by Alia Mamdouh
I headed toward the elevator and stood in front of it. I did not think about Suhaila. What came to my mind was my office at the company, my table piled with papers, the file drawers I had forgotten to lock. The lemon-yellow cologne bottle with its piercing aroma drifted into view; I had put it in our own office bathroom. Every time my eyes fell on it I could barely keep myself from following through on an intense desire to open it and swallow a few drops.
It was fitting that my thoughts were on perfume as the acidic odor of my sweat and fear expanded. Fear has a forceful smell unlike any other odor, and all the perfumes in the world can’t get rid of it. The elevator arrived and some doctors and ordinary people shuffled in. It was large, ample enough to hold our coffins as well as ourselves. It stopped at the fourth floor but I was in the very back and I ended up returning to the third floor. I stepped out onto the hospital floor, a waxy thickness of light blue. I noticed the door to the stairs that would take me to the fourth floor. I started to climb, trying to shake off more of my fear with every step. I opened the door with difficulty. It was strong and heavy and swung closed on its own. I fixed my eyes on the floor’s shininess, from which rose that stinging smell particular to hospitals. When I raised my head, the light was strong in my eyes. It was one of the old buildings and they would be getting rid of it in the coming months. I had read that at the hospital entrance. They do this in Canada and the United States, too: they get rid of the buildings that are not very high. They say that these buildings do not suit the times. I began to work out in my mind the French sentences that I might be using in a few moments, I thought, as I saw briskly moving women—nurses and doctors in pressed white uniforms and low sandals. Their caps were starched and everything was topnotch and moving along according to established practice. My leather belt sagged loosely across my middle and I was finding the burden of my raincoat annoying. I began to cough. I wanted to hear my own voice. I started to feel slightly dizzy; I halted and almost threw up. The corridor was long, longer than the one in the armed forces regional headquarters where my father’s activities had been concentrated. And it was longer than the road we’d covered together between here and there, longer than victory, failure, laughter. Talking to myself I caught a glimpse of a blonde woman sitting outside one of the rooms, something in her hand. Must be a book or a newspaper. In my state of unreality I didn’t want to be in any doubt about who it was or the fact that this particular person was here. I came nearer and the features formed of a second woman sitting a little further away. Was this Blanche? She had changed, gotten heavier, but she was still attractive. I approached them: two blonde women, gleaming with the afterglow of Suhaila’s luminosity.
“Nader—it’s Nader!” called out Blanche in a warm Iraqi dialect, as if she were scampering behind me across the roof of our house in Baghdad. They hurried toward me although Caroline’s approach showed a bit of that reserve associated with her native land, which matched her high-imperial English.
“Finally! You’re finally here, Nader.”
I wasn’t really aware of what was going on until I was in their arms. “Caroline, and Blanche, right?”
II
If only I were to lose consciousness this very minute. If only I were to hurl curses at her, just her: Suhaila. If only I were not Nader feeling perennially scared that he would receive an email one night, saying: Come and take delivery of your mother’s body. Come, come. For today she is the daughter and I am the agitated father in a hurry who is urgently entrusted with her affairs. I wonder who it was that invented mothers?
I stripped myself bare in their presence even though that is something I do not like or want to do. I did want to cry, to sob aloud, but not in front of them; that is not at all to my liking. Blanche reads me like an open book. But now she stopped staring at me. If only they would go out now, and go away, really away, further away than my mother is to me. If only they would return home. If only they would leave me alone with her. I have come, so you go now. Right now. Blanche’s hugging was a little more elaborate than necessary. She understood the state I was in well enough. Enfolded in her arms, what could I do? I was not going to make things worse or delay this process more by breaking down.
“Nader, there is still some life in her.” She grabbed my head and gave me a kiss. I don’t know where the feeling came from, but I was leaning toward believing her. I was equipped only with this suspicion of her, as if she were simultaneously holding on to me and hiding Suhaila away, at least for the few seconds she could sustain it; but, I felt instinctively, it was all for my sake. Caroline turned her head away from us and began to mutter in a faint voice.
