The Loved Ones

by Alia Mamdouh

  Conversations were going on around me, and I saw smiles as broad as singing and the room was scented with her perfume, the one she liked best of all, the gift of Caroline. The fragrance enveloped us as soon as Caroline opened the bottle and sprinkled a few drops onto Suhaila’s wrist. Wajd was silent, unusually so for her, but her eyes held visible joy at what she was witnessing. She, too, was carrying something in a bag. She went over to Suhaila, bent down and kissed her, straightened and opened the bag. She took out a purple and white shawl and draped it over Suhaila’s chest and shoulders attractively. “This is from Egypt, beloved of your heart.” She bent down again and hugged her. My mother’s eyes followed Wajd, circling round her. There seemed to be a trace of worry and discomfort there at seeing Wajd.

  “I must confess in the presence of all of you, honestly, if I had had all of these lovely friends around me I would have finagled things so that I could be where you are now, Suhaila.”

  Nur began to tidy the flower bouquets and straighten the cards that had come with them. Nur looked just like a bouquet of roses. Ahmad had sent a lovely flower arrangement and a card on which he had written lines of Sudanese poetry from long ago. Nur began to recite as if she were singing.

  So remember her

  and make my sad heart flutter

  in joy deep inside for friends

  Tessa’s plant had matured and new buds had opened to reveal the scent they had hidden. Hatim had sent geraniums and had written a mawwal in Iraqi dialect for the occasion. Starting to read it, Nur stumbled a bit and her cheeks reddened. Even the letters were not quite like those of the Arabic she had learned at school. She gave it to Narjis.

  wa-ykuul inta ward wa shloon tishtim ward

  and they say, you are a flower and how do you curse a flower

  Suhaila’s friend Sarah had not shown up to see me. She had not even gotten in touch with me. But here, for the first time, she had sent a large bouquet of flowers, a kind unknown to me, and with it was an envelope holding a pencil sketch of my mother’s face and bodice with a shawl wrapped round her shoulders. She had been drawn as a very strange creature. This wasn’t Suhaila at all, nor was it my mother. Sarah had given particular prominence to her wide forehead while narrowing her eyes. Her nose was larger than in life and her lips were thinner. Beneath it she had written: Suhaila, you always reach for the impossible, perhaps because you know your own powers when matched up against a comparable void. I love you. Sarah.

  Nineteen

  I

  At seven-thirty Narjis was picking all of us up in her little car. Hatim sat in back next to Asma and I sat in front. Caroline, Blanche, and Wajd were going by Metro. Ahmad and Nur gave their apologies. With the shyness of a young lover Nur said to Narjis, “Maalish, sorry. We’ll come another time, when Suhaila is able to leave her bed, when she moves to the sanatorium, we will celebrate—we will dance the dabke and we will dance everything else and we’ll sing. I promised Nader, and he will see it even if Ahmad gets annoyed! But today I will be the one who stays with her, even if she’s sleeping the entire time.”

  Narjis drove very sedately, as if she were worried about my fragility. She made her way with gingerly progress through the narrow side streets while I was hardly aware of the rush of sounds. I had been in a state of high tension when I joined them, but my edginess was soon replaced by a sort of nervous anticipation and even hope. I found this group and this moment more affecting than I could ever have imagined. How could love’s energy come together so, and shape such a perfect outcome among so many collective nerves? Asma’s voice was gruff with awkwardness. “Nader, dear, Narjis did invite Hammada but he is a bit shy about everything right now. In sha Allah just let your mother be well and we’ll have something slaughtered according to the Faith and we’ll hand it out to those who need it around the Paris mosque. Now all of this will become a thing of the past, it will, and so soon!”

  She meant to remunerate my presence with that of her son Hammada on the basis of custom, on the basis that we were old friends. Narjis intervened to dispel any possible unease.

