by Nihad Sirees
When one editor read the article the blood froze in his veins and he felt dizzy, so he sent it along to the editor-in-chief after tacking on the word Urgent. When the editor-in-chief read it the blood froze in his veins as well and he transmitted it up to the Minister, whose blood boiled in his veins in outrage, and when he finally transmitted it in turn to one of the mukhabarat agencies, my father was called in for questioning. His interrogation lasted a full six months. In order to spare him from having to go home and come right back again, they decided to simply keep him there in their dungeons. He came out afterward transformed from a combative individual into a pathetic shell, banned from trying cases in a court of law for a period of two years. And so, just like that, my father turned from jokiness to gloominess and started practicing law in the most serious way possible. Whenever he heard my mother tell a joke and start laughing, he would sigh and mourn the good old days. At work he was always morose and demanded that everyone remain serious.
But if life and its inscrutable politics treated my father with solemn humorlessness until the day that he died, it bid him farewell with the most hilarious farce. We buried him in a brand-new cemetery that didn’t have any distinguishing signposts yet. On that day moreover he wasn’t the only person being buried there. One of the others was a famous dancer who had a lot of friends and admirers. Rounding out the joke that was his life, the gravediggers forgot which of the two graves contained my father and which the dancer. One of the dancer’s biggest fans had requested a headstone to be made by the same man who engraved my father’s. When that day arrived and he set the two headstones upon the graves, he made a horrible mistake, placing the dancer’s headstone on my father’s grave and my father’s headstone on hers, which meant that whenever we visited the cemetery we would recite the Fatiha over the dancer’s grave, even as scores of her fans, friends and former lovers would show up and place flowers and plants on my father’s grave, sitting down beside him in order to shed tears for their dearly departed dancer. The mixup lasted several months, until one morning, early in the feast of Eid al-Fitr, my mother and my sister accompanied me to the cemetery where Samira, who possesses keen powers of observation, sensed the mistake at once. It was all cleared up soon thereafter.
Thank God, my mother was home. Even though I know she rarely goes out in the morning, the prospect of not finding her there and having to go back out and wander the streets frightened me very much. All public transportation was out of service because of the march and I had walked a long way to her house. Umm Muhammad opened the door and greeted me warmly. Umm Muhammad is the housekeeper I found for my mother after my father passed away. She always welcomes me with extreme kindness; recently she has taken to kissing me on the cheek and squeezing me against her breasts in order to express how happy she is that I have come. When my mother is there she keeps her voice down, speaking to me in a whisper; when I come over and find Umm Muhammad alone she won’t stop shouting, causing me to take a step back and ask her to say hello to my mother for me when she returns. After dragging me into the kitchen she spoke in a hushed voice. Taking advantage of my presence she lit a cigarette and started smoking. Umm Muhammad loves to smoke almost as much as she loves to complain about her bleak misfortune—my mother doesn’t care for either habit so my presence always cheers her up.
“Where’s my mother?”
“In the bedroom.”
“What’s she doing?”
“Putting on makeup and watching TV.”
“TV? Don’t tell me she’s watching the march.”
“Yeah, she’s watching the march on TV. You know how she loves to watch those marches. She always finds something to laugh at. She called for me a little while ago when they showed your building.”
“You’re joking. Can I go in and see her?”
“First sit with me for a bit. Fathi, I want to ask you something about my son, Muhammad. You’re a big figure and you know a lot of people, mashallah.”
“What about Muhammad?”
“I want you to get him a job with the city.”
“But I don’t know anyone with the city.”
“That’s impossible, Fathi. You’re a well-known personality and your pictures are always in the papers. The mayor must have seen your picture more than once.”
“Who told you that? Anyway, I’m a pariah these days and nobody will listen to me. It’s been a long time since they published my picture.” Hoping to comfort her, I quickly added, “Anyway, don’t worry. I’ll speak with a friend about Muhammad, but I can’t promise a job with the city.”
She lifted her eyes toward the sky and said, praying for me, “May God provide you with a suitable woman. Go on now, go and see Ratiba Hanim. She has good news I’m sure she’s dying to tell you.”
I walked away from her, out of the kitchen that was now enveloped in a haze of Umm Muhammad’s cigarette smoke. I crossed the small living room and walked down the long hallway lined with bedrooms and bathrooms. My mother’s bedroom was at the end of the hall. I could hear the sound of the march being broadcast live on television as I knocked on the door.
My mother was sitting in bed painting her toenails and waiting for the red polish to dry. She was wearing pink cotton pajamas and her head was covered with colorful plastic hair curlers. She could easily see the TV from where she was sitting. She opened her arms as wide as she could to welcome me without getting up. I hugged and kissed her and then sat down on one of the chairs with a flower-print satin cover that she pointed me toward as she began to blow on her painted toes.
