What We Owe

by Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde

  “If it’s in the liver, then it’s all over anyway. Will that save me? What’s the point?”

  She stands at the foot of the bed and shakes her head.

  “Nahid, I didn’t promise to save you. I can’t promise you anything. We just think it might help to radiate the tumor away, that’s all.”

  She looks down at her papers. We’re both silent for a moment. Then she puts her hand on my foot and squeezes it.

  “If we don’t remove this tumor, Nahid, then it’s over. Let us do it.”

  And she turns and walks away.

  It’s getting closer to two years since they told me I had six months left to live. Since they told me I was dying. It’s like a fog, this time. A fog of cars picking me up at my front door. My body painstakingly leaving my building and climbing into the car. A fog of paramedics. A fog of hospital doors. Doors I step through. Doors I’m rolled through on a stretcher. Doors opened by the doctor. Treatments, test results, collapse. Vomit bucket next to my sofa and carton after carton of meal replacements delivered to my door. They form a tower in the hall. I’m not strong enough to carry them into the apartment. I’m not strong enough to drink or eat. A fog of phone calls from unknown numbers. The doctor, counselor, dietician. The dietician. It’s laughable.

  “I needed you more when I was healthy,” I said to her when we first met. “What can you do for me now?”

  She continued calling anyway. They all did. The dietician’s calls were the first I opted out of. Then the counselor. Christina, she called more than she needed to. More than you could expect. So I talked to her. She became my Sonja, my dietician, my doctor, and counselor all in one. A fog of conversations that began with these words:

  “Hi, Nahid, it’s Christina. How are you today?”

  “How are you today?” There is no new answer. I have cancer. It’s devouring my body. It will kill me. It’s a fog, everything’s a fog except for that Midsummer day when all was bright and full of life. We managed to create one beautiful memory. We spent so much time in that beautiful archipelago, visited it over so many years, and in the end we made one beautiful memory. One thing that is nothing but beautiful.

  I tell myself, I have to live long enough to become a grandmother. I have to see her. I have to tell her she was born free. Tell her she has roots here. That her grandfather lies in this earth, so this is her land. Even if we aren’t by her side, we were the ones who made her free. We planted her roots. We did that, Masood and I. I want to say that to her.

  So I push the bell. When the nurse comes in, I say:

  “I have decided to live.”

  She looks at me with her head cocked to the side. Wondering if I’m hallucinating again or just rambling.

  “I mean that I want to start radiation. As soon as possible!”

  She nods. Readjusts my blanket.

  “I’ll tell Christina,” she says. I see that she wants to say something more. That she wants to make sure that I don’t hope too much. I want to stop her, so I close my eyes. Pretend to fall asleep. She stays. Changes the water in my flowers. Throws away juice bottles and wipes off my table. That’s not her job. She does it because she feels sorry for me. I know that. She does it because she knows the radiation won’t make any difference. It can’t do more than buy me days, weeks, a month. But I don’t want the nurse’s compassion. I know that a little time is all I need. I just need to be here until the baby comes.

  They keep me at the hospital in anticipation of my new treatment beginning.

  “I want you here so I can keep an eye on you,” Christina says.

  “I’ve been here for weeks,” I protest. I really want to go home. But then I realize that I have no idea how long I’ve actually been in the hospital. I have no idea what day it is. I think about it, but can’t remember what month it is. I remember that the baby’s due date is in January. Has Christmas come and gone?

  I ask Christina, and she looks worried. She starts asking lots of questions.

  “Do you know which country you are in, Nahid?”

  “I’m not senile, Christina! I’m in Sweden.”

  “Do you know what city you were born in?”

  I am about to say Stockholm, but it sounds wrong even in my own head. I try to remember, but something stops me. Like a wall between me and my own thoughts.

  “Of course I do,” I reply, and look away.

  “Nahid, what’s your daughter’s name?”

