The Loved Ones

by Alia Mamdouh

  Mother, send something more rhythmic, songs with tambourines and drums. I can’t stand this wailing and moaning. I want to learn old Arab dance like the kind you do.

  But she would insist, and she never paid attention to what I said.

  Ya ayni, precious as my own eyes, these are not poisons that you need to fear will kill you if you hear them. My dear Nader Effendi, Mr. Nader Sir, I don’t know how to explain this matter to you. Believe me, you are atrocious. Imagine, when I hear you talking or you write to me and ask about our country, I feel as if you are wearing a vest so tight that you can barely breathe. Your hard breathing puts me in mind of someone lifting heavy loads. Your voice on the phone is miserable. It isn’t your own grief or pain, exactly; I swear I imagine sometimes that you are taking pleasure in the misery of others. I hear nothing from you but scolding and this is how it always starts: we cut off communication. Sometimes it lasts months. I don’t hear your voice, I don’t read any letters from you. I can hear you sometimes, criticizing your father and his government uniform to the supermarket owners. Those people, you say. How rich they are and how long are their lives.

  Nader, don’t toss out the letter that I enclosed with my letter to you. It came a long time ago but I did not send it to you; I didn’t want you to feel any worse or any more alone than you already are. Read it slowly and forgive Aunt Ferial for what it says. She didn’t mean any hurt or disrespect. She is much more apt to make fun of herself than of anyone else, you know her well, or have you forgotten her as you have forgotten so many things there? Please don’t make a copy of the letter and send it to the children of Narmin and Tamadir in Austria and Denmark. Leave them, like you, bayn bayn, up in the air a bit. Maybe they are in a better way than you are, these days, who knows?

  Today it’s the twenty-eighth of March. Your birthday. Suhaila, your being away is a foolish, lazy thing—how frivolous and changeable you are, girl! That mother of yours takes great pleasure in repeating these traits in our hearing every time we visit her, especially on this Esteemed and Unique Day. She longs to add new words, ones she has never used in the presence of any daughter, but no sooner does she see us in front of her than she forgets; or she cannot find those words, perhaps. In front of us—specifically us, who are considered your only friends—she’s bound to make us take sides against you, to feel envy, ever since that, and then ever since. . . . But she shuts her mouth; she swings her head to right and to left, she murmurs the basmallah, In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful, and she seeks God’s refuge against all the devils!—us, of course. Her face goes tight and yellow like a squeezed lemon; she seems to be staring at us from every angle, fencing us in, to force us to show a little courage, to get something good to come out of us, though she doesn’t know what it will be, as if we are pelting you with stones or breaking a rib in your chest or your back as you-know-who might have done in the old days. But we stay silent while she moans and groans from the heaviness of the pain in her liver and her permanent constipation. As for the high blood pressure, it’s a craftier visitor than are the other kinds of pain. It knows its allotted time and comes, and takes away with it the dollars that Diya sends. Your mother now reminds me of one of your father’s characters, one of those years, when he produced Yusuf al-Ani’s Wasteland. What she says about the tears that are always pouring from her eyes is, They’re all I’ve got left now, ayy yamma! Yes, indeed, my tears, always true to me, they are! Wouldn’t even know how to betray me if they could, and they keep me company. No, no, now, I’m not shedding no tears over Diya, and not over her either, not over me, no-o-o, it’s just, I have nothing else left to comfort me.

  She blows her nose and talks to herself. Get yourself up and make tea, she mumbles. Make it the way she does, the same way, tea with cardamom. Shay bi’l-hayl.

  The cardamom is in my pocket every time we set out to visit her. Each and every one of us—and niyalik alayna Suhaila, your happiness is ours to fulfill, Honey!—we each take one corner of that place. It has all turned into dens for the rats and the black and gray spiders. We sweep and wash; we air out the place and open the windows as wide as we can. Your mother is the one who gives us the strength that’ll let us get through the next eight or nine years of our lives. She trounces us every time, as we go around through those rooms. Bushra carries off the sack of barley and then later she gives us loaves that look like hedgehogs—that’s only the shape they are, that’s all—and the food, well and good. But the shijar—your Lebanese friends call it kusa—that is what really preserves our lives, that squash, keeps our years in hand so that they won’t flee from our grasp. Gives us questions and answers, that shijar. Girl, do you remember that man we saw in the National Theater, standing next to your father? He wanted to jump on every one of us, he was that aroused and it played havoc with his personality. It was you who turned to us cackling as you said, Even the dumb zucchini imagines himself a real stallion.