“She’s in a coma, this is the fourth day. Don’t be frightened when you see her. Be strong for her sake and for yours as well. If it weren’t for her condition getting worse so rapidly we wouldn’t have considered getting you to come.”
I began blathering. She put her hand over my mouth and I saw quiet tears coming slowly from her large and pretty green eyes.
“We took turns being here. We are always here, all of us who are her friends. Even if she isn’t aware that we’re here. Between us, we came up with a schedule. Caroline took almost all the time since she does not have family responsibilities as the rest of us do. She is truly a rare friend.”
“And—”
She took my hand. “Leave your bags here, next to Caroline.”
She took them from me. She slipped my attaché from my shoulder and tugged my coat out from under my other arm. She dragged the suitcase over to Caroline, who now came right to me, eyes wet, nose red, and lips chapped.
“Go in, Nader, go in to her, this is the only thing that matters, the only thing that has to be done in the end.”
I stood still as a statue. She handed me a box of tissues. One of the nurses came over to us.
“This is Monsieur Nader, her son.”
She smiled encouragingly into my face. I was exerting unbelievable effort as I put off even looking toward the room with the number 44 on the door. Now there was a trio of women trying to push me gently but determinedly toward her and exchanging looks among themselves as I, meanwhile, couldn’t pull myself together enough to even lift my head and look straight at them. Suddenly my spellbound tongue was untied and I said in a barely audible voice, “I’ll do it. I will do it.”
I turned my back on them and dropped onto one of the seats. Huddled there, I put my face in my hands and felt only worse. Suhaila does not know how to tease or take things lightly. If she had only tried to make jokes, if she had learned how to banter, then I would have been a little more at ease. She used to repeat in my hearing, It is no longer any use, Nader. I have sent many, many letters to humanitarian organizations on the subject of the Iraqi prisoners. We do not know who is responsible. No one can pinpoint the responsibility for that frightful occurrence. Is it the army high command, or the international disaster relief agency—in other words, in some sense, your uncle? Do we have to wait longer than eternity to know how these things happened?
Is this the reason why her relationship with my uncle Diya cooled, or was it for reasons I am ignorant of to this day? I was counting up my tears: a drop, two, three, scorching my cheeks and then plopping into the palms of my hands as if I had just come from a funeral. I would have preferred it if these two friends had not been here and were not observing me in this way. What the situation called for was some courage on my part: that I be amply obliging and decent in order to please and reassure them, and so that I would appear heroic in front of them. But I am a coward. I am afraid, in fact I am utterly terrified, and I don’t know how to communicate successfully with them. Fine, I admit it: I am deceitful and crafty, and how long I have been throwing a sop to my mother! I’ve done it often, and a lot, so that she would feel good about me. No you don’t! she says. You are clever; you are a little smarter than your father. But I don’t know what it means when she says such things. I don’t understand her. And so she picks up the thread of her insinuations.
You
don’t know where to set down your other foot, Nader.
And the first one, mother? It is still hanging there between the earth and the sky!
No—it is somewhere else altogether. You don’t know how to reflect.
But I work like an ox and the routine they have over there is almost killing me.
And here, also, in this wing of the hospital, I’m feeling the same way. These people’s gazes tear at my flesh just as that routine does. Their minds will not be at rest until I’ve thrown myself from the window to prove that I am the son who deserves her. I don’t know what is to be said on such occasions. The whole thing is more than I can endure. Was the mother really there, was she a real part of the past? Or was the past entirely and completely the mother?
III
A mother and a son: two spies. One of them spies on the other at any hour, whether they are amidst the crowd or entirely on their own. What have you done to me, Suhaila? Where did you get this flair for cunning? Your war began before I was born and so I was afflicted with its seed from the start. I carried it with me in my glands and testicles, in my knees and forearms, so that I would be adapted to the climate, according to need. And you are a mother without . . . and without. I chose for myself an innocent name so I could earn my bread and to all appearances be well-mannered and decent. I conceal my rebellions inside my throat. I bite down on them with my teeth so that they won’t turn on them or on you, but what happens is that they turn directly against me.