My mother is a fifty-five-year-old widow who loves life as if she were twenty. She loves looking pretty and youthful and cheerful and insists that world affairs don’t matter. Why should we care about what’s going on in the world? The greatest tragedy she has ever known was the death of my father. She was inconsolable and stayed at home for six months (not out of any religious devotion or anything like that), neglecting her appearance; now I find her sitting on her bed, preoccupied with her looks once again. Since I don’t like my mother to be preoccupied with anything and because I hated seeing her upset or depressed, I decided to move out and get my own place. As soon as I had revealed my intention to her, she got all excited about the idea and bought me my own flat. So that she wouldn’t be alone I hired Umm Muhammad to be with her when she was lonely and to take care of her.
My relationship with my mother is one of a kind. Every day I visit to sit and watch her, like a man who watches a woman and struggles to figure out what she might need, while she focuses on her appearance. I would make no comment on such matters. I may have grown accustomed to offering Samira some commentary from time to time, but I would never get involved in my mother’s business and she wouldn’t interfere in mine. One time she asked me if I had intentions of marrying Lama, and I told her that as soon as I was ready I would let her know. From that point she stopped asking me when I was going to get married or why I didn’t think much about marriage. Samira would always probe me about this, which is one reason I hated going over to her place; I knew she was always going to ask me why I preferred to remain a bachelor. She thought I could find a wife more beautiful than Lama. To this day I cannot fathom why she would want such a thing for me. Why would a sister want her brother’s wife to be more attractive than the woman he actually loves? Samira married a businessman and is content with his profound dim-wittedness. She married a son of her Uncle Mufid’s partner after he declared independence from his father by opening up his own shop selling industrial lathing tools. That was one year before my father died. At first she taught him how to take an interest in how he looked, but he stopped her when she went too far in trying to re-educate him. Instead, he started asking her to become more like him. So that the two of them could live in peace she stopped telling him what to do and started emulating him, even his dim-wittedness. Samira is quite intelligent whereas her husband most definitely is not. In order to make their marriage work she sacrificed her intelligence but refused to give up her lo
ve of joking and her lack of interest in the world—the two most important reasons for her marriage’s success. Her husband adored her jokes. He would laugh so hard he had to hold on to his sides or else fall over onto his back. But the talent of “not giving a shit,” which was my mother’s expression for taking no interest in anything, helped her to put up with her husband’s idiocy. I imagine that in a few years they’re going to have a dim-witted child.
But let me get back to telling you about my mother because I take such exquisite pleasure in doing so. I already mentioned how I have made a habit of visiting her every day. She is the only person whom I can visit to make my anxiety disappear, to forget about all of my cares. I would plop down wherever I found her, whether it was in the living room or her bedroom, and we would banter nonstop as I watched her attend to her cosmetic needs. She got me interested in news about her friends, where they were having coffee and where they were thinking about going on vacation. She would tell me all the gory details of their family life and ask my opinion about feminine matters such as what she should wear when she goes out at night. Whenever she caught my attention flagging, she wouldn’t hesitate to make some funny remark that would make me laugh. But today the television was on and she was sitting on the bed. She had her knees pulled up in order to blow on her toenails and from time to time she’d cast a glance up at the box broadcasting the festivities. We were in the middle of a conversation when she pointed toward the march.
“I saw your building a little while ago.”
“Yeah, Umm Muhammad told me.”
“Umm Muhammad is unpatriotic for not going out to march,” she jeered.
“Yeah, that’s what they say about the people who fall behind in the marches, too.”
“But you weren’t out on the balcony when we saw your flat. What a shame. It’s been such a long time since you were on TV. I told Umm Muhammad you should have stood out on the balcony in order to salute the masses.”
“I’ll go home right now and do just that.”
We each smiled at the other’s joke. I noticed how tightly crammed together the pictures of the Leader were at the march. Everyone in the crowd held aloft a photo and massive cloth banners were unfurled on the buildings. Even the façade of the hotel in the square had been plastered with a colorful painting of the Leader. How had I not noticed the density of those pictures when I was down there in the thick of it? Apparently television captures things more accurately than one can actually see them in real life because it looks in from outside the event.
“Why are they chanting, ‘Supreme, Supreme, the Leader is Supreme’?” she asked me.
“Because he’s supreme.”
“What’s that?” she asked, staring back at me in astonishment.
“Because he’s supreme, pursuant to the latest regulations.” Taking comfort in the fact that I hadn’t changed, she blurted out a wisecrack of her own: “They should be chanting ‘Obscene, Obscene, the Leader is Obscene,’ because he’s so obscenely obese.”
“The people shouldn’t look at the Leader’s imperfections.”
“Chunkiness isn’t an imperfection. The chant would be more realistic that way. And besides, I love overweight men. Unfortunately your father was skinny so I could never find anywhere to tickle him.”
