The Loved Ones

by Alia Mamdouh

“She left early,” Blanche tells me, “to get to yoga on time. That might be the only imperative as far as she is concerned, and it is sacrosanct.”

  “And the internet?”

  “The internet is His Majesty. Suhaila says that Caroline is lacking friends. Like us. She is quite reserved. Her only inquisitiveness concerns that screen and addressing the world by means of it. Did you know, Nader, that one day your mother made a slip of the tongue. She happened to mention that she writes diaries or memoirs about being here as well as about being there. She mentioned Caroline’s name and her training on the internet and your mother’s own resistance. We were at Narjis’s at the time. She turned to Hatim—she really respects and likes him, and his daughters. Concerning Narjis, she kept saying, This one is the gift of the gods here. She is the daughter of a family who live by a particular slogan: “Concern for the causes of the people.” It was not enough for her to be a member of the Lebanese Communist Party; she was determined to have a stronger connection, and so she followed her destiny through all of the organizations on the far left. She wrote for Lebanese and Arab magazines and came to Paris to resume her studies, wanting to earn a doctorate in sociology. She didn’t abandon political work and the struggle for human rights. In fact, she became active on quite a few committees, such as the working committee to free Lebanese detainees in Israeli prisons and the working committee on Iraq. She is a type of activist that is nearly extinct now. She considers herself a fighter and doesn’t expect to be paid anything for her work. She offers it as her modest contribution to resisting the negative facets of Arab political reality. She is a truly rare sort who regularly says, in our hearing, I am shy. I don’t like big parties or occasions and I try to avoid the limelight. Political work cannot be accompanied by an expectation of returns or by personal and individual interest. If it is, the concept of struggle itself is in danger. Some people still consider struggle to be a means that must offer some compensation, a means of material or spiritual profit.

  “And Hatim—well, here is what Suhaila requested of him: If I die in this city, my dear friend, she said, please sing the songs of Husayn Neama and Dakhil Hasan in front of my grave. She was laughing although Narjis seemed uncomfortable and perhaps annoyed. You know, Suhaila has depended on Narjis in everything connected with the agencies and bureaus of the French state: taxes, guaranteed health care, social welfare, your building’s residential association, and other things that I cannot remember now. Narjis is the one who organized the files for Suhaila, wrote letters for her and sent them to official headquarters and the organizations concerned with prisoners and refugees. She called her the sadiq amin—the loyal friend, as we say of the Prophet Muhammad—no malice, no jealous confusion, no meanness, no pride or self-delusion. She would keep on saying things such as, I know I shouldn’t go on praising you—and in your hearing, too—but I feel as though your honesty and dependability and purity are too much to be expended just on the research and struggle you do for the sake of Iraq, Palestine, and Lebanon. Leaving your place, on my way home I reflect on how some of your qualities seem impossible in this age. Tell me how you bear it—you might as well be a man of religion from the earliest eras.

  “She is quiet for a few moments and then lets out a faint laugh. She persists: But why a man? A woman of religion, a Greek wise woman—a physician. She sighs at this point as if she has located the meaning in it all. Why didn’t you study medicine, she muses, like your father—hmm, my dear? You are a doctor, a specialist on all the chronic illnesses of the Arabs.

  “Narjis is embarrassed at this praise. Her pale face goes completely pink and she turns it away. Sometimes she gets up and leaves us. Her pretext is the kitchen, and so she asks us, Do you want your tea with mint or jasmine?”

  II

  “Do you like this combination, Nader? Suhaila would mix things together more than this, much more.”

  Blanche would bring with her all kinds of appetizing sandwiches. Sometimes she made them at home and sometimes, because she had so much work to do, she would buy them from restaurants—Chinese, Lebanese, Turkish. Today, she put down in front of us paper plates holding lettuce leaves, tomatoes, slices of red and green and yellow pepper, fiery pickled vegetables, cucumbers and tiny eggplants, cabbage and cauliflower and green beans. Over all of it she had scattered green and black olives. It was all arranged beautifully and it made us hungry immediately. Now she stood there, her hand out in a welcoming gesture, saying in a laughing voice, “Eat, Nader. Eat, and stop inspecting me like that! Food is one of our basic pleasures, come on, don’t act as if you’re in a boarding school dining hall.”