My name is Nader Adam and I did not go off to the war, but the war stabbed me in the chest and back and never took its eyes off me. My war never dozed off. So, on the day you let loose the reins of your imagination to tell me those stories of yours, I had to make fun of you. I uncovered you from the beginning, and I uncovered him, too: my father. It amazed me, your proud way of concealing those secrets from me: your beating, your disfigurement, your teeth being broken, and your premature deafness in one ear. You were beat daily to the point where you became infatuated with being treated that way, insistent and passionate, as if it were the only way to earn your daily bread. And so I left you to imagine that I was better behaved than you had been accustomed to from me. I had learned to control my nerves and conceal myself in front of you, and in front of him. I would see him every day getting thirstier for that act until you became like pliant dough between his hands. Your wars, as the two of you anticipated, were what would spread peace and calm and security over me and over nearby homes of neighbors, close friends, and your wider social circle. And I was powerless before the two of you; I didn’t know how to handle you. For the war was not outside as the two of you fancied, and as you compelled me to imagine. It was played out upon me, acted before me. I would see it in every inch of every room. “Suhaila”—all of Suhaila—that was what was now before me. I pulled myself together enough to stand up, and like someone in a trance I walked into her room.
When I saw her from behind the polished glass I did not scream. I didn’t see spectral death peering smugly out from between the sheets, and I did not understand it as a presence that would soon be on hand to take her from me. I was strangely calm as I looked steadily at her. A tangle of medical instruments hung above her and lay beside her and upon her. I wasn’t completely certain that it was even her, Suhaila, and I don’t know—did I want her to be alive so that she could see me or dead so that she would finally become my mother, all mine? From this moment on, I decided, I would simply call her “her” so that things would not start seeming jumbled in my head. This sleeping woman, in this position—any lady could imitate her, any woman, or any mother in the world. But it isn’t my mother, it isn’t Suhaila.
Her gentle, pretty face, her face of long ago: that face had not been contorted with frustration or illness. To the contrary, it had been able—and it had remained able—to punish me. The right half of that face held the accusation and the left, its execution.
Two thin plastic tubes flowed with liquid medicine and nutrition into her arteries. She wore a mask attached to a long silvery oxygen tube fixed to the wall, closed with a plug and locked with a copper-colored catch. And so I couldn’t properly see her cheeks, which looked as though they had sunk into two hollows. I saw her from behind the glass, a gown of hospital green covering half her ever-large chest, a white sheet over the rest of the inert body. Finally I entered the room, leaning for support on the sound of her slow breathing.
Eight
I
Had she been blind I would have exchanged positions with the woman in there so as to leave her in a position to long for me. I would be the one who would make tea for her, who would buy the newspapers, and give her the help she needed. I would be the one who watched closely and constantly to make sure that she was cleaned, who fed her with my own hand and left her feeling full. I would massage her toes, clip her nails, and experience the feeling that she was not at ease about my serving her. I would dress her in her nightgown brought from home and tuck her woolen shawl round her shoulders and reassure her that my version of chicken and macaroni would not disappoint her, and that I was capable of carrying her to her favorite chair. Well, no—I prefer not to be her cane, for the smell of motherhood seizes my head in its tight grip, and I feel the pain of it like a blow of the cane. I invent things to say, cute anecdotes, jokes. She withdraws more and I come nearer but she pushes me away until I am fully outside. This is my one opportunity to look at you as I want to, to give you everything you want. This is the best that it is in my possession to do, the best I do; I watch you, I talk to you and you remain silent. A flow of roses, carnations, narcissus, tiny buds on the point of opening, give off a slight perfume as I come nearer.
I come right up to the tubes and see the liquid moving slowly. I have not stopped looking straight ahead.
