The Loved Ones

by Alia Mamdouh

  Inside of these songs I rattle the bones in my chest, neck, and spine. Nader, you will lose out, because you did not even attempt to listen to them. Strange, when I have seen you shaking your head in time to your songs, ayy of course they’re gorgeous, and I do like to listen to them with you, so why don’t you let go, a little, give in, for your own sake more than anything else? Please, please, don’t watch me in this way, as if I am a monkey in a forest and you are Tarzan, almost.

  It was ten o’clock in the evening and I was still gazing at her. Afraid to say “for the last time,” I repeated to myself, “for the last time today, the last time this evening.” Her body lay flat and inert before me. She could no longer evade the years as if to outline new faces with the heavy makeup she put on to stand on the boards at the theater. She never did announce that her body was approaching the age of retirement. She loved her body and warded off anything that might cause it to sicken. She put it in a handsome frame, and she would always say, Look, Nader, my body is laughing as I make ready to play this role. I wonder, when do our bodies ever love us as we have been capable of loving them? When do bodies pay us back all we have done for them, all of those old debts that our own efforts have incurred for them as the years have gone by? My body was my obedient servant as I bounded through the Arab theaters. It said yes to me and I always knew at once that it was not mocking me. It would get a little angry if I tired it out with exercises but it would comply. My thin body scares me as I make my way through life. It dances and acts and never settles into a single position or place. For it I light fires made up of all the texts and plays that I perform and that my father produces; and so the theater seems more pleasurable than life itself.

  Her eyes traced the path my steps took as if she wanted to run her hand through my hair, which was crinkled from sweat, and to massage it. Now I was apprehensive, following her with my eyes: How will she come to know me now? How?

  Charlotte’s voice breaks through my thoughts. “Are you leaving, Monsieur?”

  I want to say to this nurse, She is showing signs of movement, she has moved. And it is more than I can handle. I stay motionless and I watch her. I don’t raise my eyes from her. Dry-eyed, I call her name out softly, my stares enveloping her.

  “Don’t be in too much of a hurry, Monsieur. Don’t come too early tomorrow morning. Everything is as fine as it can be. Take your time. She is sleeping.”

  What shall I do, when she is here and then gone, now present, now absent? The combined smells of the medications, the flowers, breathing, sweat, the folds of the curtains, the faint light near the ceiling, and me standing there, stretching my head this way and that; what should I do with it all? The faces of Leon and Sonia appear but they look different, so that at the end of the day I do not know who to obey and who to resist.

  By email, Caroline had continued to relay to me Suhaila’s misgivings. Your mother is afraid she will break, explained Caroline, and so she reverts to there. She returns back home, even if this means that her fate will be a concussion or complete muteness or paralysis and destruction. Paris she calls “the period of recovery from Iraqi jaundice.” What do you think, has Baghdad really been so close by, I wonder, so accessible to her, as this? Dance has been like bodily instinct for her. I imagine, Nader, that dance is her watchman who keeps her Iraqi, who makes sure that her revenge will be complete, not lacking in anything, even if it were to forcibly afflict her with the madness of pride. Whenever I have said as much to her, she explodes in my face with a sarcastic response.

  What pride, Caroline? she exclaims. Be precise, please! It is hunger that turns one into the most cowardly and abased creature possible. You stand at the back and wait for the blessings of the Paris municipality’s meals. One day when I was standing there, Saad happened to pass by and see me there. He was one of my father’s protégées as a well-known theater director. One day my father trusted him with a good role and he performed it perfectly. We clapped on and on for him from the gallery. We came from backstage to stand beside him and offer our congratulations. On that evening the true Saad was born. When he saw me in the Paris queue he dropped back a little and hesitated, but seconds later he came up to me in a state of sheer embarrassment. I was standing in line waiting my turn, following the rules. I was not quarreling with anyone in the crowd of elderly pensioners and I was not dying of shame and subjugation. I didn’t even show any signs of anger at that moment. When you are brought as low as you can possibly be, you do not think about the enormous price that you must pay later on. You forget the laws of human-kind and think according to animal instincts. That was the time and place I was in, and I was perfectly capable of going on with what I had to do. I wasn’t concerned about who might see me even if it were, for example, Saad. I know those people there—we had encountered each other through long months of coming to this building. Saad stood beside me without exchanging even a word with me. He picked out for me the best of what the glass-fronted refrigerator unit facing us held: a slice of cold fish, a small container of lettuce and tomatoes, bread and biscuits. And the sweet: then and there I remembered my mother. She had such lovely names for foods: kings’ eggs, the bride’s palms, the masters’ horns. How it all piqued my delight and got me to regain my sense of fun as she clapped her hands at me, saying, Wonder of wonders! What has happened to you? It’s nothing more than a little flour and sugar, eggs and oil and butter. What could have happened to you? Wipe that sweat off your face, eating like a wild animal! God give you strength and health.

