One Saturday she arrived to pick him up and walked into the middle of a giant fight between us. I had told Little Ahmed that he could not watch Revenge of the Sith because it was time for lunch, and he became completely enraged and screamed at me. I lost my temper—at Little Ahmed’s intractable fury, at his father who had dumped him with me, at my own lonely impotence, a single parent faced with a tantrum. I smacked him on his bottom. Not hard, but hard enough to sting his baby Arab pride. Red-faced, he drew himself upright and hurled his favorite nuclear weapon at me.
“You’re not my real mother. I don’t have to do what you say!”
“You deal with this!” I said to Rousse, and slammed my bedroom door behind me.
“Kit is your other-mother,” I heard Rousse try to explain to him. I was curled up on my bed, hugging a pillow, listening to them in the living room. “Can’t you think before you speak?” Rousse asked him gently. No reply. I could imagine his screwed-up stubborn face through the closed door. Pomegranate-mottled cheeks, tears caught like dew drops in his long glossy eyelashes. I listened to Rousse’s patient remonstrations; I heard Little Ahmed pause and imagined his quizzical blank expression when he could not grasp something.
“What do you mean, think before you speak?”
“I mean you don’t say words without considering the effect they will have.”
“But she isn’t my mother.”
“She is your other-mother,” Rousse repeated.
“She’s not my real mother.” Painful, adamantine truth.
“She is real, just as much as the woman who gave birth to you and loved you when you were little is real. She is real because she really loves you.”
“Do you love me, Rousse?”
“Of course, my Medio.”
“Call me Frank.”
“Frank whatever your name is this week.”
“Then why can’t you be my mother instead of her?”
I put the pillow over my head.
Later, after we dropped Little Ahmed off at the pottery studio around the corner, I talked it through with Rousse. We sat in Le Carillon with a plate of charcuterie between us and two glasses of beer. I said, in despair, “Why does this hurt more than anything else in the world? More than Ahmed’s betrayals and his Swiss cheesy blonde, more than my mother dying. More than leaving Granbet and Good Harbor Bay. It hurts in a terrifying way. It scares me.”
Rousse only smiled, as if she was pleased with me.
“Don’t you get it?” she said in her charcoal gravel and coffee dregs voice.
“He is always going to hate me.”
“It doesn’t matter if he hates you,” said Rousse. (In my dreams I can hear her saying, “Forgive, forgive,” and I wake up feeling guilty. Or angry. I can’t separate the two.) “It only matters that you love him. And you love him. That’s the only thing that you can do.”
_____
One Sunday, Alexandre was in town and I invited him to come with us to the Louvre. He and Rousse, as I was sure they would—both aesthetes—hit it off like a house on fire. Alexandre told her his story of being the descendant of Delacroix and Talleyrand.
“You see, I have blood of a great statesman and a great artist in my veins.”
“And a great homosexual.” Rousse, provocatrice, liked to throw darts to see if their points would stick. (“Alexandre of-the-Cross,” she would tease him when they had become friends. “Alexandre Cross is very cross with me!)
“Eugène Delacroix, my dear,” Alexandre insisted, “was not gay.”
We wandered through Napoleon III’s apartments and Alexandre looked so at home among the crimson velvet and chandeliers and gilt stucco that Rousse begged him to sit on one of the plush chairs for a portrait. Even though there was no gardien in view, Alexandre refused with a puckish smile. “Transgressions are more properly practiced in private.”
On our way out, as always, we went to see The Raft of the Medusa. The gallery was tall and painted dark maroon, the crowd was thin, and standing there in the somber winter light was like being cocooned in a dim vaulted womb. We peered at the shiny swirling oils. I was trying to hold Ahmed’s hand, because he was going through a phase when he thought it was a great lark to run off.
“Let go!”
“No.”
Rousse was drawn to The Raft of the Medusa because, as she explained to Alexandre, it was the first piece of visual reportage, the first example of photojournalism before the camera was invented. In 1816 the Medusa had run aground off the coast of Mauritius. There were not enough lifeboats, so the captain had ordered a raft built from its timbers for the remaining 150 passengers and crew. The raft was cast adrift and floated, partially submerged, for almost two weeks. A barrel of ship’s biscuits were eaten on the first day; the remaining supplies were a single barrel of water and six casks of wine. People drank themselves drunk, fought, became delirious, were thrown overboard; there were reports of cannibalism and murder. When the raft was rescued, only fifteen people were still alive. When reports of the tragedy, with all the lurid details of saturnine barbarism, reached France, it became a tabloid sensation.
