What We Owe

by Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde

  “We missed you,” she says, and that is it. That is what makes me angry. That she wants to have Christmas with me, for her sake. She wants to have one last Christmas, a mental image of me in their Christmas.

  “I have a present for you.”

  She says it with a firm voice. As if she wants to convince both of us that this is right. That giving me a Christmas present is the right thing to do, the right thing to fill one of our last moments with.

  It makes me happy. It is a strange feeling that starts in my stomach and climbs up into my throat and reaches for my lips. I know I smile with my mouth, that the rest of my face is rigid. Eyes frozen in a squint. She lifts a big package, and I throw up my arms with force. Take a firm hold. Pull the package close to me. I feel that she is there at the other end, she doesn’t dare let the full weight rest on my chest. I feel that we are both somehow grabbing ahold of this moment.

  “I hope you like it. That you can . . . use it.”

  She doesn’t know when I will wake up again. If I will. She doesn’t know if my clarity will swim out into the universe and disappear into the sea of memories and unfulfilled hopes. She doesn’t know if this is my last breath in the harbor, and she knows I don’t want to talk. That I don’t want to give her what she needs, words of comfort, caresses that will heal, that she can carry with her for the rest of her life. So she gives me something, she gives me something I absolutely don’t need and I won’t use and it makes us both happier than you’d expect. Happier than we thought we could be.

  She tears open the package and the box inside. Quickly, quickly, like it is an emergency. I squint, but I can’t see. She tells me what it is. An expensive handbag, the kind I want but don’t think is meant for someone like me. It is an expensive purse, and I am a Marxist, or at least I once was, and it makes me feel like I am worth something. Like I am worth more than I thought.

  What I see is the color. It is red, or some part of it is red, I don’t know. I hold it up, and I take her hand.

  “It matches my red boots,” I said. “I can wear them together.”

  She squeezes my hand.

  “That’s a good idea, Mama,” she says. “We’ll take a walk together, with the bag and your red boots.”

  I look up and see her, for a second I see her sharply. Her face is as determined as her voice. She isn’t going to give in for a second. She is going to keep me alive. She is going to keep me alive as long as we both need it.

  I hear their voices in the distance, and it bothers me. They have moved me into the bedroom. I lie in their bed, and I don’t know where they are sleeping. I hear them leave and lock the door, and come back with excited voices and bags rustling. I hear them assemble the crib in the living room. I hear their restrained laughter and light footsteps. I hear how she lies on her side on the rug, breathing heavily while he finishes. I hear them spinning plans and dreams, and I hear their longing. They are building a place in their home and in their hearts, they are putting together a future with their bare hands while I lie here. Aram comes in to me occasionally. She comes often, I know that she does. But it feels like occasionally. Now and then. She looks over my medications and moistens my lips with cotton balls and strokes my hair. She crosses my threshold and steps from life into death. What soon will pass and what soon will be coming.

  I can’t talk. I can’t say what I feel, and I feel so much. I feel that this is wrong. I want her to sit by my bed, hold my hand, say goodbye, be with me in this coerced waiting that composes my whole world. It can wait, the new. The rest. The rest will be there later—I am what will disappear. I feel it is wrong, what she is doing. I wish she weren’t pregnant. Wish she could be mine. Wish she could focus all of her attention here, in my direction. That she could understand I brought her into this world for me, so I wouldn’t be alone, wouldn’t end up lying here alone. She owes me that. She is obliged to protect me from loneliness. You’re deserting me! I want to cry when I hear her folding baby clothes and gently placing them in the drawer. You will regret this.

  A medical team comes each day. probably they come several times a day, I don’t know. I can smell that it is them. It isn’t a bad smell to me; it feels like home. All my hours in hospitals, nursing homes, clinics. All my hours in a white coat, all my hours caring for others. Sometimes I see myself coming toward me. In white, with my hair in a bun and lips bright red. I see myself rise up and take me by the hand. Lift up a hairbrush and stroke my hair with long, gentle movements. Pull up a stool and take pink nail polish out of my pocket. Paint my nails while singing one of my songs. One of the ones I always sang to my patients. I see myself coming toward me and I sing. I am always singing. I wish I could have been my nurse. I wish I could sing my songs. Sometimes, I realize that it is her. In short, sharp moments I see it. How Aram sits with my hands in her lap and paints my nails while she sings. She is always singing.

  That day i hear no songs. i smell their scent coming toward me, and I sense them standing over me. They grab hold of me roughly. I can’t say anything, I can’t ask them to stop. They thrust tubes in my arms and place oxygen over my nose. There are more of them than usual, I can hear it from the closeness between their bodies. They bump into each other and move rapidly. Then they disappear all of a sudden, and that is when I understand. That’s when I feel my breath and realize that it is thinning out. Each breath thrusts toward the edges of my lungs and can’t find the way out. It rattles and hisses inside me and it feels like I am stuck. Like I am stuck inside myself and can’t get out.

