The Loved Ones

by Alia Mamdouh

  “Na-a-a-der . . .”

  Quds again. She was on her feet, prepared, waiting for me. She had changed her clothes; what she wore now seemed inspired by American First Nation styles. She had dyed her face in a rainbow of colors and put a feather atop her brow. She stood in front of me like a cannon primed, wanting me to say the word. Bewitching! She grabbed my hand and, without saying a word, planted me in front of the guitar lying on the long couch. The Chinese girl, Hee, and Diyala next to her, were waiting as if they were expectant hosts of an impromptu party. I gave a start, though, seeing that the instrument in front of me was miniscule, just slightly larger than the first guitar I had ever had, the one I played in Baghdad between my seventh and tenth birthdays. They exchanged glances and then turned to me.

  “Here, Nader, ya okay it is a small guitar but it’s the best we’ve got here. Come on, we’ll accompany you, we’ll clap and dance. I dance better than they do.”

  Quds made a victory sign and hung on to my hand. What could be a more encouraging incentive to play than this amalgam of sweet and flirty? My voice was no more capable of being heard than it was ready to decipher the clashing feelings working in my chest. Caroline stood up, camera in hand, and began snapping pictures amateurishly—tac, tac, a glowing flash and then darkness. I had to make these girls happy. Diyala was giving me furtive glances. Her eyes shone and I felt that in some way I was performing especially for her. Immediately I picked up the guitar. Diyala turned off the bright light in the hall and struck the pose of an emcee comfortable with her audience, who exudes unmistakable and earnest sentiments toward the crowd. I settled myself on the sofa.

  “Play whatever you wish, Nader,” said Caroline, the kindness spilling from her voice. I heard the warm timbre in Narjis’s voice. “We will listen to your playing from over here. It is better this way.”

  The adults remained in the living room while the girls sat on the floor in front of me. Their eyes were following me closely, alight with intelligence, verve, and a delight beyond description. I began to play slowly. I adjusted the strings and half-closed my eyes. A wave of pain that I cannot characterize swept through me. It was not the pain of earliest childhood or that of pure teenagerhood that has gone forever. It was the pain one knows who has never reached that promised ecstasy, for he has seen love slip through his fingers: my first love, my love for Layal. The pieces of music were like my grandfather’s prayer beads. I had only to place my fingers on the strings for the tunes to detach themselves little by little and drop from my hands. My heartbeat was picking up the tempo and my fingers were pounding faster and faster. I was afraid of failing in front of them. And overpowering emotions pulled me to those first, original melodies, the ones Layal had so loved, the ones I had played for her without having to practice. Love Story. When Layal said, I am going to Beirut, I did not get it. I did not understand that she was leaving me. She said she would come back and I believed her. Perhaps she assumed that it was not really very important in the end, or maybe she simply forgot, while I waited for her in front of the cinemas, at the doors to museums and theaters, and in the cafés of Paris. Layal always seemed exceedingly wary of young Arab men, especially exiled Iraqis—those who had no street addresses for their fathers. Her only hint to me that she might be mine was a tiny shake of her head, a miniscule toss that threw me at first. Yes, here I began to repeat that particular segment of melody. I would whistle it in her presence and she would sway. We used to walk the streets and boulevards in rain and snow and gales of wind. I would follow her and call out, right in front of the passersby, as if I were an Arab poet-lover of another era. Look at that face of hers whose beauty has made me waste away. Tell her that if she’s a beauty she’s a vain and arrogant one—so that I can cloak my dignity in my ire. And Layal is always in front of me, always there ahead, like my father’s whip. I imagined a whip uncoiling, exploding in her hands, and instead of throwing it elsewhere, she cracks it in my face. She stops me with hot tears and as I face her, her voice seeps out, separating itself from the sounds of rain and tears.

  Listen. I am not good for you, I’m not right, and the same goes for you. I am afraid of this kind of love. I am afraid of you. No, let me go, I am not the right one. Go, right now, and leave me, go, leave me to myself.

  But she fragments, scatters the parts of herself, and draws me to the slivers of her that she has left behind. Every time she wanted to separate from me, I clung harder, to the point where she would spring away from me, a leap backward exactly like Diyala’s. This girl’s face is as alight as Layal’s was. How often I begged Layal not to let the tears flow but she did not answer. Her face closed up like the wall of a dam and her fetching brown eyes shone with something other than tears although what exactly it was I do not know. But she wouldn’t say anything. She would not talk to me. She was intractable and callous and painful. I could not forget her severity nor banish her rebuking tone of voice as I heard the whistles of trains leaving Paris for Lisle where she lived and studied. She was going to leave early in the morning. I must kiss her before I die. That was what I was thinking before I saw her. I believed I would die if I did not kiss her. Seeing her, I did not die although I was not happy, either. As she walked along before me, my longing was tearing me to pieces. She would take a seat, smoke a cigarette, drink wine. The first time I drank wine, it was she who taught me how. And when she came toward me I would open my arms. I would want to gather her to my chest. With her at my side, with that slim body of hers next to me, I breathed calmly and slowly and I felt as if I were just awakening from a dream. I told her that her body was my summer. The moment she heard me say that she laughed but she had no words. I wanted to gather her in my hands as threads of silk are brought together and intertwined, and so to discover new desires that no one before me had experienced with her, or with me. But we did not talk. I went on watching her and burning, as she smoked and I sniffed and breathed in her smoke. I grabbed her, one day, by her hand and dragged her off. We got into the first taxi that came by and went to the apartment that mother and I shared. Suhaila was in Tunis at the time, attending a symposium on the theater. In my room, there was a single piece of fruit, a pear that my mother had put into a nicely etched bowl.

