The Loved Ones

by Alia Mamdouh

  Nader, who is this Sarah? Come, leave everything, drop it, forget it all: the quarrels, the mistakes, the stupidities. My God, what is it that I am writing to you? Do I have the right to say all of this to you? It is me who is not strong enough to stay up until ten p.m., and who gets up at six in the morning. I do yoga for an entire hour. I light incense in various corners around the apartment and then I set to what gladdens my eye and mind: the computer Suhaila hates as much as she despises and fears blindness. Now there is a funny story that she will tell you. I am sure of that. Nader, I have just now discovered that you are a being who really was living among all of us, especially her and me. I feel as though I know you well, and I shall be able to put up some resistance to you if you start any nonsense against her. The important thing is that you show up before more time passes. Please.

  Twelve

  I

  I stood in front of our building. To all appearances, it was almost entirely vacant. On many floors all of the windows were shuttered. Only the top floor was lit—ah, yes, that was the apartment of Madame Angélique. Everyone had left for summer holidays. A groan came from within my body as I touched the metal bars on the outside of the front room window. It had been my room at one point. The neighborhood was neither working-class nor wealthy; it was an utterly middling area. Next to us was a little place whose owner said it was a hotel, and my mother would respond, Don’t believe him, it’s just a dive and not even suitable for long-term stays. One day the owner decided to rent the apartment facing us on the ground floor and append it to his pensione. Customers started showing up in droves night and day. Germans, Turks, English, Americans. The building’s entryway came to look like a sports arena. It started to get on Suhaila’s nerves and the noise bothered her. Doors opening and shutting, voices raised, dogs barking, the sharp click of high heels, heavy feet kicking doors, their owners drunk. My mother sensed danger, as one of her letters informed me.

  Nader, she wrote, I spent some of the money your uncle sent us. I put heavy iron bars on the front window and I painted it black myself. All for the sake of achieving some sense of security. I know money doesn’t buy this, you say as much to yourself every day; it’s just to be able to get some sleep and continue one’s journey. Nader, do you hear what I am saying?

  I was startled to find a shiver run all the way through my body; that had not happened before. I was punching in the numbers of the security code. This was something new, too. Caroline had written the number out for me in one of her letters. Lifting my head and preparing to drag my suitcase inside, I was so confused that I dialed the number on the house telephone and waited a moment: after all, she was inside and would soon answer. To the right were the mailboxes, with her name written there clearly. I opened it without thinking. There was a piece of paper from Caroline, written in a nervous hand, saying that she had paid out the month’s bill for the electricity meter.

  I opened the inner door, which swung shut behind me. The door to our apartment was directly in front of me. I felt my sweat pouring down, down the center of my back all the way to my feet. I turned the key and the door opened easily. The light switch was obvious; I pressed the button and light flooded the small entryway. What faced me first was a soaring wall mirror and someone was staring at me. The sound of the telephone made me jump. It was ringing in her little room, and I rushed in. I put on the light, glancing around hurriedly as the ringing continued. The bed was made—that wasn’t her way—and the nightgown she wore at home was on the pillow.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello—is everything quite all right there? Please, I do hope that you will not make fun of the way things are arranged. I am lazy and Suhaila knows it. How was she when you left the hospital?”

  “I don’t know, Caroline. For a moment, I thought she was beginning to move. Maybe I just imagined it, or perhaps my sight was blurred by the lack of sleep. I was certainly hoping that some such thing would happen.”

  “Uh—”

  “Thank you so much. I just arrived, and I came right to the telephone.”

  “Your wife rang. She was very anxious but I think I answered her concerns and soothed her. Nader, are you all right? It has been a long day, and a very hard one.”

  I put my hand on the small bedside table to support myself and sat down on the bed.

  “Thanks, Caroline, for everything you’ve done, all of it.”

  “And, tomorrow . . .”

  My hand brushed against her nightgown. I pulled it forward and put it across my knees. “I’ll be at the hospital early.”

  “I’ll be there, too.” Her voice was faint. “Have you been through the flat?”

  “No, I haven’t been, not yet.”

  “I hope you have a comfortable and restorative night. Do sleep well.”

  “Caroline, I can’t do other than thank you. I feel that I won’t be able to return the favor.”

  Catching sight of a tissue crumpled into folds between the nightgown’s sleeve and bodice, I faltered. I repeated my thanks several times. My gratitude sounded more like apology.

  I replaced the receiver. The phone was on the floor near the bed. Next to it sat a small stand holding a triangular clock that threw out a light in the shape of an odd bird about to ascend and circle into the distance. I had only to press on it to see part-images of the bird in the form of pendulum swings of light flying along the high ceiling.

  My clock was a gift from Narjis, wrote mother. On the day I started dealing directly with the French administration, struggling to get onto the Sécurité Sociale rolls after they had lost my file three times. Nader, have you heard of Amma the Great Mother in India, that legendary personality known for generous love, help, and purity? Narjis is even more than that. She is my mother, even though she is younger than me.