“I’m glad my father was thin and passed that skinniness on to me. Do you really wish he had been fat?”
“I wish he had been like the Leader. I think the Leader likes being tickled.”
“How would you know such a thing?”
“Whenever he laughs he keeps his arms down at his sides. That’s how a person laughs to prevent someone from tickling him.”
“You’d better be careful, Mum. A joke about the Leader costs whoever cracks it six months’ hard time.”
“That was less a joke than a revelation. Are they going to throw me in jail for revealing that the Leader is constantly under threat of being tickled?”
“Any joke or piece of information that harms the prestige and dignity of the Leader will mean summonses and perhaps even criminal prosecution.”
“But I love him, just look at his picture. He has a childlike face that women simply adore.”
On the television a segment of the march was a forest of pictures: a horizontal shot just one yard above the heads of the masses, where thousands of pictures were affixed to poster boards with wooden clothespins.
“Why do you think they’re carrying all those pictures?” she asked me.
“Because the citizen doesn’t need to see anything but the Leader’s face. Wherever he turns he should find a likeness of the Leader.”
“Wouldn’t one large picture carried by a group of Comrades be enough?”
“In the Leader’s opinion, no. The sight of even a single person not carrying a picture and not chanting his name makes the Leader uneasy. He feels reassured when he sees everyone holding up a picture of him. A million people must carry a million pictures. Now that’s reassuring. He believes this is the way the masses show their affection.”
The camera zoomed in on a group of young men who were chanting and jumping up and down in a circle. Some shoving and shouting broke out and the overseer of the circle got nervous as, one after another, the young men started moving away from one particular spot in the middle. It turned out that someone had fallen down and the others were alerting one another about it. The shoving was growing more intense as the center started to move, meaning that whoever had fallen was now being trampled underfoot. When some other people reached his body they fell as well, and a great commotion took place that resulted in ever more forceful shoving until the producer was forced to turn the camera away. My mind was suddenly preoccupied. I imagined that the one who fell down first might be dead, and that if the stumbling and shoving and violence were to continue more than one person could get killed out in that unbearable heat. My mother understood why I was so nervous.
“It’s only death on behalf of the Leader,” she quipped. “Don’t worry, it’s a tremendous honor.”
“Before coming over here I saw some Comrades mercilessly beating a young man just for trying to get away.”
My mother made sure the polish on her nails was dry and came over to sit down on the other chair. I assumed she was unhappy whenever she became this interested in herself. To me this seemed like compensation for something lost that was never coming back. Her narcissism began six months after she became a widow, though, and now she clings to making herself appear younger than she actually is. She would spend many days beautifying herself without leaving the house at all; by the time she had finished her makeup and was satisfied with the way she looked, night would have fallen already so she simply washed it all off and went to bed. By contrast, ever since the shock of her marriage Samira had neglected herself, only ever modestly putting on makeup when she had to leave the house. Often when I went to see her I would find her without even any foundation on her face.
With the television now in a corner where it was difficult for her to see, my mother said, “Thank God I was born a woman. They don’t force us to go out for marches.”
“They do too make women go out.”
“Right, but they can’t make unemployed elderly housewives do it.”
“Thank God, you don’t care whatsoever about world affairs.”
“You mean my ‘not giving a shit’?”
“Yeah, ‘not giving a shit,’ ” I said.
Sensing my despair, she stopped focusing on the television and asked, “What’s happening with you?”
“What? Nothing …”
“You’ve been like this for a long time now. Why don’t you bring me a joke instead of this depressing silence?”
“You know I’m no good at telling jokes.”
“Do you need money?”
“If you’re offering me some, I won’t say no.”
“I’ll give you some, but will you write something?”
“You know I’m banned from writing for the papers and my books are n
ever approved for publication.”
“Write something …”
“I’ll write a novel, maybe a play. I haven’t decided yet.”
“Decide soon. You write so beautifully.”
“You never read a word I wrote.”
“Your father was a big fan of your writing. And people who like you call me the writer’s mother.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“Don’t be stubborn. I’ll buy your work myself. Offer me a new novel and I’ll pay you two thousand dollars.”
“Is this some kind of a joke?”
“Hardly.”
“All right, my next novel will be about you.”
She laughed and her fillings became visible. Her teeth had grown a little bit longer. Once again I could sense how unhappy she had become. Umm Muhammad called us and we went into the living room to have coffee. I felt like Mum was nervous; this was the first time in a while I had seen her this way. She got up from her chair and went to stare out the window; I presumed this was because she was nervous about me but she came back to sit down and told me everything was fine. As she passed by, she caressed my hair with a movement that only she knew how to do.
“Fathi,” she said, in a calm and serious voice, “I want you to meet someone very important to me.”