The Loved Ones
Page 30
The rhythms of your dancing sanctioned my view of things, I thought, when I saw the photographs of those youth as they roved the alleys and popular quarters; when you formed out of your body and with your movements a scheme for setting off anger, your own anger. I sensed, while in Baghdad, that your dancing was the life that you wanted to regain for them and for yourself, and for us too, and that what you put up against the past and the present is the goal of tomorrow’s beauty itself. I understood that there are different, varied sorts of resistance now that the grand ideologies have been dislodged from their unassailable position, now that they’re under suspicion, or are less and less appropriate, for they no longer provide source points for values and moral conduct. It is possible that these modes of resistance are what make everyday details more important. Life becomes a great blessing due to those disasters. You can be sure, Suhaila, that I discovered you in Baghdad, or I got to know you again. It was not chez Blanche following the evening performance at Théâtre du Soleil, when we Arabs, among us a few Iraqis, were invited so that we could attend those seven minutes for Iraq, of your dancing on stage, accompanied by that elegant Faw of whom you later said that he was one of the pillars of the Tower of Babel. We laughed that day, Hatim and I, as we were going out the theater door. Hatim turned and said to me, We never, ever saw that tower, nor did we see those gardens. Those are things that remain shadowy in the imagination. It is as if here is Suhaila saying, It is a work of deception that a person would have a single Tower for Babel. We must take Suhaila at her word, in that beautiful fête when she was there in front of us. She wants to be confident—she wants herself to believe this first and foremost—that that tower is there in the heart, her heart, and that life flows out abundantly over those who are around her, just like the gardens and watercourses of Babylon. She wants to set them off across this earth, throughout the world, at the heart of East and West. She wants to believe that life is a goal in and for itself, and does not exist for ulterior purposes. I told you that before, Narjis, when Blanche and I were preparing the footnotes and the text for Suhaila, the sources and the documents. Even Diyala worked with us, drawing mock-ups of some of the clothes or considering some backdrops for that dance we had seen not long before, which had taken seven minutes but took from us all, and from her most of all, a whole lifetime. All right, if you didn’t find her dance pleasing, that is your affair. But Suhaila was waging war against hatred and enmity and despair even in you. You are one of her dear friends, more so than some others. I was sure of all of the returns I am seeing today, sure of the delightful success that inundated us, and equally sure that it all required a fiery will. I was confident that Suhaila has such determination. She is Iraqi, my friend.
I am repeating these words to you, Suhaila, for the first time. I am recording them and sending them to you, and I’m revealing for the first time in your presence what was unfolding between Hatim and me. Baghdad, going there—it was all so that I could regain you. I was the one in whose presence you kept on quoting Dostoevsky’s famous line in Crime and Punishment about loving to see others commit transgressions. Narjis—you would say to me—I am the original authentic transgression, sayyidat al-akhtaa, the mistress of errors. Maalish, my friend, if I have given you a headache with my dancing which you did not like. That’s what I sense, call it my ravings and naïveté, or call it my genuine instinct. Call it whatever you want, for in it I am defending the causes behind my life, and yours, too. I do not carry a megaphone with which I summon everyone to listen to my voice and feel the vibrations of my body. My dance is my only attachment to this world. That’s what you would say.
Suhaila, before I end this letter of mine to you, I am going to recount a strange thing that happened in Baghdad. Aah, that city, what it did to me! Baghdad, you, all of you, the funeral processions in unbroken succession, the wreaths of flower and laurels—that’s why my passion for Hatim burst out there, which I wasn’t expecting. Imagine, I was already living tomorrow, as the city’s today drowned in darkness and moaning. Hatim’s voice rose in song, in Iraqi songs. I was hearing a few mawwals and bastas and some abudhiya from the radios in cafés and taxis. Possibly they listen to those songs as a daily routine until the burials end or begin again. For the dead over there are too numerous for counting, and the songs are the spiritual link between death and life. The women were wearing black, not as a mere funerary ritual, but because black as a color has become the security belt and protective collar—the life buoy that keeps you afloat. They wear black as if they are expecting worse and preparing themselves for it. Hatim’s face and voice were more present for me there than my girls are present for me. Imagine that! Can you believe you are hearing this from me, who is so crazy when it comes to them? I recalled what you read of Hannah Arendt one day. You commented: It is really quite something! It seems that every human being who truly falls in love conjures up the same images and imagines that their passion is the one and only and that no other human being shares this experience. My passion for Hatim appeared to me in Baghdad: he is my very health. I wrote to him saying something close to what Hannah said to her beloved in a letter: Everything is reduced to muteness when I am not talking to you.
