by Alia Mamdouh
She would sing and dance with Leon, erasing the borders between them. With him she repeated local Iraqi expressions as if to offer him the ancient tablets of Mesopotamia, the scenes and texts and numerals of our history. She paid no attention to the resentment appearing on Sonia’s features but rather plowed on, inventing games, movements, and other means of amusement. And the child in the end was drawn to her. The two of us—Sonia and I—faded into the background, part of the crowd. I wasn’t in my own country nor was she in hers, and we weren’t (in either fact or intention) compatriots. Perhaps it was merely hopes, desires, and a sort of courage and fear jumbled together, about being a failure as a married couple. For in our case, clinging together as a passionate twosome who had come close to drowning in love (as they say) meant water that hadn’t even crept over our toes, not really. And these were two lovers who hadn’t exactly made it to the furthest frontier of anything, let alone passion. Conditions were ripe for evasion more than they were suitable for coming together, and it may well be that the quarrels and the anger we had buried in our hearts were preferable to dialogue.
Little by little and as the days have passed—and then the years—my ignorance of her has grown even vaster. It is possible that she feels the same way. And here we are facing each other now, performing the rites that marriage, any marriage, requires; the pressure and intimidation. As for flight and abandonment, they will come. Why rush it?
“By law, Sonia, whether here or over there in England, you’ll receive all the papers—the will we wrote together, if I should die, or if I don’t return for any reason. Everything will go naturally as long as it is according to the law. Come on, don’t hold back your tears if they’re there. My mother always said, The dead surround me more than the living. Why did she say that, Sonia? Was it to remind me of my father or of myself? Am I dead in her eyes because I am here and she is there? Is this the essence of death?”
A little scream escaped her. “God keep you, you’ll come back to us safe and sound.”
I went on, my timbre that of a computer-generated voice. “You’ll find all the accounts written out, the mortgage, what we owe on the furniture, the car payments. In case I’m gone for a while it would be useful to have all of the financial recordkeeping written in a hand that isn’t shaky. You would have to seek out a lawyer first.”
I explained to her the tasks she would have to take on. My voice was firm and my words were a little stern, and I felt the energy draining out of her, minute by minute. She burst into tears. I was calm, almost empty, talking as if I were reporting in to my boss. I didn’t get anything wrong; my voice was clear and my sentences cold. I didn’t repeat a single word and I deliberately made do with the smallest possible sum of feelings, all in a voice that sounded familiar enough, a voice I had heard before. It was the words that filled my throat to bursting and threatened to choke me even as they jumped awkwardly from my tongue. I was talking about my own death to keep from getting myself mired in the death of Suhaila, to keep myself from thinking about her passing. The idea of death pulling a fast one on me was the ultimate hope with which to thwart the reality of Suhaila’s absence. And so . . . these were the only precautions I took before leaving Canada on my way to Paris.
Five
I
The traffic has gotten heavier and the driver has withdrawn his attention from me completely. The taxi is making snail-like progress: we slow to a crawl and then move ahead, and finally we come to a standstill. As we venture to cross the vast square in front of the Arc de Triomphe there escapes his lips a stream of curses against “this reckless extreme generation.” He waits for a flock of flying cars to pass. For the first time I straighten up and lift my head to really look at my surroundings—at the Arc which so stirred my curiosity and amazement as I squeezed Layal’s hand to keep her from any sudden flight. She was carrying a long-stemmed flower. My crimson bloom. The sight of the Arc, dazzling me. My throat and mouth let slip a smile that quickly turned into a quiet laugh that separated me from this loved one of mine, as if I were an archaeologist or historian of ancient structures whose only desire was to savor all of this splendor, having not a concern in this world but to enjoy it to the utmost.
Today the Arc’s face is beset by wrinkles and it is merely a spartan and frugal structure as remote as can be from questions of pride and glory. And Suhaila? How did she like it? Did she get any pleasure from it or did it make her sad, or did she always look the other way as I am doing now? The traffic has gotten worse and the clamor of it is fraying my nerves. My mother’s faint voice sticks to the roof of her throat as I hear her mutter, echoing the driver.
Watch carefully, Nader. Those young men will kill themselves in the act of shouting for victory.
