Dreams of Water

by Nada Awar Jarrar

‘This will stop your skin from getting too itchy,’ he says, gesturing to the tube of lotion.

  Salah’s arms suddenly begin to tremble. Samir quickly puts the toilet lid down and sits his father down on it.

  ‘Please,’ says Salah, reaching out for his son’s trousers and pulling on them.

  ‘Yes, baba. What is it?’

  Salah presses his lips together and points at the bathroom cabinet. Samir opens the cabinet and points at the different objects inside: his own toothpaste and some aftershave.

  ‘Your cologne is in the bedroom,’ Samir says. ‘I’ll go and get it.’

  ‘No!’ Salah’s voice is surprisingly loud. He puts his hands on either side of the walker and lifts himself up again. He moves forward, towards the cabinet, and reaches for the toothpaste but it tumbles off the shelf and falls into the sink. Samir suddenly feels overcome with hopelessness.

  ‘Do you want to brush your teeth?’ he asks.

  Salah nods.

  ‘I haven’t been doing that for you, baba. I’m sorry … I didn’t think.’

  Salah leans over the walker, his shoulders drooping with his weight, and lifts his head to look at his son.

  ‘I’ll get a new toothbrush from my room,’ Samir says, rushing out.

  Salah holds on to the basin and Samir stands beside him with the toothbrush. Salah opens his mouth while his son gingerly brushes his teeth. Salah’s gums bleed slightly at the touch of the toothbrush. Then Samir turns on the tap, gathers water in his cupped hand and lifts it to the older man’s mouth. Salah bends down so that Samir can see the back of his neck, thin and taut, and spits into the basin. When they are done, Samir pats his father’s mouth dry with a face cloth.

  ‘Does that feel better?’ Samir asks, watching his father’s face in the mirror.

  Salah reaches for the toothbrush and places it on the side of the basin. He taps the surface of the basin with one hand and totters dangerously to one side so that Samir has to grab him to stop him from falling. Then they walk slowly out of the bathroom, Samir thinking back on the once deliberate beauty of his father’s movements, the ebb and flow of his hands.

  Samir misses being with a woman, the feel of her and the smell too. He is certain that love in this tired bed of lost passions would bring life back to him and fill up the silent spaces in the flat. He is astonished that he should continue to think of himself as an outsider in a place where there is no one left to make him feel like one, and wishes he had the strength in him to fight back. In returning to Beirut he has recalled a measure of himself, that place where he is at his most vulnerable, where living is not merely a recollection but a breathing, sorrowful thing. There had been no alternative to coming back, not once Salah had died and all Samir had been left with was this heaving sense of loss. He realizes how much he misses his father, not just his presence – which at times was persistent and perplexing – but his unspoken thoughts and the life he had kept so closely to himself, the loves he had cherished. Perhaps, he thinks, I will find here what my father was so anxious for me to find.

  Samir remembers the first time he came back to Beirut after his mother’s death and tried to persuade his father to leave with him. Salah had refused. Why don’t you stay here, son, Salah had said. We don’t belong in the West. This is our home.

  Several days later, Samir and his father were on their way to the airport in a taxi; Salah was very quiet. I’m alone too now, baba, Samir had pleaded, tapping his father on the arm. I need you with me.

  Now, the morning after his arrival, Samir wanders listlessly through the flat. He goes into the kitchen and begins to open cupboard doors. He takes out cleaning liquid, a bucket and a mop, a duster and a broom with a straw handle and feathery bristles. He bends down and passes the broom over the floor, back and forth and with a regular rhythm. The dirt lifts and falls. He fills the bucket with water, adds soap and throws the mop in as well. He remembers to look for rubber gloves and finds them in the cupboard under the sink. They are yellow and dry and begin to fall to pieces when he tries to put them on. With his bare hands, he takes the mop out of the bucket, squeezes the excess water out and begins to clean the kitchen floor.

