The Loved Ones

by Alia Mamdouh

  I want a single passing moment of any galaxy’s passage, I say. There I will meet someone who will not be carrying any implement in his hand. Not even a flower. Only Nader will outlast me, Tessa. And his father. One night when he came home very late after receiving a promotion, I sensed that he could not do it. He began to mewl. He would straighten and then sink down again and he could not. He was filling his chest with air, straightening his back, trying hard and not looking at me. At me, who had been stripped bare of everything. I tried to hold him. He followed me into every corner. I did not try to conceal myself or disappear from his path as he scrambled behind me with every implement he could find, with ashtrays and porno videos, driving me away and rebuking me with his heavy cane, hurling flower vases at me, whipping me with his leather belt on whatever part of my body he chose. I was the free one and he could no longer stand it. He grew tired, collapsed and began to howl like an animal. And that young Nader on the floor above stayed in his room and no sound at all came from him. Tessa waves her hand at the girl who has stopped next to the sound system. Higher, higher! she says with her hand. The drums, tambourines, guitars and violins cling to my tongue as my lips press against Faw’s cheek. The fragrance of me, and my first home, the dust of the earth that I left behind me, enter my nostrils. I breathe out into Faw’s face in the very way I have not attempted before. I suck the water and cardamom as I always did; my mouth holds those little pods. My mother taught me that habit: cardamom seeds between the teeth and your man is made your lover. I chew and Faw goes back to sucking slowly. It is on the point of unbearable. I descend further, push far inside his mouth, and bite on his lips as fast as I can. I hear the flutes: those nayys release their melodies. My waiting has grown long, and Faw flows over me. He begins at my head, undoes the head veil adorned with the colors of turquoise and saffron, pulls off the skin-bronze diaphanous veil over my belly, dips lower, detaches the pink lines of my legs so that my body opens in his hands. I feel as though he is peeling me. His arm lies across my shoulders. I have found a response to my waiting. I have found my response. My large and groaning chest listens beneath the gentleness of his palm. The movements are tender, fresh: a movement for parting, for things scattered, for the evening breeze and for fidelity to Baghdad. A movement meaning anger and the pustules on the face of the country. A movement in the opposite direction, wide-eyed like eyes before makeup and after old age. Movements for the path taken without guidance and we—Nader and I—talk in the rooms where we sleep, each one alone. In the mornings we freshen up our appearances and straighten our clothes and make it appear as though we are the happiest and most fortunate of fools. Faw starts in again, reaching upward this time, beginning from the fingers. You are very late. Come, come to me.

  He dragged me by whatever remained of me. I want the years of your life to come to mine, your waters into my pitcher. I will pull the years behind my back and make them pass across your chest. I am learning you. I am learning the greetings of your people and I am drinking the bitterness in your country’s throat. Suhaila, please—please do not falsify things to me. Come, more, more, for the cells of you will not break or wrinkle between my hands. Between my palms, your pale face erupts in fire and all of your years are my fortune. Your thin arm encircles me. Encircle me more. Harder. Embrace me, lady of mine, and let your chest laugh in my face. Aah—your little body, my harvest! Here, don’t turn to Maria and Tessa. Come away from their texts, leave them behind, and do not listen to their instructions. Bar the way in front of them. Do not follow a single and ultimate road, and do not put up signs to the roads that you do follow. Come, move, don’t tarry or hold back, turn to me so we can sleep together in the sex of the earth and the youth of the world. Here, I am gathering you up, and sprinkling you around, and murmuring your thanks. I spell out your hunger as I do the parts of your body, for I deserve you as I bring together the parts of me with you. We fade away. Fade away and don’t even let yourself hear the echoes of the applause in the final performance. Come. Don’t turn to the audience, for they do not know what has happened. Don’t nod your head in gratitude to Maria and Tessa and don’t listen to the fine expressions of admiration. Tessa will say again and again—and then again—what she said to me years ago when I was stepping across this stage for the first time. Fine, Faw, but . . . there remains something incomplete, something which the two of you have certainly not reached. Always there is an error somewhere, a repeating flaw. Yes, yes, a failure that shows itself anew in the heart, in the lonely inner place of the ephemeral body as it breaks. There is ever something that we cannot hold onto in all simplicity. It will never end. There is something here that the two of you have never faced. Always, at every time, it says to us, Come, begin all over again, come back, you two, you dear friends.

  Dear Suhaila,

  Yesterday I read the details surrounding the knifing of Naguib Mahfouz, based on the opinion of the doctor treating him. Mahfouz’s weak vision and hearing saved him from death, because if he had seen the assailant he would have been terrified and confused and that would have turned it into a far worse attack with graver consequences. So there are benefits in having poor vision and hearing, I said to myself. I say this to you as well, not just to myself; during our lives, I think, we have gotten the aid that nature grants to every creature in possession of a pair of eyes, for we have consumed our share of visual perception in many matters and deeds. I am no longer capable of taking up the magnifying glass and reading the weave of Kashan and Persian and Afghani carpets, of analyzing the stitches and the spaces between them, knowing the type of threads, evaluating the age and testing the sound, the has’hasa of the silk in my hands and between my fingers. I used up nearly all of the sharpness of my eyes for that beloved craft. Later I would sit down and draw on every one of my senses to read those books and reports on carpet making in nearly every part of the world.

