How quick is the deterioration when it starts, how quick the descent into oblivion.
That morning my brother Samer, my wife Penny and I went to my mother’s flat to say our goodbyes, and to empty it. I had expected it would be a cold house, without life. The house of my parents, the house of the middle years – years of living a middle-class life that was also so turbulent, troubled and full of tragedy. The house of so many dramas, long past and more recent, from which both my parents were carried out in coffins. When we have emptied it we will be giving up this house, which Mother didn’t own, and I will never again have to see anyone carried out from it. But as it turned out we didn’t find the house so lifeless. My father and mother were still there, as was more of myself than I expected.
Evening had descended now, twilight was over, night was upon us – a dark moonless night. I walked to Mother’s room, where I saw the quilt spread on her empty bed, that same quilt that had accompanied my parents in every house they’d ever lived in.
A few months before Mother died, my brother called. ‘Do you think she can recognise us?’ His voice betrayed sadness, disappointment and a profound wrenching hurt. I said I didn’t know.
Just a few weeks earlier she had been able to recite Mark Antony’s speech from Julius Caesar, which she had studied at the Anglican School for Girls in Jerusalem. It was as though she was emerging from behind the veil of death to prove to us that she had not lost her mind. She was making the decision to leave this life with her mind intact. It was a valiant, dignified act that proved that in choosing to die she was still exercising her will. She was fed up with life.
The process of deterioration, the progressive descent, had been going on for a while. My heart fell when I noticed that my mother had not been cleaning her teeth. When she was well she never failed to do this. We were also getting accounts from her helper of Mother waking up at night and walking through the house calling for my father: ‘Aziz, Aziz, where are you?’
The light coming into the house was making shadows. It was the hour Mother hated most, when she did her best not to be alone. Mother always said, ‘The moment the neighbour rang the doorbell and I heard the fear in his voice I knew what had happened.’ It was as though she had been expecting it. That moment was never forgotten. It marked the transition from having a husband and being a proud wife to becoming a miserable widow.
Later, her friend Ibtisam, who lost her own husband a while back, would boast, speaking rapidly without pausing for breath, that it had been her husband, the medical doctor, who was the first to arrive at the scene of the crime. She would proceed to enlighten my mother about what her husband saw when he arrived at the driveway of the garage, where my father had just parked his car and was making his way to the door of the building. How my father, whose throat had been slit by that murderer, lay in a pool of blood that spilled all the way down to the street. And how the doctor had put his fingers to my father’s throat to check whether there was any pulse but found him already dead. It was too late to do anything for him.
After he was gone we would sit, my mother and I, in the sunroom. Mother would ask imploringly, ‘Why did he do this?’ As if he did it to himself. Mother had that habit, of blaming the victim. I would say that he lived as he wanted. He satisfied himself. This is how he wanted to live.
‘But to have left me like this?’ And I would be unsympathetic, unable to begin to understand the nature of their relationship, which I got completely wrong. I could not appreciate that as a woman of her generation she was tied to and completed by her man and had no life independent of him.
‘Why?’ she would say. ‘What was it all for? What more did we need? Why did he have to keep on fighting? Who for? Who deserves all this struggle? Who cares about me now? Now that he’s gone and left me alone what sort of life do I have? It galls my heart.
‘When he was alive our house would be full of supplicants, those who wanted him to intercede on their behalf with the military rulers. They put him forward, exposed him to danger while they hid behind him, fearing to tarnish their own names. He went ahead while they remained concealed. He was always willing to help anyone who asked, as long as he could. The people who asked for his help never appreciated what it took out of him and what it cost me, seeing him suffer as he did from fatigue and incrimination. He never gave up. If it was an official he needed to contact to get the work done, he would call again and again, twenty, thirty, forty times if necessary, never giving up. He would be more adamant than the person needing the favour. It was a question of pride. He never allowed himself to fail, whatever the cost. Where were all these people after he was gone?’
I was aware that he had done a lot for us as well. He kept us feeling special and dignified and saved us from suffering the worst of the defeat and the terrible situation under occupation. He stood up to the occupier and was able to face the soldiers and their officers at every point. He never submitted to them.
At the press conference we held at the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem to report on the failure of the Israeli police to carry out a proper investigation into his murder, my mother had said, ‘The man who did the most for peace is left to die without justice.’ But this fell on deaf ears. She was addressing the Israeli public, among whom were many friends of hers, but not one of them called her to offer assistance.
She was right to be angry. After he died everyone abandoned her. Our people crept back to their small holes, preferring not to stick their necks out or speak about it, many feeling ashamed of the implication of their leaders in this murder. The Israelis, smug in their own way, said, ‘Well, of course this is what it’s like for those, however decent they might be, who live on the other side.’
