by Alia Mamdouh
That was what she used to say in the old days as we sat surrounded by a few candles with our glasses of red wine in front of us. She would revert further and further into the past.
To her health, al-Thuraya al-Nadera, the Rare Pleiades, to your health, Nader, Rare One. Imagine, I did not even cry as you were coming, but the tears were there on that night as I pushed Thuraya another millimeter from her position. The struggle of it bound me to her more. My backbone just about splintered. The doctor ladled her out. I talked to her in a low voice, lying there, ahh, if only you would spill out of my mouth instead of coming from that difficult place! If only it could happen that way . . . the mouth would be perfectly acceptable. The story will be told again; it will be told a second time and a third but it will no longer sound strange. What of the mother? Why did she not lose her mind as she stumbled in the end on her anyway—on Thuraya? Why did what we had between us come to an end in the very moment of separation? It ended, Nader, and it is not possible to explain why that is so. Even though you were so long in coming I did not lose consciousness. I wanted to spy on myself as you sucked on me. How was it that my egg did not take the wrong path and so did not put me on the path to death? You slipped out with the rapture of music, yes by God. You did not wound me, as happened to friends of mine who gave birth. As for that blood, it warded the danger away from me, and away from you. I didn’t wait a moment to take you into my arms. I passed you across my body with all the mucus and sweat and secretions you held. Nader, that was all I had; that was my savings book and my compensation strategy. As for the milk, my milk and my ample breasts, that is another story that I won’t ever get tired of telling you, even if it consumes centuries of time.
III
I heard some sort of movement next to me, a hand patting my shoulder calmly. A practiced hand that was attempting to rouse me, an inflection as light as Suhaila’s heartbeat. I don’t know if it really seemed to me that I was hearing a woman’s voice speaking Egyptian dialect or whether my hearing was simply distorted. I did not answer. I didn’t say yes or no. I was squatting down, on my knees, encircling her with my arms and fighting off a man’s pride. A son’s pride. I felt that suddenly I had gotten very old; and this woman’s shadow was blocking me from the light. She put her hand on my shoulder and bent down in front of me. At first she didn’t say a word. I was tasting the saltiness of my tears. I grasped her arm and got to my feet. She was facing me. Her face was fresh and good; I felt myself on the point of collapse. She drew away her hand and saved me from confusion. She led me outside the room.
“Wajd. Dr. Wajd.”
“Naam, ayy . . . Yes, hello.”
I really could not utter much more than a moan, my chest heaving. I threw myself heavily into the first chair I saw. Blanche, Caroline! And there were faces I couldn’t make out clearly, ones that I had not seen before. There was a tall, dark-skinned man who was smiling when my eyes fell on him and who startled me with his Iraqi speech.
“I’m Hatim and this is Narjis, my wife.”
A woman was approaching me. She put out her hand with a pleasant spontaneity like her husband’s. I tried to stand up but I could not quite manage it. They came closer and stood on either side of me. Exhaustion had dictated its terms to me by now. Wajd said in a friendly voice, “You’re shivering, Nader. Are you cold?”
I looked over at my raincoat. Blanche brought it and draped it around my shoulders. The three or the four crowded round and tugged at the right sleeve. I gave in and put the coat on. I felt like I was going to crumble into tiny pieces and collapse at any minute. I did not dare to speak and I didn’t know how in the end I would say anything at all. They moved away from me and I saw Caroline coming up, a paper cup in her hand.
“Drink it Nader, it is orange juice. We have other kinds, pineapple, lemon, peach, what do you prefer?”
“Shukran.”
My hand was shaking as I lifted the flimsy cup to my mouth. I started coughing violently and droplets of juice spattered onto my face and coat. Caroline handed me the box of tissues and as I swiped at my face I began staring at all of these people who were now gathered in a semicircle around Dr. Wajd and at a distance from me. I touched my coat with a cautious hand. I sensed a voice shouting at me.
Come here! Come and stand in front of the mirror. Don’t blink your eyes like that as if you are sad. No, I am not angry at you. Here, take it, try this one.
The coat was the color of wet sand and proved to be exactly my size, as if she had designed and sewed it for me without having to refer back to the precise measurements of my body, which she had memorized every time she embraced me in farewell and in greeting. She stood scrutinizing me.
The way you have of hurting me is beneficial most of the time, Nader. Do you know how it’s useful? I will tell you. Whenever I think about blame, about blaming you, you chase me out of your world and you belittle my stories. You incite me, without meaning to, maybe, so that before you I appear weak. Yes, indeed. You like weak people—like him, like your father. You prefer those who turn round themselves and don’t know how to stumble across a ray of hope. Fine. This is an important matter. You rescue me, in the end, from myself. Not from you.
Looking into my eyes, she adjusted the collar carefully. She was behaving as though she were a seasoned employee, a skilled seamstress at an exclusive clothier, and I was simply an obnoxious customer.
Yes. There, that’s it, just right. The belt isn’t necessary and you can pull it out from the back.
She fastened the coat so that it looked perfect and then began undoing the buttons calmly. She leaned her hand on my thigh as I am doing now and then knelt on the floor in front of me.
