The Loved Ones

by Alia Mamdouh

  Look here. I am going to prepare a special binder I bought for you, she says. We will begin right now. Her words are like the prayers of a fervent intercessor. My feeling about it, though, is that this machine hates, and loves, and feels pleasure, and is a little harsh, but it never, never relents. Never retreats. All of these machines remain sleepless and vigilant, always at the service of her needs and entertainment. All I have to do in this situation is to disavow my own uncouthness and exaggerated caution. Here is the phantom whose price I have to pay from now on, as long as the Creator wishes. The gifted brain of this machine is computed in numbers with a long string of zeros. My natural ability is computed, beaten into me, with canes and bitterness and disappointment and failure. How long must I train for this? How long do I have to suffer? How long must I forget, and pretend to forget, and prepare myself to experiment, experience, and learn?

  With the long explanation she began to yawn. She holds these secrets tightly in her hand and parcels them out to those, like me, who are in need. After a little, when I have left her, she will go into that well-designed bedroom, drape her Indian shawl around her head and begin her yoga exercises. Had she lived in the era of the Marquis de Sade he would have begun by pulling and stretching her, with all possible cords, attaching them to arms and shoulders, legs and belly and chest. He would have brought all of the candles on earth close to her face and surrounded her eyes with flames. He would have bedded her in an orgy that ends only to begin again. He is able to say to her, Come here! and she does not flee from his presence. I don’t know why I had the feeling that she was in need of a whole host of such encounters, of such surveillance and control, of passions and love affairs, some indecency and truly obscene behavior, some uncertainty and lack of control that would mean all of her projects on these gadgets would be botched. There would be no man better than de Sade to animate the instrument panel of the Duchess Caroline and send it in all directions, moving his fingers to meet that marble-like body, with the hard push of a button stripping her of all her modesty and devilishness, without giving any consideration to her hellish iciness.

  I watch some of the American channels here. I wait for everyone to go to sleep and then, alone, I tiptoe into the living room. I don’t know how to decode these talismans. Whenever I move from one channel to another I imagine myself in front of a scene from the theater that goes on for twenty-four hours. Suddenly one of the leaders of the Republican Party appears and I hear him bellow. Why should we concern ourselves with others whose fervent hope is that locusts will consume America? he demands to know. I remembered the incident newspapers in France had published and then Arabic newspapers had translated: Nine youths from Holland came for winter sports, said the news article. In a year of abundant snow such as France has not known since 1986, they chose what appeared to be an appropriate peak in the southeast of the country. Bad luck and lack of caution led to their deaths when an avalanche fell as they were skiing. But, over there, luck such as this had nothing to do with snow or an avalanche that commingles wisdom and senselessness. Over there, such items concern military targets. For at dawn on that very same day American planes were strafing the Amiriya shelter in Baghdad, as the newspapers wrote at the time. Later in the morning, four hundred—or more—corpses were pulled out of the civilian shelter. At the time, General Richard Neal stated, we are absolutely certain we struck the intended target; we do not believe that we attacked the shelter, which was not targeted. This was a legitimate target. We do not know why there were civilians inside the shelter, and we did not go to war to destroy the Iraqi people.