  I stare into the air. Feel the wall becoming thicker and thicker. On my side of the wall there is nothing. Nothing. It is like a vacuum.

  I meet Christina’s eyes, and I know before she says anything. Before they lift me onto a stretcher and roll me away and push me into the large x-ray machine, where I have a claustrophobic panic attack, shouting and screaming until they have to take me out and give me a sedative before they push me back in again.

  The cancer is in my brain now. It has built a nest among my memories. Among my thoughts, right before my eyes. It sits like a wall between me and everything I want to say. Everything I was going to say, before I disappear. Everything I can see, the only thing I wanted to see. I am going to disappear before I can die.

  “How long until January?”

  That was my only question.

  “It’s only a few weeks, Nahid,” Christina says.

  “Will I be here? Will I make it to January?”

  “I don’t know, Nahid.”

  She strokes my hair. Sitting just inches away, but she is fuzzy. Like a blurry photo. I squint to catch her contours.

  “Help me make it to January. Please help me to be here in January.”

  I see in my fog that her face tightens. That she is holding back.

  “Christina. Please don’t do this to me. Please. I’m going to be a grandmother. Let me become a grandmother.”

  I hear her crying. I can’t see, but I hear.

  “It’s unfair,” I mumble. “It’s not fair.”

  The next morning, i ask the nurse to help me sit up in bed, and for a cup of coffee. I need something bracing. Something that can help me through the fog. I want to ask for tequila. I am craving a shot of tequila and a cigarette. But my fog wouldn’t be able to handle that. It strikes me that I will never drink tequila or smoke a cigarette again, and it makes me lose heart for a moment. Not because it is important. But because it is just one more thing. Something else that is being taken from me. Something else that is banal or taken for granted by others, but that I will never experience again.

  I have two phone calls to make. Two conversations that I have to take care of while I still have my strength: one to my mother and one to my daughter. The rest can be finished by someone else. I pick up the phone, and weigh it in my hand while trying to decide which one should come first. Then I get stuck there, and it isn’t until the nurse comes into the room and stands next to me with a cup of coffee that it comes back to me. I remember what it was I wanted do.

  I call Maryam first. It seemed natural. Dealing with the past before I move on to the future.

  She answers after a few rings. It surprises me. They’d been trying to avoid my calls lately, my nagging them to let me talk to my mother.

  “Nahid, salam!” She sounds shrill.

  “Nahid, how are you, aziz? Are you still in the hospital? When do they start your treatment? Nothing is new here, Nahid, don’t worry. Focus on yourself, on Aram, on the baby—soon the baby will be there, Nahid.”

  I hear her words, I do. But I listen to her tone and the background noise, and her short, shallow breaths and the tension quivering in the air between syllables.

  “Maryam, I want to talk to Mama” is all I say. “I want to talk to Mama.”

  I had said those words so many times now. So many times in such a short time, and they still kept her from me. “I have news!” I had shouted. “Please, I’m calling to make her happy.” But I wasn’t allowed. They hadn’t let me talk to my mother since her stroke, and now I hear it. I hear it and I know it, despite the fog. Despi
te what I have called to say. I know it, and if my heart had a mouth it would howl in pain.

  “Maryam, I want my mother. Please, I want my mother.”

  My sobs drown out her words. I don’t want to hear her words. But in the end I lose my breath and strength, and she says it again.

  “Nahid joon, my heart. Mama is gone, sweetie. Darling. Mama is gone, my heart. Mama passed on.”

  It shouldn’t be so painful to lose your mother when you yourself are about to die, die any time now. When you know that your separation won’t be long. That this is just a temporary sadness. But it is. I drop the phone on the floor and sink down under the covers, into my fog again. I don’t know how long I am away, but I hear voices come and go and I want to tell them my mother is gone. Please, hold me, because my mother is gone. But they take my vague sounds for hallucinations. I lift my arm in the air, trying to grab ahold of someone, whoever is there. Trying to tell them I am still here.