  That is what mother had written to me one day. It was not long after all news of my uncle Diya had suddenly stopped. None of us had any news of him—not my mother, not the lawyer, not Mr. Ken. Directly in front of me now was the television, a Sony, which my uncle had purchased before leaving for Africa and his new place of work as a legal counselor working for the United Nation’s disaster relief program. Steadying it into its place on the middle shelf, he had said, I like the Japanese best when it comes to products and traditional wear.

  The kimono, Nader, is irresistible when women wear it in films, said Uncle Diya. The women of that country, Suhaila, carry a magic and a mystery—and where they are hiding it we don’t know. Is it in deep silence or in still more powerful respect?

  He turned to me and began ribbing me. Nader, start planning out a strategy right now to marry a Japanese woman. She won’t shut the door in your face if you are late coming home in the evening.

  It’s the same room. If I had Sarah’s talent I could draw it. I could draw the empty spaces between objects as she left them. A table of medium size with the hue of dark gold wood, with little drawers that, most of the time, do not open as they should, its surface unmistakably imprinted with the traces of hot tea cups, coffee, and wine. Ashtrays next to the bed, on the floor, on the table, on the shelf, different shapes and sizes but both large and small, deep and shallow, of various styles. She smoked then and she still does.

  We have not been able to handle her on this, Caroline wrote. She quits for a few days but then backslides for months. Joking with us, she declares, A cigarette has better morals than some human beings have. A sigara is honorable and she doesn’t practice deception. She’s the only holdout—even if that defiance only lasts a few moments. A cigarette understands what is going through your mind, especially through those long, harsh days of winter. It only takes moments for you to realize how much you love your solitude when you are sharing it with that sigara. Listen to me, Caroline–this cigarette is my loved one. She thinks as I do and she does not leave me in the lurch.

  I was still holding her nightgown. I got up slowly, turned around, and spread it out on the bed. I smoothed out the sleeves and the collar, and then the whole body of it so tha
t the hem hung down straight. I knelt down and buried my head in the soft weave. Mentally I was at the absolute end of my rope. For the first time ever I was in a complete collapse in solitude and I was making noise. I was starting to wail, and loud enough to be heard. I cried without shame or embarrassment and without trying to suppress the sound of it. I cried so freely that I was sure my eardrums would explode. I caught the right sleeve of the nightgown and plastered it to my face, clutching the left sleeve in my mouth. I could hear myself sobbing as I buried my head in her lap. Clinging to the robe, catching myself up in it, I could find no one beside me who would calculate my tears and hold me to account for them. There was the sound of the telephone again. It was Sonia, most likely. Sitting in front of the dining table playing with Leon, and she wouldn’t waste any time.

  “Nader, love, how are you and how are things there? What’s that?—you’re crying? The sound of your voice gives you away, but I know that you don’t want to confess. Nader, what is it? What’s going on there? Is—”

  “Nothing new, Sonia. I have been back in the flat for only a little while, and I’m not certain of anything. There’s lots of talk, details, information, medical terms and mental health jargon I haven’t heard before. It’s all had a pretty big impact on me. I have this feeling that I am going to burst from the roar of it before I can even go mad.”

  “Please, please, try to go to sleep right away, if you can. Have you seen her friends? Were they with you the whole time? You must try to calm down and take it a bit easy since they are there with you. Nader, please, please do not leave us full of worry about you. One of us has to hold together. I am praying for her and for all of us. Nader, the baby and I are waiting for you. He wants to say something to you in his own language—here, listen to him. There . . . can you hear? Dada I love you.”

  “Fine, Sonia. Thanks for calling. Take care of yourself and Leon.”

  I turned my head away from the phone and shifted my position. I tugged at the small and expensive carpet, pushed it under myself and leaned my back against the bed. The wooden floorboards were old and dark. I stretched out my legs. My sobbing started to subside. I blew my nose and folded my arms over my knees. The pain was welling up from there and erupting where Suhaila was. Does the pain know where to head? Piles of clippings, newspapers and files. Papers, notebooks, brown folios large and small; it seemed likely that Caroline had arranged it all this way. There were three stacks and on each had been placed an ashtray, a book, a flower vase so that nothing would scatter or fly. My eyes traveled upward and I saw those same shelves. They had been empty at the time of our arrival years before, at the time when my uncle was preparing to leave Germany first, having already sent his wife and his son Ziyad to the south of France where her wealthy family lived. Marianne retained her own peculiar ideas, most of all about Suhaila whom she treated rather coldly, making her distaste obvious. We did not live here when we first came to Paris by way of Turkey. When my uncle left us and went away in the early seventies he and my mother did stay in touch regularly. My longing for him had become indescribably intense and I imagined that when he first saw me again he would take me in his arms as he always used to do, lift the sleeve of his blindingly white shirt and tease me—Hey, Nader!—as he had always done in the past. He used to balance me on one arm and act as if he could not breathe as he repeated his usual phrase: I’m going to go on making sure that you sit on my arm even if you reach twenty.