  I woke up in the morning and went immediately to the window. Most of what I describe is imaginary. I make mistakes and then I say to myself, Fine, Suhaila. Perhaps this place is the right one for you, so don’t go and leave it. And where will you go? Here thirst is not satisfied while there hunger is more shamefaced than are the words that express it, and any elaboration becomes meaningless. From morning to evening I work hard—my hard efforts are trivial and sick. I stare at the fresh greens and the meats, and at the frozen chicken and fish. At legumes, fruits, medicines, vitamins. At cartons of milk, household goods, pots and pans, all sorts of electrical appliances, for juicing and grilling, for doing anything and everything. At clothes, precisely engineered cabinets, chairs more essential and active than I am. Carpet sweepers quieter than an ice-covered tree in the garden. I listen to all of the parts of things, all the while searching for someone in need of a touch of insanity: those women, me, or those men, before we all start to rot and go thoroughly bad and insane. I do not want to be a useful member of anything here; this is not my home and the objects here are no affair of mine. I am not an extra part nor am I a whole drawn to them. If I move the flower vase from where it sits this is only to escape from what has been lost forever—the whole garden. If I cut the cake I know that they are observing me, six eyes waiting for one tiny piece of enjoyment and entertainment and satiation. I set in motion whatever is not requested of me. I set their intentions in motion and I carry out things they are not even able to articulate. They are watching to see how far I will go, under observation, under the microscope: my face, my gestures, my words, my irritation and bad mood. As for my silence, that is the heaviest thing weighing down on them, and on me. They always have the ability to remind me that I am mistaken so that I will inflict my own punishment. There, in Baghdad, I showed no resistance except through acting and dancing. My father produced roles for all of us who were new actors, newly minted graduates of the academy. Of these roles he would say, They will raise your heads high and give you immense stature. Come, you must forget everything you have memorized, for texts are prisons, they are like the prisons of the homeland, and your only recourse is to smash them by means of other performances, different performances, the kinds that shake things loose. He would stand behind me, whispering into my ear, Come out, leave your weak and fatigued body. Leave behind its nature, which is to feel guilty even before the commission of sins. Go to the bodies of others. Pry out the treachery, cowardice, and abasement from your body. Stand tall like the noblest of the ancient saalik poets, those vagabond reciters, when they were at their most fertile. Don’t stand as if you are a commissioned soldier who is intent only on performing his military duty. Forget the whip of the sayyid your husband, forget his voice and his commands, even if your feet go weak and tremble, for weakness is the badge that announces the human tribe and it is the glory of actors. We do not want or intend any of you to become criminals of a theater or indeed its drunkards, filling the stage with the dregs of the steps you take. My father let slip the reins of the body and the heart. He said, You must betray that Suhaila, the defeated and cowardly Suhaila. Bite her as hard as you can and look carefully at the wound. No authorities, no rank, no battalions, no fleets of airplanes, no maps to deceive you and no uniforms to induct you into social respectability. You are an artist and not a clown.

  Those years I spent on the stage enticed me and lured me on: my harshness and my torment, my crimes and my evil. As for my identity, it was fragmented, dispersed between sayyid-father and sayyid-military man. My father, too, used me for the sake of his own great glories. I will extract the pearls from you, he would say to me over and over. And I will braid them around the waistline of the contemporary Iraqi stage. But I used to distance myself from my father even as I would not come close to either my husband or myself. It was my father who gave me the nickname of “Suhaila, untamed animal of the theater.” That phrase ran like fire through the dry kindling of the Iraqi press and indeed the entire regional Arabic press. That husband, meanwhile, was getting drunk and staying away. Every ascent I made in the theater was accompanied by a punishing, blasting volcanic lava in bed. I played characters in comedies and farces, but I was especially accomplished at roles that embodied miserable sadness and downright abasement. I changed my appearance, dying my hair a different shade for every role. With the help of makeup I gave myself different faces and relaxed my facial muscles and lineam
ents so much that I did not recognize my own self in the mirror. Then I would not be held responsible for my own demeanor, my own features. For that short span of time I would be a different creature, one whom I had created myself, one whom I had not known in the past. I invented it. It would be an unknown quantity, during those conclusive hours of my life, thus multiplying by two the risky adventure I was facing. I would always be the contrary, so that the search would continue for the face: my face. And so it was that, as my age advanced, I would bid farewell to one of those faces. Sometimes I would reconcile the two faces of myself but most of the time I did not. I was always led to something different, as if I were music that no one can hold onto but that everyone sways to as they listen hard.

