by Hassan Daoud
Being left alone had weakened and altered him. Out there, some distance away from the end of the balcony, I imagined my mother sitting with the other woman in that same silent get-together, uninterrupted except for a short time when they would turn to eating what they had prepared and brought from home. There, on the sand over which they spread their mat, my mother’s face would still hold a smile as she enjoyed her flush of well-being. I asked my father again if he wanted me to make him something, and he shifted his eyes to me as he had before, but this time his gaze was sluggish and drowsy. He looked as though that sense of safety was lulling him to sleep. I knew I had to go on sitting there next to him when he dropped off to sleep, for even as he napped he would remain alert to whether I was still there. Though his eyes would be tightly shut he would open them suddenly as if something had surprised him as he slept, and he would look in my direction. Our leaving him on his own so much had definitely weakened and fatigued him. When he opened his eyes in one of those moments of alertness I wouldn’t say to him that it would be better for him to sleep in his room so that he could actually get some rest, even if I could make him understand that I was saying this for his own sake. I wouldn’t tell him to go and sleep in his bed even though if I did tell him that, I would follow it by saying that tomorrow morning we would go out together after all. I will not say that to him. I will leave him to sleep here on his chair as I sit beside him and wait, even though I am so very tired.
XV
IT WAS SO EARLY WHEN we went out that as we walked the sand track I assumed that the merchants would not have even come to their shops yet. Knocking on my door with the tentative rap that I had been expecting, my father was standing there in his outdoor clothes, having dampened his thin hair and parted it just as I do mine. Indeed, in the long interval since he had gotten out of bed, he must have re-ironed his clothes and polished his heavy black shoes again, though they would be coated with dirt and dust as soon as he took his first steps onto the track. I had suspected that he would wake up very early. More likely he had not gone to sleep at all. As soon as we stepped over the threshold and were outside the building, readying ourselves determinedly for the long streets we would walk, it seemed as if all of a sudden he had regained his old manner of walking, which gave his short figure that look of strength peculiar to short and stocky bodies, and a youthfulness that made me wonder whether, once we reached the beginning of the paved street, he would roll up his shirtsleeves, stopping only when the folds reached halfway up his arms.
He had slept little that night, or perhaps not at all. Going out with me to steer me to the right place was the first occupation he’d had since stopping his activities all those years ago. He had to prepare for it as old men do when they feel they’re about to take something new in hand. I didn’t sleep well either, given how tired out I was. Indeed this fatigue of mine, which I thought would send me into a sound sleep, instead kept me awake through most of the night. In the little bursts of napping from which I would soon awaken with a start, instantly alert, my father’s face would come to me, very near. He was looking at me but those watery eyes didn’t really see me, and they seemed to smile out of a face that was weak and strained.
Or his silhouette would come to me as it was before we went to bed, arms straight out on the armrests of his chair, sinking into his nap with a swiftness that terrified me, for I couldn’t help wondering if this onrush would stop before it paralyzed his face and killed him. I did not get the sleep I needed that night. My weariness was too heavy to banish just by lying down on my bed and closing my eyes. As we walked together side by side on the sand track, my fatigue sat on me heavily, drying up my throat and making my head heavy. My father’s face, still so close to mine, had not lost the look it had had in my interrupted naps—until I would glance at him and see him next to me, real.
The merchants on either side of the street where we turned in from the sand track presented the same scenario as the day before. That they had longer to wait today before their customers would come down seemed to make no difference in their activities. These shops in close sequence, packed so tightly together at this end of the street, were ones my father knew. As we approached their proprietors my father greeted them with a wave of his hand, greeting upon greeting, to which they replied with their hands in the air as well. For him this was the opening sacrament of this work he was performing: with it he was showing me that as long as I was with him I would enjoy circumstances different from those I faced when I was on my own. Or it may be that with these first steps of ours, he was intent on trying to make me remember what he had been like in the days when we would go together to his shop down in the old city. He greeted these men whose shops followed so closely upon one another; he greeted them in turn, giving the appearance that he was one of them and was intimately familiar with their work routines. It probably pleased him no end when the men paused in whatever they were doing to return his greetings, looking at us both all the while. These were something more than the usual glances, but my father couldn’t see that they were looking at us for their own reasons—to satisfy their inquisitive nature and their curiosity—and not from something due to us.
