by Alia Mamdouh
What’s the meaning of this, Nader? I don’t like your shaven face. Your skin is so clear that it makes you look too sweet, like a bit naïve. I really like you better aimless and lost among people, a little crazy, oddball, not looking like yourself. So that I don’t know you at all and the nearer I get to you the more you separate yourself from me—I get dizzy trying to follow you and I have to work really hard—and that’s what I want!
Suhaila, on the other hand, would stand me there in front of her even though I was already twenty-six years old and my hair was beginning to thin. Seeing its long coal-black locks flying across my forehead and down into my face, she would tie it back for me in a rubber band and tug me forward a little and sigh. Would you tell me, now, how such respectable seriousness can come together with such youth in a single face? Now, would you just tell me that?
I loved to really make myself sly and clever in front of her as I also worked to do in Layal’s presence. But Layal! No sooner did she meet me in Paris, long after those years of stupid pride, than she let out a dramatic sigh in my face and gave me a firm hug.
You’ve always been attractive, ever since adolescence, but I never imagined that you would truly fascinate me like this! You are aware of it, aren’t you? Don’t you think your attractiveness is your major talent?
What’s the use of appeal and youth when Layal isn’t with me—when she isn’t my lover or my wife or a friend of mine? A relationship without clarity, so much so that I could not even say what it was that we had had between us throughout those years. My “respectable seriousness” had held no attraction for her in that past—to the contrary, it brought me low from the start and it still does, because it appears in the wrong time and place. Nor has my gravity been of any help since I have become a married man. My mother did not take Layal’s characterization of me seriously; she couldn’t consent to it. In my first visit to Paris after graduating from the university she would beam a little-girl smile into my face. You’re very sweet and nice but you don’t look like someone who inspires confidence! she would say.
It wasn’t a description of my traits that I had ever given any thought to. All I wanted was to disappear from her life, to make my own way, even if my back were to stoop with cares or my forehead to go wrinkled and my hands rough with cracks. Suhaila makes me look at myself and so I forget her a little. My faraway mother—that’s what she is, and that city, Paris, took from her and gave the takings back to me. I would become stronger: my backbone would firm up, my bones would grow strong, and my manipulative abilities would double, while Suhaila wilted, and was diminished, and grew smaller.
All of the cities to which we came, leaving other places behind, stole something from her. What it was I do not know, but I would witness it in those storms, in the long spells of silence and the feelings of aversion as she shrank from what lay around her. As for that torturous suffering: she called it the mask that has settled permanently into place, turning into a sort of regime in itself. I see that right in front of me, face to face, as she starts to look more and more like charcoal briquettes that someone left outside. When I come near I can see that she was once aflame but the fire has gone out. Layal, too, was much changed the last time I saw her. She had finished her university studies and gotten a master’s degree with honors and then had begun to work toward a doctorate. Somehow or other she had dampened the flame; now she seemed quieter, deeper. Layal, almost Layali, Nights, had become a single layla now that Beirut and Paris had taken from her, and from me, all of those nights.
And now, here I am, returning to this place. Was that inclination of mine a love gone astray or was it a patent misery whose steep price I was still paying to this very day? I don’t know. Layal had made my blood curdle with fear: in my dreams I faced her in one-to-one combat. Awake, I would not be strong enough to lift my head in her presence. I look like I’m falling asleep as the taxi driver leads me to my new destiny. I have traveled from Montréal to New York. I tried to sleep on an uncomfortable seat until the Concorde flight to Paris was announced. Much earlier, I saw Sonia’s anger as she read the price of the ticket but a look from me had silenced her. Among the many words that came crowding into my mouth not a single one came out. She noticed. She was alarmed at my silence for she no longer knew what she ought to do. Like my grandmother, Suhaila suffers from high blood pressure. She takes medication and reduces her salt retention with long walks. And yet, she treats herself carelessly—perhaps as I already knew she would—and as if it is of no consequence. Isn’t that so? No, Caroline responds, that is not true at all. She’s playing tricks on you. She is doing it to try to provoke you, and she has gone on provoking you for her own sake as well as for yours. It’s amazing, Nader, how like my mother she is. In this one respect, they are peas in a pod. Mothers in general are alike when it comes to this sort of situation. But this is purely her—to the contrary, she is coming up with new kinds of artistry in the service of health and bodily strength and liveliness.