  Ferial called. It was Sonia who picked up the phone. I was taking a bath. Tell Suhaila, she said, that Rabab and I are in Amman. I arrived from Rome a few days ago. We will try to call again or perhaps we will write her a long letter. In Baghdad Ferial used to say, Her husband’s voracity doubled the number of medals that were placed on his chest. I swear to you, Suhaila, that even when he was tossing and turning in bed, his oaths would gush out over me. For he did his duty as thoroughly as one can. I knew; so did you, but you are the sort of person who keeps things under wraps. You are the opposite of me. He was afflicted with me. I am the sort of person down whose cheeks tears do not flow. Unbendable iron—if he hit me on the cheek I slapped the nape of his neck. It was all hideously, shockingly, ugly. It was me who commanded him, one way or another, to beat me. He was not endowed with patience and I would not take back my words or withdraw from battle. A blow to the head and I would kick back. I would sprout wings. Humiliation—yes, indeed!—but in the corners of my eyes my fatal charge was amassing: scorn. For how long I saw that happening, in fleeting moments! Something like joy was in it, alive and real, something that would require a whole other life if I were to truly recall and assess it and not simply be rid of it. And even then. . . . That long, long grief—that grief was what deluged my life and led me to induce those abortions. I didn’t count how many there were. It’s a dirty way to either freeze things in place or correct them. I know what you will be advising me to do.

  When everything between them was finished, she had gone down like the setting sun. She said those words that I remember: I am exactly like my republic. I have become fragile and full of cracks. I have been depleted and ruined and destroyed yet I still feel that I have been something of value. The finest years of my life passed within a framework of a single and unchanging idea. I had the determination and the sense of responsibility and the ability to change it, but I failed. Do not envy me, please, don’t you see? Our clothes are modern and the ways we beautify ourselves are in fashion, but our skins are spattered with the oil of fear and our hearts drag behind them a caravan of illnesses, misery, and obscenity. Even friendships did not come to our aid or stand with us. To my eyes they appeared threadbare, shabby, and outworn; they were not strong enough to excite respect or sincere, pure affection. Our illnesses, too, are ones we do not even seem to deserve. They are sicknesses devised by others. They are their invention. I was tricking you, Suhaila, and I will not say to you, I will never say to you, give me a break, when you repeat in a bashful and laughing voice as you are staring into our eyes, we friends of yours, We must not leave all of the old places to our coming maturity and old age, may it bite the dust! It commands many talents for usurping what we used to imagine we were capable of preserving: nobility, self-esteem, and zeal. Why shouldn’t it, when this is the sole remaining danger for us in front of them.

  Ferial remained intensely feminine, continuing to attract men merely by the way she walked, her speech, and her laughter. Her appeal was like the secret police who always find exactly the right circumstances in which to inflict punishment on others. When I danced in front of them—those women—or on stage, I was acting with trained skill, and working on the roles I played, so that those meters of space would be transformed into my one and only test site. I would get to know those women better. I would sweep away all the categories of protocol and formalities, provoking their nerves. On occasion, I would feel as though they were turning or had suddenly gone against me. This state of affairs actually tempted me and generated new symbols and allusions that I used but that they did not know or connect with me. I was becoming strange to them and now and then to myself, as I emitted signals that were in no way classifiable or could be inserted into any larger image of me, signals about the movement of my soul and my body, my sex and my experience. Dance guided me to shake the whole world into moving with me and through my inspiration. Dance organized my pain and made it more resistant; dance hid my pain in a deeper place. It gave a frame to friendship and fortified my commitments to friends in trenches deeper than all those of the republic. With my first dance steps and movements I would observe my own myriad transformations inside and out. I would absorb the world instantly even if everyone were to abandon me, especially those women, for soon enough I would come back to myself as I summoned them back, one by one, steering my body toward them again and again. I lead it; I don’t turn it into an obstacle. I teach it and it explains to me how it wards off the dangers from me and from them; the incomprehensible dangers that faced us and the things to which our life has led in every land and on every continent.

  Two letters, Mother. The first is from Amman and the other arrived from Paris. Nader handed them to me, smiling. When I looked at the handwriting I knew that the first was from Ferial and the second from Narjis. Strange that Narjis did not call to say mabruk even though a whole two and a half months had passed. I tested their thickness with my fingertips and pressed down on them with longing. I smiled at Nader in turn and he understood what I wanted: to be alone in their company.