She waves her hand toward them and her eyes get watery. She follows the crowds on the television screen, utterly sympathetic, able even to put herself in their midst, roaming about in their shifting masses. Nervous and furious, the driver is giving me his side of the story just after a car bearing diplomatic plates has all but careened into us. Unlike her, he is full of words. She had not been a seasoned observer of what went on around us. But she began to learn, gaining some new insight four or five times a day. She meant to acquire new skills that would enable her to distinguish between Victory and other labels. Her powers developed and she began to reveal a most eloquent tongue, as if she were on the stage of my dear, beloved grandfather’s theater. Little by little, she came to occupy the leading spot in the sitting room in front of the screen, as long as father was absent. And when the television broadcast dwelt on inessential, marginal topics, which was likely to happen now and then, she left the room to meander down the long corridor. Restless, she would go out into the garden ringed by towering trees and barbed wire like that which enclosed the army barracks. Repeatedly she would say that magic word, and when she got tired, she would sit down on a settee in the garden, swinging one leg over the other. As it appeared to her one day, Victory preferred to stand on two strong feet. Whenever this insight came back to her, she would bristle and stand rigid in military fashion. As she swiveled her head—as I am doing at this very moment as we pass by the Arc de Triomphe at long last—she would commence straightening her spine and then would tilt her head upward and stand at the ready. She would appear utterly eccentric as she tugged her long skirt at the waist to adjust it, pulled the blouse tight below it, and took a deep enough breath in preparation to usher in that Victory. Yet her body would appear fragile indeed, even limp. Where had that strong firm body gone, the body that never a single day knew illness? She used to show me photographs of herself on stage. She would tell me, It’s not physical activity that sends the blood rushing through all my veins; it’s the force of art.
She would stay there, at the theater, on stage, long into the night. And that is when the battles would erupt between them. Between my father and her. I imagined sometimes that they were performing roles in a play with me as audience. But no sooner would I see her afterward, see her so sad, than I would understand that this had become a matter more troublesome and perilous than before. She stopped going there, ever, and my grandfather became my father’s Enemy Number One. From the window of my room on the upper floor I would gaze at her downcast face as my father was spelling things out for us, having returned from the base at the end of the night. It won’t be long, he would say, before you hear and know the very latest news.
She would try to plant her feet as firmly on the ground as he did but she was not strong enough. And there we are, she and I, repeating after my father like a chorus, twice, three times, four, and he shouts with us. Louder! Louder!
Louder than this clamor and screech of cars. I could see her haplessness within her sweet, mild demeanor as she remained determinedly gentle with me to help me get over every hurdle. I was fifteen and she wanted so much to forewarn me, to provide every precaution even if it had to be surreptitiously done. She herself neither retreated nor advanced. There she is: putting her finger in her left ear, sh
e shakes her head as if a fly has gotten in and she doesn’t know how to get it out, and so she starts rubbing violently, uncharacteristically. Startled that I am suddenly there she flares up.
How many times have I told you that I can’t put up any longer with these childish things you do! My nerves are not what they used to be, Nader. That’s right, I don’t hear as well as I used to and I’m still at this age. I’m not that old. It might well be that those sounds ruined my ears. It might be better to be deaf.
Suhaila tried to teach many things very quietly but my father preferred a loud voice as he recorded his objections to the two of us. Several times in the space of a single day we would be triumphant; all she wanted was to catch her breath in front of him so that at least she would not be charged with an offense when it came to the Reckoning. He would not accept her dozing off in her chair, wouldn’t accept her thoughts wandering even a little way off; and so she was terrified that she might give way and collapse in his presence, seeing Victory’s steam wafting from his nostrils. When it was time for his breakfast or lunch or dinner, we sent double meals to him at the base. It was laughable; he was getting fatter and she, thinner, right up until the day we left Baghdad. And so the days were passing and the victories were mounting; and my parents separated. They started sleeping in separate rooms. They didn’t concern themselves with me or the state I was in as I witnessed those battles between them. Each one changed in his own way. Suhaila, losing control of her nerves for whatever reason, slight or significant, maintained her silence and went into her new room. And he—he would lose his head completely. He suffered more than she did. I was aware of that fact, especially when he followed her from one place to the next, and without any letup. Later, after she had shut the door, I would hear his nightly sobbing. It pressed hard against my ears. I would feel very sad but there was nothing I could do to bolster him. I did not even dare to put out a helping hand. I don’t know why that was the way things were.
In a weary voice the driver says, “The hospital, Monsieur. There it is, directly ahead.”
II
Abruptly I returned to the present. I found it difficult to move even slightly and I had to drag my body out of the car. I stood on the asphalt street in front of the broad entrance gates. I averted my eyes from the driver’s face as I paid the fare. I hoisted my suitcase, slung my attaché case on one shoulder and threw my raincoat across the other. The sound of an ambulance siren as its driver spun out of the main driveway gave me a fright. My tongue was like wood. The actual entrance to the hospital was narrow. The red tile was slightly dirty from car exhaust. Odd, unmatched bouquets of ugly artificial flowers stood in grey plastic basins. The door swung open suddenly in my face. To the left was a white and brown wooden counter and behind it stood a slightly plump, tawny-skinned woman. She gave me a sweet smile: at the sight of her white teeth, my fear and apprehension left me. Her appearance of lively interest perked me up, too. This was a good omen.
“Good evening,” I said as I walked up to her.
We understood each other quickly as she read the papers Caroline had sent to me.
“Aah, your mother, Monsieur, what terrible luck . . . you’ve come from a long way away?”
“From New York.”
“Ah. Are you American, Monsieur?”
