The Loved Ones

by Alia Mamdouh

  As I read, it comes to me that my mother wanted to cover over deficiencies and failure. It is for her own ears to hear that she wants to declare her undaunted progress. Amidst these bits of paper and notebooks that I have spread out, searching for what Narjis requested from me, it is difficult to distinguish between false and true. It is as if Suhaila is in front of me, anew. I am not the only one who does not know her; first and foremost, she does not know herself. Likely, she preferred this woman, talking and addressing her, babbling and being sarcastic and extracting from her head all of these farces. Suhaila lies. She means to lead me astray so that I don’t have misgivings about her. She is doing this so that I will not stumble across her, the real her, neither in the world nor in these papers nor even in the afterworld. Is she simply a bunch of stories, merely stories that she tells? Stories that will leave marks on me, that will have consequences which she will not know, should I come across them and read them some day? How many lies will she concoct and how many lapses of the tongue will she voice?

  Approaching these notebooks, I felt myself intensely cautious. I was afraid that I would run into a man. Men will break my neck as I collide with them in these pages. They walk fast and try to get away before I can catch up with them to learn their identities. Every piece of paper here is a guidebook. Every guide is a voice calling out to me, a call that is not lost and will not dwindle away or vanish. And I wonder what Madame Tessa Hayden will say should I meet her days from now as I am studying the notebook in which her name appears—alone of all the notebooks. This one was different, which intensified my anxiety. I sensed danger as I picked it up but then I took down the rest of the notebooks and lay them out beside this one so that my fear would dissipate. If Tessa tightens the grip around my throat I will go to a different one and put this one aside. I will burn it, throw it as far away as possible, and not return to it. But I began to hear echoes of laughter wafting from that notebook, rising and then growing softer as if Suhaila and Tessa were themselves emerging from it and standing in front of me in the middle of the room, to say in unison that today is a day different than all of the others, that day itself which went away and did not. . . . When I opened the cover I read immediately on the inside: To Tessa Hayden. Without any break, the first sentence was: Let’s go.

  Everything sends furtive glances your way. I have gotten accustomed to that, as you hover in the rows of seats with the students clustered around you. Ultimately, you can convey what you want to whomever you want. On that particular day, your choice fell on me, on that wintry evening that was so very cold. I was not alone. Caroline, as well as Nur and Ahmad, had also come. Layal had contacted them and invited them to attend the defense. I swear that she must have said to them something other than what she said to me, because deep within me I know somehow that they came for your sake. Me, with the latma on my lip, with my shadowy face, with my prim caution and my fear, with my country which would be blasted apart in the course of the day or perhaps in just a few seconds—I came to make you hear the vibrations left by that earthquake. With the dead, their chests weighted down by dust and dirt and humiliation and sickness; with the flags of the empire that flutter and the sound of the airplanes warning of the worst as they spew out white smoke: with all of this.

  We are standing: we wait for you to walk by in front of us. What words will I find to say in your presence as I stumble along my way and trip over my own tongue, tucking inside of myself all of those who are still alive so that they will not slip away, slide off my features, eluding the contours of my face.

  No doubt you will notice all of this in the expression on my face. No doubt you will believe the streaming tears to be genuine. Our tears were our unchanging weather conditions. No doubt you will take it all very seriously as I look at you. Caroline tugged at my arm a bit roughly, and said in a low voice, Here she is, she’s coming, see, that one who moves as if she is walking on a ray of light. Don’t look directly at her with those big eyes of yours. Close them until she goes by.

  How do you want me to look at her, then? I like my own way of looking at people. I want whoever sees me to know that with my gaze I am stepping toward that person. That way I am already speaking before the words come from my tongue. Shush—I don’t like your advice.

  You shush. She’s getting close, look! Look how elegant and beautiful she is.