  I went into the warm, glass-enclosed space that overlooks the broad street and the carefully laid out garden. I fine-tuned the position in which I was sitting; this long and comfortable leather chair allows me to stretch my legs out all the way. It was six thirty and I longed for a cigarette but that was utterly forbidden here. For Leon’s sake and yours, said Nader. I agreed, and not grudgingly. But wine—my adoration of it remained undiminished. I heard the sound of Nader’s footsteps. He came in with a tray bearing hot tea and a few cookies. He had come to have an English alarm clock in him. He put the tray down next to me on the square table and went out right away. He did not let me see the captivating expression in his eyes. He was spoiling me, for my scheduled return to Paris was coming up quickly. I hastily opened the letter from Ferial and Rabab first. Rabab was our third friend in the academy and she was unique. And she had brought me under her sway by now.

  Suhaila dear, here are a few lines from me before I leave you in Rabab’s care. I came from Baghdad to Amman for her sake. This creature remains a hazard. It is as if we were still in those classes! To me she is like a light storm of delicate and harsh elements, as if she lived all of those years only in her underclothes. She remains pure in her relationship with herself, in the first degree, and in general her movements echo her own sculptures. And not the one she was ordered to sculpt one of those years and because of which she was dismissed from the academy. She brought me a select archive of them. She lived like those statues, in an ascetic state. Mortification of the flesh. But the fantasy erupted and returned to us our confidence in the old art, the art we used to study and dream of. Do you know, age hasn’t gotten to her yet, ayy w-Allahi! Perhaps, unlike me, she didn’t make it into an exclusive focus as I did and so the years have ignored her. It’s an astonishing thing—unbelievable, really—for despite the terrible difficulties she suffered in Rome she still says Allah! in wonderment, even at the speck of dust she sees floating above the car which I leased for her sake, driving her from place to place. She has held onto compassion and wonder and other things of which I am not even aware. Nobility and sincerity, perhaps, which for some of us have been changed into waste. When I saw her after twenty years or more, I screamed and then I wept. I began to search
for her. I searched carefully over her face and her features as I asked her, Where did you take those vile years? We are stuffed full of years. But Rabab—aah, if only you could see her, Suhaila. I cursed you as usual, and I cursed myself, my grandparents, my ancestors. I cursed all of them, between you and me. Akhkh, Suhaila, if only I were a mere ten years younger, that’s all, akhkh, age would just be a dream, a phantom that went away so swiftly, that ended before it began. It wiped its hands after it ate us up and tossed us as far and as low as we could go, the lowest of the low. Suhaila, as I also said to Rabab, I still try to win myself over to myself when I am in spacious rooms or in secret rooms that are locked upon me. I am afraid of the light. I am afraid of the unknown step. In Baghdad, one after another, we incur big emotion-debts, but I don’t know anyone to whom I could pass them on, and I have no son or daughter for whom I can preserve my only inheritance. Suhaila, the war has cleansed my vision: now I can see in every direction. My senses have been well-honed and I have gained what I was completely ignorant of: danger. Here, in Amman, even if it were to be a mere few days or a month, and even if I were truly removed from the dangers of those who come and go, I feel that I am living the danger in its entirety. I live it to its furthest extent. To the end. The danger of it is what renews my forces. I imagined that I was fleeing from it but I found it that it was inside of me, more than ever it was there, in this city which appears to me afflicted by the stammer of the terrified after all the original teeth have fallen out so that Baghdad put artificial teeth in its mouth. Those teeth can’t bite us as they would like. Today, my dear, I feel freer than I have ever felt. In Baghdad I don’t know what to do with my freedom. I tried hard, as you did, and as they all did: Tamadir, Narmin, Azhar, and Rabab. Now, would you remember her if you once forgot? Just now she is at my side, after all news of her had vanished completely. She returned suddenly like the new moon that signals the feast day and we never know exactly when it will show. She searched for my phone number and address, asking around among all sorts of people who don’t know me, but she found me in the end. Suhaila, when will you return to Paris, and what are you still doing in Canada? The grandson arrived and she is the mother. You are not. Sonia has taken on all of the roles and so has the son, and he crosses the spaces between you and her like a clock hand. Return to yourself a little, return to us. I leave you now with Rabab.