And how brave she was when we went on our quest for justice together. It was her last service, last sacrifice, to a husband who required so much from her throughout their life together. But we could not succeed. They closed all the doors in our faces. She refused to see him after he died, saying she wanted to remember him energetic and active, not as a corpse. She never visited his grave and hardly ever talked about him. He was there in her life, accompanying her in silence. She never gave him up. It might be that Mother’s refusal to leave the house where the murder happened was out of her sense of allegiance to her husband. She remained there, a custodian of the house, of Father’s possessions and papers, refusing ever to abandon her post.
As we moved about the house today we found more and more evidence of this, more and more of their life together. Father’s side of their closet was still packed full with his clothes. She never gave them away. Everything in the house indicated that she was waiting for him to return. She could not accept that he was gone.
I looked at the TV room with its large round coffee table over the Persian carpet, now covered with boxes of Father’s papers and books, blocking the passage, and thought of him moving so briskly, so energetically around the house.
‘Mama, why don’t you open your eyes? Is it painful for you to do it?’ I asked her.
‘No,’ she answered. Then added, in a matter-of-fact tone, ‘I want to finish.’
It was not the first time that she used the word ‘finish’ in English. Earlier, Penny and I had been talking to her about Jaffa, to cheer her up.
In the last years of her life she was tense, anxious and unhappy most of the time. The only time she cheered up was when we took her to Jaffa to sit by the sea. This was the one instance when she asked for a cigarette and she smoked it with great pleasure, blowing the smoke up into the air with a sense of abandon.
‘Mother,’ I asked during that last week of her life, ‘would you like us to take you to Jaffa to sit by the sea and smoke a cigarette?’
‘No. Finish,’ she said. It had become an effort for her to articulate words and this was all she could come up with.
I had been suspecting it, but after this I felt certain that for the past several weeks my mother had been wanting to die. Perhaps she thought that if she closed her eyes, if she shut o
ff the world, it would happen.
Penny did not agree. ‘Her body is responding. If she had really decided to die she would not eat.’
‘But then she is only eating,’ I said, ‘because she is being fed and doesn’t want to refuse and get into the hassle of having us urge her to do it; she is in a passive mode and just wants to finish with it.’
If I had the courage and knew how, I would have helped her do it. It would have been the kindest thing to do.
I knew it. I knew that Mother was fighting for death. Fighting to die. Trying to prepare herself to face what was coming. As always she did this her way. She did not express emotions; she kept it all to herself. I hovered around. Not untypically she made me feel inadequate. If I were a good son, I thought, I would help her die. This was what she wanted most of all and I could, if I had the courage, lend a hand. But I didn’t have it in me. It is so like my mother – even in death – to leave me feeling guilty, inadequate, not quite the man she had hoped I’d be.
And yet, Mother never mentioned death until the last months, when it hit. She was obviously readying herself. One day, a month before she died, her helper reported that when Mother got up in the morning feeling a bit better she told her, ‘Death seems to have passed me by.’ I fear she didn’t sound triumphant.
She stopped being a mother and became a woman preparing to die, seeking help for it from those who had preceded her – her father and mother. She was their child again and kept on calling them each in turn to come be with her, to come to her rescue. She now needed them above anyone else.
Penny and I made several attempts to wake her up, urge her to return to us. But she had decided to follow a man with a white beard who seemed to be culled out of her rich imagination full of elves and the strange characters that inhabited the mysterious forests in the amazing stories she told me when I was a child. Now she was giving herself up to that man, following him deep, deep into the mystical forest about which we were ignorant.
She would no longer move about the house at night calling her husband, looking for him in every room. ‘Aziz, where are you? Where are you?’ She was going to join him in death. She would have to go alone down that last dark alley to the damp forest, following that white-bearded man with white hair and a dangling white beard, who wore a sky-blue jacket with many pockets and who had been bidding her to come. His long face with blue eyes bidding her to come, come to him. Reluctantly she began to follow. Her cheeks hollowed. Her face grew longer. She started looking different, more of the other world than this one.
I looked out at the horizon from the glass veranda and thought of her during those last few weeks, facing the end of her life on earth, and it occurred to me that the question of whether or not she would be returning must have been connected in her mind with whether there was something to return to. She must have decided there wasn’t, and so she continued forward, never turning back.
How bravely she approached death. This was her final lesson to me: not to worry about it. When it comes you’ll be ready. As I stood there looking into the dark, the words of my father came back to me. Words that he had said twenty-five years earlier as we sat around the white-painted wooden table in the kitchen: ‘You’ll take care of your mother when I’m gone,’ he had said. Did I? Have I fulfilled my promise? Have I been a good son?
I kept a diary of the last months of Mother’s life. But it is far too sad to reread. It speaks of my repeated attempts to have her die in the house, away from the hospital she hated. But even in that I failed her. It is very hard to know, in the case of a dying parent, what the best choices are, medically and ethically. And one has very little help. I rode with her in the ambulance that last time, hearing her cries of pain, which were now muted. She had so little energy, even for that.
