The Frightened Ones

by Dima Wannous

  Home for me was my father’s bedroom, where I spent most of my time sitting on the edge of his bed or lying next to it. Home was also the door to the little kitchen balcony, where I spied on taxis, wondering which one held my mother inside. She was often gone for hours at a time, going from doctors’ clinics to labs to al-Buzuriyah market, to buy anything that might strengthen his immune system: almonds, walnuts, local honey, royal jelly, bee pollen, cactus innards, apricot kernels…It put my mother at ease to know my father was not alone in the house. But when she was late returning, fear stirred in my chest. I would stand at the balcony door waiting for her to come home, my eyes trained on taxis while my ears remained pricked, ready to catch my father’s voice if he called. Even when he called for me, he whispered my name, as if I were sitting right next to him.

  In later years, my father spent most of the afternoon sleeping. Whenever my mother was out, I spent the whole time walking on tiptoe between the kitchen and his room. I would stand outside his door and wait until my pupils widened and my eyes grew accustomed to the dark. Then I would feel my way forward, step by step, afraid of bumping into the bed or dresser and waking him. I would come closer. Bend over him. My long hair was always kept braided or tied back. He was always lying there, sleeping on his side, and I would draw closer and try to hear him breathing. When I could not, I reached a finger towards him, slowly, so incredibly slowly I felt frozen with concentration. All of my senses were condensed into the tip of my finger stretching towards him. I got closer and closer, ever so cautiously, so as not to touch his lips or nose and wake him. When I felt warm air brush the tip of my finger, I relaxed…he was breathing.

  One afternoon, he called for me. His face was pale. He asked for a cup of coffee, the one thing in our dreary home I could make proficiently. I remember our little coffeepot well too; it was made of thick, dark steel. Its colour never dulled, because my mother was obsessive about cleaning and forbade the natural progression of things. She soaked the pot from time to time in boiling water, salt and lemon juice, and the steel was rejuvenated and reclaimed its natural shine. I opened the filtered-water tap and filled the coffeepot just over halfway, then added the coffee grounds. I lit the stove, placed the pot on the hob and watched it heat up as if nothing existed but that small circle of water. My life was full, just like the coffeepot. I stood there, and grew tired of standing. I watched the water, knowing that what Baba really wanted was for us to talk about something. Coffee was just an entry to conversation. My stomach clenched. Talking was agony, but a cup of coffee was a stepping stone. A susurrus of steam interrupted my thoughts. A spoonful of sugar, the brew foamed, then calmed. Three spoonfuls of coffee, and it foamed again. The coffee rose and foamed and then fell. I loved that viscous foam; it reminded me of hot milk mixed with Turkish coffee. (When I was young, we did not yet have Nescafé: we used to drink hot Turkish coffee with milk, and it was delicious. The taste is still sharp in my mind.) I brought the coffee to a boil until all trace of foam had disappeared. I placed the pot on a small tray alongside a caramel-coloured cup, its thick sides decorated with olive flowers. I lifted the tray, always walking slowly so the coffee would not spill. In those days I wore clogs, and my mother had shown me how to move in them as easily as if I were barefoot. I walked through the house like a ghost, no footfall preceding me. (With daily practice, the nerves in my toes and feet grew used to constricting clogs, slippers and all kinds of shoes, even heels. The sound of skidding on tiles was never heard in our house.)

