs, far from all the hatred coursing through people’s veins.
We’d leave them the country so that they could torch it and desecrate its remains; they would shed bitter tears over what had once been only after it was too late.
17
Luay woke me with a kiss on the forehead before leaving for work.
I asked him about Youssef and what had transpired the previous night. He said naturally, Youssef was upset, but he wasn’t angry.
I told Luay I was sorry about what had happened and he kissed me once again, this time on the cheek.
“It’s okay,” he said, “but make sure you apologize to him. I must get going.”
We agreed to meet at home that evening so that we could go to church together, like we did every Sunday. I reminded him that it was the anniversary of Hinna’s death.
I washed my face, got dressed quickly and went downstairs to apologize to Youssef before leaving for school. Even though his car was parked outside, he seemed to have gone out. I waited half an hour but had to leave after that. I almost called him but decided it would be best to apologize to him in person.
I wasn’t able to focus on the dissection lecture and kept thinking back to what had happened the previous evening. I felt really bad: I loved Youssef and respected him, but I just didn’t see the world the way he did. He didn’t know what it was not to have one’s own home and to feel prey
ed upon or threatened by potential predators. He didn’t know, and would never know, what it was like for a woman to lose a baby. He didn’t get it that the Muslims didn’t want us in their midst and that they were treating us like intruders. How strange it was that he watched all these cable news shows and heard all the things they said yet insisted that it was all “merely a passing cloud.”
The professor was talking about growing tissue and cell cultures in laboratory settings, citing examples that showed the incredible advances that had been made in recent decades. Years earlier, I would have been excited to learn more about the human body. I considered the human form to be exquisitely complex and felt glad that we were also blessed with a mind to understand it and protect the life that God had infused it with. It made me proud that I was going to be a doctor. All these new discoveries still impress me, but my enthusiasm has been replaced by feelings of nihilism. We spend long years in lecture halls and laboratories, and we wade through books to learn all the intricate details that other people have gathered over hundreds of years about how to care for the body and spare it suffering and death. But then others who are illiterate bigots come along and rip a body to pieces at the flick of a switch or by pressing a trigger. Blood everywhere, and the country becomes one massive dissection lab, but now instead of the dead, they experiment on the living. Deathology is the new science.
During moments of absolute despair, I would seek refuge in Jesus, and ask for his forgiveness. You commanded us to love our enemies, I’d pray silently, but I can’t. I cannot love them. I don’t understand them and I cannot curb the hatred and the revulsion I feel toward them. Especially when I see pictures of those enraged turban heads ranting on the satellite channels, their eyebrows bristling with anger and their hearts filled with rage. When I saw one of their faces leap out from a poster on my way home from school, I couldn’t help thinking that such hearts knew neither love nor mercy. We used to rail against the pictures of Saddam everywhere, and now posters of these men proliferated like amoeba. It was as if the same polluted material had been cloned and implanted anew.