In preparation for his epic painting, Géricault interviewed survivors, built a partial replica of the raft, and plundered the morgue for body parts to understand the pallor and rigor of corpses. He changed his mind several times about which episode of the drama to depict. The survivors wave towards a ship on the far horizon. It looks like they are about to be rescued, but in fact the ship is too far away to see them. It looks like it is a picture of hope, of deliverance, but it is a false dawn, the moment before the reality of disappointment and despair.
Rousse was transfixed by the story of the shipwreck and by the story of the painting and how people had paid and queued to see it when it was first exhibited in London. And by the work itself—the petrol blue color, the triangle composition, the bitumen paint that was spreading a black void at its center.
“The restorers don’t know what to do about it. It is eating the picture. It is a metaphor, non?” She pointed out the Christ agony of the splayed corpse in the foreground, caught awkwardly in the timbers of the raft.
“Look at the angle of his bent leg. Unnatural and horrible.”
Rousse moved along the gallery to the right of the Medusa, where a much smaller shipwreck hangs, sea-swamped and indistinct, painted by Delacroix.
“It is a pathetic attempt to be Géricault! But he cannot match such majesty!” She looked at Alexandre, an amused smile playing at the corners of her mouth. Alexandre raised an eyebrow, as if to say, Bravo, but I’m not taking the bait. Rousse continued to the next painting.
“And now look!” Little Ahmed let go of my hand and ran over to catch hers. They stood together in front of the huge canvas of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, her breasts bared, tricolor aloft, striding over the barricade of corpses.
“Do you see?” Rousse nudged me. But I didn’t. Little Ahmed tugged at her hand.
“It’s the same dead man!” he announced. He was perfectly right. Delacroix had copied—almost exactly—Géricault’s bent dead leg.
On the opposite wall is Delacroix’s extraordinary masterpiece The Death of Sardanapalus. Alexandre turned to look at it and we all followed him.
“Just look at the whirl—it’s more of an orgy than a massacre, the great fat arse of the king, the giant bed—”
“Emmeline, my dear, your salacious mind! Tut-tut.” Alexandre pulled up the white mink collar on his winter coat, exaggeratedly, as if the very thought of sex made him shudder.
Little Ahmed wandered off towards the steps at the far end of the gallery. I went after him and held him by the wrist. He scratched at my knuckles to release him.
“Let me go!” he said, whining.
“I’ve got to take him home,” I said. I could tell Little Ahmed was hungry.
“Take the monkey away!” encouraged Alexandre.
“I am not a monkey,” said Little Ahmed, hands on hips.
“But monke
ys are clever and they climb high,” protested Alexandre, pretending to look affronted. “Your father asked me for a job once and he said, ‘I can do anything. I am a good monkey, I learn fast.’ ”
“That’s true,” I said.
Little Ahmed regarded the ripe and terrible scene of Sardanapalus’s deathbed. “There’s a monkey there,” he pointed.
“Don’t stick your arm over the red rope, they will think you are trying to steal it.”
“It’s too big for me to carry,” said Little Ahmed reasonably. “There in the corner behind the big divan is a monkey trying to get out of the picture frame. He’s trying to escape . . . look!”
We three stared hard and could not see what the child saw.
“It’s a man with long arms,” said Alexandre.
“No, they are his big long monkey arms pulling him up, do you see?”
“So monkeys are clever to try and escape,” said Alexandre, giving in to his opponent’s logic to get him to concede his original point, an old diplomatic trick.
“OK, so it turns out that you are right this time,” said Little Ahmed. “My father is right. Monkeys are clever. It is better to try and escape than to beg the king for your life, especially if the king has already decided to die and kill everyone else as well. Aba said my grandfather would not beg and that’s why Saddam killed him. It would have been better if he had escaped.”
THREE
I missed the Arab Spring in Egypt, Tahrir Square and the toppling of Mubarak. Rousse and Jean came back from Cairo with shining amazed faces, full of revolutionary zeal.