  For shame! Zucchini is neither a fruit nor a vegetable. No, shijar doesn’t even have that distinction. It is a species without honor or personality. When we cook it, any of us, we Iraqis, we would rather lower the curtains against the sunlight. We don’t wash our hands. We sit down at the table and fasten our attention on its cowardly fragrance. How can we come to an understanding with this dish of shijar, Suhaila? We defeat it at one swipe—we swallow it then and there. We don’t leave any of it on the plate. That is the ideal way, as its life is short. The minute we pick it up it has left us. About some of it Narmin says, and she is not joking, See, it looks just like our men’s things, after the war. We’re charmed by her simile, but she doesn’t laugh, as I do, in the beginning when I’m treating it delicately. I’m soon pounding it, though, and shouting. I’ll grill it! I’ll burn it, kill it, we all hate it, and the first one is—Suhaila.

  How is it that we no longer care about zucchini though it’s become one of our loved ones? We discovered—I did, and Bushra, in particular—quite a few ways to cook it. And to actually enjoy it. If you were here, you would see how pleased we are with our glorious invention. We have offered it grandly to the matriarch who hadn’t been able to stand it before. How could it be, now, that she accepts it so delightedly, her eyes watering? She is that happy! After all, the kitchens are empty except for shijar. That was the dearest and highest fine to pay which made our laughter erupt, our jokes on ourselves and on you and on the whole world. Zucchini gave us energy. It chased away our sense of failure and sparked enormous appetites, testing out the strength and liveliness hidden deep within each of us. So, from two o’clock in the afternoon until nine o’clock at night, true good fortune with those homemade goods has been our ally. We have learned new things about ourselves and about other peoples of the world. We could even predict the next day, through the life story of this hollow and barren squash. Shijar was our Leader, the leader of every household, a coward who required no elegy. Meals with that leader were a material witness to the highest stage of self-denial: we would eat our midday meal and proffer the emptied plates as if we were awaiting revelation at the Leader’s hands. After our stomachs were full and we had wiped our hands of the divine grace of it, we would make a place for sweets, the royal dish that puts us in a condition of overall aversion, by creating a true curfew. After eating it, we really could not go out and about! Sweets, sweetie, provision our intestines with unbelievable amounts of gas, with that smell that never leaves the memory no matter how hard we try or what we do. Your mother—what a dear she is, ya ayni! She is so very embarrassed, you know she’s like that, whenever she happens to let one out and we’re right there. She drags her feet to the bathroom but even from there we can hear it all, a wide vocal range, as if her body has got its own private drain. We turn on the radio or Narmin starts singing in her lovely voice to flummox the sounds of your mother’s gut. Sweets, sweetie, guess what they are? The sweet is your mother’s invention: a raw onion cut in half and sprinkled with a layer of cinnamon and brown sugar. We put it in the oven for a quarter of an hour un
til we can’t stand the wait any longer. We don’t leave a crumb or a sliver of anything—nothing stays for the next day. Not even the contents of our bowels are held back for the morrow. After all, the two substances hold nothing in common, and no one holds them in common.