  You are practically crushing me, she said. Nader, please, leave me alone, I’ll eat it by myself.

  I put the fruit between her lips, between tongue and tongue. I began to peel it, my tongue and my teeth reaching. I pulled off the skin, my tongue quiet between her teeth. I did not close my eyes or give any thought to myself. I began to push the juice into her mouth, inside of her, far down and inside. It bubbled and ran down her throat and I licked it and she was on the point of falling asleep and I wanted her to open her eyes a little so I could know her more closely. But she did not look at me. It was me who was fading from view. I was playing tricks on myself so that she would not distance herself from me when she was in my arms. She would withdraw into herself, moving further and further away from me. She would tremble, and shiver, and I would touch her. I would stroke her slumbering body, that soft body that made me dizzy but that was never obedient to me. It shrank away from me; it grew remote as if to refuse this communion. I believed her when she said that she would return. I believed everything she said to me. And no sooner would she stir, meaning to leave on the instant, than I would begin my flight from her. Without warning, I sensed myself rejecting her. She was slinking away; she was killing me with pure ferocity. This was not Layal, for whom I played songs I had learned in my country. She was leaving me and going to another place and what and where it was I did not know. Playing the guitar, I fantasized that she was listening, as the sweat beaded on my forehead and my clothes, as if she were saying to me, Go, Nader, go on your way. Work out your life far away from me. I have been fleeing from the war and you are coming from it. The war is between us, Nader. Why can’t you believe that? This isn’t something that concerns only you or me. We live among dead people more than we do among the living. . . .

  The clap
ping rose around me and an adolescent hand grabbed me by the shirt.

  “We recorded everything you played!” Diyala said this shyly, her expression a copy of Layal’s face. Standing by herself, Wajd stepped nearer to me but remained standing. Her eyes said to me that she had heard and seen everything. She knows, doesn’t she? I didn’t avert my eyes from her nor did she take hers from me. As we exchanged looks I was trying to smile; I lowered my gaze from her, then. Asma broke the silence, her voice merry.

  “Your mother didn’t tell us you were such a wonderful guitar player. No, no, your mother did not let on! I’ll bet in your mind you were playing for her. Tamam, Nader, that was wonderful, wonderful. Did you think about your mother as you played, hmm, my dear?”

  She had a broad smile on her face as she went on. “What Hammada is missing! W-Allahi I will tell him everything so that he is sorry he didn’t come and hear you.”

  “I’m a beginner, just an amateur.”

  “You were angry, Nader,” said Blanche, “and you were working hard to keep us from noticing it.”

  I didn’t burden myself with answering. I did not want to land myself in a situation that I didn’t know how to get out of. Hatim looked me straight in the eye. “It is as if you are threatened by some danger as you play. As if you are in a little rowboat and are worried that you will drown. But the message got through, Nader.”

  I stood up, turning my head among the three girls. Each one stuck out a hand. I raised Hee’s hand to my mouth and imprinted a kiss on it. Quds smiled as she put out her hand, offering me the yellow feather. I poked it into the pocket of my shirt. She did not say a word but she kept her eyes on me. And then she retrieved her gracefulness and turned in the other direction.

  “Take it, there you are. Haak. If this drawing doesn’t please you then you will have to come here again so I can finish drawing you. Your face was a little hard to make out as you were playing.”

  “He will come here again. Many times. He will still be here in Paris and we will see him often.” Hatim was propelling them toward the corridor that led to their rooms. Diyala had an unending stream of words to get out, as I realized when she was standing in the shadows of the hall. There was a sudden silence and everyone was standing up or moving. Diyala wanted to say that the time had passed quickly. Was it a single minute, a second, or even shorter, or was it longer? Layal could be presumptuous and stubborn. She said she would come back one day and I believed her. It would have been better if she had not said that at all as long as she was not able to do it.

  Wajd stood in front of me, her purse in her hand. “I will go with you to the hospital, Nader. I want to get back to her and see how she is doing, with you.”

  She paused. “Will it bother you if I go with you? I mean, do you want to go without anyone, to be by yourself there?”

  I smiled at her but I did not say anything.

  “Tomorrow, okra stew at our place. Please don’t forget.” Blanche was laughing as she offered the invitation to us all, grouped in the entryway.

  “Nader, one minute, please.” Narjis took me by the hand and we walked over to her desk. I saw files crammed full. Postcards, official letters, French and Arabic newspapers and magazines, books piled high.

  “I want to thank you but I don’t have the strength, I don’t know what to say.”

  “Don’t say this again!”