  She began to eat, for food brought joy to her heart. I could see her growing more beautiful as she chewed—as if she were eating for the first time. She had in her mind’s eye something much more than this little table that she had crafted in seconds inside the hospital. I joined her, slightly embarrassed at first but then changing my mind and taking what she offered me. Her generosity was simple; she didn’t record how many bites one took. Generosity with Blanche is a kind of virtue. When I said as much, she reacted skittishly. I looked at her out of the corner of my eye as I pushed bread into my mouth. To taste food in the atmosphere of the hospital made my nervous tension even worse, but belligerently I went on seeking the pleasure it could give me.

  “And Hatim?”

  “What about him?”

  “What does he do? Is he a writer and researcher, like Narjis?”

  “In addition to writing and researching, long struggle and longer exile, he writes folk poetry and sings. You excused yourself from coming to their evening party and so you missed the chance to hear him. His voice is lovely; it’s astonishing when he sings the Iraqi abudhiya. Hatim is interested in everything that has to do with Iraq’s cultural legacy, from myths to costume and ancient folk dance. He has provided Suhaila with the best sources that exist on that heritage, from his memory as well as from his library. Suhaila conjured up Babel and Sumer for Théâtre du Soleil in Tessa Hayden’s presence. Suhaila performed it, a routine of just a few moments, during an evening show. Tessa and Suhaila gave the piece the title Dancing in the Silt between the Two Rivers.”

  “We will get together next Thursday. At first, I felt uncomfortable with all of you, almost ashamed. I felt as though you were all watching me. I could sense many pairs of eyes following me at a time when I was completely exhausted. I tried to pull myself together as much as I could and to concentrate on making sure that Suhaila would pull out of it safely and return to consciousness, even if it turned out to be very tough indeed.”

  “It didn’t paralyze her, though, Nader. Wajd says we are now at the stage where her treatment won’t extend beyond a few months, perhaps four, perhaps six. At first, she will have to use a cane, but even this she won’t need later on. Don’t you see, now she is with Asma, this woman—here is how we describe her in Iraqi: Put her on a wound and it recovers. Her faith moves your heart and makes the danger evaporate. Listen, Nader, your mother doesn’t believe much in luck; she’s caustic about it and she says, Luck is good for good-for-nothings—and there’s no relation between friendship and luck. But my response to this was to tell her that we are lucky in our friendship. She smiles and doesn’t say anything immediately, but then she adds in a low voice, Friendship doesn’t come down from the sky. It is rooted in the earth and it is up to us to make it come up and to tend it so that it will persist and flower. Where is the luck in what is between us? Most times it doesn’t come when called. But you and the rest of the clan didn’t ignore my call a single time.”

  “With the girlfriends only. . . .”

  “Eat, dear, eat. You are her son and her country. Eat, and don’t invent things that can only give you pain.”

  She offered me all sorts of delicacies; I couldn’t help noticing how marble-hard her hand seemed. On the finger of her right hand, she wore a silver ring bearing the shape of a crescent moon, at its center a turquoise. I don’t know why I pictured her in Suhaila’s gui
se, standing on stage and concealing her face with an orange-colored silk khimar, practicing the initial movements rapidly and exploding seconds later into laughter and weeping. I felt that my powers of observation were not what they ought to be; I sensed that once upon a time, her beauty had been striking. Swallowing that morsel, I said abruptly, “I am going to film Suhaila while she’s like this. Hmm—what do you think? It might be a bit severe, perhaps distressing, but it is important for me.”

  “Do you mean that it would be a kind of treatment?”

  “It might be something of the sort, but that wasn’t how I was thinking about it. If she would watch the film in the weeks to come I think it would hasten her recovery.”

  “And she . . . she might not be very happy about someone surprising her in circumstances like these.”

  “She will see these images when she is better, when she is fully up and getting around. She will see her body and her form. She will see the strengths that she does not know she has, and we do not know either. This will be the best of witnesses to all the pain and agony she has suffered.”