  I felt the traces of the fever in my eyes rather than on my lip. We were still standing in the long corridor at Université Saint-Denis. She reached us and went on. For a fraction of a second our eyes met, hers and mine. Our eyes traveled as far into each other as one can go, and acknowledged something. She knows me, I thought. I did not know her in that hour but I discovered later, in my state of illness, that I knew her, too. I knew that I knew her when I saw her in front of me. I almost let out a loud laugh: who reckons the number of times, who counts the number of months and years? She was strange; she had no age. She was sculpted from the East; no, she was pure supra-East. She was very tall, very slender, and very elegant. Over her shoulders she had draped an African shawl that was folded against her long neck and, between tightly erect shoulders, draped low on her back with its even longer proportions. The ends swirled in front of us. She seemed happy as we stared at the shawl draped behind her. Its tones were those of sulfur, volcanoes, and iodine, and on her head, I immediately noticed, she wore an odd hat, square at the top and round at the rim, with some handwork on it, and stones and tiny mirrors which, I imagined, would flash and sparkle whichever way she turned, so that we would always know exactly how and where she was moving. I was following her with my gaze. She arrived before the student—Layal—and the group of professors. She came for my sake. Why not? This professor with her slow, stately walk and her dignified carriage waits for the main door to the exam hall to open. She carries about her a certain magic. She bears the authority and integrity of the wise. She is exacting in matters of schedule and timing; she knows precisely how far this particular intolerance can go. I felt myself in the presence of a first-class soldier at the peak of performance and the height of glory, exhibiting the drills learned on every variety of firearm and an easy ability to leap over the flames of hell in order to defend the line of fire—and all with severe solemnity. I swallowed, privately repudiating the easy-going ways at our universities and the indulgent attitudes found among professors and doctoral students engulfed in the tumultuous wars of educational devastation in our lands.

  So, what do you think? Nur asked me, her own voice filled with admiration.

  I don’t know . . . I swear that I have no idea.

  Caroline jumped in. What do you mean by that?

  I have not seen her yet.

  You are always like this, said Ahmad, laughing. You never echo and you never hand back, a yearning.

  Her face, it’s—

  It’s what? asked Caroline, her voice insistent.

  She puts me in mind of an unfinished portrait. Her face seems to be looking out from a painting that isn’t yet fully realized. No, she is looking out from a book, from books, from somewhere far to the east, Far Eastern perhaps, but in the best of circumstances from among us, from our land. She is from there. From Babylon.

  Winking at Ahmad, Nur commented, You claim everything for yourself, or yourselves. Even Tessa.

  Everything that I am able to take with me, for me, everything is mine, everything is somewhere among my possessions. Why don’t you believe that? Look at us right now. We have come here for the sake of Layal but we came for her sake first of all. Different nationalities: you are from Syria, Ahmad is from the Sudan, Caroline is from Sweden, I’m from Iraq, and Layal is from Lebanon. Every one of us wants a share and there it is gleaming like a pearl in front of us. But she . . . does she know that she. . . .

  We went quiet expecting the door to open, though my gaze continued to shift here and there, distracted, and in my head reverberated echoes of writings, texts and ideas I had read, some of them hers and some about her or against her or supporting her when
she pronounced her notorious sentence, I am not a feminist. That had been years ago. Recently she had set out her new theory on feminine écriture. Writing had become feminized, and she was proposing the feminine as two facets, intellectual and philosophical, confronting the dominant male in the edifice of patriarchal thought and its linguistic and philosophical structures equally. Such writing, she argued, was not solely the province of women who write but rather it was discernible throughout the writings of myriad eminent men writers, from Shakespeare to Jean Genet and Heinrich von Kleist. Reading her ideas I would applaud loudly, if only within myself. She has responded to my very own secrets! And here she is continuing to uncover that world and to probe its depths. She was attempting to take apart and expose the enduring patriarchal construction of Eve’s rebellious role face to face with Adam’s role as he played it, submitting obediently to the incomprehensible command of prohibition and banishment. For Eve responded to her own desire or, to put it more accurately, to her humanity, in the sense that humans are creatures who err. She dared take a risk; she gambled on rebellion by eating from the forbidden tree, while Adam’s response acceded to the attractions of power and positive law and their conventions, even though both were put in place for him: they were not of his own making. He preferred the ongoing and stable existence of the system to the danger of rebellion, although rebellion quickly enough swept him along when he could not withstand its powerful magic. Thus, she argued, the regions where desire accrues are put in confrontation with the law, and the self is placed against the system, and the female is positioned as contrary to the male. And so it has been ever since the beginning of all things. She finds that this story of origins in humanity’s legacy of knowledge is what has set the shape and development of the two basic paths available to humanity since its earliest dawn. One consists of submission and obedience to that which has been decreed, in return for reaping the fruits of blind obedience. Since the dawn of history, this path has granted men the status of prisoners of power and authority, sentencing them to be slaves to its conventions and victims in its struggles at one and the same time. Woman, meanwhile, paid the price of rebelliousness. Religiously instigated and patriarchal maledictions long pursued her, even if they could not imprison her desire or shackle her buried yearning for rebellion. And yet more significant, on the philosophical plane, is her relationship to the other, ever since her eating of the tree of knowledge led to her discovery of Adam as an other and different on the one hand, and to discovery of the principle of desire/pleasure entwined, on the other.