  The way my uncle had of announcing his love was quiet and affectionate and sometimes contradictory, the opposite of my father, except his emotions remained hidden. I did suppose at the time that his feelings would have remained unwavering toward me, at least. His objections to my father’s treatment of Suhaila were constant and incessant. He objected to almost everything, in fact. He had graduated from the College of Law and Political Economy with honors and opened a law office in partnership with the top graduates from his year. After only a few months there, however, he dropped everything. His resounding arguments for the defense and his successes had made certain people anxious, my father among them. My father scoffed at him, at both his ideas and his personality. Later on he was offered many positions: postings in the judicial diwan, a governorship in one of the southern provinces. Choose as you like, Diya, he was told. My father would repeat those words to him in an unnaturally loud voice as if to ridicule his brother-in-law: Don’t you see, we hold the likes of you in reserve for times of need. Now the time has come for you to work on our behalf. It is the only sure cause there is. Otherwise. . . . My father did not complete his sentence. Suhaila was sitting in her room trembling and not a sound was to be heard from Diya. As he was leaving, we caught a glimpse of his shadow. It looked as though he had been pummeled all over his body, battered as my mother had been. Later—years later, when we were in England—I learned that he really had been subjected to beatings. At the time, he had confided his suspicions to my grandfather: I feel like I’m being followed. Watched. There was someone shadowing him when he visited his fiancée, Nihad, and as he returned to the family home. My grandparents were afraid for him. But the surprise was in wait for my father most of all. I heard his screech all the way from my room on the top floor. Your brother, the honorable effendi, has fled. Do you hear me, Lady Suhaila, or has the deafness reached your other ear as well?

  Was my uncle a courageous man who was turned into a coward at my father’s hand? No one dared ask my father or anyone else about the matter. My grandmother sold an orchard that was in her name on the outskirts of Karbala and began smuggling money out to him. She always found channels for bribery—relatives, military men and civilians, businessmen and artists, and friends of my grandfather’s, whom she would lure with substantial commissions. My grandfather, too, exerted himself on my uncle’s behalf. While away on theater business and to stage plays in Arab countries and the socialist states, he sent off whatever he could get in hard currency. The phrase came to echo in my ears: hard currency. I would hear it for months at a time, and years; I read it in the newspapers and heard it on radio and television. Did hard describe the conditions of those who were strong and rich, and soft the lot of the lazy, the failing, and the poor? The idea itself was hard for me. I was embarrassed at my inability to solve the riddle even though I was so excellent at math and at the sciences in general—and the sciences were said to be very hard! As long as these matters had to do with currency and money, and all of these words which seemed to adhere to each other, it all afflicted me in some sense. It was very complicated, the impact on me of all of the events taking place around me. There was the day that Suhaila whispered to me that I could study in Paris near my uncle if I wanted to—but after I’d gotten through secondary school exams. Because, she said, there was plenty of hard currency right now. She said it in a most theatrical manner. The images crowd in my head; I dream when I’m awake as well as when I’m asleep. During the period when I was finishing middle school and going on to high school, I was learning foreign songs by heart more efficiently than I was memorizing the revolutionary writings which were declaimed to us in class. As for the guitar, my father used to ridicule me savagely about it. Instead of qiitaar he would call it qathra—dirty. It spoils revolutionary understanding, he would add. And it weakens patriotic sentiment.

  But Suhaila and my grandfather stood up for me. She sent me to a Bulgarian teacher who taught at the School of Music and Ballet. She did it without his knowledge. Time elapsed; my father would come and go, and we would receive our orders. He never retreated nor wearied of it. I told myself, One day, someday, I will not carry through on anything that my respected father means to have done. My attitude was that laws and commands existed in order that we not comply with them every one and to the letter. At the age I was then, being apart from the family meant either carrying out drills with light weapons or receiving orders and preserving the principles of the revolution. I didn’t understand what it meant to be revolutionary. Was my father revolutionary? He was the badge that let me gain entry
everywhere. His chest was decorated with medals and his shoulders were covered in stars, many and glistening, as he marched ahead, while I often advanced more slowly than the other students in my division and year. I would move on, and draw away, and go in a direction contrary to them; and I would discover that the longing that motivated me was to echo the songs of Bob Marley and the Wills Brothers, Elvis Presley and Jacques Brel. These singers’ lyrics were simple; they were sympathetic and free and they didn’t fill me with fear or ennui. Their songs spoke of things that were always on my mind: traveling to new cities, innocent love. I memorized Bob’s words and they moved me. Me don’t dip on the black man’s side nor the white man’s side. Me dip on God’s side, the one who create me and cause me to come from black and white. And I loved God more than my father. I would hear the word revolution in some of those songs as if it were meant only for me, and as if it were meant to keep me happy. No one was compelling me to do this thing or that. I believed that revolution meant pulling together the elements of my strength in order to triumph over my weakness and incapacity. And that it wasn’t a question of military training alone but of being sound in my ideas and natural and free. Whenever I saw and heard my father talking about the revolution I had the feeling there were pebbles in his mouth. He would start to look gloomy, sad, and angry. He would pace around his room, his hands behind his back and me in front of him with my head lowered.