“Kit, you should have seen it!” Rousse swirled her finger in the foam of her beer. I scrolled through the pictures on her iPad. They were crammed with faces, so many faces in every frame.
“Everyone together, young and old, Copt and Muslim, the fancy Zamalek girls with Fendi sunglasses and the poor from the slums. Everyone shared food, fought together. The atmosphere—oh, Kit, I cannot describe it.”
When the protests began in Syria a few months later, I convinced Oz to send me. Ahmed was in Damascus on a short-term contract, ostensibly advising the U.N. on the protocols for a conference between the government and opposition parties. I took Little Ahmed out of school for a fortnight. Zorro and Jean were there reporting for Le Figaro. Rousse came too. The whole family gathered. It was the last time we were all together.
Alexandre was ambassador. I had expected to find him optimistic. First Tunisia, then Egypt, now the West were backing the rebels in Libya and thousands were massing and marching against the old dictators in Bahrain, in Yemen—even in Baghdad! But he seemed only more cynical.
“The Arab street, pah!” Alexandre said as we sat on the balcony overlooking the garden of the Iranian Embassy. “The streets are mosques. Listen, listen to what people are actually saying. Down With! Oh, they are all very excited. But they are not talking about parliaments; they are not asking us how to write a constitution, like the Eastern Europeans did when the Wall came down. They are circling the empty thrones like packs of hungry younger brothers in the Ottoman Sultan’s palace.” He fingered his cigar. Gray smoke serried against the blue sky. “I miss Nasser,” said Alexandre, as if he was recalling an old flame. “I even miss Arafat.” A different generation of chess players. He lamented the passing of the great characters of that era; things were so much simpler when you could pay off the Saudis and outmaneuver Khomeini and play the Americans against the Russians. When terrorists took over passenger jets back then, you could negotiate with them. “Negotiate! Imagine, this word is almost entirely forgotten now.”
“What will Assad do?” I asked.
“He will do what his father did.” Alexandre looked out over the rooftops. Puffs of black smoke rose over the riots in the suburbs. An Iranian on the opposite balcony watched through a pair of binoculars. “He will kill them,” he said with despair. “My old friend Father Angelo agrees and I always considered him an optimistic man.”
I had heard Alexandre telling stories of Father Angelo and his monastery at Deir Mar Mikhael, in the Syrian desert, for years. Alexandre had first visited when he was economic secretary at the embassy in Damascus in the early nineties and found respite from the geopolitical game in the wide spaces of the desert. Father Angelo was the restoration of simple piety in a world frenzied with blood and banners. Even after he had left Syria to take up posts in Africa and then Washington and then Baghdad, Alexandre returned almost every year to Deir Mar Mikhael. When Zorro overdosed in Kabul and his father wanted to put him in a mental hospital, Alexandre arranged for him to convalesce at the monastery and Zorro had also come to love the place. Peace after war, sanctuary.
Alexandre said we should go up to the monastery for a few days.
“I think it might be the last time it will be possible for a long time,” Alexandre said. “And there are things I need to talk to Father Angelo about.”
Ahmed was in Hama, talking to dissidents; he said he would meet us at the monastery.
_____
We took the highway from Damascus, driving out of the brown pollution haze, over a smudged horizon. We passed a convoy of eight tanks being transported on lorries and turned right at a bronze statue of Assad the father; his arm outstretched, pointing to the future. We drove through a town of straggling concrete houses that ended in a landfill gorge full of garbage and across an area of cracked dry earth littered with black plastic bags caught on thorns and scrub.
We left the embassy SUVs when the road ran out, and began to climb. The path was rocky and the sun was high. My hat trapped the heat and my face puffed as puce as the purple thistles that grew among the stones. Little Ahmed kept asking, “Where is this place anyway? Is it all uphill?”
“Stop whining.”
“I’m not whining.”
“If you want to go back, go back,” said Alexandre equitably, and Little Ahmed fell quiet after that.
Zorro carried a bag of tangerines as a present for the monks. After a couple of hours’ slog, we stopped for a break and he broke one open and shared out the segments among us.
“Can I have another one?” asked Little Ahmed.
“No.”
“But it’s the best tangerine I have ever tasted.”
“It tastes so good because you are hungry. If you have another one, it won’t taste as sweet.”
“It will!” Rousse relented and gave him one of hers.
