The Loved Ones

by Alia Mamdouh

  Suhaila

  Canada Diaries

  Sonia has become a true woman—with the child in her lap. Motherhood leads me toward her in a way that no exchange of smiles ever has. I have come to feel that she knows what she is talking about. She notices the lapses in the house and in the order of things. I have begun to understand her old nervousness. Her presence is strong and so is her wariness, even if that has intensified just recently for the child’s sake, and there is something of nobility in it. Her wise Indianness has encouraged me to draw closer to her, and her merry Persianness has made my body shake with joy. We came together, that is what I have imagined, woman facing woman, a lovely, real mother with all that means, to accompany the body that gives birth. With this sweet fragile newborn, it was as if I were receiving back my son from her. He is the very same child whom I took in my arms as if he were curtaining me, and veiling the years of my life imprisoned inside my body: and he gives them more glory and virtue.

  I watch him and notice things. There is no use in kisses or tears or all of the Iraqi murmurings with which I came prepared. None of that has sufficed as I address him through the magnanimity of that beauty which makes joy public and strong and which neither his crying nor my singing or dancing interrupts. He is simply there and I love him, another being whom we love. We don’t know how to behave in front of him until, in his presence, we become acutely aware of our own shortcomings. That is how we know that he possesses us and not the reverse. I have seen all the secrets of my life in his face, witnessing them with my own eyes, and I am allowing him to discover them, with me, little by little. My age has become a good thing in this life I have lived. I have become completely me, more myself than I was before. Whenever I bring his soft palm and his gentle flesh to my lips, the warmth from his hand flows and my soul comes to seem simpler and yet deeper. This child is my recompense as I come forth to him. His eyelids are lowered. I embrace him. This child comes from my imagination. He does not live in dreams but in the wakefulness of reality. He alerts me to my own slips and blemishes, and he rescues me from my failure and my losses.

  Sonia is asleep, the little one beside her. Nader is at work and I am walking in the street. I was alarmed when I first saw these extremely wide streets completely empty of people and movement. What frightened me was the freedom, which I don’t know how to handle. I felt like a person whose shackles have been removed but who has lost his folk. Like an animal’s, my nose sniffs for the smell of the first place it has known, the one that is lost forever.

  There is no solution to my depression; even the existence of this exquisite newborn doesn’t provide an answer. I immerse myself in it until I sense that my blood will indeed clot among my pores. At times, my depression protects me even if by an inaudible voice and keeps me from feeling upset. I do not know how to be free. Freedom devours me and I am truly struck with terror. I am afraid: was it waiting for me all this time and through all of these distances I have traveled? How late freedom was! Freedom turned out to be out of reach and we were trying to sidestep its kicks. It was as if I were dreading that it would sweep me away as it has carried away others. I wonder what old people do with freedom? I clasped my hands together as if I were clasping my life for the first time and broadcasting a secret to an audience of myself. So, let us play together and whoever loses will lose. For the first time I become aware of, even attentive to, that region of the body. And the pains that Sonia feels do not turn my head. I smile, walking down the street. I am always walking. I walk especially when I am readying myself to dance. My muscles have grown hard and my steps flow over the even asphalt. I transform my walking into a dance. I search in my body for new regions and I sense my own transformation. I give dance my two feet, wholly, and I acquaint myself with my condition and the calls of my body. I call and always encounter something strange: ties of peace, bonds of fraternity chasing me as I am making adjustments between walking and dancing. It makes me feel as though I have just been born, like Leon. But these streets are here, they exist, with all of this natural-seeming unconcern around me. It is all spectacular. Yet I prefer the narrow alleys and the side streets that take me only there. As soon as I cross into them I will see someone beside me, a man or a woman, and I will feel the give and take of friendship. The ground slips away from me as I walk over it. It clutches hearts and minds as it pulls back from in front of you to be ready to equip your fear. It laughs at you silently: we are the territories of ourselves. Walking so much, I was tired. My feet were asking me questions other than those my hands were asking. The spaces of greenery are my hands, sprouting over my feet.

