The Loved Ones

by Alia Mamdouh

  Suhaila, I will respond to all of those questions of yours, which I imagine are not quite formulated yet but rather still suspended between your lips and your tongue. It seems there is no escape from crossing this distance with you after I crossed it for days with Ferial. With you I will be less spontaneous and more difficult, for I was never one of your beloved women. You used to annoy me with your acquiescence but it was not up to me, or it was not my right, either before or after, to say whatever I might say not only to you but also to others. I have learned how to organize the chaos of my emotions and sentiments, like a faqih combs out his beard and trims it and plucks out the stray hairs but goes on scaring children with it, not to mention pessimists such as you. Life in the academy was my first swallow of bitterness; afterward, the cup overflowed. Your questions comprise one such gulp of bitterness. That’s how I feel about it: questions coming from a past which remains strong and essential even though it has been totally annihilated. I haven’t shut the storeroom door on that past and, likewise, I didn’t demand forgiveness for it either. I broke off all my relationships so that I could bring to light my own condition and unearth the state that all of you were in as well. A single pit we entered, whereupon we were buried in dirt and worms, just like that, even without benefit of any riddles we would have had to solve. Who among us has been completely victorious? It appears that we have all been defeated. I am not talking about you, about your ordeal—are you really in the midst of an ordeal? I don’t have the right to ask such questions—I wrote this one down as a kind of joke. Every ordeal has some appearance of begging. Even our understanding and the other person’s attempt to understand us makes a sort of beggary. And here I am, watching myself begging your understanding. But why? As I am writing to you I bring you fully into my presence: your radiance on stage and your despondency in the academy’s quadrangle. You were a lot, you were an abundance, you were more than we were, much more. Just now I have been discovering you but I am not reaching all the way to you and your presence doesn’t allow me to bury myself in my own concerns. Just barely are we witnesses: we contracted leprosy and they came to fear our touch or any proximity to us, but we are still scratching at the site of their ugliness and their old pus and their monstrous, deformed shapes. Our heads are still bowed, and I am in the forefront. You will ask, What have you done, Rabab, in the land of the Romans? I studied, and I learned, and I got work, even cleaning the shit of some rich old women who were mere skeletons. But among them the shit had been preserved in them as a human being’s strongest possible modesty and filth. From these bodies, the bodies of women in particular, emerged my sculptures and my formations and my misshapen, monstrous figures as well. From that site, and among those old women, I was born. That was the essence of my life or rather, more accurately, the core of the art. Their remains and talents are still there upon my hands, and their true insolence runs across my body. I needed them more than they were in need of me. They were very gifted with vomit and excrement, with urine and sweat, with laziness and chatting and unbearable crudeness. They were gifted with all of the illnesses of the ancient and medieval and modern world that you can possibly think of. Yaah, how much I profited from sicknesses! They were a target and they were my training and they were stubbornness and a challenge. I hunted down the ill like one of those Italian gigolos who tracks closely and patiently, and pursues the hunt, and is compelled in the end to do up the buttons of his pants and sink himself in the secret act in order just to remain somewhere above despair. All my amorous rendezvous took place in the homes of those women. I would clean and feed and perfume them and leave the light slanting in so that they would not disappear from my sight as I stole their ancient profligacy from them, and the sighs of that tyrannical ruination that was, and the moaning of the mothers over the dissolute sons. You can be confident, Suhaila, those are them, the women. Those women in whose embrace I found care and security, and before all else, adventure that was also creative. It was those women who helped me to excavate my blindness and impotence, and from inside the forest of their primitive souls they achieved for me the most beautiful sculptures. I had my first show in the garden belonging to one of them, a rich woman with the aristocratic name of Señora Clementina. She let me have a whole section of that lovely garden for my work—after all, I was a source of pride for her and her family and her wild gay grandson who had an unrivalled way of arousing me to my femininity. My sense of myself as a woman doesn’t need that particular mode we all know, that calls on protection and virtues and mistakes. So I gave him my virginity as a sort of bounty to that ferocious beauty. I sculpted Mario nude and into his body I cast the rebukes, prohibitions, and insults that my notorious body attracted when I was in Baghdad. I did not plan on staying in Rome; I