The climb became easier. The air thinned and cooled and the breeze swept our hair into salt strands. Little Ahmed tied his keffiyeh around his head in the fashion of a Bedouin road worker toiling in the noonday sun.
“Where did you learn how to do that?” I asked him. Shrug.
At the top of the path were a hundred steps carved into the living rock, worn smooth by centuries of pilgrim footfalls. We picked our tired feet carefully upwards and mounted the final step, crossed the thick stone lintel and ducked through the low arched doorway. We came out onto a wide-span terrace and there was the world laid before us, woven in ancient striations of gold and rose. An infinity of sky fell away from the edge of the parapet. Beneath us an eagle glided along thermals.
Father Angelo came towards us in greeting.
“He looks like he is about to fight Conan the Barbarian in a movie,” Little Ahmed whispered in awe. Father Angelo was six feet four, heavy-boned, with a square jaw and steel gray hair cropped close to his scalp. He bear-hugged Zorro, shook Jean’s hand heartily, kissed Rousse on both cheeks, bowed solicitously to Alexandre, and held out both his hands to take mine in his. Then he knelt down and motioned Little Ahmed to sit before him and take off his sneakers. A young monk brought a copper basin of water and a towel, and Father Angelo began to wash Little Ahmed’s feet. This was his ritual welcome to newcomers. Little Ahmed watched Father Angelo very carefully with a quizzical look on his face. When he was finished, Little Ahmed ran over to the balustrade and terrified me by walking along the stone lip that overlooked the steep chasm below, leaving a trail of little wet footp
rints.
Father Angelo sat with us and poured us tea. He wanted to know the news from Damascus and shook his head gravely when Alexandre told him about the arrests and underground prisons.
“They have circled Deraa with tanks, no one in or out,” reported Jean. “There are Alawite gangs of thugs in the squares in Damascus—kids pretending to sell cigarettes, lookouts. It’s almost impossible for people to protest. Not in the capital.”
“In the capital, no—and the capital has always supported the regime,” said Alexandre. “Assad was careful to make alliances with the urban Sunnis.” Father Angelo stroked his thick gray beard, listening. “And the Christians—the Orthodox bishops will support him until the end,” Alexandre added.
“The danger for Assad is going to come from the old Muslim Brotherhood strongholds,” said Jean. He looked at me, “Isn’t that why Ahmed has gone to Hama? To talk them into talking instead of fighting?”
“Who knows what Ahmed thinks he’s doing,” I said.
Zorro leaned back against the wood frame of the vine canopy. He held his Leica in his lap and lazily pointed the lens at Little Ahmed, who was sitting on the wall and tossing stones into the ravine.
Rousse whispered to me, “Isn’t this the most beautiful place in the world? Doesn’t it fill your soul with an extraordinary floating happiness?”
I leaned into her warmth and felt her joy, stilled by the wonder and magnificence of the view and the limitless horizon. Little Ahmed jumped down from the wall, tired of stone throwing. He ran to me and for no reason at all threw himself into my lap and hugged my neck. There was a bowl of hazelnuts and Zorro showed him his trick of crushing them between his palms.
The bell rang for vespers. Father Angelo clapped his big hands together.
“Andiamo! Yallah!” He stood up to his mighty height.
“You boy!” Little Ahmed looked up, startled. “Stop eating all the nuttiness or we will feed you to the squirrels!” Father Angelo had lived in Syria for more than thirty years. He spoke in a fluid mixture of his native Italian mixed up with English-Arabic-French-Italian and interspersed with Latin, Greek, and Koranic surahs. This would have been comic, but his charisma, combined with an imposing stature, invested him with the authority of a regimental sergeant major. No one would have dared to laugh at him, even though he often laughed at himself. Father Angelo was stentorian and wry; he bellowed his kindnesses. Zorro (whom Father Angelo mysteriously loved in the tradition of saints always loving the greatest sinners) could not stop photographing him. Father Angelo was different in every portrait: glaze-eyed mystic, muscled rock-splitter building the new guest dormitory, bon vivant with a jug of wine in his hand, martyr reflecting the agony of a woman with bowel cancer whose sons had carried her all the way up to the monastery on a stretcher. The lines on his face were as deep as the runnels that sudden rainstorms carved in the desert parch, and as myriad.
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