  Aram wants me to come home with them. Live there. She stands in the hospital room talking with Christina, and her voice could be mistaken for firm, but I hear only panic.

  “I can take care of my own mother. We’ll solve whatever needs to be solved.”

  Christina tries to protest.

  “There is a lot to handle. The morphine, medicines, all the practicalities. She can’t walk by herself, she sees very little. And then there are the hallucinations . . . They will get worse and worse as more tumors press on her brain. Those things can be difficult.”

  Aram stands with her hands on her waist. That is all I can see. A black figure with a huge belly and hands at her waist. She looks like an angry troll, a fairy-tale creature.

  “This is my mother, Christina.”

  Her voice breaks, and they both stand in silence for a moment. I remember. Those were the words she had said during our first meeting, the first time I was admitted here. There lies the weight of guilt and shame between them. Why didn’t you save my mother, I told you this is my mother, how can you take her away from me?

  “I’ll call home care,” Christina says, and leaves the room.

  I raise my hand and catch Aram’s attention.

  “Let me go home to my place. I want to be in my own home.”

  I try to talk clearly, and she understands. She takes my hand and kisses my forehead.

  “I know you do, Mama. I know. I wish you could.”

  She rests her lips against my skin and I feel the warmth and the wetness of her tears. I want to ask why I can’t. Why she is crying. I want to ask: What is happening to me? I can’t remember.

  But my words are gone for the day. I can’t find them, and I can’t make my mouth form them.

  It is the paramedics who come and pick me up. They lift me onto their stretcher and roll me through the hospital, to the emergency entrance. I want to make a joke about it. To say it is surreal. To be delivered home by ambulance when you’re really on your way somewhere else. I want to say so. But the lamps shine too brightly and the machines beep too loudly and I close my eyes instead.

  I wake up when they lift me into the car.

  “My birthday is soon.”

  I speak.

  “I’m turning fifty-five. I’ve gotten so old. Come to my party. You have to come to my party.”

  I don’t think they heard me. I don’t even know if I actually said the words. I try to repeat them, but they are lost.

  My mother and i went to the cemetery together once. The place where political prisoners were buried. The executed received no funeral. They were just placed underground. Some families were told. Some even knew where their children’s bodies were. Others, like us, just assumed. We assumed this was where she lay. Where she rested. A fourteen-year-old body that shouldn’t need to rest. That wasn’t meant to rest.

  My mother hadn’t said much after that night. She’d gone to the prison. She told us so later. She knew we would have gone in her place, and she feared they would take us, too. She’d gone there and asked for her daughter. They had said that her daughter wasn’t there. When she turned to leave the guard shouted after her:

  “Shame, khanom. What kind of mother doesn’t know where her daughter is. What kind of mother has to knock on the prison gate asking for her.”

  Mama walked over to him, got up close, and stared into his eyes. Then she spat in his face. She knew they could have taken her then and there. It was a miracle they didn’t.

  But he looked down at the ground, that guard. A boy barely older than Noora. He looked down at the ground, and my mother held on tight to her purse and walked away as fast as her rheumatism allowed.

  And then, two weeks and four days after our Noora disappeared, we were sitting at breakfast, she was pouring tea in my glass, and she said in a calm voice:

  “Today I want to visit Noora.”

  Masood looked up with disbelief and pain in his eyes.

  “Mother, do you know something?”

  Mama reached across the table for some cheese.

  “I know that my girl has left us. My heart knows it.”

  Masood started to protest, but she put up her hand and shushed him.

  “Today we’re going to the cemetery,” she said, firmly and calmly.

  Masood turned to me, but I couldn’t meet his eyes. So he got up, pulled on his jacket, and slammed the front door on his way out. Mama didn’t move a muscle. She just sat there. Back straight. Hands in her lap. Her coat and scarf over her chair. Her shoes placed next to the wall and her purse next to them. She was ready. I didn’t understand how she managed to be, but she was.