  It is not envy or spite toward Sonia. I am free of that. It is a quality of anxiety that I don’t dare to resist as I see her again with the child in her lap. It is something between admiration and respect. Something else solemnly pledged to the unknown drudgery that demands from you nothing more than modesty and silence. It drags me by my clothes and says to me, Don’t leave the playing field, Suhaila. The periods of the game are not over yet. When it comes to most things my curiosity is feeble, and that did not change until after Leon’s birth. I became someone who sticks her nose into everything, examining, spying, without twisting my head in the other direction. I want to see so that I may reel from the sight before me. I danced for the child day before yesterday when Sonia went into the bathroom and left him with me. I danced for him and for long stretches I left her behind me. I went all the way to Baghdad, and to all the women, and to the choicest men, cut down before their time. I danced, the suitcases in my grip and the country on my brow. I dance as Ishtar danced for Gilgamesh, wearing my simple clothes, picking up the flower vase from where it sits, as a gesture of coming together, of repartee and affection. And when I hear the soft hamhama of his voice I float on my tears. Leon will be redress for my tears and the years of my life. He’ll be that redress more than his father ever was.

  Faw rang. I was next to the phone when he called. Congratulations, he said. I’m longing for you. When do you come back? His voice was extremely buoyant with a tinge of flirtation to it. I felt as though my chest was bursting. You are my hard labor, I said to him. I heard a spirited laugh. I don’t want anything stronger in what the two of us have together. But I do want that something stronger, I responded. He muttered something and didn’t say any more. I did not laugh but I seemed to sense the color and size of my eyes change. I did not tell him, though; I didn’t want him to get the wrong idea. I do not want anything unfamiliar from him. I want to keep him as he is, and between me and my self. I am not taking sleeping pills for his sake nor antibiotics, and I don’t cajole my complexion so that it looks more glowing. And I don’t like my imagination to go very far. I don’t want to imagine us doing, or not doing, anything in particular. I can accept the idea of not meeting him again, not circling with him on stage, and certainly not making a vow to myself about being his alone. I can handle not feeling the sort of need for him that would kill me if he were to die before me. He is there, in his own place, in his country, there in the presence of his women and his body and his magic and his age and life; and I am here in the presence of my femininity and my sensitivity and my primitiveness and my stupidities. What happened, what took place between us could no doubt act upon the way our pasts and futures look to each of us. Endless and unspoken! So let him go away or go back, let him be in touch or bail out—it’s all the same. I didn’t give him the number in Canada and he didn’t ask for it, and so without a doubt he got it from Tessa. She called, too. The telephone is at my side and the moment it rings I answer, afraid that it will disturb the little one. If only Tessa knew Arabic—the local dialect; if only she could talk to Hatim and he could sing for her, ya binadam—O children of Adam!—in the language of the south. The sadness in his voice makes “people flee,” as the saying goes. He is perfectly able to speak the dialects of the middle Euphrates and the south of Iraq. Blanche knows the dialects of the north and surrounding areas inside out, and when she starts to talk in Mosuli Arabic she becomes an
unfamiliar woman. She blends Assyria with Babylon; it is all very bold and one can’t begin to describe the scene. Why didn’t she take up acting, this dear woman, why not the stage? Perhaps it would have been better for her than collecting antique carpets?

  One day, sitting in that lovely and elegant apartment of hers, I said to Tessa that it is as if the objects there are not things but rather are salt and bread, water and air, and are standing or walking along before my eyes. And despite all of the books and recordings and paintings I see, and all the appearances of modernity, you—I said to Tessa—are so like a pagan being. I see you—instead of seeing these books—among rocks. Do you know that all these miniatures and treasures and silken veils from China and India, from Africa and the Orient, are nothing other than the rays of the sun, and you are inside the dome of your soul, listening to the music made by the breezes and the running sources of rivers and the trees of the forests? Do you realize, Tessa? Sometimes it seems to me that you do not work with your hand at all, or with your tall, thin body or your short and calloused fingers and clipped, worn-down fingernails, or your face like that of a bird with no name, a legendary bird. You don’t write simply from the senses or only out of thoughts and concepts. Nor do you write out of intuition or your sinews. You write with all of these as if you have come here from an unpromised land. As if your throat has gone dry as you call out to your people and no one answers you. Covered in dirt, you are not soiled by despair. To the contrary, your spirit has recoiled in horror from oppression. You do not sleep, Tessa, for witnessing the disastrous cataclysms of those lands; of Palestine. But you do not complain of your affliction to God and you have no time to rest. Tessa, what are you doing for the sake of those and the others?

