by Ghada Samman
“His clinic is right across from the AUB. I’ll go over now and make you an appointment for Monday morning. I hope the clinic’s still open. People around here really love their weekends! But don’t worry, Baba. You just get some sleep now. What’s going on in Damascus lately is enough to wear anybody out, especially if you’re a big-hearted person who cares what happens to your country. Just look at what people have been through: the defeat in Palestine in 1948, one military takeover after another, the union with Egypt that split apart, then the internal split between the Nasserites and the Baathists. You helped to build up Syrian autonomy, and you were on fire to see Palestine liberated. All these things have taken a toll on you. But everything’s okay, Baba. I’ll be waiting for you in the hotel lobby when you come down tomorrow morning.”
Gripped with worry, Zain sped over to Dr. Shamma`a’s clinic. After parking in front of Uncle Sam’s, she walked into the building next door. She’d make the appointment, then go work at the AUB library until it was time to meet her father.
The receptionist, singularly unhelpful, said the doctor didn’t have any openings for the next ten days. Zain insisted that her father be given an appointment. As Zain haggled with the receptionist, Dr. Shamma`a walked out with his last patient and was about to leave the clinic. Sensing the urgency in Zain’s voice, he asked her, “What’s hurting you, Miss?”
Hugging her books to her chest, Zain replied with childlike artlessness, “What’s hurting me is the way my father sounds. He’s having pain in the chest area, and he’s asked me to make him a doctor’s appointment to have his stomach checked. He’s never been to a doctor in his life.”
“I gather from your accent that you’re from Damascus,” the doctor remarked.
Zain nodded.
“You’ve got some excellent physicians in those parts. The pioneer in modern laboratory analysis is a Syrian by the name of Dr. Sulayman Haydar. Why hasn’t your father consulted him? The pains he’s experiencing might be originating in his heart rather than his stomach.”
“Well, as a certain Syrian saying goes, ‘The church next door doesn’t have the cure.’ So he wants to go straight to the Vatican!”
After a pause, she added, “My dad’s the type that doesn’t like to let on if he feels bad, but his trip here seems to have been hard on him. He’s never had any health problems before.”
Clearly a compassionate person, Dr. Shamma`a said, “Why don’t you bring your father to see me right now? I’ll wait for him.”
“All right, I’ll do that! Could I give him a call?”
He led her into his office and, in a solicitous gesture, had her sit down in his chair behind the desk. A girl beside herself with worry over her father? That’s a rare phenomenon these days! I have elderly patients whose grown children I know personally, and who are too busy with their own success stories to take their parents to a doctor, damn them.
The hotel switchboard operator refused to connect Zain to her father, who had instructed the concierge not to allow any telephone calls through for the next couple of hours.
“In that case,” Dr. Shamma`a told her, “just bring him to see me on Monday morning. I’ll be expecting you.”
She thanked him profusely. As they were leaving, he said, “By the way, what’s your name?”
When she told him, he welcomed her all the more warmly, saying he sometimes followed her wars of words in the newspapers. That made her happy.
“You’re quite a troublemaker,” he remarked, “but when you’re worried about your father, you’re a tender-hearted little girl.”
“Don’t tell anybody!” she whispered mischievously.
“Don’t worry—I won’t!” he obliged with a chuckle.
* * *
She sat trying to read in AUB’s spacious library, but couldn’t concentrate. She was counting the minutes till it was time to go see her father. Another hour and a half, and she’d be in the hotel lobby waiting for him. She was happy to know that his colleague Najati would be taking part in the same seminar and that he was staying in the hotel with him. At the same time, she was secretly glad Najati wouldn’t be joining them for dinner! When she asked her father why he hadn’t invited Najati along, he said, “The truth is, I just wanted to spend some time alone with my girl.”