  Just a minute, please, Suhaila, while I get myself a glass of the wine that your heart adores. I have not done what I have done just to make the time pass. My feelings of pride have expanded every time I have read, because all of those who craft those fine and lush types of carpet, all of them are women. Amen, I said to myself, as if you or Asma were right here in front of me. I tried to establish the truth of this observation when I visited Morocco some years ago to attend the Festival of Carpets in Meknes and Fez. Wherever I went my mood soared as I saw their faces in front of me, smiling and beautiful and most distant from the honorifics of heroines. Just imagine, the one reaction they have to their situation is to protest their bad treatment. They know without any hesitation where to go and what to do, and that would be so even if their lives were to be destroyed by pain. Yet between evening and the next morning, they discover themselves by means of that lovely choice. They are capable of living from what they produce. They are able to work on their own even if they are not fully conscious of that.

  I would meet with them in unofficial meetings on the margins of the arranged ones. We would eat together, to move further on our discussions of the book on carpet weaving which I still hope to write. I think about all the consequences of those long conversations should the book be published. My poor vision will be of some sort of benefit after all. You know? I think I will resort finally to laser to correct the wandering eye I’ve suffered from (but have I really suffered?) since childhood. Sometimes I walk in the street imagining that I have corrected my vision and that I see further, further than I am able, further than a fantasy tripping down the street that I do see in all its details. Then I step back from my ever-moving fancies and I echo the words of the poet:

  I open my eyes, when I open them, onto much

  but I see no one

  Over there and here, both, there are things that one’s being blind to—and I mean really blind, not metaphorically so—can be considered a mercy from heaven. There are people to whom this applies as well. But my problem centers on reading the carpet’s threads so that I can judge the actual or approximate age. And this reading, as the Fren
ch writer Céline put it, has made me one of those people who are good at issuing judgments on people quickly from the first glance and thus do not see anyone. But I do see that “anyone”—and two and ten anyones—within the ordinary course of everyday greetings, in antique shows and carpet exhibits, in concerts and plays at the Théâtre du Soleil directed by your friend the playwright luminary Tessa Hayden. My impression is that she freights her texts with radioactive material. This writing is what I love—it’s uranium writing. Life after your trip to Canada! By the way, will you go to New York? How I wish we were with you so that together we could all win a great victory. Life remains for me an end to be attained, not a means. You are receiving in advance the profits from the years of your life, as you don’t demand more than this Hatimish liberality in a city that never once entered the mind of the generous Hatim of Tayy, that early and legendary Arab poet, who is not the same Hatim, not our lovely dear friend, our Hatim. As you habitually do in Paris, you asked me about the draft of the book and how far I have gotten? Have I started? You said to me, Writing about carpets is also a creative art through and through, and why don’t you believe that? About the pleasure of getting reactions to one’s art, about . . . and about. . . . As if you do not know that I know all of this. Hear it from me, then, my dear friend, once and forevermore: I am a special case. My daily life in its particulars is a creative act that breathes and laughs, despairs, eats and drinks, loves, and walks on two feet. Wherever and whenever I shift my gaze around my apartment I see the different styles of carpets, and their images and the texts of small carpets and smaller ones and the large ones that surround me—on the walls and flung over the sofa and under the glass of the long coffee table in the sitting room. Then I can feel a netting of fingers and hands and arms enveloping me. I feel soft and loving hands, free and real, expressing their emotions and their selves, and they have done all of the hard work they have done in order to reach the treasure: freedom. And here I am following that call, their call, the call of those women, all of them. I lift my hand in tribute, raising a toast to their health, to the health of freedom. Those women are the substance of my novel and short stories, not on the walls alone but in my blood, with every step and every blink of my eyelids here in this place. For Paris, this magic woman, this jinni who connives with me, works with me hand in hand—this Paris provisions me every new day with thousands of cargos. I become umm arbaa wa-arbaiin, mother of four and forty, that creeping centipede with so many legs. I want to climb and struggle and reach the innermost point in the innermost hear of the city. Paris opens before me all of its saliva and sweat, all of the threads that it holds, and I live the days and years I have here in a state of agreeable and avid energy, provisioned with mellow feelings and eager appetite. Writing alone certainly could not provision me with all of this!

