The Loved Ones

by Alia Mamdouh

  She started crying and sniveling, wiping her nose with her hand, avoiding meeting my eyes. For the first time I looked right at her face. She was truly in a miserable state. Her movements were jumpy and she was pulling me this way and that.

  “During the war, your country was getting hit by everybody, even France. I went downstairs to her one morning, very early, and I saw that she was crying even though she was not making a sound. I gave her a hug and we cried together in the hall. Your mother was more uncomfortable than I was but she didn’t say a word. I told her she could go stay for a while in my village in the south, in the house in the country, but she just turned her head away to wipe her tears. She said to me, It’s not your fault, Angélique. It’s our fate. Monsieur Adam, did your mother tell you that? She didn’t agree to go with me. She is stubborn, she said to me, No, thank you, I won’t leave the apartment.”

  The smell coming from her mouth was making me dizzy.

  “I will take my daughter back, that’s what the court will order, and your mother will go with me as my witness. She said so and she is a lady you can trust. We will go to the house in the country together. I am on holiday. Air France is on strike right now. Didn’t your mother tell you that Jacques left me, and stole from me? He stole my money and my jewelry and the credit cards. And he stole my daughter. Pig, bastard, salaud! For so long your mother kept after me. Leave him, she said to me, he is not good for you. But I can’t, no, I can’t do that. No, I don’t love him any more, but I want my daughter. Just my daughter. He’s crap.”

  Her fingernails were cutting into the flesh of my hand.

  “Monsieur, please don’t leave me. Your mother never left me. She waited with me for Jacques to come back at night. We would stand right at the door at night and talk. She’d watch the street with me and make it easier for me, and we’d look at all the cars passing. Do you know, Monsieur, I bought a new car for him? And suits, shares, bonds, and I put one of the apartments in his name? Jacques is about your age, Monsieur Adam.”

  She had me cornered between the wall and her arms. I had the sensation that she intended to sit on me and keep me there, and I could just about feel her insides erupting from her mouth.

  “Jacques doesn’t want to see me. He says he’s busy. Fils de pute!”

  Her voice was assaulting my ears by now like the screeching of some animal. Falling down on the ground, she was begging, cursing, and crying. The sound of her wailing and the smell of her wine compelled me to try to drag her into the little dive next door to the building. Her body was trembling as I carried and dragged her, and she held me caught in her arms. She was taller and heavier than I was. I tried to put her gently down onto one of the seats. I ordered black coffee for her and stepped back out of the place, her voice chasing me as I made my way to the hospital.

  II

  Angélique’s face and voice pursued me. The image of that woman produced in me a deathly fear for Suhaila. I remembered my mother in our first days living in Paris, the image of her as no longer capable of holding a passing conversation, even a trivial one, with anyone, no matter who it was. She didn’t respond to anything. I would try to lure her with the pleasant weather, inviting her for a walk, but she would remain still and silent. She did not know where to put herself in a city like Paris.

  I do not understand what is going on around me, she would say. No, no, it has nothing to do with language. Language by itself cannot patch up what is around you. Language is just one means. It is as if I am without a memory, without a father or grandfather, without ancestors, without history. It is as if I had not been living before this. I mean to say, the question is, have I left my first self behind forever and I will never meet it again? I have been afraid, Nader, and I still am. But I am still waiting for her to show up: for that first self of mine, do you understand me? I beg you not to get angry with me. I really did not notice, believe me, that that lawyer seemed to find me attractive or that he was flirting with me. He is a pleasant fellow, a friend of your uncle’s, and he means to show his concern for us. He is polite, he’s warm, but he is a man as you are. He is like you, like your father, like all the men in every place in the world. You are all alike. But here alone is where I become your mother and I am no longer Suhaila. I have told you that before, I said it in a different way that I don’t remember now. We change, and you have to notice as much, but in yourself first, and not just in me.

  This was true and I felt the justice of it as I was entering the corridor of the unit where they put patients like her. Caroline’s face was the first thing I encountered, a face that granted some of the repose I had lost this morning. She seemed out of breath.