Those words had been music to her ears. She’d agonized over the rift that had occurred between them when she’d stubbornly insisted on marrying somebody he didn’t want her to. In the end, of course, she’d admitted her mistake and he’d helped her to correct it. And now, like her, he seemed to hate to remember those difficult days. He was just happy to have his daughter Zain back again. Or is he happy to have “Zain Al Abideen,” the son my mother died trying to give him? I don’t want him to love me because I’ve become the son he never had. I’m Zain, not Zain Al Abideen, and I’m not just the shadow of a son who never came. Actually, though, I know he’s proud of me. He’s told me how happy he feels when one of his interns asks him, “Is the writer Zain a relative of yours?” and he can say, “She’s my daughter!”
Unable to think about anything but her dad, Zain gave up on trying to read and left the library. She drove over to the hotel and sat in the lobby waiting for him. I’m not going to mention anything upsetting. I’m not going to talk to him about the past. He sounded so tired when we talked. It’s time I stopped demanding so much of the people I love and started sympathizing with them instead. I’ve got to grow up and stop running around looking for a surrogate mother! When I told Baba I’d made a mistake and wanted to correct it, he was right there by my side, and he told me he was proud of me. At that moment, an unbreakable bond of friendship and human connection was formed between us. He’s the dearest person in the world to me. Since I never got to know my mother, I sort of invented her, and then I loved my invention… There he is! He’s coming out of the elevator and heading my way. Running up to her father, Zain threw her arms around him, crying, “Baba! Baba!” like the little girl she was on the inside.
He bent down with difficulty to squeeze into Zain’s sportsy little Karmann Ghia. I wonder if the bright moonlight reminds him of the nights he and I used to spend strolling down the railroad track in Rayhaniya. When we heard a train coming, we’d race to see who could jump off the tracks the fastest. It wasn’t a game of chicken. We knew the difference between courage and foolhardiness. So there was a lot that brought us together. Even my crazy failed marriage, which had been hard on both my father’s nerves and his wallet, couldn’t sever that special bond between his heart and mine.
Trying to revive his appetite which, as a true Damascene, had never been in short supply before, Zain sang him a funny song he’d taught her years before about meat pastries, bulgur and lamb meatballs, to which the singer could add whatever dishes he was craving. Then she asked him, “Where would you like us to have dinner, dearest? At the Seven Seas, where you can see the fish swimming around under a glass floor? At Al Ajami, where you used to get together with journalists like Ghassan al-Tuwayni, Said Freiha, Kamel Marwa, Riad Taha, Rushdi Al Maalouf, and Badee Sirbiyeh? At the Carlton Hotel? At Faisal’s? At Uncle Sam’s? At the Yeldizlar? At Sindbad’s across the street from it? At the…”
“Actually,” he broke in wanly, still not his usual ravenous self, “I’d prefer to go to Ghalayini in Raouché by the seaside. I’d like to go where I took you ten years ago on our first visit to Beirut. You were a little girl then. I remember having to carry you out to the car because you’d fallen asleep at the table.”
Her father’s words stunned her, since she felt a thousand years old. Had she really been “a little girl” just ten years earlier? What about all those lifetimes she’d lived through in Damascus, the wars she’d waged, the experience she’d gained, the sadness she’d endured, the articles she’d written? Had all those things happened in the space of ten years? Or had it been ten decades, or ten centuries? She thought back on her battles with Sheikh Shafiq and the adolescent minions who had declared open season on her life in the nam
e of religion. Then there was the war she’d waged on the bourgeois class that Lieutenant Nahi claimed she belonged to. He hasn’t got a clue what my father and grandmother had to endure just to survive. She’d also been at loggerheads with the Latakian aristocracy on her mother’s side. Nothing in either her conduct or her writing would have ingratiated her with the Zhdanovists. Both reactionaries and revolutionaries looked askance at her quest for freedom, especially as a woman. So she had no intention of pledging allegiance to a political party as though it were some sort of alternative religion, and she rejected authoritarian practices of any kind, even if the people who engaged in them were revolutionaries.