  Throughout the day, Samir finds himself wanting to stop but something makes him go on, an urgency that he cannot quite understand. By the early evening, his parents’ bedroom, where he is now sleeping, the bathroom, the kitchen and the balcony are spotless. Samir has even taken out the few pieces of china and cutlery that his father had used just before he left and cleaned them for his own use. He is tired but suddenly very happy.

  I’m hungry, Samir realizes.

  He puts on a light jacket and goes out to look for something to eat.

  My father, Samir daydreams as he stands swaying in the crowded underground train. My father should outlive me. He is everything a man should be, strong and kind and given to outbursts of dazzling anger.

  He raps the knuckles of his right hand on his forehead and shakes his head. He is going in to work for the last time and feels exhilarated at the thought of starting all over again, of taking care of Salah and living within the details of everyday life, being a part of it in ways he had never managed before.

  ‘Aha!’ Samir says out loud and watches as the woman next to him scuttles to the other end of the carriage.

  He remembers leaning over a balcony railing as a child to stare at the moving patterns made by the sunlight on the wall beneath. His head had begun to get heavy when he felt two large hands pull him up by the shoulders.

  ‘Allah, Samir,’ Salah says, pushing him gently towards the door that leads into the living room. ‘Do you imagine you can fly? Don’t let your mother see you doing that.’

  As the train comes to a stop at his station, Samir pulls his fingers further into his leather gloves and trips over his feet while stepping out into the throng.

  He has always resembled his mother, her compact body and the way she moved through life with purpose. Even at night, as she tucked him into bed, whispering goodnight and I love you into his ear, she did it, he knew, with a view of the task ahead, tending to Salah perhaps or making plans for the next day’s chores.

  Samir has grown into the same urgency, a kind of singular impatience to complete what cannot be completed, approaching everything as a challenge that would only lead to yet another and soon feeling weariness tapping at his skin and seeping into his body, until all he can do is to rub his hand hard back and forth across his chest to shift the pain.

  Yet with his father, Samir has known a halting friendship, the kind of closeness that could weather constant interruption. He is aware of an urgent need to tend to Salah. He sees no reason to differentiate between their new roles, to recognize one as giver and the other as recipient. Compassion, Samir has only recently come to understand, courses through and beyond the confines of our own selves on its endless journey through our hearts.

  At this stage, Samir still has a window of opportunity. The headaches always begin with a tingling in his fingers and a vagueness to his thoughts that makes everything he sees appear filmy and unfocused. There is a moment during which he can take medication and then hope, quietly, that it will work. The first sign of the tablets working is when the sensation in his fingers starts to fade away; only then does he begin to think he has successfully avoided jumping over the precipice once again, as if he had just been given a second chance.

  But when the medicine proves ineffective, when he starts to wish he hadn’t waited so long before taking it, when there is nothing to save him from the nausea and the retching and the agony except time, he resigns himself to the pain, draws the curtains and lies back on the bed wanting only to die.

  And when it’s all over, when he can sit up and breathe easily again, a wave of something bigger than relief, something like grace, sweeps over him and he is suddenly, inexplicably, overwhelmed with gratitude.

  When the headaches first started, Samir had been a teenager. He remembers the feel of his mother’s palm on his forehead, cooling ev
en in the throes of fire. She would wet a small towel with cold water from the kitchen tap and then place it on his face and head before kneading his hands with it, pulling at his fingers slightly so that he felt the tension in them ease a little. And as soon as he lifted his head, almost overcome with queasiness, she would walk him to the bathroom and stand over him as he was sick.

  ‘Here, habibi. Have a glass of water. Rinse your mouth out now.’

  Then back in his dark bedroom, his father hovering nervously in the doorway, Huda would tuck Samir into the bed, expertly and with the same precision she had used when he was a very young child.

  ‘There now, you’ll feel better after that, Samir,’ she would say. ‘Don’t worry now, darling, they’re just the same silly headaches I used to get when I was your age. They’ll eventually go away. You know they’re a sign of a sensitive nature.’