  Zayn. Fine, you are not a writer even if you do write, using your body to enact what others write. We are alike in this quality. Writing is their bread, Hatim and Narjis and the rest of our friends who are writers and poets. Those people are prisoners of the temple. They are the sorrowful, deprived of the pleasures of touching the moment and feeling the pulse of the universe. As for me, I have been liberated from all of my bonds. I leave the threads of the carpets to lie in solitude along the walls and I enjoy them to the extent that I leave them on their own to turn toward all the corners of the world. I write my existence on this earth with the eloquence of the loveliest fictions ever written. The work of the household and making a living take only a few hours from me. I do these things quickly and competently because I’m so accustomed to them, and afterward I wander freely among my pleasure excursions and friendships and the life of a flaneur, and singing in my heart an abudhiya that went missing from its writer. The silk threads protect me from the herds of the treacherous. Suhaila daughter of Ahmad, you who confessed to me of an astounding innocence, that the seven minutes in which you danced with Monsieur Faw on the stage of the Théâtre du Soleil were tantamount to the story of your life, and I believed you, and I was not afraid for you as you were afraid of the reactions of Nader if he were to discover it. Ayy, Nader is here, your son, though he is in Canada, it is as if he is living in your apartment, in the second room. Go, Suhaila, travel in your feelings to wherever you can, to whatever you can do. Do only what agrees with you and pleases you. We can never please those around us, no matter how hard we try, and I’m the last one to be giving sermons. I have not begun writing anything for that book in which my belief has been strengthened by your insistent queries. I am coming back to my wineglass, I am refilling it, and I drink to you. To the health of those women, creators of the light coming from all the carpets around me. To the health of your light, my friend, at a time when you are with Nader and your newborn grandson Leon. Don’t let your absence grow too long, please. For you, too, are like the Kashan zawliyya—the older you get, the more youthful and active you are. Your flaw is that you have no confidence in this.

  I have just looked over what I’ve written to you. First time I have ever done that, the first time that I am on the verge of begrudging you this letter, putting it in an envelope on which I write my own address. It is a model of the sort of letters that I dream of receiving. But I will be noble and generous, as I usually am, to judge by what you say, and I will write your name on the outside.

  Blanche

  Dear Blanche,

  Ja wayn awaddi al-hija witaatib ma’a man. . . .

  If Hatim were here, he would have sung us these lines in his mellow voice on this glorious occasion. Where can I stow these words? To whom shall I lament?

  As of a few days ago, I’m a grandmother! The whole thing took only a few hours of labor and then a very real child was born into my hands. The grandmother is experiencing a new sensation that the mother never had. I did not understand what it was that I held in my hands when Nader handed it over after a few hours in the hospital. For me it wasn’t a grandson. What is this thing whose perception exceeded the powers of my mind? He is not a mere child, nor simply the child of my son; and it isn’t in my power to produce the assumptions that others—other grandmothers and grandfathers—have made before me. I did not understand, Blanche, what was happening to me. I am not one to strut about in pride as I bring him close to my lips. He has a certain authority when he is in my arms, a power that compels me to alter all of my actions and behavior.

  I was avoiding embracing this baby out of fear for my own state, not out of fear for him. As I watched him, I was afraid that I would somehow dwindle away into nothingness, breathing in his fragrance. It was an indefinable odor that ran between us, a fragrance that sends into one’s soul a sort of faith and devoutness that has nothing to do with any of the religions but rather with something whose essence I don’t know exactly: it’s a contentment that remains unfinished, a poetry exhausted of its powers, a mysticism akin to that of the Sufis who wore wool, but this mysticism is silken, not woolen. If only I were a poet, or a singer, then I would have thought of Edith Piaf when she sang those lines to her beloved:

  Le ciel bleu sur nous peut s’effrondrer

  Et la terre peut bien s’écrouler

  Peu m’importe si tu m’aimes

  Je me fous du monde entier…

  Je renierais ma patrie

  Je renierais mes amis

  Si tu me le demandais . . .

  Blanche, my days are not simply going by here; rather, they are developing and accumulating, like growing crystals. This is what led me to avoid getting into the game with Nader and Sonia of choosing a name for the newborn. I did not interfere in this at all; I simply could not do that. The name does not fix its owner’s identity; no name does that, as you know. But as I was leafing through the Arabic dictionary that I once sent to Nader, an idea took hold of me and wouldn’t let go: As they did not permit me anything having to do with the grandson, my choice fell on your name. As is common in the Arabic language, common in the way news is reported, in any male language: Do you always know the male before the female,
or is there simply never any mention of the female? But I will transpose the image: Do you know that Blanche is the name of a sea located to the northwest of Russia. Blanche: the name of a valley—Valle Blanche, just below Mont Blanc where the snow piles high. But you are like the samovar full of coals. Blanche of Castile, Queen of France in the thirteenth century and wife of King Louis VIII and mother of St. Louis: after her husband’s death, she ruled for eight years, and then she returned to rule for four more years during the early Crusader campaign. And finally, “Blanche”—my friend—is the name of a beer that tends to be almost white. This latter meaning is what has stayed in my mind; it is the gist. I think that when you arrived in Paris twenty years ago and tasted that beer, the flavor and color pleased you so much that you changed your name from Kashaniya, marble-colored, to Blanche, beautiful white.