  I invited her to my apartment months after we had met for the third time. I also invited the Iraqi-born playwright Nasim Salman after meeting him at Blanche’s. I invited Caroline and Nur as well. That evening I made the most wonderful Iraqi dishes I had ever prepared—it was a meal I made, after that, only for Tessa’s sake. That evening we talked about the language of ongoing communication among people. That new and lovely friendship returned me to far-ranging memories, to Nasim as he watched my practicing with Faw and then decided to write for us a short theatrical piece to be presented at Théâtre du Soleil between the acts and in Iraq’s name. That evening I returned to years long past, to the theater festival in Iraq in the early 1970s when I presented my paper but did not present my dance or any of my roles. My father was upset with me but I didn’t care. I told them about it as I drained my third glass of wine. As I was speaking to them, surreptitiously I began to shimmy my body. I stood up, sensing my hands saying, We are all from the East, even Caroline the Swede. The East is not the past or the search for lost time. It is the mouth of a river that pours out love even if it is a mournful, hot, and harsh love, one that squeezes the heart with the heaviness of its misery. I don’t know why I feel that all of you are closer to the East, are from the East in the first place, I told them. I was drunk, bursting with life and feeling the hot Iraqi sun, knowing it had not befuddled my head but rather had made of it a fountain where the water of the two rivers met and rose. I was acting a role just as if I were on my father’s stage. No police chased me, no husband was beating me as I bathed and swam in the Euphrates. For humanity stays interconnected by means of faces and dress and furnishings and gestures of celebration; through spontaneity and music. All of them play a role equivalent to the language of words. The function of communication is attendant on the whole of social practice more than it is represented in the spoken language alone. Tessa felt exactly as I did: what brought us together in the first place was the unspoken. Language sometimes breaks up relationships among people. To the extent it is an instrument of communication it may become an instrument of mutual misunderstanding and missed meanings. And then, all that is left are these gestures and silence and the touch of hands and the acuity of lively eyes.

  I sat down, my glass empty and my speech winding up. This is what happened between us, Tessa and me. We didn’t talk at all, but the communication and connection between us shone with words we had never before uttered. Isn’t that so, Tessa?

  When I put out plates and spoons, mouths were busy and tongues voiced their admiration. I started to talk again, my voice slurred with drink, directing my words to Tessa. If only you would agree about singing in all the dialects of the world, my dear. English and French are not enough. If only Babel would erupt again with tongues and anger and singing that sends its echoes far. If only the place where the date palms grow could be shaken, undone, so that it would spread to cover the cosmos. If only Christmas did not center on the Christian holy figure, the man, the prophet, but on the place as well, on al-Quds, the Holy, Jerusalem; and on Najaf and Karbala, on Mecca and Medina. It is not only Jerusalem in which the crucifixion took place. The crucifixion is all over the world and especially in our lands. If only all languages were destroyed and everything once again became the babble of Babel! Why isn’t the theater this confusion of everything, Tessa, between scoundrels and vagabonds, human beings and the prophets? Your theater will be a cosmic adventure that will be neither spared nor left behind, and it will cause a splitting and a rending. I know, you are going to say that I am babbling because of the good wine. This is our blood, take and drink it. . . . My voice chokes and I swallow it into silence. Tessa laughs. She always laughs, and doesn’t answer me.

  What do I do in Canada?