  But the threat of pain remains with him now. He only gets the headaches once or twice a year at the most but that is often enough to keep him on his toes, to push him into a kind of gentle acquiescence, into admitting a vulnerability that he does not wish to acknowledge. Yes, I have rather a delicate system, he tells himself and others who care to know, yes, I do have to be careful but it’s all right really, I’ll be fine.

  The house stands on the outer edge of a park on a road that bends slightly inwards, enclosing the pavement and the buildings that line the street in a gentle arch of trees and neat green.

  Salah’s bed has been moved into what used to be the library, on the ground floor of the house, and is placed directly beneath a large window that looks out on to the view. Samir spends several hours of the day in an armchair next to his father’s bed reading or simply staring out of the window. Cars regularly drive down the road and pedestrians walk past on the winding pavement, both too far away to be heard but close enough to be seen and observed.

  ‘Do you see the woman with the baby, baba? She’s about to cross the road and go into the park.’

  The two men watch the figure pushing the pram. She has her back to them and stops for a moment to bend down towards the baby. Once in the park, she disappears down a path beyond the trees and their gaze.

  Samir turns his attention back to his father. Salah is trying to straighten the small cotton blanket placed on top of the duvet and over his legs. The three outer fingers on his right hand are bent inwards and he is unable to grip the blanket firmly. Samir takes his father’s hand in both of his own and attempts, gently, to straighten his fingers.

  ‘It is good to be here together, isn’t it, baba?’

  But when he looks at Salah’s face, he is unable to read it. There is firmness around the lips, as though they have been pushed together with disapproval, but Salah’s eyes, appearing small now under the folds of his eyelids, are alert and questioning.

  ‘Do you need anything, habibi? Can I get you anything?’

  Salah lies back against the pillows, smacks his lips together and looks out towards the park once again.

  Samir walks on the other side of the Corniche, where the fast-food places are and the ice cream and sweet shops. It is busy and there are people, families and groups of young men, wandering up and down the street. Men push carts carrying sweets and nuts and ears of corn cooked over hot coal up and down the Corniche and children on bicycles weave their way around them. The cars on the road drive up dangerously close to the pavement, come to a sudden stop and then park at impossible angles or alongside other vehicles before their passengers step out slamming doors and talking loudly. It is the kind of chaotic, teeming noise that Samir has not heard in a while and it makes him aware of something in himself that he has long ignored.

  He goes into a fish-and-chip shop, orders and takes his food and drink to an outside table. The fish is battered and crumbly and the potatoes are crispy. As he sips at his drink, he notices a woman with short grey hair and a young boy sitting at a table not too far from his own. They are talking animatedly as they eat, their chairs and their heads close together. They are both in jeans and trainers, though she is wearing a white top and he is in a blue shirt. The woman says something and the boy puts his head back and laughs out loud. Samir reaches for his soft drink and when he looks up again, the woman is gazing at him. She raises her hand and waves. Samir feels himself stiffen and only relaxes when she finally turns away. In any event, he thinks, I would not know what to say.

  He takes a circuitous route home, away from the Corniche and on to the parallel street. Many new buildings have gone up since he was last here. There are small hotels and blocks of furnished flats with neon signs on the outside and doormen in uniform. Garages where dozens of vehicles crowd against each other and spill out on to the pavement alternate with clothing and other shops on one side of the street. These are changes that, strangely enough, appeal to him, that make the neighbourhood appear less staid than it did when he was a child.

  He has on soft shoes and though the pavements are uneven, with cars parked across them so he has to walk on the street most of the time, he feels himself glide effortlessly across the ground. It is a lightness of being that he has not felt for a long time. I am tied to nothing, Samir thinks to himself. Watch me fly, baba.

  Salah takes on the housekeeping very soon after his arrival. Samir is at first amused by his father’s sudden interest in everything domestic and eventually feels something close to admiration for Salah’s newly acquired skills at keeping the house in order.

  ‘I never knew you cared about such things,’ Samir tells him one day. ‘Mother said you were hopeless at it.’