  I entered his room. He did not look pale any more. His bed was on the right side. (Every six months my mother rearranged the position of their beds: sometimes she slept in the left bed, and other times in the right one…that was how it went.) The bed on the right was grey, and its wooden headboard was decorated with carved flowers and leaves. My father was sitting up, leaning against a pillow with the quilt pulled up to his chest. I poured a coffee for him and placed it on the nightstand to his right, and he asked me to sit next to him. He gave me a tender smile to start the conversation. Then he uttered a single sentence, in a voice firm and composed: “The doctor in Paris told me I only have three months to live—we still have three months together.” I could not contain my feelings in that moment. A pang passed through me, and my eyes filled silently with tears. I remember my voice disappeared, and my body began to tremble. My eyes swam and all I could see was darkness; the tears gathered under my eyelids and then streamed down, and I remember feeling their heat on my face. I could not move. At the time, I did not know how this moment would change my life, that the trembling would stay with me and remain part of me until this day. My father opened his arms to hug me and in one movement I went towards him, as if I were a statue being lifted from one place to another. I flung myself onto his chest. An anguished sob crept up through my lungs and escaped; I could not swallow it. I kissed his neck like I always did. I loved his neck. Even now, I can still almost feel his skin against my lips. That spot on his neck was home for me. It made me feel safe and secure. I let my head fall on his shoulders, pressed my face into the wall of his neck and peacefully dozed off. I never found the spot again after that.

  * * *

  —

  I don’t know how I got here. Am I intentionally defying Kamil’s advice not to keep a journal? Or am I indulging a fundamental need for escape, even if just momentarily? Those long, cruel years still unsettle my sense of security; they have never released their grip on my life. What else did Kamil say that evening? That my life is not substantial enough to write a journal about. He tried to coax me out of silence after that, but I had little interest in speaking. So he tried to lead me towards happier memories. After all, my childhood had not been entirely terrible, and the hellish parts must have receded at times in my early years. But happiness, if it existed, had not imprinted itself in my memory. Happiness was fragile, faint and elusive, no more than a glimmer in the looming sadness. And sadness was all that remained; it bore down on me with all its weight, cast an impossibly long shadow and completely filled the space where other feelings might have grown. It made me feel as if I had never known anything else.

  Then Kamil coaxed out another suppressed memory. I told him my life was filled with women, and my father was the only man. I had my mother, and an aunt on my mother’s side I had also called “Mama” from the time I learned to speak. This aunt had two daughters; one of them married young and had a daughter my age. And there also was an aunt on my father’s side, who had three girls and three boys. My grandmother on my mother’s side had died when I was young. (I have an image of her once giving me a translucent brown plate piled high with white sugar, which I devoured behind my mother’s back. I can still taste it and still hear the granules crunch.) My grandmother on my father’s side was still alive. I told Kamil that my childhood was filled with women, and not just any women. Women who were strong, who spoke with confidence. They raised their voices so often the sound still echoed in my memory; these women commanded whole families and managed affairs with aplomb. When it came to men, all I had was my father. My mother’s father had passed away when I was quite young too. All I remember from the later years of his life was him lying in his little bed, on the ground floor of our house in the Afeef neighbourhood in Damascus. He always kept a bag of sweets he called “caramels” hidden next to him: he snacked on them and often gave me some too. I helped to conceal his sweet tooth, not realising until later that he suffered from diabetes and his legs had been rotting away with gangrene. My paternal grandfather, however, lived until he was quite old, over one hundred, but my relationship with him was tepid and rather complicated. My mother had one brother, but when I was five years old, the taxi he drove flipped over on his way back from Homs. The accident left him paralysed on one side. He was a different person after that, and I lost the young uncle who had been so mild-tempered, full of life and always laughing. My father had an older brother, but there had been a falling-out and I did not meet him unt
il I was twelve. He had another brother whom I adored, but who also died young. This brother had suffered from infantile paralysis and was confined to a bed in a hastily built little room on the roof of a house in the village—a house he actually owned. He spent his days drinking coffee and moonshine, smoking long Alhamra cigarettes and listening to the radio. The room always smelled foul, because the only one who tended to him was his careless sister. She was their middle sibling. I did not really know her, because my father had fallen out with her too. She had rented her paralysed brother’s house out to a family in the village, on the condition that they build a room on the roof for him. That was where he lived, drowning in filth, suffering the cold and humidity. This uncle passed away fourteen years ago, after drinking tainted local moonshine.