  The sweet in the Paris municipality’s meal looks very much like my old shoes, your mother told me. Leather spotted with little blisters, some empty stretches, its color that of the viscous coffee at the bottom of the cup. What’s the harm, I said to myself, I’ll take it. It is misplaced pride to reject a blessing, and this will come in handy for the hard times, at least. When I open the refrigerator door I will have a sense of food security. I will make double-sure first that I have eaten all of the real food. After the confection one must enjoy a Nescafe. A tiny packet of it and another of sugar, during airplane flights. A meal isn’t complete without some bite to it. Saad put everything in a plastic bag that was small and thin and transparent and that bore the emblem of the Municipality of the 15th Arrondissement. The food of the municipality is quickly digested: God give it long life. As I belch, my mother’s voice will come back to me. Afarim, Suhaila, good health—you ate it all. Awafi. May you be strong and vigorous!

  Saad and I walked together down the street to my apartment without either of us saying a word. When we reached the main entrance, I gestured to him to come in; he was more confused and uncomfortable than I was. He stood facing me, took my head in his hands, brought it near to his mouth and kissed me on the forehead. He raised my hand with an unforgettable gesture and kissed it too. I cried at the time, cried as hard as one can cry. Saad’s conditions were worse than mine were. Caroline, have you ever stood waiting for the plastic bags of the Paris Municipality? They are meals I went on eating for months, eating and thanking God that France has laws that deal fairly with the hungry and the very poor, the sick and those who live on the streets, and that it did not abandon me. Paris: she was generous to me, as are all of you.

  III

  I felt intensely thirsty as I was coming out of the main entrance. I don’t know why Hatim came into my thoughts, his face and his eyes as he was saying goodbye. I had the feeling that he had never in his life taken medicines or tranquillizers. I wanted us to be friends. To eat together and tell each other jokes and he would not ask me anything, nothing about my secrets or my life. He would leave me alone, to tell whatever I wanted, how I wanted, and I could be quiet when I wanted to be. He would say to me, Hey, would you like another beer? But no sooner would I start talking than I would forget myself and would sense that his heart was splitting in two on my behalf.

  The apartment was a short distance from the hospital. My uncle Diya had come from Germany when things got too burdensome for Suhaila, after she had bee
n moving surreptitiously between university housing and the actors’ studio next to the Théâtre du Soleil that the playwright Tessa Hayden had made available to her for a specific and limited period. Crowding into it, though, were actors coming from all parts of the world to play their various roles. They would be there for the whole period they were rehearsing and throughout the performances themselves, which might go on for months. Most of what my uncle sent to her Suhaila would transfer to the administration of my university and into my own account. Sometimes she did not pay her bills and the telephone service was cut. One year the electricity was cut off after she went on ignoring the letters from the utility company. Since it was wintertime, the heater did go on working until spring came. She did not write to my uncle because she did not want to cause tension between him and his French wife, who never did take to my mother.

  But Ken informed my uncle in his own special way and he came to Paris.

  Caroline did not ask me about my uncle, and she did not repeat her invitation to me. She did not look anything like Marianne, my uncle’s silent, uncommunicative, and hard-to-make-out wife. We did not take to Marianne; neither I nor Suhaila felt comfortable with her. Caroline was silent all the time, distant, her expressions suggesting heavy suffering. She would get to her feet, pace for a few minutes and then sit down. It was as if she had decided not to pay any attention. To be present but only that, without having any direct contact with anyone else.