  She continued her measured walk, quiet and composed, and I followed until Layal arrived with her set of friends. Nader was the only absentee. Nader, the naughty unfortunate who would have crawled on hands and feet to satisfy Layal. But Nader was not cowardly as I was. Nader is more courageous than I am. I am the most cowardly, set between the two of them, him and his father. This is not something that I will confess to in anyone’s presence; I will not even acknowledge it to myself. Saying this, I hide my face from everyone and I say yet again that my cowardice is my sole courage. It is possible that I protected myself with it so that I could remain by myself, and thus mingle with, and even blend in to, the circles of colleagues, women and men, in this association or that, time after time, and so that I could go out in the demonstrations, and record, and criticize and accuse and call out and shout and press myself into the crowd of others in the streets and in front of the embassies of the great powers, filling my throat with imprecations infused with all the languages there are, knowing that all of this was no use and would produce nothing.

  Come on! They have opened the door. Where have you gone off to, Suhaila?

  Layal stood before me, looking like a paradisiacal nymph. She gave me a hug.

  Did you see her?

  Yes, yes. Come on, let’s go in. Later. . . . I am praying for you.

  I made way for the two of them and they went in together, Tessa and Layal. They shook hands and embraced and then each went her separate way. Caroline stayed close to my side. Without a word from me, she asked as we walked across the room to take our seats, So is she as I described her to you?

  No, not at all. You are not a very proficient portraitist.

  I took my seat beside her. Nur and Ahmad sat next to me. The hall filled up. The professors who had directed Layal’s work sat in the very front of the room, facing us. In the center of the room sat Layal behind a table, her back to us. To the right and left were two rows of long wooden benches on which her friends sat. Tessa, honorary member of the committee, sat half a meter away to my left. She is a committee in herself, Layal had told me. Her remarks will conclude the discussion.

  The student was at her most tense and most splendid. She had prepared her defense in advance. Nader was the one who would be defended today, whose case would be acknowledged. To my eyes Layal appeared magnified a hundred times, although today her elegance was understated. She wore a trouser suit with a vest, the dark green of naphtha, over a milk-white silk blouse. Her hair hung loose down her neck, swinging about her shoulders. A beauty I cannot properly describe stole from her. I had never seen her looking as lovely as she did today and I had never really seen Nader quite as taken with her as I was now. My God, where is Nader? Why had one of the two held back until it was too late for the other, too late by ten years? Both of them were late to leave and late to return. Nader acquired some wisdom and one day he spoke to me about it, his tone of voice unruffled, even serene.

  Mother, it may well be that I loved her for myself only, not for the person she really was. I loved her out of my own self-ignorance, and I wanted her to pull me out of my fear. But she was more afraid than I was. She was like me. We were both fleeing from war and men, from women and cities and the family, from insanity and death, and each of us went in a different direction. I’m not demanding an excuse or apology for her, or for me, but I curse all the wars that turned us into rabbits.

  And Layal, whenever Nader’s name came up, would resort to evasion. Love wasn’t at the top of the list, Suhaila. I would have implicated him in too much, and myself as well.