Go on, now, walk up and down, and leave those buttons undone. Doesn’t that look nicer?
I hadn’t noticed until this moment, among all of those friends, how dirty the coat had gotten and how dusty its color had become. She bought it as a gift for my twenty-fourth birthday. I had never had it cleaned. I kept it hanging next to my clothes and when she arrived for a visit I would wear it. And then I would leave it hanging there, mocking me as it swung back and forth in the closet. I would tug at it angrily and shove it to the very end of the wardrobe in the way that I shove my body back into the depths of the chair before slumping against the headrest. The raincoat was one of those old, classic models. My immediate associations with the style had to do with retired men from an earlier time in the century. It was expensive but I never liked it. Wearing it, I looked like an old man standing in a graveyard, receiving condolences for the loss of someone dear to my heart.
Nine
I
Detaching herself from the group, Caroline came forward.
“You’ll come with me, Nader, after you have had a talk with Dr. Wajd. You can relax for a little while—I live alone. And we’ll have a light supper. I’m not a great cook as Suhaila is, ya?”
She stopped and then, in a low voice, she went on. “You have to pull yourself together. Come on.”
I lifted my head. What were they talking about? The look of apprehension on Caroline’s face grew more anxious. Her voice was trembly and her words were a bit abrupt and disjointed.
“Thank you, Caroline. Today especially, I’d like to be alone.”
She did not insist. She didn’t even say another word. She walked away from me and in a moment came back carrying her bag. She put out her hand, a key ring dangling from it.
“Keys to the apartment, the mailbox, the storeroom, and the outside door.”
I lifted my hand to take it, mumbling my thanks.
I won’t be late, Nader. Here in Brighton, the American Film Festival begins today.
Hearing these words in my mind, I recalled how Suhaila would toy with the apartment door keys as she held them. It isn’t an apartment, really. It’s a single large room that she partitioned cleverly and appealingly. She put up a curtain of thick oriental fabric and over it she hung photographs, silver necklaces and traditional earrings from back home. Whenever t
he curtain was moved the silver jingled with a pleasant sound that echoes in my ears to this very moment.
Give me a chance to look at others in a darkened amphitheater, she says. I can sit there and not move, and this way I bring to light their scandalous secrets. I’m tired, Nader, of my secrets, the secrets I conceal from you most of all, my stupid trivial secrets, my sick secrets. For an hour and a half, two hours, I sit next to a man and a woman whom I do not know until the light and the silence and the outside world fade away. Your real mother fades away and the second one, whom I don’t know and neither do you, triumphs. There I become a person who does not break out in a sweat over what is appropriate and what is not; who is not seized by conflicting, contradictory feelings that I cannot control or overcome. I become a spectator and that is all. Why are you afraid for me to cross those barriers, my dear? I have gotten tired of occupying the lead role in whatever is at hand. Yes, Nader, in that hidden and out-of-the-way spot I become another woman, not the mother and not the wife, not the free woman and not the slave, neither the Iraqi nor the foreigner. I am no longer a mature, sedate, self-possessed woman. And you are always insistent when I go out: Be careful, mother, you say, not to lose the key. It would be easy to lose since you hate carrying a purse or a wallet. And put that money deep in your pocket. Things might slip out when you take off your coat.
But my words only provoke her more and she is thoroughly annoyed with me. She answers in an irritated voice, telling me that she can’t bear and won’t stand for orders and instructions like this. But I keep talking and I don’t let her finish what she’s saying. I stand in front of the door, blocking her way.
It isn’t a matter of the key or the wallet, mother, but of you. When you leave the cinema you return here shaken and hypnotized, and I can barely even talk to you. As if you haven’t even left your seat in that big theater even though we both know perfectly well that everything taking place in there is deception—meaning, it’s nothing.
Then her eyes take on an odd gleam and she answers in a firm voice: Nader, how can I find a way to make you see that this nothing has an appeal that it is impossible to understand rationally? I am in the most urgent need of the kind of emotions that these nothings produce. In those halls, by means of the theater—and here is the role of the show itself—I am really and truly me. Just stop this and let me go. You just cannot be exactly you always and in every place or situation.
II
I had to notice and acknowledge to myself that Suhaila, now, was a sweeter being than ever before, even if she did not sense this. She was the one responsible now for this face. She had been in an odd state of perplexity that had gone on for some time, and this had confused all of us in the beginning—me, the Vietnamese driver Ken, and the French lawyer Monsieur Alain. This bewildered demeanor of hers seemed incomprehensible for someone of her age but she didn’t pay any attention to our concerns. Then, this might be her last opportunity to be my mother—and to be herself—without asking for any help or aid, not from me and not from the women whom she had called, in all of her letters, the loved ones.