  It is not a complicated business nor is it a catastrophe, Suhaila. So don’t hem us in with haloes and heroisms, and don’t start in with insane bouts of loud concern for our sake. Your mother is living first class. Your father left her for the home of that actress, the little demoness. He produces those stupid, superficial little plays to showcase her and then he labels them folk theater. The esteemed master, your father, has gone through a sea change. The plays of Shakespeare, of Yusuf al-Ani and Salah Abd al-Sabur, Peter Weiss, Lorca, Ibsen, Strindberg, Molière and the rest, have disappeared forever. We—and anyone else who still breathes—we do not go to his theater. People grieve, seeing him plunge to such depths of triviality. What reigns these days, as I understand it, is The Rhetoric of Triviality. Have you ever heard any such thing being used as a title for a play? The run of this particular play has lasted longer than the years of our lives, and it seems likely to keep playing until our grandchildren see it, having pushed our children to flee. Don’t let this surprise you, Suhaila. We heard that your father married the actress but we couldn’t pin down that bit of information. What’s the difference, I wonder? He still sends some expense money to your mother, along with your money and Diya’s. So she simply scoffs at everything and everyone. What’s this they call hard currency, shu! Look, she exclaims, it’s just very old, worn-out, crumpled paper. Huh, what am I going to do with all of this money? Where am I going to spend it? Who’ll I spend it on?

  She hands most of it over to us. You’ve got more claim on it than me, she tells us. I opened a savings account for her in Iraqi dinars, which are exactly like shijar—no taste and no utility—and another account in dollars. By now she may well be richer than you and richer than many women here who are her age. But she’s just the same as ever; she hasn’t changed in the ways that so many women have. She’s still our mother; she’s everyone’s mother, with those black prayer beads in her hand, repeating “In-the-name-of-God-the-mighty-dear-and-wise” before she turns to her everlasting occupation of sewing. To her heaps of heavy wool, and of thin fine wool, and of the ancient stuff from which we catch smells of medicine and memories and sweat from long ago, of men and our monthly periods and crying and laughter and boredom. She takes apart all the old clothes that sit next to her and sews them back together in new ways. Fortunately for her, she no longer smells the odors of those first years, twenty years or more ago, when bodies were fresh and fashions pretty and enticement was a divine blessing. These days, she isn’t afraid. She is like a dedicated smoker: her smell is unbearable but we love her. She hasn’t washed for a long time, because she can’t; and sometimes she says, I don’t want to.

  The cursed woman, she adds. She used to send me shampoo that smelled like peaches. If only she’d send some now, at least we’d have the smell of peaches even if we can’t eat them. They say the fruit these days is all blemished and poisoned? Is that true, girls?

  This is when I can’t keep it in any longer and I start sobbing. I shout curses at you and I say awful, unfair, things: If I were to put you in the frying pan right now and fry you to death, it still would not quench my thirst for revenge.

  We leave the house in the evening, each of us clutching some part of you, from the residues of you that we still have, from the friendship that was orphaned. We put your mother’s words aside; we turn those words inside out, and in unison (but everyone at a different pitch), as each of us is getting into her car, the gas propulsion taking effect without anyone to watch. Ayy, I did learn how to drive, finally, yes, I did, learned that even if I were to forget my own name, Ferial, youngest of all of you, the one crazy for sculpture and drawing, sewing and décor. It’s me, now, who screams in a voice higher than the Eiffel Tower and all the towers of the world, in front of my self and them, in the street where your house sits, and without any well-founded motive, Suhaila. Me, I scream it out: When will you die, my friend, why don’t you die? Why haven’t you died yet? What are you waiting for, billahi alayki? Usually people your age, women your age, I mean, Bushra, and Narmin, Azhar, Tamadir—they have died, one way or another, and that was a big help to us. We got something out of it, of course we did. Some found it a superb way to save energy and thereby ascended to the highest of ranks. One group died immediately, early. Died while combing out their hair. Fine, then, it was all over for them when they were at the beginning of the road, so in terms of principle they are above everyone. As for us, as for everyone who is waiting, it’s all the same. Well, no, but it’s no worse. After all, in practical terms, we’re not knocking ourselves out to get there.

  We did not understand your letter, my dear. It took a very long time for me to go begging to my brain, as your father always used to say. I didn’t understand this alluring proposition of yours. Did you say you are going to get operations going in Europe and the Americas? That you will embark on a personal and dazzling sequence of actions—as you wrote, a string of actions that’s engraved in the memory, that belongs to the long-ago era of struggle? As I understood it, you are planning to go and pay visits on some of the masterminds around you, clothed in our venerable national dress, the Sayi and the Hashimi styles both. You will offer them all the old stories with all the necessary explanations and at the end of the evening you will collect lots of signatures written out with elegant Parker pens. It is all to be a better means of bringing us back to the human fold.