  “For the loveliness and hospitality and the lovely girls. Narjis, I’m unable, really I’m unable—”

  “Listen, Nader. We have a great deal of work ahead of us. Suhaila handed over to me a lot of files on the prisoners, on the 1980s war specifically. And, I collected files on the 1990 war for her, but there is a lot that I am still missing. Would it upset you to look through her papers for—here, take this, I wrote down what I want, because she wasn’t able to give these things to me before everything happened, and you know the rest. We have campaigns ahead of us. Writing letters, petitions, recording all of the grievances, going to demonstrations, and collecting anything and everything for Iraq. Do you have the time and the desire to search these things out? Or even to work with us as long as you are here? This would be helpful to us and beneficial for you. And for Suhaila, according to my thinking. Give it some thought. Today is Thursday, and it seems likely that we will take her on Monday to the sanatorium. Did Tessa explain the details to you?”

  “Yes, she explained it all. Everything is ready to go.”

  “And your work, Nader? And the family, and everything else?”

  “Caroline and I have worked out everything with the head of my company, by email. He was very understanding about my new circumstances. If things are stable at the weekend I’ll search for what you have asked for. Again, thank you, Narjis.”

  Diaries

  The news this morning, yesterday morning—there is no change. They will strike the country again, and just like that, whenever they want, without giving us any timetable in advance! Soon, they say. Or later. Now. Could be any time. They have taken this as their special mission in life and their area of expertise, and they have gone all out, and now they are positively on fire with the excitement of it all. We are not alone as the targets of all of this love that they apply to corpses—and there can never be too many corpses. It is not yet quite the right time, intones the news announcer. When?—we are in December now, so . . . in the New Year? Or before?

  I snuggled into my very thick and heavy woolen shawl, took out a cigarette, pulled open all the curtains, stretched my legs out in front of me, and began to study the naked trees outside the window. I could not take that first puff, though. On my lower lip there was still a trace of a fever-blow. Latmat humma—that, I said to Wajd, is what we call it in Iraqi Arabic. It’s a blackish bruise that has a mean way of developing. Suddenly it is making it very hard to talk, as hard to say anything as it normally is to swear, and a smile is even harder to manage. Layal called a little while ago so that we could comfort each other before the next blow descends, and to repeat her invitation to attend her doctoral thesis defense. My dear, I said, I can’t do it. My face is all bruised. I feel as though it isn’t my face. That fever-blow is marching in time across my skin and I am just following along—where to, your Lord alone knows.

  Her enchanting voice came back to me instantly. Suhaila, you will be more beautiful than ever! Come, now, don’t use that as an excuse. My mother, who does not even know you personally, hounded me to make sure you would be there in her place, and in Nader’s place, too. Tayyib, come for his sake, then. Will you?

  All right, then, I said. Tammam. I suppose that the leftover traces of fever are a pretty trivial case. I grant you that. But, you know, sometimes what is trivial sets the highest example for us.

  She laughed. And added, to shut me up, Tessa Hayden will be there. She is honorary member of the committee. I’m sure you will forget those effects of the fever and all of your various woes soon enough.

  Twelve noon.

  I’m in a very bad way and it’s unsettling. Annoying. It’s not just a matter of the many and long years I’ve lived. There is something additional going on here. Something that is sneaking ravenously between my temple and my jaw and creeping in beneath my eyelids. It doesn’t seem to slow down at all and it hasn’t given me time or space to make up for the steady losses. Every day it strips a layer from me without even allowing me the meager compensation of being able to howl like a faithful dog over whatever traces of flesh and bone I can still find as they are coming apart and disintegrating. Incomparable courage there!

  It is the fact that I have reached this ripe old age and I am now on the other side of the pinnacle; nothing more. The age of maturity! I stumbled over it in my path like an obnoxiously clever girl on her way to school, but I have always just knocked her breezily onto the main road and continued on. But then I would feel my teeth shifting in the gums. I would clench them, my jaws clamped together all night, and the moment I woke up I could see the blood on my pillow and my gums would be swollen. My teeth were
the first thing to disappoint me. Dr. Nabil said it was a matter of inheritance. There’s no escaping it, Madame, he said. I’m so sorry, but there is nothing I can do and I am afraid it is going to go from bad to worse with every year that passes. May God compensate you! And may you live a long and happy life! I started to keep on hand a supply of openwork lace handkerchiefs that I could put over my mouth whenever I laughed. And then I decided that there was no real need to laugh, either, and hopefully, if I could avoid that, it would keep the peripheries of my mouth, already seriously damaged, from deteriorating any further. I figured that a permanent frown and a serious attitude would produce excellent results. But the position of my nose shifted: it no longer had that pert and prideful lift. I swore to Blanche that things were better in Baghdad: its position was definitely preferable there. In truth, my nose apparently enjoyed a firm alliance with luck, back in Baghdad. It would go up a little, in disdain, and my sense of dignity would increase accordingly. At least I would die happy, as long as I couldn’t live that way. I no longer remembered my parents’ noses. Now I have completely forgotten the shape of them. Did they become bent and lowered from it all? So many things that could break a nose. . . .