  Rue de la Convention is a very long thoroughfare. Here is where Suhaila fell as she was on her way to the post office. Tak, tak, and no one noticed her. This was the first thing to happen; it is what set everything off. In her first letter, Caroline had this to say: It was very hot that midday.

  It is possible that here is the very spot where she fell as she was crossing the street, in front of the post office building, which I am standing exactly opposite. It was three o’clock in the afternoon.

  Caroline went on: It is as if one were watching a frame from an old black-and-white film. A small woman in her fifties, thin and short, wearing wide-legged pants and a light short-sleeved cotton blouse, carrying a large bag in which she has put a small wallet holding her French residence permit, a checkbook, and another small notebook, old and wrinkled and mussed by fingerprints, containing her friends’ addresses and telephone numbers. Your mother, Nader, still writes the Arabic numerals in foreign form, not the way we write them in Arabic, and she always says the same thing: These are our numbers, ours. Fine, you took everything and you left us the zeros. Do you know, Caroline, my dear, that zero is an absolute number? If it gets all mixed up with sums it raises a ruckus that will reach the skies. It will become the marker of envy and misunderstanding.

  The numbers were written in a smooth hand and needed no special scrutiny to make out. But the names, Nader—most were written in Arabic and that’s why everything got mixed up. They knew who she was, of course, but how were they to contact her acquaintances and friends? On the other side of the street, the story was told a second and a third time. Three black youths took it upon themselves to take charge. Did it ever occur to you to imagine such a situation involving such pain and suffering? Her body—and I’m imagining what it looked like in that fix—would have been remote, strange. Please, I beg you, do believe in her intuitions, and trust me with what I am about to tell you. One day she narrated it to me, in a joking manner but she was not joking, as if she was telling an ordinary story about another woman. What if, in the end, events really were to unfold just like this? she speculated. Would it be so hard to imagine that, Caroline? I beg you, believe it! But don’t threaten or scare Nader with it.

  This is what she kept on saying, always returning to it, seeing incidents and people and faces and cities. She would cover her eyes with her hand as if trying to rid herself of an unpardonable sin that agonized her. She would say, I know them, all of them, and as well as it is possible to know them; and that is the only thing that I cannot avoid seeing. She was taken to the emergency room with everything she had with her. And then, how did we find out, Nader? If you had been in Paris at the time and had seen all of the chaos, you would have been hard put not to laugh at that aspect of it. I beg you, Nader, to come; it may be your last visit, and this way she will see you and you can talk everything over with her. Her voice still torments me whenever I hear it: al-Thuraya. That’s what she calls you. Don’t you see these Pleiades in the front room of your apartment? she asks me. More beautiful than that rose crystal! Don’t stare like that, with those doubting eyes of yours. I am talking about my blemish and illness, my star and my sun, about my eternal loved one. Listen, if I die, don’t pass on to him all of these things I’ve said. He will say that they are just stupid ravings. She’s a mother more suited to other children. Not me. That’s what he’ll say. How is that, Suhaila? I ask. Her face seems on fire as she answers. He does not understand how to be at ease with love, how to get along with it. My love. I’m not talking now about being a son or being a mother. I am talking about difficulty. Injustice, prejudice. About the fruits that having children yields, so bitter in the throat. About bringing a son into this world, a child who wounds you in your most vulnerable spot, who rejects you, but through this child you are made exceptional. A newborn without hope, you leave him to someone other than yourself, to them, all of them, but not to yourself. You leave him with peace, or with war, with quarreling, and the striking of swords. You love him elaborately and you spend time loving all the tiny, trivial things about him, and your love is endless. You try every way of calling to him, you use everything that is to come and everything that has passed, you try successive attacks and competitive ploys, you wield a cane and then a whip, you invoke luck as bad as hell and luck so good that he feels free to satirize you as a mere belly, a womb, a couple of breasts, and mucous, sweat, milk, and shit all pouring out—and my pleasure in him is ever insatiable. He is a masked son. He is absolutely my opposite. And all he has to do, at the end of the day, to shatter my own status as his mother is to fall into some kind of harmony with me. I have no role then, Caroline, except my own ruin. Like an uneaten, and now rotten, piece of fruit, I will drop off the tree. He knows that very well but he denies it. Ayy, he is a clever one, and a handsome one, too, at least in my precipitate eyes. I do not have a love for valuable treasures, and certainly he cannot be compared to any wealth that it might be in my capacity to possess. His meaning for me is that utter and conclusive deprivation that allows no further words of explanation.