By the time Zain had been a published writer for two years, Syrian radicals and conservatives alike had decided their country was in no need of a rebel like her, and society as a whole rejected everything she stood for. Some expressed their opposition in shrill, harsh tones, others with a tact and subtlety that left them a line of retreat. Yet none of this caused her anywhere near the heartache she’d suffered from her run-ins with her family and neighbors in Ziqaq Al Yasmin, home to the traditional values that had so suffocated her mother.
Since coming to Beirut, Zain had carried on with her uprising. But instead of shunning her, the City of Freedom had embraced her ideas and supported her in every sense of the word.
Her head still abuzz with all these thoughts and memories, Zain pulled up in front of Ghayalini’s and helped her father out of the car. I’ve never seen him looking this worn out before. But maybe his condition isn’t as bad as it seems. I bet he’ll perk up after we get to a table.
Gazing at the steep flight of stairs that led down to the restaurant, her father said, “I’m not going to make it down that staircase, much less back up it again.”
“That’s all right,” Zain replied evenly. “I can take you to Maxime’s, which is right past Ramlet El Baida and Eden Rock. You don’t have to go up or down any stairs to get to it. You just cross the sidewalk from the parking lot, and you’re there.”
Finally he said, “I don’t want to upset you, but the fact is, I’m so tired and my stomach hurts so much, I just want to go back to my hotel room. I think I should just have some light soup and turn in.”
“No, that doesn’t upset me,” Zain said reassuringly. “On the contrary, I want you to do whatever will make you feel better. And I want you at your best tomorrow morning!”
In front of the elevator he kissed her on her forehead. She bent down and kissed his hand.
“Tomorrow we’ll go up in the mountains,” he said affectionately. “We’ll go to Aley, Bhamdoun, Sofar, Shaghour, Hamana, Falougha…”
“We’ll go wherever you want to!” she broke in brightly. “And I’ll be your chauffeur. What time should I be here?”
“Well,” he said wanly, “you know I get up early for the dawn prayer. But could you come at around ten?”
“I’ll be here waiting for you when you come out of the elevator,” she whispered tenderly.
He disappeared inside the coffin-like wooden elevator, and its doors closed behind him. She walked away happily, daydreaming about spending the next day with her father and reminding herself to set her alarm for eight in the morning. so she could jump up and get ready to come meet him. Little did she know this was the last time she would see him alive.
* * *
Before her alarm had gone off, Zain was shaken gently awake by a teacher who shared a dormitory room with her. She got up, and before she had a chance to ask what time it was, her colleague told her in a voice filled with compassion, “We got a call from somebody by the name of Najati. He said he was a friend of your father’s, and asked for you to come to the hotel right away. Your father is very sick.”
Zain nearly asked, “Did he die? Tell me the truth!” But she was afraid to. She didn’t know if she could handle the answer.
On her tears’ tiptoes she went to the hotel where she received the devastating news. She listened attentively to Najati’s account: “We’d agreed to meet over breakfast to go over some topics related to our seminar. I came down to the dining room but he wasn’t there, so I went back up to check on him. I found him lying on the bathroom floor. His face was covered with shaving cream that had begun to dry. There was shaving cream on the shaving brush and on his razor. The doctor says it was a heart attack.”
On her tears’ tiptoes she asked to go up and tell her father goodbye.
“Don’t twist the knife in the wound,” Najati said gently. “You go back to the school, and I’ll call you once I’ve finished all the red tape. I’ll arrange to have him taken back to Damascus this afternoon or evening.”
“I’ll take him back with you.”
“You won’t be able to, Zain. You’ll be arrested at the Jdaidet Yabous border checkpoint, and instead of visiting your father’s grave, you’ll be visiting a prison. But you could follow us as far as the Syrian-Lebanese border.”
“Please, then,” she begged him tearfully, “just let me go up and see him one last time, if even for just a second. Please.”
“All right,” he relented. “Come with me.”
Laid out on a couch, her father was sallow, but more relaxed than she had ever seen him before. He seemed cold, so she took the bedspread and covered him up to his neck.