  “Diyala is fourteen and Quds is eight. They’ll have in mind that you listen to them play the piano, and I expect that Diyala will perform some rap songs. She loves them. She buys a lot of rap albums and goes to parties where rap is the thing. Suhaila told us that you’re a really good guitar player.”

  I answered with a shake of my head. “Well, really good is a little too strong of a description to suit my playing. I make an attempt, that’s all.”

  I had bonded to a strange degree with this instrument. My playing would take me to frontiers and borders far beyond the limits of my understanding. It was not that those strings brought me immediate if short-lived euphoria as seemed to be the case with most people. Rather, as I was playing I would sense these songs drawing together the fragments of my self. Through playing the guitar, I seemed to shake off my feeling of still being that young boy who was just amusing himself or that adolescent whose voice had changed and who just wanted people to listen to his new adult timbre. Playing the guitar, I could live all of those things that I had never really lived. It had never been a matter of simply amusing myself and I had not perfected the art or developed it as well as I should have.

  “Do you still play, Nader?” asked Hatim.

  “Sometimes, just for myself, but I always used to play for her. It’s only her. She was the only one who really did listen to me in a natural way.”

  As she once wrote to me: Nader, play whenever you are in a bad state. It is better that you please yourself in art than that you end up being a hypocrite and giving way for the sake of someone else even if that someone else is your wife. Please, please, don’t lose your patience—don’t burn your fingers with Sunday cooking or the work that has to be done in the house and garden.

  “And your wife,” asked Narjis. “Did she love your playing?”

  I made an effort to change the subject somehow or other. “When a person marries, his previous life disappears forever. That doesn’t mean that it is worse, or better. But it is different. That’s all.”

  Suhaila prefers music to all other arts. She listens with intense attention and, whatever the circumstances, whether or not she is in my direct line of vision, her body moves. I think she feels that music liberates her from being alone and depressed. But I can always hear her saying, I am invigorated when I hear you play, Nader, and it is wonderful that you play. But, Nader, marriage is the reality. Marriage means living with another person when we have no idea whether that person is wrong or right. We have no idea. We don’t notice it when, between one night and the next day, that person begins to follow a different path. Even the basics—every meal!—even those basics have to change.

  I said all of this and I was laughing but everyone went quiet. Marriage had stolen from me my mirth, my youth, and my happy propensity for odd tangles and motley associations. I had changed and it was a transformation in which I had acquiesced. Viewing my image in the mirror now, from whatever angle it was, I thought I looked out of my own time, ancient somehow, a being from another age. At least I looked very old. I could still move at a run but I had accepted my new image so that my wife would accept it, too, and I did not change direction away from the route that her expectations followed. Before our marriage she had loved music and guitar, and she had been all enthusiasm for those late-night musical notations I would write down. She was dainty and sensitive and caring as she carried that instrument over to me wherever I might be sitting. She took care of my guitar, too, wiping it off gently as she returned it to its leather home. She embraced my playing as if I were the university’s premier musician. As I engrossed myself in my art, working to polish my playing, it was as if I could feel my spinal column coiling and my fingers elongating to become more delicate and pleasing than before, and it was all so that I would obtain her approval which had precedence over my own. She fell in love with me and told me all she loved in me; and my guitar playing was the biggest part of that passion. W
hat happened afterward? I find it hard to make out the reasons for that change. I don’t remember who put the guitar in the garage. Was it her or was it me? The strings went loose and flabby from the humidity and dust and the instrument’s body began to rot. I went in there one day and saw it in front of me, ailing and elderly. I touched it in the same way I had touched Leon on the day of his birth. In the same way, I considered him a part of me; in him I deposited my feelings, my joy and my sorrow. I could not see my feelings being thrown out like this, or put aside in a corner to rot. I couldn’t stand seeing that instrument so dusty and ragged, imploring me. Angry, I slapped at it until one of its strings broke in my hands. But I kept on as if I had taken up a whip and was beating myself. I remembered my father when he beat my mother. I remembered fathers and husbands, mothers and sons.