  “But it is possible—I think perhaps it is certain—that she wouldn’t welcome this. It might remind her of what she wants to forget and what she hates thinking about.”

  “We won’t tell her in the beginning. We will film her while she’s asleep. Awake, too, but in that case from outside, from behind the glass. Did you say that you are going to color her hair? There are dyes in crème form that don’t require washing and drying.”

  “I know—I know that.”

  Did I want to use the camera to protect her from obliteration? Couldn’t this be considered as a kind of treatment even if it was a ruthless one? I regret now that we did not have ourselves photographed with my father. We have a few pictures of him in military uniform, medals on his chest, wearing his cap, or, sometimes, bareheaded, his bald spot visible above his slightly narrow forehead. I have a couple of photos of him where I am in the picture, too: a child of four, and we are with my grandfather at the theater, my mother standing on stage performing one of her roles. There is no photograph of all three of us, though, and there never was. After the war, I read: The image is a dangerous thing: it is the opium of our society. There, images were everywhere, even in unexpected places such as the façades of theaters, cinemas, and bars. On the day I went into our apartment in Paris and saw the photographs of me from childhood to the present, I said to myself, My mother doesn’t love me as much as I love her. I don’t put pictures of her around our home in Canada yet I still feel her presence, and much more so than my presence stays with her.

  All the plates had emptied—we hadn’t been paying attention. She noticed my worried glances. “Don’t worry about Asma and everyone else. I brought lots of food. I put it in the refrigerator in this unit before I came in here.”

  I smiled into her face as I saw Asma coming in and out, her hands lifted. They were glistening with oils.

  “So, how are things going?” asked Blanche.

  “Allahuma, prayers on the Prophet Muhammad, I rubbed her shoulders and arms and neck—I did it, instead of the nurse. She nodded her head and gave me a look that was all tenderness.” Asma looked happy in spite of her fatigue.

  “Don’t you see? From where I’m looking, Suhaila isn’t disappearing, nor is my father. They transform themselves into a secret or a puzzle—and then they’re even more present than they were before!”

  “It’s as if you envy Suhaila or your father,” responded Blanche, “for the conditions they’re in now.”

  “Why do you say so? That didn’t enter my head at all, and that wasn’t how I was thinking about it. I think Suhaila has many spirits. One time I see her with your spirit and another time with the spirits of others, and many times with my spirit. If I do take this film, it will be one of her faces. Should I take it with sound or without? What do you think? Your voice or mine, or Caroline’s voice, or Hatim’s, Asma’s, Nur’s or Narjis’s or maybe Tessa’s. Why not? Why not have it record all of our voices? Right now these thoughts have come, while I’m with you. Voices talking and folding into each other, in many languages; music, tambourines, flutes, various religious chants and hymns. Imagine, right now I am noticing that we have three faiths among us, and several languages and peoples and states. So, here we go: Hatim’s daughters play and he sings and you chant from the Holy Book and Asma recites verses from the Noble Qur’an, and Tessa, I don’t know, would she agree to read from the Torah?”

  “Maybe she’ll read stanzas from the Song of Songs,” said Blanche, giving me a smile full of meaning.

  “And Sarah, the Iraqi artist, do you know her? I’m thinking, what if Sarah was to draw her?”

  Blanche answered without looking at me, a touch of fear in her voice. “Ayy, Sarah, yes, of course, I do know her. Listen here, though. Do you mean that you want to film me with her, here, right here? Please don’t, please, I don’t like seeing myself in any film. No, please leave me completely out of it. I can add my voice to it, and—”

  “You’re at the head of the list, and there’s no getting out of it, Blanche, please. Do you know? I’m thinking about playing for her, on the guitar. She always liked my playing a lot. She would sit and listen as I played—over and over—the Spanish songs she loved. I never did succeed with the Iraqi melodies. She would forget herself as she listened to Spanish music. Those gypsies, she would say. Their voices and their wailing, they are like the pain and wailing of Iraqi musicians—Nasir Hakim, Dakhil Hasan, Hudayri Abu Aziz. When I would ask her about those three—who were they, and what did gypsies have to do with them?—she would bite on her fingernails and answer me with a shake of her head. Think about it, Blanche. All we are trying to do is to make her listen to us and respond to us. So—what do you think?”