As she left the room, Najati said to her, “I’ll call you when we’re about to leave Beirut so that you can escort his remains to the border.”
Your “remains”? Oh, God! You used to get mad at me for doing stupid things and not consulting you before I made a decision. And now look at the stupid thing you’ve gone and done by dying on me just when I needed you the most! How dare you leave me just when I’ve finally come to see that the only way to live my life right is to seek out your counsel before I act? This world is a brutal place, full of traps and mines, and when you collapsed on that bathroom floor, you crushed my compass beneath you. So what will I do now? How will I go on without your guidance, your support, your affection, your friendship, your love, your forgiveness?
* * *
The convoy started out toward the border. As I followed the black hearse transporting by father’s body to Al Bab Al Saghir cemetery in Damascus, I cried and cried without a sound. The hearse came to a stop in a traffic jam in Dahr Al Baydar, and I stopped behind it. For a moment I turned off my headlights along with everything inside me. My heart stopped beating, and my spirit stood in salute to a man who had fought valiantly for Syria’s freedom from foreign mandates and who, by God’s grace, had been spared the noose.
I could hear wind whistling through my lungs and waves roaring off the shores of Latakia where my mother had been buried. I got out of my car and knelt in respect for my father’s funeral convoy, which embraced not just his spirit, but the spirits of thousands of freedom fighters I had never known and who, with my father, had bequeathed to me a sense of self-respect and a readiness to stand up against anyone who dared try to rob me of my dignity and freedom. Once, when I was eight years old, I was with my father in a restaurant, and I asked a waiter for a glass of water, saying, “Dakhīlak kubbayat mayy.” Hearing what I’d said, my father scolded me, saying, “Dakhīlak is a groveling word. It’s a begging word, and I never want to hear you use it again!” But now I found myself pleading, “Dakhīlak, O God, let me have him for just a while longer!”
The funeral convoy set out again, and I set out behind it. During that last visit from my father, he’d told me he was planning to come back to Damascus specially to celebrate my birthday. This was a huge thing for me, since I hadn’t been allowed to celebrate my birthday since my mother died. I guess my birthday reminded people of my mother’s death for some reason.
As it approached the Lebanese-Syrian border, the hearse stopped. Najati got out and signaled to Zain that this was where she would have to turn around. She pulled over to the side of the road and started to cry without a sound.
I bathed the Masnaa checkpoint and the whole Lebanese-Syrian border with my tears. After tr
aining myself since childhood never to complain or cry, I purged my heart of the sorrows I’d hidden in silence all my life.
As the hearse’s tail lights disappeared into the distance, the trees stood in mourning for my father. The sunflowers and cannabis plants that dotted the Beqaa Valley curtsied and bowed like willows in his farewell procession, and the forests and fields fell into a reverent silence. All the plants, birds and animals that were so dear to my heart—from owls, sparrows, frogs and insects, to cows and horses—consoled me in my ordeal, and for an entire minute our hearts stopped beating in my father’s honor.
For the first time since my mother died, I broke into sobs that brought actual tears. At long last I could cry in the true sense of the word. And with my tears I released curses on those who had prevented me from placing a wreath of myrtle on my father’s grave. In fiery agony I whispered, “Without you, Baba, I’ve got nobody to protect me or hold me up. But I promise to carry on. You taught me how to lose gracefully, and never to give up or lose hope.”
The hearse that held the body of my precious beloved stopped at the Masnaa checkpoint. Najati got out, holding the papers that would allow him to take my father home to rest with his forebears.
It was pitch dark, and tears blurred my vision. Even so, the scene before me was clearly visible. I could even see my father’s body. His face was at rest, without a trace of the pain, turmoil and conflict that had etched themselves in his features over the years. His placid eyes were devoid of passion, anger and ambition alike. It was all over. He had shed his earthly shell and departed for another planet. So why was I grief-stricken over not being able to go with him to his grave? It was silly to be crying, and I needed to stop. But how?