didn’t strategize for it. Those things, those events, happened of their own accord. I saw time’s existence as I left that city, and as I was leaving all of you. I was leaving the man I loved and we were saying goodbye to each other. I saw he was a trivial lie and all of those stars in the Baghdad sky were bankrupt, and those projects we dreamed of, him and me, were nothing more than a silly nightmare. That night, in that emptiness I felt throughout my body, I cried as hard as one can cry. I will cry here, I said, in Baghdad, as I am saying goodbye to it, I will cry all of the tears I have, I will finish them up and come out clean and light and pure. That is how I will come out to the airplane. I was sobbing and blowing my nose, weeping for the dust-covered city quarters and my destitute home and my eight siblings and my retired father whom I would now be obliged never to see again. I wept at the terror of those new streets that would crush me beneath them if I were to forget. For I had died as I prepared my papers for travel, and when I hoisted my completely empty suitcase I sensed that I would never return there again. Rome was the hardest. Language was not the only obstacle. I didn’t have enough money, either. At the time I had no more than three hundred dollars. But when one has gotten accustomed to living at the very bottom of the pit, it is no problem to live in the bowels of a seductive and shameless city such as Rome. At the time I thought of Ferial in particular, and before I thought of you, of course, for you and I were far more thoroughly demolished than she was. Our ruin did not bring us together. Indeed, to the contrary, it tore us apart, scattered and fragmented us. It was Ferial alone who brought us together, because what is different about her, compared to us, is that she has this powerful and lightning-quick way of facing things. Perhaps it was because those who so admired her were greater in number and reputation, I don’t know. My quiet demeanor was not a target in itself nor was your mute and indistinct outward appearance which stuck in the gullet. Your marriage when you were still a student at the academy infused the insanity of your inner nature with a sort of stupid wariness. This put limits on your comings and goings and on the signs you gave us at the university, even though you appeared affectionate, and the drama professors would call you the electrified ghoul. I longed to have Ferial with me in Rome, not you. I wanted her to be there so that she could regain or reorient her eyes and redo her taste in the art of décor, the specialty she chose and was so passionate about, so she would not once again grow confused as she did when she took on arranging your stupid bogus expensive furniture when you invited us to that extravagant villa in the neighborhood that was fenced in with electric wire and police dogs. I decided to forget all of you for good, but your news did reach me, bit by bit, from where I don’t know. The Iraqi artists began to emigrate one after the other and so I would hear snatches of your news or hers. Ferial found herself a way by means of the homes of some of the old rich, people of influence who had emigrated for good. She began to redecorate interiors, replace furniture and carpeting, remake guest rooms, gardens, and sitting rooms. I laughed when I heard her news. I said to myself, She has become like me. I bring back life to the skeletons of rich old women and I return by night to excavate them again and encase them in plaster of Paris. I put them into ovens, grill them, and from their most extreme moments of desolation extract suffering,
shame, and their own deferred deaths. And Ferial deals with objects, everything inanimate, mute; with silk and herbage, linen and artificial flowers, with wood and steel and electricity and other things that follow. Every one of us was able to spend or perhaps to squander her life with cold, unmoving blood. She wagered on those lumps of material and creatures, and between entertainment and dream she kept going. Each of us took a small space, a tiny margin of existence, keeping it small and unobtrusive as if she were trying to conceal a nest egg from the eyes of the tax office. I know what you will say now; I can hear your raised voice. Ayy, fine, you say. Didn’t life look to us more cursed than death? Precisely. What were we to do? That’s how I will answer you—and you have not even asked about men and relationships, what I did there, how I handled that freedom. Not in the sense of the body only: I mean the freedom to take decisions, for a woman isn’t merely a body as most men think. I doubt you know that I fell in love only twice. One of them you know, that first love. The other one was an Irish artist, a brilliant painter. The relationship ended after a year and a half when he returned to Ireland after a special study tour of murals in Florence. I did not die after he left nor did any serious fatal accident happen to me. Even so I do not personally applaud transient relationships. They stir up in me the sort of terror that death causes in us, and a sense of insult for which there is no recompense from heaven or earth. There is an inconsequentiality about such relationships that my spirit cannot bear. Fleeting relationships are life lived upside down.