  No men in my life except for my father. The rest were either sick or dead. Kamil nodded, and that strange, changeless smile played upon his lips. The smile lasted for several seconds, and then vanished with a nod. Maybe Kamil’s lips were connected to the movement of his head. All he had to do was nod to make his smile disappear, and then he could go back to his papers and questions. “What about your father’s mother?” he asked. I didn’t understand the question. What did he want from my relationship with Khadija? How important could my relationship with my grandmother be? She lived in a village far away, and I only saw her on vacations. But Kamil insisted. He wanted to know more about her.

  I have never encountered anyone in my life as even-tempered as my grandmother Khadija. She was never cheerful, nor flustered. Her mood was constant and steady, and she was impossible to unsettle. She sometimes got angry, but even that did not change her temperament. She would keep smiling at us, even when annoyed. Her anger never struck randomly; it was always directed at my grandfather. He was the only one who made her cross. No one else. I have never met anyone who talked to herself like my grandmother, either. I constantly heard her chatting to herself in the kitchen while cleaning or doing the washing-up. She told stories I did not understand, using different voices for different characters, and sometimes she also sang folk songs or poems.

  My father and I usually took a yellow taxi to the village and arrived in the afternoon. He always sat beside me in the back seat, smoking the whole way there. Every five minutes felt like an hour to me. “How much longer till we get there?” I would ask, as three and a half hours passed lethargically. My father would gaze out of the window, lost in the road and his cigarette, while I observed the leaning cypress trees as we approached Homs. Seen from our vantage point, the ancient trees seemed shaped by the wild wind. They bent towards Damascus, as I remember. Near the trees, on the other side of the road, there was a rest stop my father loved, though I do not know why. “Seaside Rest Stop.” We always stopped there on our way to the village, and on our return trip too. I remember loving all the games and toys piled up behind the dusty shop window. Baba always ordered a cup of coffee and continued his cigarette, while I ate a grilled cheese sandwich. I remember how thin it was from the grill, and how the kashkaval cheese dripped down the sides, melted and delicious. We would spend about a quarter of an hour there before continuing on our way.

  I loved the second part of our journey. The road from Homs to Tartus was shorter, and more picturesque. The land became greener and the stretches of desert, with their dusty, desolate hue, gradually disappeared. The road began to bend and wind, snaking to the left and right, rising and falling until we reached the outskirts of Tartus. (After my father passed away, I came to love the first part of the journey more than the second. The rocky mountains rising slowly into the distance behind stretches of desert somehow reassured me.) I remember the cement factory that spouted black smoke, poisoning people nearby, and the shadow it cast over ruined olive trees. Rates of cancer had risen in the surrounding area, and in Damascus. Baba was sick with cancer too, as if factory smoke had carried it all the way to his new home, hundreds of kilometres from the village. I remember a statue of Hafez al-Assad, hand raised, greeting everyone coming and going. I remember another statue too, near Homs: half of a person who appeared to have been sitting. And on the other side of the road, a statue that was life-sized, or even bigger, alone on a hill. I remember the sign as well: “Smile! You’re in Dayr Atiyah.”

  My father was strange. I don’t mean his personality. It was not that he acted strange, but that he seemed estranged, somehow, from everything around him. He moved through the world as a stranger, at a distance from objects, people, voices and smells. As if the world extended no further than his own body; as if it ended at his tender skin. Silent and decisive, he watched life go by from the taxi window like someone contemplating their fate. His gaze emanated a certain directionless fear. (My father, despite his inner strength and confidence, feared odd little things. He was afraid of chilly weather, for example, and of catching a cold or a sore throat. He was afraid of travel and traffic and stressed out by large crowds. He was afraid I might choke on a piece of food, so he watched me closely whenever I ate. He would open his mouth, and I would open mine for him to place a piece of food inside. He closed his mouth when I closed mine. And slowly chewed while I did too, playing along to please him. He would pretend to swallow and I would see his throat move, then I would swallow my food too. I imagined him digesting the air while I digested my food. Now here I am, often feeling as if I cannot breathe, choking on air, not food. Is it the same air my father closed his mouth around, the same air he swallowed?)