How is that?
She has a great deal of enthusiasm for following lectures on maintaining a fresh and varied diet, Caroline explains. Her spirits rise every time she reads or hears about some new idea—everything you could possibly imagine. The fragrance of the honey that alters her troubled mood: she chooses the finest sort from stores that specialize in organically produced food. She practically breathes in vegetables and seafood, and she keeps track of all different kinds of river and ocean fish, not to mention fish that comes from lakes. Your mother laughs, Nader, when this comes up. She says that fish have discharges like women do and to eat them makes us as strong and frisky as newborn fillies.
Don’t you see, Caroline—your mother says to me—that one’s enjoyment of the world grows many times over when one has the pleasure of sipping or swallowing, exactly in the way bodies lap up the gestures of dance and the notes that make up music. She began saying that a lot in our hearing—when I was around, and some of our girlfriends were, too. She would go into the little kitchen in the studio next to the Théâtre du Soleil—Tessa put her there. I told you, of course, that Tessa arranged it so that she would have a decent stipend, for the time being, as a non-permanent member of the foreign acting company. She rolls up her shirt sleeves, puts on that striped vest over her own clothes, puffs out her chest, and launches into it. Mood and mind will change for the better—there, Caroline. Get in touch with Blanche, Narjis, Hatim, Asma and Wajd, because today I’m going to rob the World Food Bank. I’m a thief, my dear. We have to learn how to steal good things from within us, as long as the gods are as stingy as this toward us. All we can do is to compose our own sources for our health and amusement, for our short lives. My saliva runs just thinking about the dishes I’m intending to make for Nader, Leon, and Sonia, and for Tessa and all of you. I am playing tricks on the illness and on age. Maybe these are ruses whose only benefit is more dishes washed and more swollen hands, but they ensure whatever remains, whatever there is, whether it is days or seconds. They are a warranty that I can spend my only remaining wealth—what lies in my imagination, and in my senses, the intuition I have. Once again I’m consuming the world. Instead of the world consuming me.
Four
I
Sonia is beside me, the child is asleep in his room, and I’m packing my suitcase. Her face is confronting me but I’m trying to avoid looking at her.
“Yes, Nader? Did you say something?”
She has come closer and now she is facing me. She’s a bit unsteady. She tries to hug me but I’ve got my head bent, apprehensive for myself and for her. She tips my head upward with her hand but still I avert my face from her gaze.
“Do you want me to help with anything?”
“No, no thanks. Just sit down, here.”
But she didn’t. She stood behind me, encircled me with her arms, brought her chest closer and began to rub her breasts slowly against me while at the same time she was turning me around to face her. Turning me to her chest. After Leon’s birth I would tell her not to g
et upset or tense as long as she was nursing him; otherwise, the milk didn’t come out so abundantly or freely. Maybe she felt shy or embarrassed or did not know what she was doing. Or perhaps she wasn’t very happy about the whole business, worried that it would cause her breasts to stretch and sag. I would wake up in the middle of the night and begin feeding the baby and washing and cleaning him. There were his feces, which I would easily take care of, and then I would wipe his red behind, put on salve and see him in front of me refreshed and crooning. Maybe I was like my mother in these things; if I had had milk I would have nursed him too. I’ll say that to Suhaila and I’ll bet she’ll laugh. But Sonia doesn’t laugh, not at all. She isn’t scowling but she is a little down.