  I dance on the stage of the earth. I see the calm lakes; they look like little food cans next to the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. This is the theater of imagined lives: there are no spectators before me but the air, the light, the brush of insects in the air, and the sound of the wind. No microphones and no loudspeakers but the whistling of the gods. The clothes I wear are as heavy as they are long and dark. They are so opaquely dark that I cannot even tell what color they are. From afar a faint light is visible, as if I am to be blessed by the illumination of a golden field of wheat; and one can hear the poundings of what sounds like a mortar and pestle, which I imagine to be the drumming announcing the performance in my father’s theater. Suddenly many voices are erupting, tormented and sad, not moaning, not in pain, merely turning all the way around to face me. Dance is not enough, Suhaila, neither here nor there. Diya, your only brother, called, that’s all. He sent a check for a thousand dollars as a gift to the newborn. He was afraid; he fears his wife.

  We had arrived in Paris only months before. Coming across Turkey we were fleeing between terror and certain death. Such a flight was prohibited to us—to us, wife and son of a military man of an as yet unknown fate. As dawn broke I was still awake, conversing with my spirit. Nader was next to me on the other bed. I heard Marianne, Diya’s wife. She was giving me a nickname that instantly captivated me as she announced it to Diya.

  The khityara makhbula: the crazy old lady. I was not afraid of my new title. I fancied that all of my nicknames were ones I deserved. But she didn’t stop there. Don’t you see? she told Diya. She has begun to spread terror in the hearts of the two little ones. What does this lady want? She’s your sister, fine, but it’s too much—this air of hers, always this gloomy and mocking expression. She is a candidate for insanity as it is, and I have begun to feel afraid of her. As for you, your efforts at joking and clowning aren’t enough to get around these sudden fits of hers. Diya, she is confused, and that’s that. Just consider, last night for an entire hour she raved on and on, some nonsense I couldn’t understand about prison and love, and then death and dancing. Then she was going on about the way her husband humiliated her. Her feelings seem to be a jumble of anger and understanding, showing in her eyes as he returns by night from the barracks. I think the two of them are not quite right, my dear. I know a little about what has happened in your country, even after you shut your mouth and refused to speak any more about it. Even the chirping of the sparrows had begun to frighten you when you arrived here. Don’t look at me like that, please. Your country i
s somewhere else; somewhere out there, I mean, in that region of the globe, and I and my children are not concerned with it. We have nothing to do with any of it. And when you come through the door of this apartment you leave it far away, further away than the most remote galaxy in the universe. You know that. Has the whispering gossip of the home country, of your homeland nation, of family and folk, the sister and her son, started to come back to you? You must make yourself go to a psychiatrist. I thought the issue had been resolved. You are French now, my love, be sure you remember that. You will be buried here, having let go of everything for the good of your family. Did you forget that on the day our marriage was announced in my parents’ presence?

  When Nader returns from work the table is ready, laden with the most appetizing foods. The only comment I hear from Sonia is, He will gain weight, Suhaila. Please. I have a response for her, though. But he is thin, like me and like you. We all need nourishment—and you most of all.

  The foods I prepare for her are varied; they are full of calories and they are beneficial. I put them on a tray which I carry into her room. I thought I was forming more of a bond with Sonia than I had had before, but Nader would grumble as he sat in front of his plate, muttering as I ladled out food for him.

  Imagine, Mother, that we at the company have the power to buy and sell everything, beginning with goods, continuing through ideas, and ending with people. You could say that we sell truths and illusions and we exchange them for each other, and because our company is half American and half Canadian, the American side takes from the countries of the world stocks and shares, hours of work, and minerals, and exchanges these for figures and fancies recorded in bank registers and computer memories. The whole situation appears laughable not to mention unbelievable. Daily, as if it were the national anthem that we’ve written on a piece of paper and put in front of us so we won’t veer away from it or forget it, we recite our mantra. This is as per the instructions of the directors who have come to the company. It might as well be a sacred oath in the presence of a singular lord: Coming from Wall Street, we are the financiers and we are the ones who decide who lives and who will die.