  Several years after he passed, a friend of his from Tartus, who was in his mid-fifties and had since moved to Lebanon, gave me a bundle of letters my father had written to him when they were in Year 10 at school. In one, my father wrote of lying awake at night in fear of throat cancer. He was fifteen years old at the time! And it was not until his forties that he was diagnosed with throat cancer. Did he conjure illness from his imagination? Had he lived in fear for all those years? Had he been expecting it?

  We always arrived in the afternoon, and my grandmother would be standing at the front door waiting for us. She wore a flowing, long-sleeved dress and a light kerchief covering her hair, now pure white. My grandmother was a little creature of flesh and bones. Even as a child, I could encircle her with my arms without touching her body. She gripped me with rough hands, pocked and ruined by time, and kissed my head, brow, cheeks, shoulders and hands. No one kissed me as passionately as my grandmother did. She kissed with a unity of body and soul; there was no hiding how she felt. She kissed and kissed and could not stop; she would keep kissing until I slipped from her hands and dashed next door to my aunt’s shop.

  My aunt was always standing at the shop’s front door, also waiting for us to arrive. I hugged her, and she always kissed me with the measured passion of a physicist, no more and no less. My aunt wore an embroidered dress too, and a light kerchief that revealed a few strands of hair, dyed a lustreless black with hints of red that flashed in the sunlight. She had a plump figure, large breasts and an absent-minded smile that hung on her lips even in moments of sadness. My aunt lived in perpetual sadness. She complained constantly about life and her place in it, and never stopped bemoaning the “rotten luck” that had been following her since the day she was born. My aunt attributed every tragedy to her luck. “Some people are just lucky” was her motto in life, a phrase she would slip between sentences as if to grease the words.

  My grandfather usually entered the house from a door connected to her shop. I often saw him sitting in a big chair holding the Quran, repeating verses which, though he had memorised them by heart, he still read from the pages throughout the day. He always smiled cheerfully at me, and I do not know what I found so irksome about our relationship. I would kiss his large, drooping cheeks, and he would ask, “How are you, Grandpa?,” calling me by his own name to show how dear I was to him. “How’s Mama? What’s new? What brings you here this time? Don’t you love us any more? D’you like the Sham better?” This was my grandfather, constantly admonishing me i
n jest, and never pausing for me to answer. He did not want to hear what I might say; all he wanted was to chastise. My grandmother always shushed him, murmuring in her soft, delicate voice. Had I inherited her animosity? I did not love him the way I should have done. My grandmother did not love him. She complained about how stingy and controlling he was. But she never reproached him: she did not know how. All she knew was how to love. Scolding was the speciality of my grandfather and aunt. They did not chide me because they actually missed me or resented me. Their chastisement was born of a complex relationship between the countryside, where they lived, and the capital, Damascus, where we did; between my father and his Sunni Damascene wife, the woman who had stolen him and stolen me too! I was constantly reprimanded for a sin I had not committed: “coming from nothing,” ignoring my roots, acting like I was better than them. I could never defend myself because this sin was undeniable, a given. Any interaction we had began from this premise.

  My grandmother often sat next to me on their long sofa, holding my little hand in hers, kissing me and ruffling my hair and generally showering me with affection. She always brought me to the kitchen so I could keep her company while she made coffee for my father and grandfather in the big coffeepot. The kitchen table was low, as if made just for me. The wicker chairs were low too. All the houses in the village had chairs like these. I don’t know why. Maybe they made sitting more intimate, less formal. In the kitchen, my grandmother asked me questions while she made coffee. “How are you all doing? How is your mother, and school, and your father’s health?” My grandmother was silent after each question. She always waited for my response.