  But, did you love him even for a day? I asked her once. We were in the apartment, the same one, our apartment that had witnessed ruin and broken passion. Their passion. She hung her head and the tears flowed. It was the first time I had seen her cry. She answered in a very low voice as if she did not want me to hear her clearly.

  It is out of the question that I could love a man as I loved Nader.

  I tried to keep back my own tears. I was shivering: I could hear the sound of the military marches and land-to-air missiles, and I could see the colors of fire in the skies over my country and hers—that besieged, surrounded East, from Palestine to Baghdad to Beirut. Here they were, the two of them, Layal and Nader, each on a different continent, between them the defeats and the crimes that struck them down and sent each one in a different direction. Not a single grain of sand would ever be returned to their possession. Not even one.

  Nur writes fast, translating summaries of what is happening, as we agreed on beforehand. No sooner do I raise my head and swivel it to the right than I see Tessa’s gaze opposite me. My God, whom does she resemble? The resembled is more beautiful than the one who resembles, so why did I want her to resemble something other than her own self in order that I not go astray? If my mother could see her she would utter the basmallah and recite a verse for her from the Noble Qur’an and let out a string of admiring la ilah ila Allahs. And in the midst of it all she would turn to me and exclaim, Your father will send her a telegram to make her head hurt! He will be that insistent on having her come and see one of his charming plays. Suhaila, my girl, this woman looks to be honest and clean through and through. That’s my feeling about it. It’s a thing of intuition and belief. Like us—she’s like us, ayy w-Allahi, she knows right from wrong, all right, she’s a daughter of good folk, I can tell.

  This is my first encounter with a celebrity writer who conceals her fame behind her plea
sant, unassuming demeanor. Her smile is inconclusive, as if she isn’t even smiling, as if she is merely remembering other smiles, recalling the first time she smiled after conflagration and terrors. Looking closely, I can tell that very soon she will smile. Afterward, she will smile.

  When she stood in our line of vision in the corridor her form seemed to reshape itself; it seemed ever-changing. Big eyes that are always there in whichever direction my gaze turns. Why do I exaggerate and say again that we were exchanging looks bearing the strength of words not yet in existence? I look at her and I am bemused at seeing that she is looking at me and we are realizing that we know each other. We are the daughters and the women of those butcheries and disasters that bloodied us with wounds and death. As one professor stops speaking and another launches in, our glances take their time, accumulating out of that history smeared with blood, out of childhoods saturated with stoic waiting, out of Eastern mystical asceticism that I can see as a shining exemplar for her and for me, out of Andalus and from Andalus to Baghdad to Jerusalem without my choking over a single superfluous word.

  The committee members take turns, each with his own path to pursue, while I run my eyes across Nur’s translation. I read and I seek refuge from the devil in the way of my mother. I all but let out a loud, piercing zaghrada at the high-powered words showered on Layal and her thesis; but I cannot. I am fundamentally too shy. For my benefit, Nur writes: The committee is now recording its official judgment. The thesis is excellent. It is a strong and thoroughly considered work. They found no gaps in it that require specific discussion. Layal closed the circle completely. I think she will get the highest distinction possible.

  At this point Tessa stood up. She began to speak about Layal, Marguerite Duras, and the substance of the dissertation. She pushed up the sleeves of her wool pullover, leaving the shawl across her chest, and began to move about in the space where she stood. She was using the space to fullest advantage. Her step was firm and she met the eyes of her audience. I did not miss even a second, listening to the timbre of her voice, to the very last moment, sensing danger all the while, all of the danger that I must reckon with as I listen to her. I was sure that we had talked before although I could never have imagined such a possibility. She inclines her head to listen and I run behind her. A silken veil wraps her short hair. I raise my hand, a first salutation to this hair which no dyes in existence can tint and camouflage, it is so soft. What if her lover loved to play with her hair? What would he do and where would he put his hand? Her hair has escaped its primary ties, its intimate family bonds: Nature. I will tell her when I meet her, very soon, that this hair is the childhood stage as she describes it in her writings, and that stage reached its essence in a single point of harmony on her head. It reached that limit when she was a child in Algeria and so—unlike me—she triumphed over the dye.