How painful it was for me to see my mother in hospital, pricked by all those needles, suffering pain from treatment she did not want because by that point she had decided she wanted to die. A week later she died in hospital with the needles still pricking her arms and lovely hands and an oxygen mask over her beautiful mouth, preventing her from speaking even if she had wanted to. We stood around, unable to help in any way.
My brother Samer had by now done most of the work of emptying the house. It had all been boxed, the entire household reduced to boxes. This is how life ends, I thought, in a box and down into the earth. But before I started on my final tour of the house as it was dismembered and the walls denuded, there were still a few things with particular meaning that we had to decide about.
The first was the portrait of Father painted by Ismail Shammout during my father’s exile in Rome. As the older son it should go to me. But since I have no children I offered it to my brother. When it came to the porcelain Buddha that my parents had brought with them from their home in Jaffa, Samer offered it to me because I had written about it in one of my books. But I gave it back to him. It has to stay in the family and he is the one who can ensure that it will.
Then we got to the last painting on the wall, the one by Mother’s aunt Lora, of a woman with a broken jar. Her son Suheil had asked me to send it to him in London, where he now lives. As I removed it from its frame, dust came out. It was Haifa dust from the convent where the painting was kept until we managed to retrieve it after 1967. The dust flew up hesitantly and then disappeared. I realised it was the last physical link that we had to that old land where my parents’ generation had once lived, a puff of old dust.
As Samer was removing the portrait of Father from the wall I remembered what Mother had said when I tried to use the presence of the portrait to prove to her that this was her house – in her last few months of life she refused to believe that it was. ‘They come every night and place the same things on the wall, this is why it is here,’ she had said. ‘But this is not my house. I want to go home.’ And here we were, as predicted, removing it from the wall.
All too quickly the walls were bare, and the old familiar furniture was removed and the books packed. The space between these walls was growing narrower; it was ceasing to be her house or indeed the house of my youth.
We had piled up the clothes to give away. Before we left them, I looked for the black jacket she was fond of and wore so often for many years. I held it to my nose and smelled it, the last whiff of Mother’s scent.
As I left the emptied house I saw one of the remaining relics of her old conventional life, standing silently at the window in the dark, hoping that she would not be seen by us, pretending not to be home and so be excused from having to perform the neighbourly and friendly duties towards us, the children of her lifelong friends and neighbours. As I looked at her made-up face, I felt glad to be leaving forever a life where maids did the laborious work, where concern was paid to who invites whom and who gets invited to which parties. A social circle of vacuous people who cling together not because they really care for one another’s company but because they cannot stand to be alone, people I never cared for – perhaps not unlike my grandfather Salim, who preferred to stay alone in his room, reading his books while his wife Julia socialised – but to whom I remained tied through my mother and her suffering in later years at being excluded and shunned by them.
It was appropriate, I thought, not to have to say goodbye, or to meet this neighbour, but rather to turn my back silently and definitively on the social conventions of this meek society, so full of affectation, which I would never again have to bother with, think about or tolerate. Without her put-on smile, Mother’s neighbour looked both sad and severe.
I said my final, silent goodbye to Mother’s house and, laden with boxes, walked away to my car through the garage where the dreadful deed that had destroyed her life was perpetrated.
A few months later I was in my study when Penny came in. ‘Don’t you want to put up a picture of your mother?’ she asked, and brought me a few to choose from.
I had thought about it but was not sure I was ready to turn my mother, who lives on so strongly in my mind, into a framed picture on the shel
f. But I looked at one picture and then another and another from the pack that Penny had brought for me to choose from. They were not from the sad and difficult period that has persisted in my mind, but from a happier time when she looked radiant, and I remembered that she had enjoyed better times and her life had not been all gloom and misery. I chose one in which I thought she was looking happy.
Now when I look more closely at her smiling face I notice what had eluded me for so long. Even though the mouth has a valiant wide smile, I realise that the eyes tell a different story. They are focused on the distant past. They do not express happiness. The smiling mouth is a distraction, the public face, the joy she wanted to put on to please others. It is her eyes that speak of her mood at that point in her life. They belie what is expressed by the mouth. Yet despite her many difficult ordeals she had always tried to keep on smiling even when for so many years her sadness and pain were overwhelming. Sometimes she couldn’t manage it and I was overcome by despair and did not know what to do. At the end her pain and sorrow took over and she was taken away from us.
I look again at the framed photograph and decide that I shall follow her lead. I will do what she did during her lifetime and concentrate on the smile.
AFTER ZERO HOUR
Janine di Giovanni
1
In the last days of Iraq, shortly before the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime, the Ministry of Information, which controlled the movements of all the press, granted my request to travel the country by car.
That was in 2002. My companions on these long and melancholy trips – shadowed by the coming American invasion – were my driver, Munzer, a transplanted Palestinian Sunni whose family had emigrated to Iraq in 1948, and my translator, Reem, who came from Babil Province. Sometimes we were accompanied by a bad-tempered ‘minder’, graciously provided by the ministry, whose purpose was to spy on us and take detailed notes about where we were going and whom we saw.
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