  We excuse you—you do mean it all perfectly sincerely, I know that. Here is a bowl of shit, my lady. My dear, to the words your mother finds to describe you, one could add stupid. You are truly stupid. If only you would come down to earth a bit, deal with that self-importance of yours, and your heartaches on behalf of us, and your contradictions, and also your hesitation, because I can say, as a general rule, We are here. We are present and accounted for. I mean, we can shine our own shoes, and we’re capable of opening our front doors to receive some guest or other—a guest we’re expecting, not the other sort. We go to the salon to get our hair done; when we open the old photo album we’re seized by a sort of impotent joy. Back in those days, as we waited for our husbands, sitting around in those evening gowns that we can still see in the album, we knew perfectly well that before long we would be beaten to a pulp with canes and whips. Those photographs of ours—which we keep close by, as if we are in a secret meeting or a party assembly—we take with us to the kitchen. Or we place them carefully on top of unoccupied pillows. Our odd, unfamiliar forms that peer from the album are all that we have got left. Even so, we are living better than you are and better than they are. That is how we live. We live, coming and going, however it happens, this way or that. I think we are living in utter art: we take hold of our days with our own firm hands and we pass the iron over them and we do not send our clothes to the automatic laundry. We still smile into each other’s faces and full in the face of the United Nations, the Confused Nations, nations more confused than we are, and the Short-sleeved Nations. Nations, nations, nations—we are their extra workloads, their overtime, and their vacations cut short by dollars. We are the ones in demand from all the gentlemen of the world. It is a bewildering thing, Suhaila, my dear; I don’t want to say to you, So long, see you soon. What I do want to do is to boast a little. As long as you are listening. This little tendency to strut has cropped up in me recently. So here you are—I’m duty-bound, you see, to not let you off the hook. I am duty-bound by cleanliness, companionship, and the holiday friendships of our children, every Sunday and Friday that they spent together. Your friends’ children became my children, like Nader. When we ate gaymer—I miss that thick Iraqi cream of ours!—and dry bread dipped in homemade honey as we made our way to that very island, Jazirat Umm al-Khanazir, the fishing and bird-hunting paradise, Pigs’ Mother Island, across from the Baath Party res
idences. A thing of the imagination but it isn’t strange or foreign. With that curiosity of ours which is constantly moving and shifting, we always feel that we are on our way to that island. It wasn’t simply some wild, uninhabited ground plumb in the middle of the lackadaisical Tigris River. I can say to you, appropriately and frankly and with typical Iraqi liberality, that we abide there throughout all the seconds and hours and years that pass. We do not punish anyone with stoning and we don’t fish, but we’re there. We’ve grown smaller and less numerous than our children who fled as soon as they sensed that the fishhook might find them and sink into their flesh just as it found their fathers.

  Get yourself far away from us, Suhaila, and stay away. Keep your resounding ideas and your proverbial sayings and your throbbing, pulsing actions far away from us. I beg you not to waste our time with one farce after another. Because, you see, we’re no longer who we were. I won’t press it on the rest of our little and loving group. They might write to you, as you asked at the end of that letter. Before you now is a golden opportunity—one—so don’t let it slip from your hands. Who knows, we might even come to trust you if you make use of it. Suhaila, to all appearances you haven’t gotten sick in a century, you haven’t darkened the doors of any hospital, neither government nor private-sector, you battalion-in-one of Don Quixotes! It is within the realm of possibility that if you were to get yourself out of that chronic lethargy of yours and go into that world, you would get the reward of repentance. No. Of curses. Curses be upon you.

  Seven

  I

  It was nearly five o’clock. I headed toward the building. There were a few steps rising in front of me that I would have to tackle in order to go inside. I didn’t feel up to it. The silence was unbearably heavy and oppressive. Hospitals are self-sufficient cities that a person could inhabit endlessly without stepping outside.