  “She moved, Nader. Her fingers and her eyelids showed some movement. Just a tiny flicker, and it is only the beginning, of course. Does it make sense? Did it happen for your sake?”

  I followed her military stride down the corridor. But what is the use? I thought to myself. Will she know me, or not?

  “Imagine it, Nader! The nurses and doctors said she must have sensed that you were there. It’s because of you, see, it is for your sake, that this has happened. Ooh, she’s coming back, she’ll come back, Nader, you must believe that so that she will believe most of all. Isn’t that so? Don’t shake your head at me as if you don’t believe it. Come now, it is possible that she sensed you, just you. The bonds of love, as Dr. Wajd said, are what we must be most attentive to. Nader, the fatigue of your traveling here was not in vain, aren’t you confident of that? Come, now, go in to her. Put your hand over hers again—love runs through hands, by means of the pulse and the will. Go in, Nader.” She pushed me toward Suhaila.

  III

  She looked different. She was Suhaila and at the same time, she was someone else. She had not changed so much in the past twenty-four hours, but I felt that she had begun to notice me, to sense my presence, and that her body and mind were no longer the still emptiness that illness brings. It was not simply a matter of communication or its absence. Before many minutes had passed, I thought I could sense that she was fighting the illness. I got very close; I stood above her head. The pillow was blotchy with warm sweat, and a few drops rolled off her dry lips. Whether it was the residue of her liquid nourishment or saliva that had come back out I did not know. Her face looked serene but there was something about her slumber that caught me, something, I thought, that had no bearing on me. Perhaps it was something very private, something that was hers alone, I told myself, or perhaps it was something connected to her women friends. That something whose essence I did not know, but which was clearly there, surprised me and I couldn’t account for it. It would not be sensible of me, though, to be distracted by this, or by anything. I must concentrate on her, must satisfy my craving for her and my overpowering desire to touch her. I wanted to appear as a new son, that I might really come to possess all I would be due from her, as a good son. All of that closeness. All that she might be for me. For those moments, this was enough to fill me. But all of these eyes behind me and around me—the nurses, the doctors who came in and went out and paid no attention to me, Caroline, Asma, voices talking in Arabic and in French, voices muttering, sniffling, crying. This day I decided not to cry. The tears were there in my eyes but I pushed them elsewhere. I was trembling and I had the feeling that my inner organs, my liver, the sites of life and feeling, had been shifted from their usual positions in my body. The channels through which urine was carried from my kidneys to my bladder now seemed to be somewhere beneath my feet. I was about to pee on myself; nothing inside of me was the way it usually was. Has she gotten to the point where she is thinking about me, has she been waiting for me? Am I really here before her, present to her? I touched her again and then a third time. I felt love, that very first and primary of emotions, so natural, so immediate, always so excessive just before we part from each other. Her arms lay motionless along each side of her body. Her flesh was not so very shriveled as I had imagined it last night. It was soft, like putty or children’s clay, and there were disco
lored patches. For the first time I was seeing all this quantity of spots on her cheeks and lower face and all the way down to the bottom of her neck and in the vicinity of her ears. The spots had multiplied across her skin. I put my hand gently over hers. I drew up the chair slowly. I began to study her. For the first time since the end of the war, it seemed, I was truly looking at her. Her face, there in front of me, looked so generous. Mother, all that is left of me is you. The fingers of her hand were all enclosed in my fingers. Her left hand and her right. And then I saw the twitch. I am definitely not exaggerating.

  Now, and since last night, the layer of fog veiling my eyes has lifted. I hear the steps of one of the doctors coming in. Perhaps he is the senior doctor here; perhaps he is the one in charge. I sense him behind me and then he is in front of me. There is something happening and all I have to do is believe it. Otherwise, it will all be—

  I tried to stand up as my head went up to attract his eye. Her palm was still between mine. I suddenly caught sight of a plastic sac at the bottom of the bed, connected somewhere but I didn’t know where, its color that of iodine, the yellow liquid dripping slowly.