  That is what Suhaila says, Nader.

  The situation had grown critical. Caroline told me that the doctors and nurses tried all of the numbers, starting with the first letter in the alphabet.

  If no one answered, Nader, they went to the next, and then the next, and so on. No one seemed to know Mrs. Suhaila Ahmad. An explanation, then a few details, a quick description of her appearance, a few words about how she was now bedridden and that it was urgent and critical, but still nothing positive happened. Can you guess what the problem was, Nader? Your mother did not write down any of the numbers that she knew by heart, the telephone numbers of all of her close friends. She recorded those who were more distant and those most peripheral to her life. Lawyers, dentists, eye doctors, cosmetologists, internalists, bone specialists, workers from the gas and heating companies, plumbers, electricians. The airport and the ambulance service, hotels, other airports, L’Assurance maladie, and Sécurité Sociale. Numbers in London and Moscow, Baghdad, Amman, Cairo, Dammam, Damascus, Beirut, Canada. Someone’s number was dialed, a man’s voice answers, hesitating a little: yes, he does remember this name. He met her in one of those symposia convened for the sake of Iraq . . . but he doesn’t add anything more. And when the caller persists, he answers, Yes indeed, he does know one of those women, so perhaps they were friends—they had come to the event together. When was that, Monsieur? A year ago. And the name of that lady? Might be Asma, he thinks, if he recalls it correctly. She works as an accountant in some private firm. There they had the
thread and could unravel it, and that is how we emerged from home and started arriving in droves and in turns at the hospital. I stayed the first night, observing her the entire time and cursing you, Nader. Excuse me, permit me to say this, I cussed out you and your father. I cussed out both of you as I saw her declining. I disbelieved my own eyes, which never left her. The first friend to arrive was someone I had never met, Sarah. One day Suhaila told me about her. Sarah is a sketch artist who breathes in colors instead of air. Hard to make out, very odd is this human being. Her bearing—the look on her face, the way she seems to live her life—she piqued my wonder and curiosity. She was compelling in the way that a dark painting draws you and you can’t get it out of your mind. Nader, do you know Sarah? When I saw her at closer range, I realized that I was seeing one shape that death assumes. She was trying to give us a living sketch of it. Her behavior in public is unbelievable. She was quasi-stoned or drunk. She was not insistent or intrusive as she looked at Suhaila, and she did not seem afraid as I was. She felt that she had arrived later than she should have done. True, she was quite late, but that was not the most pressing matter. After all, she had not even hurried. But she was dripping with sweat, you would not believe how much of it, and she took out a fabric handkerchief from her bag and began to wipe her forehead and her cheeks and the back of her neck dry. She had a sense of confidence about Suhaila coming out of it that I will never forget as long as I live. She did not actually say so, but her manner, as she saw Suhaila lying there in front of her, made it clear enough. Doctors were coming and going; but the distance between us did not get any shorter. She was completely wordless. I was afraid of her and I tried to step back, out of the picture. But she wasted no time coming up to me, and she muttered something without looking directly at me. It was as if she were addressing Suhaila face to face. The price of knowing death is life. She said it in limpid French and then added as she wiped her face dry, When I die I won’t be seeing myself die for the first time. Abruptly she raised her head to me. She was utterly sincere as she said to me, I don’t want to know what happened. But, believe me, she’ll come to. I swear that she will regain consciousness. Do you get it? This sleep of hers is upsetting but it is just a daydream. Excuse me, but I do not have the strength to stay here. I am in worse shape than she is, and she knows that. You are Caroline, bien, thank you for being here, in place of all of us. I can’t. No. . . .