Good-looking—Sonia’s that. Dark skinned with lovely, flashing large honey-brown eyes, a wide forehead, straight nose, and taut lips that are rather thin and dry. A very slender body that I worry will snap in two in my arms. Her steps are slow, as if she is an elderly woman even though she is still in her thirties. Her chest rises and falls and I surmise that she will be fast asleep very soon. This body was at its peak state four years ago: elegant, lithe, attractive, flaming the moment I touched it. But what first drew me to her was her sense of cultural identity. Like me, she’s from the East. She speaks English with the fluency of its native speakers who colonized her country as they did mine. And so we were a blend of things: in us were combined three of the world’s most ancient civilizations. She was Arab and Persian on her mother’s side and Indian on her father’s side. I thought that our difference would be our freedom: that it would keep us from misunderstanding each other if any problems should arise between us. Are unlike cultures more able to approach each other, more receptive to mutual understanding, than those that have always been linked and close? Why did various sorts of misunderstandings arise between us that I wouldn’t have imagined happening had I married Elizabeth, my English classmate at university? Our friend William married a Palestinian woman and they’re content, in fact they’re happy overall. Is a Western man more apt to compromise, to give something up, or better able to adapt than is the Eastern woman, or the Western woman who marries a foreigner? We are an emotional people. We descend from cultures where emotions are the decisive factors. They, on the other hand, are more rational and calm—the opposite of us. I was thinking all of these things when Sonia’s frightened voice reached me.
“But, Nader, in case, I mean, God forbid, what . . .”
We aren’t strong enough to look each other in the eye. I’m dripping with sweat and I feel a sort of resentment or spite, though not just against her.
“Nader, we’re alone in Montréal and you know the rest of it. You mustn’t leave us on our own here for long. Do you think it might be something serious?”
She looked like she was about to collapse and I grabbed her. Holding her, I stared into her face. She was very pale. In fact, she didn’t look at all like herself. Her emotions are very strong but she has drawn apart from me.
Our love swings back and forth as if it is just eluding us. Both of us. It is a love we wrap in acceptance and apathy, a love teetering on the edge of the chasm and liable to plunge off the precipice because it carries the affliction of dizziness rather than being carried by the giddiness of a happy love. I will say I love you out loud but I say it without feeling that those words are lodged solidly in my heart. This has been a love not of the powerful and intense kind that could make me ill and deprive me of sleep, but nor is it of the weak variety that leads to forgetting such that I would have to consciously watch over it to preserve it from complete collapse. My love is a light thing, as if it serves to keep a void at bay. And so I do not attain the longed-for ideal nor is my lack ever reduced. How was it that this happened and why only now am I seeing it? Was my love feeble from the start or did it sometime ago grow weak and wither away without my noticing? Why do I feel so dull when I am in her arms? Run-of-the-mill, gauche, and clumsy, and my heart wants more than what I—or she—can supply. My appetite for sex has diminished to almost nothing. I don’t know when that happened. I have come to a place where I no longer know, no longer desire, and no longer need. I love my imagination when it roams wide and deep and she’s there next to me, but she prefers other things and I don’t know what they are since she has never described them to me. For example, I don’t like porn films. I bought a couple of them, yes, that happened, and we watched together but they didn’t get me going. Of course I’m not discounting porn films in themselves. But they really don’t do anything for me in the way of pleasurable and untroubled sensations. In fact, they caused me to forget myself and my own pleasures because instead I became absorbed in what I was watching. I told her that I love guessing games and the imagination—I think it is all less boring that way. But she keeps quiet; she doesn’t trust what I’m saying. And then I am troubled, but I don’t let her notice. That is the way I have been in this relationship. I will go to sleep and wake up sensing that my own fluid has drenched the sheets beneath me. She has not dared to comment and I no longer care. In those moments I have had the feeling that we are merely a married couple who stare at each other just like every other married pair in the world. She and He!
When Suhaila arrived chez nous she sensed that something in the air. Not because she is four years older than I am—that’s a trivial factor. Later, after Leon’s birth, Suhaila decided to proceed by simply taking my breath away. Uneasy, I heard her out.
Nader, she said, inside of you I see a mother, a sister, some kind of soothing feminine touch. You’re a gentler, nicer mother than I am, you’re better at it than are a lot of my friends, not to mention the aunts. I see you as one of those good and useful women—you wash the little one and you are regular with his bottle and you make new and varied foods on Sundays. You’re good at organizing what has to be done in the household—cleaning, keeping the garden nice, paying attention to décor, hanging pictures, fixing electrical problems and spigots and broken appliances. You turn the rugs and do things I no longer remember, and you do all of it with the generous chest of a nursing mother who is never tired or fed up. Where do you get all of this patience?