  “Bonjour, Monsieur!”

  “Bonjour, Monsieur!”

  No, he could not be the doctor in charge. He was a young man and his features gave an impression of nervousness. He is slightly older than I am, I thought. Waiting for what he would say, I am sure I appeared bewildered and lost. To me he seemed very young, someone who would not be able to really supply me with the truth. I put down her hand and got to my feet. He began to read the metal clipboard hanging on the side of the bed. When he spoke, his voice showed little concern.

  “Good, good, everything is going as it should.”

  “How so?” I had the sense that I had not spoken very clearly. After a moment, he came closer to her and I moved out of his way. He lowered his head and began to study the sac at the bottom of the bed.

  “Very good. The kidney is working slowly but there is no call for worry.”

  “And the pressure, Doctor?”

  “Stable. Things look better this morning than they did last night.”

  I followed his eyes, coming closer as he examined her eyelids and fingers. He touched them. He tried to raise the upper lid and I saw a flash of white. He closed the eyelid manually. He put his hand out to hers and began to move it in his. He opened her fingers and folded them in with tiny movements. It appeared that something was successful but what it was I did not know.

  “There’s some change.” It was as if he were talking to himself.

  “What is the meaning of it, exactly, Doctor, please?”

  He lowered his eyes and looked away from me. He set her hand down, took out his stethoscope and began to check her heartbeat. I don’t know why it was, but I was feeling that his responses were merely gestures to quiet the worry of a big child. I tried to shrug that off as I faced him squarely. Two new faces appeared in the window that opened on the corridor: a pretty, delicate young woman rubbing her eyes although the tears refused to stop coming, and, next to her, a handsome dark-skinned youth who was staring at everything around him, an expression of bewilderment and awe on his face. I found Caroline and Asma facing us in the doorway as I followed the doctor from the room. I wanted more information before he went away.

  “But, Doctor, do you know who I am? If, if—please . . . if she were to move, would—will she remember who I am? Please, will you tell me?”

  I had gone completely pale but I stayed in control of myself as I saw the doctor’s smile. His teeth were small and white, and his smile was sweet. The feeling flooded over me that he would understand me after all.

  “Do you want her to remember who you are, first of all?”

  I did not understand. I wasn’t accustomed to such pointed, challenging questions as this.

  “I want her to come back. To come back, first of all.”

  He set about asking more questions, and answering; he spoke about things I did not know, matters of which I had not the slightest understanding. I believed that he was being harsh; indeed, that he was being harsher to me than she was. She was still in a coma and this morning would be no better than last night. After all, though, on the telephone Asma had told me that she was beginning to recover. And Caroline had pushed me into her hospital room, exclaiming, “She has moved!”

  Neither Asma nor Caroline would let me go. They were firm in their insistence that I should stay near her. Hopefully, my presence would help her to come back to herself more rapidly.

  “Today, it wouldn’t be right for us to leave her for even a second,” said Asma. Nader, dear, wipe those glasses of yours. Zayn, zayn—that’s better.”

  If Asma could give me a sweet, gentle smile, her eyes were still on the point of shedding tears. The young woman whom I had not seen before this morning came up to us and spoke to me shyly. “Shidd heelak, Nader, gather your strength. I’m Nur and this is my fiancé Ahmad.”

  They were about my age or perhaps a bit older. They put out their hands and each of them took hold of one of mine. “You’ll be seeing that she has friends of all different ages,” said Ahmad.

  “I took today off from work,” said Nur. “And the weekend makes three days. I’ll stay with you here until you are really tired of me.”