The naturalness with which she spoke appealed to me. She sat down on a low computer chair in front of the screen and began to search for the name and hospital wing, the unit and building.
“Good—here she is, the Iraqi lady, Suhaila Ahmad.”
She summoned me up there again, and with what sweetness! She pointed straight ahead, and when she saw me staring stupidly, she came out from behind the wooden counter neatly to stand beside me.
“Come, Monsieur, let me show you the way to her. That building way over there, behind the tall trees, emergency unit, room 44. Bon courage.”
I felt as if my tongue were literally tied. I bowed my head and walked away. A feeling of nausea went with me and it seemed to me that I smelled its odor in my mouth and clothes. When I asked one of the nurses in my path where the building was she pointed it out.
“There. The last building, where you see those doctors standing.”
She disappeared swiftly behind the gardens planted with flowers and trees hanging down like parasols. I couldn’t hear any sounds of rushing water as I used to hear in our garden when I went out of the house in short trousers, shirtless, to lie on the grass which had gone yellow from the intense heat. The earth under my feet was not firm and I had had no sense that my roots were firmly, deeply planted; they could be uprooted, it seemed, at any moment. I avoided the faces of the guards at our front door who would replace each other regularly, though I did see their necks from behind, fat and thick. I heard their voices chasing me in the night more than by day, and I turned my back on them. I annoyed them with the voice of Bob Marley, the Jamaican singer whose portrait I had hung on every wall of my room. I turned up the volume on his voice when he was singing the song whose lyrics I knew by heart. No woman no cry. I used to sing it to my mother. Rather than her weeping, though, I was the one who was crying and she did not know. My father and those pals of his, those military, spoiling-for-a-fight generals, would get angry at the extremes in my behavior, at my clothes, my haircut, anything and everything.
I’m dripping in sweat and I can smell myself; I don’t know if the stink is too disgusting to bear or whether my sweat is the odor of that earth which they call my country. I feel as though the air here picks up the odor of Suhaila and carries it to the other riverbank of the world, navigating all the pronouncements of lying and hypocrisy; but that same air returns and settles in my nostrils. It is the same air that gave me lessons to help me understand my new situation: that I was in a region neither mine nor hers. Suhaila says, This is what they metaphorically call cosmopolitanism. I don’t know what this word means. Why do you keep harping on this particular word, she asks. I don’t know either. As if mothers knew everything, she muttered.
Later—many years later—I knew, thanks to my imagination or perhaps without its help, that their use of me was not metaphorical.
I sat down on one of the wooden benches facing the door that would take me into the building. My joints were betraying me, from my fingers gripping the briefcase strap all the way to my neck. I lowered my nodding head and tucked it between my shoulders, overcome by a sense of terror at what was to come.
Six
I
For the first time I looked at my watch. It was nearly four in the afternoon and it was the twenty-third of August. The hospital wing, directly in front of me, seemed inviting; it seemed to be beckoning to me that I could enter it safely. Come in, Nader; come on, get on your feet, move! She is indeed here and she is more than you can possibly handle. Everything is up for grabs and you can’t trust any of it: the advice, the East, the West, the last resort of internationalism. Calm down, cool down, be a little colder; you must not trust to feverish intensity, and zeal is a path that will steer you to mental chaos. Leave a space between yourself and her. Yes, even your mother—you must always put a distance between yourself and her, a space where you shrink back into yourself and keep yourself at a remove, and then your blood will have a chance to simmer down before it hardens and congeals. And then you will fully deserve that label of foreigner.
I rested my back against the bench, reached for my bag, took out my handkerchief and began to wipe off my sweat. Suhaila is no different from other women even if her nature is incompatible with theirs. She always liked to talk about a variety of things and she crammed many stories in as we sat at the dining table. I would observe her when we went together to the supermarket. Only there did she lose her patience.
All of these prices are written on the merchandise. They are thieves here! She would say this and laugh, but then she would take me by surprise and go out by herself, traveling long distances by bus, simply to see herself in small and different shops—Iranian, Lebanese, Indian—where she cou
ld bargain.
Hah, I want to test my skill in commercial affairs, she would say calmly when she encountered me in the evening as I was returning from work.
No, mother, that’s not quite accurate.
She would look at me and smile. Fine, Nader. No. It’s that I don’t like shopping in supermarkets. They destroy my concentration and sometimes I buy things I don’t need. In little shops I feel like I’m in my own hometown. I know what I’m looking for. Please, don’t take me to the big store, because it costs me a lot of tension and pressure on my nerves. Son, I am no longer what I was. Can’t you see me as I am?
I did see her. I envisioned her as she was sending me clippings from old newspapers, quotations from writers and playwrights whom she liked very much. A few letters she had written to me, times she was angry at me, that she hadn’t sent. At the top of the page, a few words of consolation on the suffering I would be in for. She began sending me recordings of very old Iraqi songs, older than her, older than the generations that lived before her.