  You know, Suhaila, in one of our conversations at the academy Azhar was with us. Her good looks provoked admiration among the male students and professors around us, even more than Ferial did. I wonder where she is now? At the time, I felt as though we were part of a permanently ongoing hunting party and the one with the most bodily strength would master us. In response to such behavior I was always at the ready to commit a crime if I had to. My relationship with the other—with men—if it was anything at all, tended to be one of overall affection. If a certain man was not a colleague or friend, my relationship with him was governed by shared cultural interests, and that was all. I cannot feel any fondness for individuals who do not stir up real admiration in me and whom I do not respect. I know, though, what you are trying to get at. You want to know more about that miserable relationship with virginity, right? To release you from your headache, I will answer you. I know perfectly well how persistent you are behind that silence of yours. What happened to me took place without any cunning or underhanded behavior. I took it all very calmly and, later, I did not try to follow him. Nor did he feel any particular sympathy for me, as I didn’t have any regrets. I did not carry with me the notion that I was a woman with a past which had killed the person I was and spoiled the future for me. In fact, he became one of my dearest friends. He always sought my help in those nervous afflictions which constantly bothered him, and I would hurry to him. Suhaila, those young men are priceless friends. Shame is not what brings us together with them nor do regrets and moaning divide us. Like most women, I believe that love is something that has nothing to do with sex in comparison to its close affiliation to the imagination. And I really do love love. The sort of love that is rare, I mean. I imagine there’s a relationship here which is practically sacred, such as we feel in the presence of God. Our misery is unbounded in the absence of God, and above and beyond all of this I feel that God loves me very much, just as I love God. Suhaila, I passed through Paris often on my way to Ireland to visit that ex of mine through those time-honored years. I never thought at all about meeting you, I don’t know why. Was it egotism or aversion or anger? Or as if I didn’t want your help in my destructive struggle with myself? I wanted to remain by myself unendingly. I gave all of the papers to Ferial who was astounded at how I was able to record what I did, as if one of us had not been apart from the other for more than a few moments. And even so, as someone has said, I am more skilled at friendship than at love, and in this, it seems to me, you are like me.

  Rabab

  Dear Suhaila,

  I remembered the way you put it once, when you said, in frustration, Right! What I really were problems and crises, did you suppose the opposite? You turned to us—we were at Blanche’s. You and Hatim were pestering each other as usual. Suddenly you lifted your head. But you didn’t look any of us in the eye as you said in a low voice, I have only realized just now that I am the problem. My son says this and here you are repeating the same words but in different forms. Blanche was saddened and angered when I told her that, ever since things have gotten tight for me, I have been working as a babysitter in my building. You kept yourself in check, though. Maalish, shu yaani, you said. So what, it is work like any other. Don’t take what Blanche says seriously.

  But—you told me, too—the accusation in your eyes, Narjis, challenged me whichever way I turned. Hatim was the worst. His anger was sharper than anyone’s. His eyes seemed to pop out of their sockets to pour their abundant anger all over me. He got to his feet, in the middle of the sitting room, and made it clear that he was speaking directly and specifically to me. I feel the same sort of responsibility toward you as Nader does, he said, and what your son says is correct. You must close up your place and go to Canada, for the duration of this trying period at least. I know what you will say—I know all of it, Suhaila. Fine, so your son isn’t the ideal gentleman for your coming life, but he must do his duty toward you. A trap. That was all you said when Hatim stopped speaking. You lit your cigarette, drained your glass, and began to lament.

  I am the same, friend. I grieved and wailed when I was there—not in Canada like you, but there in Baghdad. It was a unique thing, impossible, unbearable. The world would be utterly dark but for the space cleared by dreaming. Thanks to the most tangled political situations I understood the secret of Don Quixote’s appeal, I mean both the literary work and the personality as people generally understand it. Don Quixote gives us a model for the raucous dreamer, who is naïve or full of illusions, perhaps, but who struggles and fights. We Arabs will describe someone as donquihotian, Don Quixote-like; I will say it without hesitation, I will say it to you, and to some of my good friends and even social acquaintance, why not? Yet the scope of that accusation always unveils a certain amount of admiration and an admission of praiseworthy qualities. Perhaps this personality’s absolute sublimity gives it a place in the world of the angels or that of those we call majadhib, crazed, those holy people who, whatever else is said about them, are always regarded as truly possessing “a piece of God,” in other words, of purity and loftiness and irreality. In the arena of scientifically provable knowledge, they establish the role of fancy. They know well that fancy and imagination stimulated the truly great inventions, and they know the relationship between this sort of motivation and the energy necessary for moving from invention to application, for persistent, tireless, patient work that doesn’t end until the goal is