Mabruk to the newborn. Mabruk to Nader and Sonia, and congratulations to you as well, holder of the first link in the chain. For you to be a grandmother is a thing like having a vine planted in the heart, for everything around you no longer suffices when you see the birth of a child. How I would like to live long enough to have the same some day. Suhaila, we are all waiting for you, so hurry back to us. I brought you dates and dibis, the date syrup you love, a loofa and a bag for the bathroom, original Iraqi work which I bought for you in the Kazimiyya souqs. I brought you a handful of soil from your garden. Your mother insisted on that so I did it for her sake. It is soil that is ill—they said it was poisoned and I was afraid to believe that. It terrified me to think that the United States wants to transform this country, and perhaps the whole world, into nothing more than a graveyard. To make it thirsty—but thirsty for blood—makes no sense.
Hatim just saw the number of pages I’ve written, and he says, You have become a specialist in writing letters instead of research papers. Tell Suhaila that what is ahead will be finer than what is now.
Narjis
I stretch out to sleep on a lie: I want Nader to escape from me. I’m tired, I tell him, and I want to go straight to sleep.
He did not answer me, didn’t raise his eyes off my face, as if I were gripping the menu and choosing what others would eat. As for my favorite dish, it remained the broth of Faw’s sweat. Every day I was in Nader’s company I would resolve to tell him the story, the chaos of that story; but I would hold back, and then it was too late: I would vacillate, and then I could not say a word. It had nothing to do with good faith and sincerity in a mother–son relationship, and nothing to do with wickedness and bad morals. It is something I find myself unable to describe, a thing of concern only to my inner self, my illness and mirth, my grief and my mourning for my life gone astray. I always used to lie to this self, a self that I see in a haberdashery shop, picking up its burdens and dragging them behind it so as to weigh down my frame, and then my position on this earth where I stand will be sedate and serious. I always feel that there is time enough for us to get old, to go soft, and to act like children with childish manners. Enough time for us to cry together about the tremblings that are fortressed-in by guards and insults. I begin to smile as I look in the mirror. My voice rises as I close my eyelids; speaking to him, my voice is low at first.
Nader, you must change the mirror. That’s because it is feeble, unable to make me appear as I am. It is resisting me. I used to repeat that, whether or not he could hear me, when we had recently arrived in Paris. And when we were in Brighton, I would insist on it. And now in Canada I say derisively, If you don’t change it I will. Today. Right now.
I don’t hear his reply. I can’t hear his voice. I changed the mirror, I add. Without your knowing. And I did
it months ago. You didn’t even notice. And why would you notice? Sons are like guests at court; what appeals to them is looking at the ornamented surfaces and flamboyant decorations and paintings, and the flow of water and where and how pictures and curtains are hung and the feel of objects. But they don’t give their attention in the slightest to what is beneath the screaming and moaning, what is beneath and behind everything they see.
When I hear no response I go back to my room but I continue speaking to him. What is the difference, Nader, whether you are here in front of me or absent?
The light had narrowed. I told myself that here was the reason my face appeared crude, thick, even savage. What is not open to doubt is that when the lighting is so very clear, it makes a face look nearly ill, icy, and sometimes deathly. Nader, I want you to be absolutely confident that this is not my face, the face I know and you know as well. This was never my face. It surprised me and so I was upset at first. No, at first I was easily insulted because it abandoned me. It became an exhausted, emptied structure, one of those structures of which we say that it has kept on being a treasure house of the honor that gives us everything. Everything, that is, except security over honor itself. Nader, do you hear me?