I calmed down, overcome by a sense of clarity and peace that were inexplicable since I had had no reassurance: I had not been able to stand up and walk over to the circle that closed and opened before me as faces and forms came and went. Only Caroline went on standing by herself at a distance, for everyone else was speaking in Arabic. Her head was bowed and she seemed to be staring at an empty space that was expanding little by little. She raised her hand, wiped her eyes, and blew her nose. If only I were able to go over to her, I thought, and put my hand on her shoulder and thank her with my touch and not with words. Apparently wearied of standing, she fell into a nearby chair. I observed the backs in front of me each one looking very different from the next. Voices were hushed and the same gestures kept reappearing. Narjis and Dr. Wajd were the most talkative. I took off my coat, put it to one side and began to dry my sweat. One of them should turn in my direction, call me, and come over and talk to me; this waiting was the worst thing possible in my present state of mind. I had not had any practice at this and I had no energy except to think about the urgent duties that were to be put before me.
When I got up to find the bathroom everyone’s head turned toward me but even then we spoke only with our hands. My face in the mirror looked toxic, as if darkened with the aftereffects of poison. My eyes were puffy, my nose red, and my lips chapped.
Will she live so that I will talk to her once again? An additional day, a fragment of a quarter of a day, an hour completely unrelated to what would happen next, a minute, an instant that would fortify me and draw me to her? She would begin from my neck, she always kisses me there, she calls that sunken spot magharat hanan, a little love grotto. An eternal, never-ending task awaited her but with a push of my hand I would end it, scolding her. I never could bear that which filled her eyes and I would want to blast it away completely.
Mother, I’m too old for such things. I wish you would stop—please stop!
I would go away—and I would leave her talking to herself. No one knows what she was thinking. But soon I would hear various sounds coming from the bathroom. She would begin there; she would empty the cabinets slowly, scrape the dry soap along the edge of the bathtub, polish the mirror and the basin and the washing machine, change the towels, and begin mopping the floor. She was always entranced, even seduced, by the soap bubbles, the fragrances of jasmine and musk. That was how she would talk herself through long spells of anger and tension that would suddenly leave her to craft a smile on her face which a little before had been almost lost forever. She would not stop until her hand was swollen and blistered. When I tried to go in to her she would wave her arm up and down to stop me.
Those I’m speaking with, they’re better than you are. I’m saying hello to them, welcoming them here. They are not as sly, not as distant as you and your father are.
Everything she held in her hands became an easy and delicious task. She worked as if she were singing or dancing, for she was blessed with a small body, thin and short, a build like a fan of feathers—light, soft, moving in all directions with ease.
Listen, Nader. To lighten my tension and unease, from inside my body come a dancer’s moves freeing themselves to help me. I don’t know where they were hiding, believe me I don’t know. Before now, I never learned to accommodate them; in fact, it was always the other way around. The more practice I have at something the more lost I am and the more I lose. It is better for these movements to emerge of their own accord. We slice bread, swallow food, dry the laundry on the line, and cover our bodies in coats. These are movements that show us how to face death so that he does not dare turn his face to us. We leave death bewildered about us, unable to find a way to reach us—he doesn’t know how to even begin his work. Dance is what keeps death guessing, eternally confusing him—even if they are wretched steps and movements like those I make.
III
She used to sing, too. Her singing would reach me as I reached the bottom step. Her voice was hoarse from smoking and coughing, from the late nights and all of her pacing during the day. Her voice is not pretty but it carries an edge; it mocks you. About her voice she says, It is made of the tobacco and the aged wine I consume at Caroline’s and Blanche’s. You know, Nader, I’m an Aries. A ewe, that is. Ferial is the same sign. We used to fight some of the time, and your father would separate us with an attempt at a joke: I am the ram, so now shut up. Ferial would answer him in a low voice, Ajib shlon araft? Amazing, how did you know? As she said this she would let out a sturdy laugh. But I love goat—its milk and cheeses, she would add. This animal is the one that triumphs in the end, even if its victory is a slim one.
Suhaila devoted herself steadily to those consumables on the few evenings we spent together. She was more interested in them than I could bear and I would show no admiration for her voice or her way of singing and dancing. I would get angry and feel embarrassed when I had to see her dance in front of me. Her image would
abandon the realm of mothers to join that group of women of dubious pursuits, and this scared me. What if, one day, she were to present some man to me and tell me he was her man? What would I do if that were to happen? But that’s something she would only talk about sarcastically.
Imagine, Nader, imagine that I did not take your father with knife and fork, or one bite at a time, but rather took all of him in one gulp like snakes do. That I swallowed him whole and he settled inside of me. Where, I don’t know, though—and this is what confuses me.
She drains her glass and mocks my father again, makes fun of the man and of me too so that I get even more frightened. She was not like this before, when we were still in Baghdad, or even after that when we first arrived in Paris and lived in my uncle’s apartment temporarily. Back then, she was not capable of any conversation however fleeting or simple and no matter with whom. When I would say to her, Mother, the weather is pleasant today, let’s go walk in the garden by the building, she would turn her head away and not answer. She would not know how to respond or how to put things or ideas in their appropriate places. The words would come out from between her teeth slowly and with effort as if she were dragging them in from a very distant location. This would put me into agony but I would press her. And then I would feel as if she were answering for my sake, and only for my sake, to keep me from becoming even more upset.