achieved. Achievements that result from positive knowledge are never ultimate or fully complete, for the door always remains open. One can always go beyond or contradict what has been done. Baghdad is leaping through that door but slipping sideways perilously: contradiction and achievement. Its vanquishing power is concealed inside of it, inside its children, in the fever of its humdrum everyday terrifying always-interrupted existence. We see this fleetingly in the eyes of an ordinary, anonymous woman as she stares at the faraway horizon but then rolls up her sleeves and bakes our bread. She cooks and washes and picks the basil from the garden and with it she lays on our hearts all of Iraq. She performs every aspect of the world’s daily business that you can possibly think of, in order that she may hold onto that moment. What is that moment, my dear friend? It’s the Iraqi moment, one which has stepped outside all of the familiar rules. It is different: it doesn’t resemble anyone and it does not want anyone to resemble it. I left town with my friend the Saudi researcher Jawhara for the sake of that research—do you remember that? “What are the priorities of citizens, especially the women, following
the horror of the war?” That was merely a marginal detail—the title, I mean. There were titles that transformed themselves within a single moment, fleeing and abandoning themselves to other titles, just the way it was with us during the civil war in Lebanon. Down the entire length of the desert road between Amman and Baghdad we were questioning ourselves, Jawhara and I. We wrote the questions in the form of a questionnaire very like the one that France produced after the second world war, having to do with the divergence between priorities and results. Behind the transformation sits a movement along the ladder of values inside societies; the priorities and values that support these are not one and the same in all societies. Naturally, we can pose the same question in more than one place and make comparisons, and why not? What spurs on Iraqis today, or Palestinians or Algerians or other peoples? I don’t want you to become alarmed. I went to visit your mother at home. I saw her, of course. She is a lady whom it is impossible to sum up in words, whether a whole speech or a single word or two. She sits there sewing up woolen clothes and taking them apart again, drinking tea with cardamom and muttering your name and that of your brother Diya. I believe that your father moved out and went to live with that young actress in her apartment. She was happy to have him because he was going to produce plays for her—some flops, some productions that were bordering on the indecent. In your home we heard jokes too many to count, which your mother told about him and that actress and about all that everyone is going through. She didn’t smile or laugh in the way that you do. She wasn’t trying to amuse herself or any of us. She would tell each joke as if it squatted obtrusively at her feet and she needed to push it to the side even a little so that she could move. We were embarrassed about the fact that we smiled and then even broke into laughter, a little. She had her eyes closed as she worked. She would put her hands on things just like a skilled professional, and she had everything right there around her, everything you could think of: tea pots, bottles of oil and vinegar, bags of flour and sugar and tea, pots and pans, plates, towels, shoes and sandals, medicines and ointments, old clothes—all old, I think, though I almost said, and new. There was Iraqi money scattered around her, dinars next to dollars, and you could count as long as God wishes without flagging. And let’s suppose that you do get bored or tired: your mother never does. She has an ability to extract the special from the general, and the opposite is true as well. I recalled the words of the famous French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu when he said of language, I mean of the words themselves as they are in the dictionary, that they don’t mean anything, or that the meaning they can carry in themselves is trifling. For your mother words mean nothing. She’ll say a word but that’s the end of it. It doesn’t alter anything in her and when she says a word she does not intend that any meaning connected with her will come out of it. The word, any word, in one sense or another, has lost its fluidity, its heart, its depth. It has become like that thread which she sews and then undoes and then sews again. Threads, neither single and independent nor bound together, but lots of them, in her hands. Within the tiny and mundane spaces of her life, she toys with them and she uses them to toy with all of her time, so that in some way or other she can feel her own existence. Hence the joke. The jokes she flung out were cause for admiration and surprise, even unparalleled astonishment. Where did she get this ability to memorize and narrate? I’m not exaggerating, Suhaila, if I tell you that attending to the fund of jokes circulating among people in most Arab countries, and writing them down with the dates they emerged and spread, are tasks that must be at the heart of sociological research. What each country’s jokes will say to us is certainly more telling and significant and eloquent than the information contained in the tons of articles published in the newspapers of those countries, or the speeches and serious books published there. Added proof of this is that the jokes themselves are watched; anything in them that exceeds the red line faces the possibility of surveillance, and people who tell them face defamation and interrogation. And the jokes go from oral circulation—which in itself is a potentially dangerous challenge to the authorities—into writing, which is just as serious as writing a political slogan. You know better than I do that the Iraqis are not masters of the joke quite like our brothers