  I am the exact opposite of my father, I began repeating to myself. But was that really so? Somehow, I had gotten to the point where I expected to be against my wife. What good was it, then, to be with myself? Why had I—I!—faded away when the wedding ring remained right there on my hand where I could stare at it, feeling neither happy nor sad? I had bought it before my mother’s arrival for our small wedding celebration. Mr. Ken was the only one present from Suhaila’s world; even my uncle had not come from Africa for it. He had apologized fervently and sent a gift, a check for five hundred pounds sterling. He had said, Buy something that the two of you are keen to have, and please accept my apologies. My mother gave us her diamond ring, which had originally been given to my grandmother by her mother. I put it on Sonia’s finger. Since it was too big for her ring finger she put it on a different finger. Suhaila hugged her, tears covering her entire face. How is that I could have changed as much as this? I felt that I had been robbed, stripped of all that was me. In that dark garage my nature was plundered from me, the original and simple being that was me. For the first time since our hasty departure from Baghdad, I felt no sense that to come here was to return anywhere, but I also sensed that it was not within my grasp to return there.

  “Hey, Nader, you can get out. I’ll park the car and catch up with all of you.”

  Everyone was very welcoming and warm. Caroline was standing motionless in front of the massive bookcase in the living room, studying the French book titles and carrying on a whispered conversation with Wajd. I heard Caroline’s laugh and Wajd murmuring. Blanche rejoined us and gave me a hug, beaming. Hatim’s demeanor radiated sympathy and kindness so strong that it embarrassed me. He took my hand and walked me through the warmly lit home.

  “Come, I’ll introduce you to our delightful pair of girls. They are a little shy around guests and new faces.”

  I suddenly saw the piano as we went further inside. I glanced at it quickly, noticing how prominently it sat in its own open area, a special piano stool in front of it. We came up to Diyala who stood with her head slightly lowered, Quds hovering behind her. Hatim’s introductions were informal. Diyala had the kind of good looks that make you instantly happy. I recalled what my father used to say upon seeing my mother’s friends, Ferial, Narmin, Tamadir, and Azhar. He would smack his lips and swallow as he greeted them.

  “Kull wahda abaalik keeka! Your sweet faces look just like cakes—you pretty things look sweet enough to eat!”

  I never did understand this way of putting it. Ferial was pretty and I adored her. She mocked everything—my mother and my father, herself, life in general as it was for us then. She had a knack for poking fun at beauty—her own, my mother’s, and beauty’s own beauty.

  I can prove to you that beauty is counterfeit, she would say in a laughing voice. It’s false—it’s criminal, because it is against us. How can I explain this to you, Nader? I don’t know, w-Allahi, I just don’t know.

  Perhaps this mocking outlook was why her husband divorced her, or maybe there was another reason for it. I don’t know if, like Suhaila, she was being beaten. Or whether perhaps she was the one doing the beating and then things went on from there. She was always doubting and suspecting everything. God’s truth, she would say over and over. They would be in the right if they were to beat us every one! We are unbearable; I can’t stand myself and sometimes I can’t bear your mother, either.

  I was very fond indeed of Ferial. She was always so much fun. Her conversation and jokes dazzled me. The minute she came into our home she would already be changing something around, some aspect of the décor, grumbling into Suhaila’s face. This place is a wax museum, she would exclaim, not an inviting and comfortable home! Nader, go out to the garden and pick us some flowers, the nicest you can find, and come right back, hurry. Don’t pay any attention to your parents or the soldiers at the door. I swear, flowers don’t grow well here. They sicken.

  Diyala’s beauty was sending me sailing somewhere above the horizon and I did not know when or how I would once again land on earth. She raised her head suddenly and I saw her face all at once, glowing a warm pink. She did not resemble her mother: she was darker and her eyes were as green as Hatim’s. Her name echoed an Iraqi province famous for sweet oranges and lemons. I felt as though the fragrance of those orchards was filling my nostrils. She put out her hand and shook mine. She was wearing blue jeans so long that the hems dragged behind her.