I can’t see you clearly. Who are you?
By the time I was close to her I was trembling. I did not speak to her, did not breathe into her face. Her hands were open and spread apart as if she were about to fly away. Or dance. Her mouth changed shape, changed position, twisted to the right side a little, looking contorted. I knocked into the one chair beside the bed as I forced myself to move forward, even closer to her than I already was. I raised my head; the clouds looked low behind the window. In that moment my life appeared to me like the cloth covering that table in Montréal: the more she straightened and adjusted it the more weirdly it hung, and the dirtier it got the more she cleaned it and then draped it in front of my face so that I could not but see the holes and the stains. At that, I make it appear as though I am polite and even complimentary, and she does not know that part of my life which is wreckage.
Blind—no, no, I don’t want that, but I do want her to see no one but me. I make a silent plea: if only she will not doubt and mistrust me, and remain blind, only so that she will live at my side, with me, that she will be in the other room, in the apartment next door, in the nearby city, like a phantom, a mirage, or a secret, for a particular reason or without it, with me there but always incapable of catching up with her. For she does not need me. Was all that happened to her a kind of retaliation, a punishment visited on me for my diseased intentions? I knelt there, next to her; I could feel the anger taking hold of me when I sensed my eyes overflowing with tears. I began to kiss her, once, twice, again and again, beginning from the dry palm that was so cold in the way hands are. I said, We will talk to each other. We did not do that before; and the time has come now to do the things we have to do.
Suhaila must make the first move. She must show the slightest movement, across her fingers, and I will press gently back, in the beginning, and then more strongly, and more firmly still. I repeat random words to her. Sun, moon, palm trees. My mouth kisses her palm; I wash it with my tears; I breathe between the spread-out fingers. Hands are the best channels for letting through any flow of words and warmth.
II
“Her voice went away completely,” Blanche said, “and night before yesterday the danger returned. The doctors tried hard to pr
eserve some life force there, any amount of energy that they could preserve, perhaps for your sake, Nader.”
Al-Thuraya. The Pleiades. That is what I’ll call you, instead of Nader.
These were Suhaila’s words, one day, and she added softly, This is your first and real name. In the beginning we were thinking it would be a girl. She would be my companion, my dear companion, the moment she emerged from her place of safety. A girl-child whose beauty would come from the strength of the mix between me and your father, from the secrets of the kisses, the particular foods we ate, the shapes of our caresses, the hours of bathing at dawn as we fondled our tender bodies. Your father was sweet and gentle. That was in the beginning. He was a distant relative of my mother’s and a part of him was still unspoiled. I don’t remember when it was that that man went bad. When it was that he was corrupted. If you were to ask me, I would tell you that possibly it happened when the patrols to the north started. You don’t believe that, of course, nor do I, but. . . .
She would pick up energy as she threw herself into telling that story. She would tell it time and time again, laughing shyly. Here she was, in her past. I want a girl that no one can steal from me to take to the barracks, she says. A little girl I can bob in my arms, lapping up her fresh flesh. As I’m bathing her, I look at her and it gives me pleasure. Those first, warm feces from which hot steam rises; as I remove them, all I can do is cry. I cried—I bawled and squealed—when faced with that extraordinary and simple thing on the second day after your birth. I saw the first, the primary, truth at that moment. I beg you, don’t mock me, because this thing has nothing to do with either modesty or exaggeration. The story always returns, it’s always retrieved and reclaimed; and I used to want to turn that story upside down. To turn her upside down, and kiss her, and smell her, and call her Thuraya. I love definition, and I retell all the details when you are with me and I’m wholly ensnared in the insolence of motherhood. But not even motherly insolence can embrace all of the aspects that enter your mind (and they are all true) when you are witnessing the first emergence of a child, coming from the furthest unknown, coming toward you, and you can touch it. And these reactions and needs are first and foremost for your own sake and not for the child’s sake. This was the only way to create hope. Isn’t that right, Nader?