  “If we move to the private sanatorium that Tessa arranged for her, then everything might be possible.”

  III

  “I didn’t know I was so hungry. I wasn’t feeling hungry at all.”

  Blanche got up, opened her large and heavy black bag, and took out something wrapped in colorful giftwrapping. She stood in front of me, her whole face laughing. “If you knew what this was!”

  “Wine?” The tone of my voice reflected what I saw in her face. She let out a loud laugh but quieted down immediately as she caught sight of the passing nurse. Asma came over and joined us.

  “What is making you laugh so loudly that we can all hear you?”

  Asma sat down next to us, the scent of oils drifting from her.

  “Thank you, Asma.”

  Taking off her glasses and setting them down next to her, she began wiping sweat from her face.

  “Thank you, Asma,” I echoed in a soft voice. I sensed that Suhaila was in safe hands, perhaps safer hands than were my own. I ought to feel reassured, I knew, but even so, I felt a dash of jealousy.

  Blanche stood up between us. “You must be hungry by now. What do you prefer—duck, fish, or chicken?”

  “And I know you only eat halal meat,” she said as she moved away. Asma smiled. “Thank you, my dear. But don’t forget the water, please.”

  “Is fish the most halal?” We both looked at Blanche.

  “You know, Nader, my dear, this woman has done so very much for your mother. Ayy, my son, and God give her good health. She does a lot of good and does favors for everyone and no one really knows it. Maybe your mother told you, she has an antique shop, a tiny shop in the eleventh arrondissement that she opened years ago, practically the moment she arrived from Baghdad. She was invited by UNESCO to be part of the international exhibition for antique carpets. Her father shipped her here, loaded down with all of those splendid and costly carpet varieties, the work of Mosul and Iran. Her father had retired from the army and gone into this trade with his brother. She had graduated from the College of Communications and was thinking about working in journalism. You know, Nader? I had arrived in Paris just the year before and had started a master’s degree in political economy at the unive
rsity.”

  “How did she go from communications to antiques and carpets?”

  Asma sighed. “Back there they wouldn’t allow her to remain outside the Party. Everyone who works in the press has to be one of them. Blanche says, I’m Iraqi and that’s that, shnu hizbiyyeh, what does party have to do with it? Iraq is my party. There was no newspaper they were willing for her to work in. If you knew where she was appointed right out of university!”

  “Wayn?”

  “The Ministry of Agriculture, and in a unit that makes one laugh, ayy w-Allahi, the unit overseeing poultry and eggs and caging chicks and the proper feed for such creatures and all.”

  “How long did she stay there?”

  “No more than a few months. Then she requested a transfer to the Ministry of Communications. At least that way she would be closer to books and magazines and the press.”

  “Did they say yes?”

  “They said yes to her transfer to the Ministry of Health, in a unit just as laughable. In those huge fat registers, she was recording the name of every child who got vaccinated for measles, polio, smallpox, who knows, even dysentery! In the government hospital, she saw some things that a body would find really hard to see and she’s such a gentle one, poor dear. You know, that’s when she started getting terrified about needles going into the skin. She decided to resign and work with her father in carpets. She loved all the styles of old and valuable carpets. She would laugh and say, If the Generous One were to reward me with children I would name them after carpets: Isfahan, Tabriz, and Kirman. Ma sha Allah, she became a specialist in Persian and Chinese carpets, a magnifying glass in her hand whenever she looks at one. She sees the weave and can tell its age from the number of stitches. And the day your mother, my dear, was upset about the war, and your uncle’s problems with that French wife of his, and the money stopping, she started thinking about selling your uncle’s carpets. They were of several varieties: Chinese, Persian, Indian, and African. He had collected them through all of those years he was away. I think your uncle did not ask his wife for her opinion when he asked your mother to sell some of the small rugs. That’s when the problems started between them—your uncle and his wife on one side, and your mother on the other. Blanche says that the small rugs or fragments are many times more expensive than the large ones.”