  ‘That’s because she never let me anywhere near the kitchen,’ Salah replies with a shrug of his shoulders, ‘or the cupboards and the cleaning things. I always assumed she was right.’

  He is loading the dishwasher with the same unconscious grace as he does everything else, Samir thinks as he watches his father. He begins by scraping the plates empty and rinsing them along with mugs and cutlery thoroughly under the tap. Then he bends down carefully to place them neatly on the racks. He is a pleasure to watch, Samir thinks.

  ‘But we already have someone to clean the place, baba,’ Samir eventually says. ‘I don’t want you to tire yourself out.’

  ‘There’s a lot more to keeping house than just cleaning, habibi.’

  Salah puts the soap powder in its compartment, shuts the door of the dishwasher and turns it on. Then he straightens up, taps the kitchen worktop with the fingers of one hand and turns around with a look of great satisfaction on his face.

  Thoughts of his childhood come regularly into Samir’s mind and sometimes when he least expects them, as he sits in the kitchen folding the laundry or while looking out at the view from the flat’s balcony. He suddenly sees himself, small and neatly dressed, walking alongside his mother on a Beirut street, his hand resting on her handbag; or standing in the doorway of his parents’ bedroom watching her as she applies her make-up. There is something about the way the boy carries himself, seemingly self-contained, almost defiant, and in the way he looks at his mother, his eyes questioning her every move.

  But there are things he does not need to recall for they have stayed with him through adulthood, such as the silence that always pervaded the rooms of the flat, following his parents around so closely that they seemed outlined by it, a kind of glow that encompassed him as well, though it disappeared as soon they stepped outside and into the beckoning world. His aloneness also, not the self-pity sometimes associated with loneliness, but a kind of impatience with things outside his immediate circle, with those who would be friends and events that did not directly affect him.

  As an adult, Samir realizes, he has been less than forthcoming, has hidden a measure of arrogance beneath what others sometimes see as mere reticence. It gives him the sense that in everything he feels, even now with the sorrow over the loss of his father, lies a measure of falseness, so that he is often compelled to say, Don’t pay any attention, please, it’s just me pretending again, though he does not know who he m
ight say this to.

  Now, discovering this humbler, less-assured version of himself settling into Beirut as though it had never belonged anywhere else, Samir wonders what might come next. He is astonished also that this flat which, in his parents’ lifetime, had held so much fascination for him, both good sensations and others that were indifferent, has suddenly lost its associations. This, after all, could be any kitchen, he mutters to himself, and these rooms are like many others I have been in. I, Samir concludes as he stands rigid in the centre of the hushed living room, could be anywhere in this wide world.

  He walks into the house one evening and finds Salah and a young woman sitting on the Persian carpet in the living room. The coffee table has been pushed to one side and they have their backs against the sofa, with their legs stretched out towards the fireplace. They are both shoeless, Salah in his grey silk socks, and the woman in black matt tights that have a slight run at one heel. They stand up to greet him when he comes in.

  ‘Hello, I’m Aneesa,’ the young woman says.

  Her brown hair forms a frizzy halo that frames an already round face and she is wearing a knee-length corduroy dress in an unbecoming shade of purple with a denim jacket buttoned over it. She holds out her hand to him and smiles. He realizes she is the same young woman he saw as he was rushing out of the house weeks earlier. This time, he notices her skin, clear and so radiant it seems as if he has just lifted his head up to the sky and met the moonlight with his eyes.

  ‘Hello.’

  Samir looks at his father.

  ‘We’ve already eaten, habibi,’ says Salah, ‘but I could heat something up for you.’

  ‘It’s all right, baba. I had dinner earlier.’

  They stand, the three of them, by the fire. He can feel the heat of it on his legs. When he looks down, he sees that Aneesa’s toes are curled inwards and Salah’s long, thin feet are lined one against the other. His own black shoes, clumsy and awkward, shine in the firelight and complete the circle.