  Sometimes hope is unmerciful, exactly like despair. But despair doesn’t deceive, and so you cannot blame it if an hour passes, and then the hours languish and finally the way to hope is lost. It is too hard for me, this hope. I am not strong enough to bear it. I cannot imagine it into existence nor can I make it bigger than it really is. Asma was huddled at a distance from us. In a nearly inaudible voice, she was reciting verses from the Qur’an. With her exhalations, she was fighting desperately to animate her friend. She thought it was the only right and proper way to go about this, and I was supposed to believe or otherwise I would lose first my equilibrium and then my patience. Asma is a woman of patience. Patience is her superogatory work that commences at dawn and continues until the following day. Asma searches for patience and, if she stumbles upon it, she strews us with as much of its bounty as she can. Whenever I see her in front of me, I have the feeling that I am stepping over my own threshold. Now I hear the light thud of her footfall again next to me followed by the rustle and crunch of bags. She is opening them and taking something out, diffidently but calmly. “Nader, honey, here’s the Bread of Abbas. I know how fond you are of it, and she doesn’t make it very well. I made the dough last night and I baked it first thing this morning. Your mother says, Hammada and Nader are so like each other in their sympathy toward others, God keep you both, my son. Yallah, come on, sit down here, come on, now.”

  She took out a round of the filled bread. Still warm, it gave off the fragrance of Iraqi spices. The warm, flat bread encasing fragrant lamb attacked me in the face and whisked me off, over there. That I was Iraqi suddenly held some value even if it remained a hidden worth, kneaded into a loaf of bread that intensified my sad loneliness and compelled me to survey this road that linked Suhaila and Baghdad to this generous hostess. I took it from her hand. She had already turned to Caroline, Nur, and Ahmad.

  “Come, now, dears, taste the real bread that comes from homes. Ma biikum? What’s wrong with you, why are you all so shy? Come, come closer.” She offered a loaf to each of them and then turned back to me with a smile. For the first time here in this place I was seeing a true Iraqi smile.

  “I swear, by her mother’s wedding Suhaila never tasted bread like this—ya, Nader dear? I made tea, it’s in the thermos—I know you really don’t know how to make yourself a proper breakfast, love.” She set about pouring the tea into plastic cups and handing them round.

  “Hatim and Narjis, there’s their share. Blanche, Dr. Wajd, here, Nader, and even Sayyida Tessa, if she comes, her cup is waiting for her. I baked maybe twenty loaves, just about. The meat is halal, son, halal, North African meat.”

  Caroline sat quietly next to me, taking bites and swallowing in silence. I s
ensed she was feeling a sort of happiness and I guessed that soon her emotions would expand to include me. Ahmad came up; our eyes met as he swallowed.

  “If you need anything you really must ask me, or Nur. We have a car, we know people, doctors too. They are from home, from Sudan and Syria, and we have friends in the fitness and physical therapy and natural medicine centers. I can say one thing: she will pull out of it. You can be sure of that. You just have to be strong and let your patience do its work.”

  I had finished the first fatira without even realizing it. And I had been imagining that I had lost my appetite!

  “Strong health a thousand times over! Now eat, eat, God keep you, my dear, you have to get strong to face these difficult times you live in, all of you young folks. Ya ayni! Eat, please now, eat some more. Kul, kul!”

  She took out another loaf. She swirled a spoon around inside the plastic cup and handed it back to me. Caroline, Ahmad, and Nur set a pleasant tone as they ate. With their good cheer, they were trying to break the inert silence and dispel my sense of waiting.

  Fifteen

  I

  Commotion along the corridors. The faces of new doctors and nurses. The sight of equipment I had not seen before. Suddenly, everyone seemed to be in her room. We got to our feet hurriedly and collected in front of the glass pane that separated us from her room. She was no longer directly and wholly in my view but there were openings in the curtains, and they allowed us momentary glimpses of her. She was still lying on her back. The pillow under her head had been pushed slightly back. They were touching her from every angle and no one turned their head to us. Someone put a hand against her forehead and another opened her eyes. Arms were moving back and forth as if they were stroking her. They replenished the intravenous liquid. The nurse bent and straightened up holding the sac of urine, which she put into a deep metal basin before attaching another bag. They would remember something that needed to be done; I could see them retracing their steps. Amidst all of this busyness the nurse suddenly caught sight of us peering from behind the glass and she stopped in her tracks, turned to the pane, and pulled the linen curtains tightly together. Suhaila disappeared. Ahmad drew a few steps away and Asma followed him.