Anyway, he stopped turning his face to the men in the shops after we turned off their street. In the long street where we now found ourselves, I had the feeling we had come into the area where I’d been yesterday, for here were the streets that stretched on and on so that we would do nothing but keep walking. Walking beside him, I had to quicken my pace to stay abreast, which made me appear to onlookers as though I were hopping or jumping across the ground, since my feet appeared to be my only moving parts. I didn’t tell him to slow down, even when, to keep up with him, I had to go almost at a run. At the second intersection he turned to the left without any show of hesitation or uncertainty. And when he asked me, as we went down this street that went on and on in front of us, whether I had gone this way, his intent was simply to draw my attention to his lack of hesitation at the intersection; he had not slowed his pace for a moment. This was the same route I had walked yesterday. And I thought, as I hopped along beside him, that his coming with me had not added anything thus far to my own solitary venture. I had walked in these same streets without him, and indeed I had reached other streets. I wasn’t sure he would reach them with the same ease.
No, up to this point he hadn’t gotten me anywhere I wouldn’t have gotten to on my own. In the street where a wide and straight road cut through, he had to look in both directions before settling on one of them. From the middle of the road, his weak vision didn’t allow him to see signs or landmarks that might tell him where he was, so he had to choose a direction by relying on guesswork and instinct. To reassure me that we were taking the correct route, after we had left some buildings behind he gestured in one direction as if to anoint it as the right one. He reiterated this when, a bit farther on, his eyes encountered shapes he fancied he knew. That’s the one, he said, reverting to his usual rapid pace that hesitation had slowed down. What could I do but follow him, especially since the streets I had been down yesterday had not gotten me to where I wanted to be? I remained silent when his hesitation became acute as new junctions appeared. Every time we reached an intersection, all he could do was rely on seeing something up close that might tell him where we were, for his eyesight could not get him any further than that. He couldn’t see the street as he remembered it, since his eyes failed him in this regard. Once he was already walking down it he would go on looking to both sides of the street to convince himself, while he was walking, that this was the correct route.
But once here, he will not be capable of retracing his steps to that intersection he left behind, in order to begin again down another street. Or it will not happen with the simplicity he practiced when we were at home: losing himself in streets he remembered, he would return to a point where he could start off again in another direction. Out here, he wouldn’t be able to correct whatever error he had fallen into by a mere wave of his hand, closing his e
yes to remember where he’d been before taking the wrong turn and then returning there in his mind. Now, all the while he is walking, he must continually peer around, examining whatever he can see to make sure, with every new step, that this is the route he knows. This process slowed our pace. In the very long streets we would walk looking hard at everything around us just as if we were constantly facing intersections where we would have to choose which way to go. Aha, there it is, he would say to me, pointing to a shop he saw or waving at the façade of a building. Yes, this is it, he would say; but this certainty of his would soon fade as we went a distance in which he recognized nothing. This is what began to frighten him: the street we were in would fragment into uncertain possibilities. Either it was the right street, or it was the street we ought not to have taken. I have gone through here before . . . this street, I know it . . . he would begin saying after some moments of silence, having been gripped by a flurry of confusion during the time it took to walk by two or three buildings.
He could have asked the men who were in their shops, those that sold nothing more than the foodstuffs required by residents of these buildings, yet he would not do that unless he was very certain we had really lost our way. Did you go by here yesterday? he would ask, only to realize that he had not the slightest idea of how he would make use of my response. It would not help him at all if I were to answer, No, I didn’t come by here. We had moved quite far away from the streets I had learned yesterday, having turned off them to go down others. As we proceeded slowly among the people who had begun to come down from the higher floors of the buildings, the thought that came to me was that we were now in his streets, whether they were the right ones or not, for we were no longer in those closest streets of which we shared some knowledge. Read this sign, he began saying to me, wanting what I read to help him see something more clearly or to remember it. Read this, he would say, pointing to another sign or banner. It fatigued him to go on walking through the streets hesitant and confused. He was too tired now to see or to be able to read what he saw, even as close up as this. I knew that the only thing more walking would give him was further deterioration in his eyesight, and that it would not be long before he would be unable to see anything that was more than four or five steps ahead, barely enough for anyone trying to see where to put his feet and keep moving forward. Come on, let’s ask someone, I would say, only to have him answer that I should wait a little, and in any case, the shop name I had just read to him had jogged his memory. But this didn’t work out, either. It wasn’t long before he came out of that space that was logged somewhere in his memory. They changed the streets, he began saying to me, going on to mutter something from which I gleaned only that the streets were no longer what they had been, and that they had spliced some new streets from the knots of old ones. When he meant for his words to be heard, he would turn directly to me to remark that they had expanded this new city of theirs, taking over more space, but that of course we would eventually reach areas he knew.