  I smiled at her. It took so much for me to bring forth that smile, but I did. I smiled and said:

  “We’ll do what you want, Mama.”

  And so we dressed in our finest clothes, took each other by the hand, and walked toward the bus. I wanted to fall down on the ground and never move again. But I held my mother’s hand. I smiled when she looked at me, and we sat for the whole of the bus ride holding hands. In her other hand she had a bundle of carnations. She must have bought them the day before and forgot to put them in water. They hung over her knees, drooping. I remember thinking: This is not how it’s done. This is wrong. But what else could we do.

  The cemetery was enormous and our walk long. I felt how my mother limped, that her rheumatism tore at her. But her face didn’t change; she held herself erect and her face impassive. Once we were among the unmarked graves of the executed she dropped to the ground. It was as if her body, like mine, wanted to sink completely into the earth and finally had permission to do so.

  She bent over the yellow sand. I sat down by her. I heard her whisper, and I heard her kiss the ground, again and again. All I could do was lift the sand in my hands and watch it stream back down to earth.

  I see my mother. she stands in my room with her arms full of drooping carnations. She has come to me, come to say goodbye. I see her coming toward me, dressed in her black coat with a scarf over her hair. I see the serenity of her face and her firm grip on her purse. She kneels down next to me. Kisses the floor.

  “How did you get here, Mama? Who let you in? How did you get here, Mama? I thought you were gone. I thought it was over. Mama, I have something to tell you. Mama, listen.”

  Someone puts a cold hand on my forehead. Shushes me. Sings softly. My vision becomes cloudy, and the contours of my mother start to disappear.

  “Mama, don’t leave me. Stay with me, I need you. I’m going to make it better again! I’ll give back what I took. I promise.”

  But she was gone. She left the carnations, brown and rotten.

  I feel it in my head when the world snaps into focus and clarity returns. It sounds like a click, like opening a jar of mayonnaise the first time. A seal being broken.

  It clicks and I open my eyes. It is dark and windy outside the large windows. Tree branches tap against the glass. Inside the lights are low. On the dining table candlelight flickers. On the windowsill an Advent candlestick stands, and in the corner a Christmas
tree is all lit up. Classical music is playing at a low volume, and I hear voices in the distance. Smell fried meat and creamy potatoes in the oven. I think for a moment I’d imagined it, but it is unmistakable. The click. The clarity.

  “Aram.”

  My voice is hoarse and rough, and I clear my throat.

  “Aram!”

  The voices fall silent, but no one comes. It is as if they are listening to see if the cry is repeated. As if they think they might have imagined it.

  “Aram!” I cry out with a clear voice now, and hear her drop whatever she has in her hands and run. She comes running, stops in the doorway to the living room where I lie, and stares at me.

  “Salam, madar,” I say. Hello, love.

  She stands in the doorway with her hands on her lower back and looks at me with wide eyes and it is as if there is a glow around her. A shimmer of light shining from her face, from her glistening hair held high in a ponytail. From a spot behind her head. She looks like an angel, what I’ve always imagined an angel might look like. I think, We’re so close to each other, the baby and me. I’m close to death and she’s close to life, and soon we’ll both cross that thin line. Perhaps we are in the same place. I feel safe in that thought. I feel for the first time in such a long time that I’m not alone. I won’t die alone. We will meet and hold hands and then push each other gently over the line.

  Aram wants my clarity and i want it for myself. She wants answers to her questions. Words that she can live with. But I just want peace and quiet. I just want to lie with my eyes open, staring at the tree branches moving outside the window, and to feel myself a part of that movement, a part of life.

  She sits on the edge of the sofa, and the first thing she says is:

  “You missed Christmas, Mama.”

  It awakens a darkness in me. Her comment, it makes me angry. Who cares about Christmas, who cares if I missed this one when I’m going to miss each one that is to come.