Suhaila puts her finger right on the wounds, and she doesn’t stop there. Her voice has a sly quality to it.
It is not just that fatherhood is an instinct in you. It’s a gift, a matter of will and stubbornness. Everything you touch turns to fatherhood. The kitchen knife and the paving stone, the flowers in the garden and the flour in the cake mold—even when you want to appear naïve, just as you are doing right now, acting as though you don’t know what you are doing, to fool me or to put her off the track. I can’t help but wonder when I see these abilities bursting out in you; and they come from somewhere you know but we don’t. It’s as if you were born a father and the only thing you are suited for is to be a father. Damn you, how did it happen that you are better at it than we were, we—your parents, whether we were together or each on our own?
I went about closing the suitcase and I set it down upright, ready to go. I tried calling Paris one last time but I had no luck. Where had Caroline gone off to? Suhaila had praised her lavishly but near the end of her letter, my mother added an odd line: I don’t know why she stirs up my suspicions—but I prefer a friendship like this because it keeps my mind constantly alert. My mother went on to say, Caroline is the one who trained me in the wonders of that pale man, Bill Gates. One day she stood there opposite me as if we were adversaries in a state of war. Her palm, out in front of me, was very white, thin, and marble-like, and so still that it might have been narcotized. Her arm all the way up to the shoulder was every bit as rigidly unmoving. She trained me, and she swore by Bill Gates, by instruments, and numbers, and symbols, and new inventions, and all the different technologies. As she gazed at me, the very man seemed to hover before me: C’mon, Suhaila, shake off those old terrors of yours, and don’t answer me saying that the smell of paper affects your body and your mind too—it may well be that the hanging gardens of Babylon nev
er did exist. Come on, close that old mailbox of yours and come to the blessings of the internet. Throw away your ink pens and your airmail stationery and your heavy envelopes—toss them all into the trash. Suhaila, do you hear me? Where have you gone? Are you with me? You know, Nader, Caroline is not a monochrome person but what is strange about her is that her actions hardly vary.
II
As I pace around the room everything shoots through my mind in a matter of seconds. The mixed marriage: is that the flaw, the cause of the disorder? We speak English at home and French at the firm. And Arabic—I speak it with Suhaila when she comes; and as we do so we get the definite impression that Sonia is uncomfortable, even irritated. We are very fond of our language and we converse in it, but we abandon it when she is with us. When she goes to the bathroom or goes to sleep early, we pounce on Arabic as if it is the food of paradise. We joke, we quarrel in it, we put on airs and we remember the city and the world and the old house. Suhaila refuses sometimes to speak English. She says to me, She should have learned Arabic, not just for your sake but also for hers. It isn’t nice, this look she has in her eyes about our language. True, English is the language of the strong and powerful these days, but does that mean we must bury ourselves and our language in the ground and stand watching while the worms eat us? And what about the children, Nader, will . . . ?
Suhaila feels that Sonia, in spite of the fact that she comes from the East—even further east, which suffered as we did from the dominance of Great Britain and its arrogance—still stumbles between a sense of superiority and an inferiority complex which she holds simultaneously. My mother goes on. It’s not up to me, she says, to counsel you on a psychiatrist for her, or for us. I don’t have diagnoses that explain how we hold on to a partner when thousands of miles of complexes and illnesses and disparities separate us. We—your father and I—were from the same country but the nightmares and harshness and pains drove us to living in a permanent state of war. And here we are, you and I, together now. I cook and prepare and write down recipes for you, recipes for Iraqi and Arab dishes, as if I am infusing my Iraqi breath, my very soul, into the fragrance of our food, but onto her tongue and my grandson’s before I put it on your tongue. Food is the language of sympathy. If mutual understanding or communication between human beings is hard because of language, maybe food offers some merciful solutions to us, we children of this earth.