the Egyptians, but the wrongs, the injustice, and the terrors that have befallen them have sucked out half their lives. Thus, the other half is left to the joke. That’s how it all appeared to me, anyway. They stumbled over jokes in the darkness as they were calling out the names of the dead and the murdered, those who fell, the starving, and all the rest of those categories with their easy labels. I anticipated that when we saw some of our friends, men and women, we would come bearing jokes to dispel all of that sadness, oppression, and grief. But we were to discover that they had left behind distinctions such as complicated versus simple, and they were the ones who pressed us into laughter. I felt a bit afraid. I said to myself, If I tell one of the jokes that I have prepared specially, a joke about foreign leaders expressly suited to such moments as these (and as you know I am not one to memorize jokes and I don’t have that special capacity to tell them well), still and all, despite everything, they will laugh. But, there, we exchanged roles. They were telling us the jokes and we needed to hold our sides, we were laughing so hard, even if it was laughter that turned before long into unending wails. Every joke told in our presence would turn into a bout of spiteful envy toward some group or other. But, alongside it all, there was also the silence and those who remained mute. That silence which is a way station between faithfully committing oneself to abstain from speaking, on the one hand, and ultimately rejecting speech as beneath one’s cares, on the other. Both states were causing unbelievable pain and misery among everyone we encountered. As if speech itself was the source of mutual bad treatment on a large scale. In the best of circumstances, it was speech that had hit them with missiles and bombs rather than words and sentences; adjectives, verbs of continuing action and also of completed action, agents of action and objects and that entire rich harvest of Arabic rhetoric. That frightening silence that was never, ever absolute or total but indeed gave birth to phenomena that had no relationship in the first place to utterances. It gave birth to a sort of distension, or, if you like, a flattening. Laugh if you want to at these usages applied to things that couldn’t be more serious and strange: a wholesale destruction of speech’s capacity to regulate things or to pick up on reactions; to select the appropriate action or perhaps the inappropriate one, whereupon words turn into illness, epidemic, defect. Heading down a certain lane, we found ourselves in a popular quarter along River Street. Directly in front of us was a small café. It seemed to me that what the old men sitting there wanted to let us know was an unbelievable and also a brilliant thing: they wanted to tell us that they were incapable of telling us anything at all, and they were so eloquent that I was terrified. After all, there was nothing shredding their insides that they needed to talk about, nothing at all. It wasn’t a matter of cleverly escaping us, of some sly set of tactics; no, and it wasn’t even despair. I think I simply do not know what it is, exactly. It is something that forces our heads to bow in acquiescence and makes us powerless even to kill ourselves. As long as I live I will never forget that skeletal elderly man whom I saw in the café along the Tigris, who left an odd impact and made my anger at us, as Arabs first, stronger than the blood in our throats and our resentment toward the United States and the entire West. It was as if in my hearing he told the story of all wars: historical wars and personal ones, wars of hatred against love, friendship and absence of friendship, and wars of the separations that spouses are so good at devising against each other, wars among those who work in the same profession or craft, wars of a person with a self, wars between the noble beating of a human heart and the odium that comes to exist between human beings. The wars that happen between people are really the same wars that erupt, in some sense, between a person and his own kinds of wickedness, all his foul loathing, his triviality and cowardice. I don’t know, if I were to go on en
umerating for you all the wars of that creature—the human—I would have to bring into it the oppression and loss I saw in the eyes of that old man. He is the raw material for irretrievable loss, for all that is gone and will never return. That is why I was so afraid of what he would do to me, and what he would do to the rest of the Iraqi women whose names I had put on a list, and all I had to do was to knock on their doors one after the other—that is all I had to do, in the name of keeping desire and hope alive. The country was not ruined; it has not been dismembered and it has not disintegrated, corpse-like; and I will witness and reclaim all the absent ones, retrieve all those who are alive, and the sick and the elderly. And I have seen some of the pictures that were taken of young Iraqi women and men who scattered to the side streets and who were given, especially right after the war, the label of al-zahira, the phenomenon, the phenomenon of what came to be called the dance of the streets or break dance, which went on for many months. That kind of dance was born in the streets of the miserable outer neighborhoods, akin to the ghettoes of the black people in the United States or the quarters ringing the large French cities where Arab immigrants live. That variety of dance was formed, where it was born, as an expression of the cohesion of marginalized groups when faced with the prevailing, and dominant, order. An understanding began to seep into me of what it meant that young people in Baghdad were going out into the streets and becoming breakies, which was the term that had become popular especially in Algeria and spread like wildfire to all of the Arab countries, even if surreptitiously so.