  “Diyala.”

  She withdrew her hand quickly. But Quds spoke up so fast that she all but interrupted her sister, her voice forthright.

  “I’m Quds. So, you’re Nader, Tante Suhaila’s son.”

  Her gesticulating hand grabbed mine and Hatim let out a small laugh. “She’s a little demon. She is Suhaila’s pet. They have fought every time your mother has been here. Quds gets a little angry and stays out of Suhaila’s way, but then she creeps back in and stands in the hall, staring at her without letting her notice.”

  “Take me to Suhaila,” Quds said. She still held my hand in hers.

  The place felt familiar. The smell of food was there with us and yet my mother was not. Narjis, passing us on her way to the living room, could hardly begin a sentence without Hatim finishing it. He had left me, delivering me over to his daughters’ care. Quds gestured at her sister. “Diyala, come on, start playing.” Those smiles seemed to be a permanent feature on both girls’ faces.

  Asma walked by us with a load of utensils and Blanche trailed after her bearing a tray stacked with glasses. Diyala sat down to the piano after lifting the top and coughed a little as if she were preparing to face the audience with the obligatory gestures that would draw everyone’s attention to the performer. She bent forward slightly over the keys. When she began to speak, her voice returned me to myself and to the present.

  “I’m going to play some pieces from a group made up of French Africans and Arabs. I will give you some of their lyrics, first. You understand French, right?

  How much malice in people’s looks

  how many insults in people’s mouths

  generations change but

  people want more and more

  they get sly

  Meanwhile, Quds was gazing at me steadily. She seemed now to draw nearer, now to draw away as she smiled and swung her arms to the words. I was afraid the two girls would notice the tears I had been fending off. I closed my eyes. She pushed me to sit on the floor with her. Love was capable of making Suhaila well again and of making her once again whole. That notion was what had led to my anger at Wajd on that first day at the hospital.

  Diyala turned to me and said in a very shy voice, “Listen, I’m not a very good performer, I don’t have the skill. Please don’t judge me. But listen to this second one:

  the system forgot us

  forgot us

  till elections come round again

  state grabs us by our necks

  with hopes strong as ropes

  “I love this one—listen.

  state won’t move no

  ’less we got so many people on the edges

  their breaths weigh down the

  concrete of le seizième . . .”

  Quds suddenly
perked up. “The sixteenth—that’s the really bourgeois part of Paris.” She blinked at her sister and puffed out her chest. “Nader, now listen to me. We will play something and you have to guess what it is. Can you?”

  It was just as if we were sitting in the garden outside our house in Baghdad, except that Suhaila was not there calling out to me. What if she had come here with us? Why didn’t we think of that? I had seen her today looking beautiful, more beautiful than she had ever looked before. It was a beauty, I thought, that had nothing to do with hair coloring or finery or the silver necklace and the silk blouse over her bosom. Her bosom: that was her primary problem, especially on stage. Her bosom was full and she was always embarrassed about it.

  Diyala recited the poems of those marginalized people for us. She declaimed them as if they were missives directed to us all. As if we were the marginalized. In itself, this was a message for Suhaila. I couldn’t imagine lovelier playing and singing. There remained a particular place in my mother’s soul dedicated to that prisoner, recorded in his name, the plea mouthed again each day, even though that little place in her soul would remain empty.

  She sang out in a loud, strong voice. “Visit me every year once, it’s wrong to forget me wholly.” It was the famous song of the long-ago Egyptian singer Sayyid Darwish, a song we all knew because Fairuz had also later made it popular.

  Suhaila could scream just like me: if death were to strike down my father, he would be more secure than in prison. Members of the family would prefer visiting his grave to any leniency; they would prefer the relief of death to being granted leave to take on new burdens, those of hope and talk of tomorrow.