I had to wait for him to decide the moment when it became unavoidable: we would have to ask one of these people who were now so numerous around us, in and around the shops or walking in front of them or clustering in certain spots where they were doing nothing. But he couldn’t do it. If he were to admit the necessity of asking, he thought, he would be acknowledging that it would have been better for me to come by myself and admitting that all he had done by coming with me was to usher me into these streets from which we didn’t know how to get anywhere. Worse, this terrible failure would not just embarrass him but, to his way of thinking, it would mean that we would no longer listen to anything he said to us—to me and my mother—about anything. If we surrendered, he and I, and allowed passersby to show us our route, that would mean he was truly relinquishing the possibility of going out into the city, not because he no longer wanted to but because he no longer could. He knew the way, he said to me, and it was only his eyesight that had gotten him lost. He hadn’t been able to tell the streets apart by sight even as his feet had gone into them of their own accord. What had made him get lost was his eyesight, he told me firmly. He was tired, breathing hard, and when I looked closely at his eyes I saw that they were empty and still, as if something inside wasn’t working. At that point I didn’t need to lose more time searching for someone to guide us. There were so many people around us, and all I had to do was turn my face a little to be directly facing someone whom I could ask. When I began talking to him my father stopped looking at what was around him and simply stood next to me, just like that, silent and looking at nothing.
XVI
EVER SINCE THAT EXPEDITION OF ours from which we returned tired and dispirited, my father had begun spending most of his time sitting on the balcony, even though out there he could no longer enjoy anything but the gusts of cool air coming from the deep emptiness below him. It had been a while now since he had begun to experience extreme eye fatigue and disease, and he could no longer see anything at any distance. The old city, remote and far below us, he could no longer see at all, for it was encased in the blackish fog that was now composed of everything his eyes could not distinguish clearly. He could see only nearby objects, and to do even that he had to bring them very close to his eyes if he wanted to see them as they really were. When he looks at me I assume that he sees me obscured and darkened, as if I’m covered by a dense and undulating smoky fog, just the way his eyes themselves seem covered. It’s become hard to imagine their smooth surface beneath that nylon skin that has grown into the thick and wrinkled crust that covers them entirely.
Out there on the balcony, flush against the wall so that he can support his elbow on it, he no longer leaves the chair with its ottoman and back cushion that my mother sewed to allow him to sit a bit higher and straighter. He no longer enjoys anything but the surging puffs of cool breeze reaching him. He no longer asks what has happened to the shop in the old city that his finger, jabbing the air, was always seeking when we moved here. The whole of the old city has become a single façade now, a single direction to which he points with his hand or his head, making a single gesture that takes in all of it. Afterward he asks me where they are now. By this time, I know that what he means by his question is whether they have finished demolishing all of it. I tell him they have only a little work still to do, and he says to me that many things were left there whose owners should have taken them out along with their furnishings and goods. Or they should have made sure to be there during the demolition to extract these things from amongst the stones as the walls were taken down. He’s remembering wardrobes and cupboards built to measure in the houses, and steel vaults in the shops of watchmakers and jewelers, which looked so solidly built and firmly attached that they seemed as if they had been constructed along with the walls themselves.
He enumerated many other things, among them the contents of the grand stores that did not have just a single owner who was always there along with his employees. They must have left all that marble where it was, he would say to me before adding that in the cinemas as well, they must have abandoned all those seats that were fixed in place, in rows. As for the curtains that had covered the screens, which consumed so much fabric that the cinema owners had to take them out to the enormous courtyards in order to even pleat them, they would have been left hanging. Sitting there, my father could not stop naming all the things that must be taken from the old city. One thing was always leading him to another, and when he remembered something else still, this seemed to make him happy, as if the thought of it had occurred to him at precisely the right moment. The electric meter boxes! he would shout to me, as if coming up with the answer to a riddle that had fatigued his brain. Doorbell buttons! he would say; they were all left at the entryways, by the doors. That was his game, his entertainment or solace; he was able to harmonize what he had already named with the new items, accommodating one thing to the next. He would grow genuinely sorry about what had been abandoned there. First, because of its cost and its worth, since nothing comes fo
r free, as he would say; and then because, after all, these things were necessities of life, and everything that had been left behind must be bought again to replace what was lost.
That was his way, too, of expressing his fear that the funds he had remaining would dwindle to nothing. Or it was one of his ways. Another was his way of counting—every evening—the contents of the little chest and organizing the coins and bills into piles according to each one’s worth. Every time my mother saw him sitting on his bed with the money spread all around him she would ask from behind the door why he was counting it again today, since we had not spent any of it since he last counted. She would raise her voice just enough so that he would hear it. No doubt she hoped that the suspicion would enter his mind that she went about describing him just this way when she talked about him to anyone else. He didn’t answer her while the money was scattered over the bed. He waited until he had put it all back, organized by value and in rows, to say to her, as he returned the chest to its place in the wardrobe, that it was better than spending his time standing in front of the mirror.