  They come back and lift me onto a stretcher. I try to turn my head, searching for the outline of Aram. But I know that she isn’t in the room. She is standing outside the door, and something is wrong. There are so many of them, and they obscure my view, and I want to shoo them away with my arm but I have no control. I can’t lift my arm and I can’t open my eyes enough for anyone to understand I am still here. They wheel me through the apartment and out into the hall, where I hear her. She moans. Breathing heavily, rhythmically. They stop for a moment as we pass her. She sits down. Holding her hands on her belly. That is all I can see. She reaches for my hand. She presses it so gently, but so firmly, that I feel life pulsing between us.

  “We’re coming, Mama. We’re coming.”

  Her voice is strained. I want to hear more, to understand what is going on. But she bends down and holds back a scream, and then the moment has passed. They wheel me out into the cold stairwell, and I close my eyes.

  We’re coming. The words spin around in my head, my body, like gargling water in your mouth, around and around and everywhere. We’re coming.

  They sit next to my bed. my mother, in the black dress she wore the day we went to the cemetery. She has her hands on her knees, rocking back and forth, as she did when I came home and she knew it was Noora who had been taken. Maryam, her head bent forward. Her lashes cast long shadows across her face. She has a pencil behind her ear. Her mahogany hair flows over her shoulders. She’s beautiful, so beautiful. I know a blue handprint pulses on her cheek. That’s why her head is bowed. And behind them, behind them stands Noora. With two braids and a beret. With large glasses and a joyful smile. Fourteen years old, on an adventure. She’s the only one who looks at me. Her gaze captures mine, a thousand words. Every word I longed to say since that day.

  I know the smell and know that I’m in the hospital again. Movement, bodies. They press on me, attach new tubes. I hear the sound of a pump and I know what it is. I know they’re injecting morphine into my body. They want to take away my pain, they want to calm me. Get me to let go and drift away. I try to grab hold of someone by tugging on a sleeve. I try to ask for more time. Just a little more time. I try to scream. I’m not ready, not yet! But my movements aren’t visible to their eyes, and my cries are soundless. I can’t hold on. I feel myself letting go, letting go. I’m floating away. It’s a comfortable feeling—I’m the most comfortable I’ve been in a long time. It’s like lying on a beach, the sun high, a breeze caressing you, and you
doze off. Into a state between sleep and wakefulness.

  I hear it then. The sound, it seems far away. Far away in time and space. A baby’s cry. I try to move, but it’s as if my body is sinking into a mud hole. Mama is here, I want to say . Mama is with you. Mama will never leave you. The words you say to a crying baby. Mama will never leave you.

  I hear it again. A cry that grabs ahold of my numb body. It sounds close now, it sounds like it’s approaching. Another cry, and then Aram coming toward me. She’s dressed in white, her hair in a knot, her lips red and her arms holding a child. For a moment, it’s as if I see myself, and then I see my mother coming toward me with a newborn Noora in her arms, but then it clicks and everything becomes clear again.

  Aram pulls the chair as close to my bed as she can get.

  “Mama,” she says. “Mama, I’m here. I’m here with you.”

  She lifts my arms, doing for me what I can no longer do for myself. She puts them across my chest. Then she says those words. The words I have yearned for, yearned until I thought I’d stopped yearning, stopped hoping.

  “She’s here now. Noora is here. You did it, Mama.”

  She lays the baby on my chest. Just like that. Just like that, she’s here. Just like that, she’s back. The scent of life overwhelms me. The soft scent of untouched skin, of a new beginning.

  I try to bend my neck in order to see her properly. Aram lifts up my head and helps me, helps me to see. The baby opens her eyes. The baby. Noora. My little Noora.

  Her eyes are bright blue. Blue like the sea. Blue like the archipelago, like the sky above the bridges we drove over, back and forth, around and around. Such beauty. I feel her weight against my chest, on my heart. I imagine my heartbeat pulsing inside her body, giving strength to her being.

  “Beloved child. I’m your grandmother, dear one. I’m your grandmother.” I don’t know if I actually say the words out loud, but I see that she’s listening. “I was the one who brought you here. It was us.”

  their outlines are dissolving, and soon they’re gone. The light wanes. My body is heavy in the bed, the weight of the baby is on my chest. I feel Aram holding my hand in hers. I feel it, the weight of the bodies I’m leaving behind. Aram is singing. Her voice follows me into the darkness that receives me. She sings my songs, and inwardly I smile. They will sing our songs, and our songs will never die.

  About the Author

  Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde was born in Iran in 1983 and fled with her parents to Sweden as a young child. After graduating from the Stockholm School of Economics, she was named one of the fifty Goldman Sachs Leaders. Soon to be published in twenty-five countries, What We Owe is her first novel to be published in the United States. She lives in Stockholm with her husband and children.

  Connect with HMH on Social Media

  Follow us for book news, reviews, author updates, exclusive content, giveaways, and more.