The Frightened Ones

by Dima Wannous

  Her habit was to go to sleep at nine and wake at four thirty, but she never went to bed before my father and I came home at night. Sometimes we stayed out until midnight visiting relatives or friends, and we would always come back to find her slumped on the sofa, her hands in her lap, one palm resting in the other. Her neck bowed, her head listing to the left or right. Our footfall always woke her. “Why haven’t you gone to bed, Ma?” my father would ask. She never admitted she was waiting up for us, so as not to make us feel bad. She always said she had been sitting there and must have nodded off. Then she would wait until I had changed into pyjamas. She tucked me into my metal-framed bed, and unfurled the pink mosquito net. Winter was cold in the village and we only had primitive heaters, which did not work when the power went out. My grandmother always covered me with a thick woollen blanket; I remember the weight on my body and how, lying beneath it, I could hardly move. I slept on my back with my arms by my sides under the blanket until morning. Once, a gecko woke me in the middle of the night; I glimpsed him slip into a crack, and then scurry up and down the wall of my room, whose window looked out onto a little vegetable garden. Sometimes my grandmother told me bedtime stories. She instructed me to sleep on my right side so as not to put pressure on my heart, and I would end up facing the cold wall, my nose pressed against the mosquito net. My grandmother lay down next to me in her long white nightgown and thick kerchief, which always smelled clean. She wore woollen winter socks called qalsheen, and I don’t remember ever seeing her toes. She told me folk tales each night, which she thought were marvellous, and always concluded with a moral. Never content just to tell the story, she always explained the moral to be sure I understood. “There once were two men who climbed a mountain, hunting for game to eat. All of a sudden, the mouth of a cave yawned opened before them. They went inside, and what did they find? A pile of gold coins! The first man put as many as he could carry in his bag and left. The second man filled up his bag all the way, and his jacket pockets too, and even put a few coins in his mouth! But they were so heavy that he couldn’t move. So he emptied his pockets until they were lighter and he began to leave, but then changed his mind and came back to fill them up again. He went back and forth, and back and forth, until night fell…and the mouth of the cave closed up. And he died there, alone.” Then she would pause. “See, little lady,” she would say. “See, light of my eyes? Nothing good can come from greed.”

  One morning I woke up at six. My father was still sleeping in his bed next to mine. I got up, trying my best not to make a sound, but my metal bedframe didn’t cooperate; it always grated and creaked with the slightest movement. I crept out of the room, slowly, and I’m almost sure that my chronic stomach cramps—the same ones he suffered—have their origins in that moment. My grandfather sat in the living room reading the Quran. “Good morning, Grandpa,” I shouted. He had trouble hearing. He nodded and smiled. “Hello, hello…” he replied. I went into the cold little kitchen, where my grandmother gave me a hug and made me breakfast, the best I have ever tasted in my life: scrambled eggs cooked in olive oil, fresh home-made labneh, a little plate of hummus, olives, special cheese she made herself, za’atar and olive oil, and bread, fresh from our neighbour Leila’s bakery. Leila made bread to order for people in the village. With some neighbours’ encouragement she added more salt; for those with high blood pressure she used less. Either way, it was delicious. Whenever Leila was ill and absent from the bakery for a day or two, talk of bread was on everyone’s lips.

  The village mosque shared a wall with my grandfather’s house. This annoyed my father, and made it harder for him to stand our infrequent visits to the village. I never saw a prayer rug in anyone’s home in the village, and we visited many. People fasted, but never prayed. During Ramadan, when they broke their fast at Iftar dinners, some people drank moonshine—“A sip brings you closer to God,” my grandfather would often say. Shortly after the only mosque in the village was built, the one adjacent to his house, children passing by the door glimpsed the sheikh leading prayer. He stood, then kneeled and touched his forehead to the floor, then went up on his knees. They laughed and made fun of him; how indecent he looked! “Look-at-him-trying-to-do-a-headstand!” they giggled.

  When I sat at my grandparents’ low table and reached among all the plates of food, my grandmother, whom I rarely saw eat, was always content just to watch me attentively and tell me stories. She often told stories about my father. How, when she was nine months pregnant, my grandfather awoke one night in a panic, terrified, sweat streaming from his brow. He had dreamed that my grandmother had given birth to a baby boy on land he owned in nearby al-Wata, but that a hawk had swooped down and snatched the child from her arms. My grandmother told me that she had worried about my father from the moment of his birth. How could she not, when he was her only child? Later, she became pregnant with my aunt, but her line of descendants ended there. Oh, the prophecies would be fulfilled one day. A hawk would snatch him from her arms.

  My grandfather had been married before, but I never met the other woman, and did not even know if she was still alive. She was the mother of the one uncle I had met only recently, and the other uncle who died from drinking tainted moonshine, and my eldest aunt, the one I knew nothing about except for how she treated my disabled uncle. My grandfather loved me, I was certain of that. But children have a sixth sense for things. They pick up on love, hatred, caution and worry. At times a look of envy would shoot from my grandfather’s eyes, probably unintentionally. He didn’t acknowledge his children with his first wife, and had broken off contact. I only remember seeing them and their children in the house on rare occasions. My grandfather hoped my mother would eventually give birth to a boy, but she developed a benign tumour in her womb after having me, and could no longer conceive. My grandfather never stopped trying to convince my father to marry again, so that his “only son” might give him a grandson.

  My aunt and her daughters teased me constantly when I was little, calling me “darkie” because of my brown skin. My cousins had light skin, blue eyes and light hair, and were mad about staying white. They shied away from the sun, and bought little jars of thick, sticky cream called Daboul from a shop near their house, which they daubed on their faces twice a day to make themselves whiter. Not only was the cream laced with mercury, but they applied it with an aluminium wand made for polishing copper utensils. They smeared it on their bodies after showering, and rubbed it in so vigorously that their skin turned red. I usually came to visit during the summer, and spent most of my time on the beach, swimming and playing until the sun’s last light was extinguished. Then I would head home on foot. The way back was harder than the way there, because the village was perched on top of a mountain overlooking the sea. After just one week of my two-and-a-half-month summer vacation, I would be noticeably more tanned, and they increased the pitch of their taunts, teasing me both for the colour of my skin and for my skinny frame.

  While my grandfather was never bothered by my brown skin, he did complain constantly about my clothing. When August arrived, the temperature climbed past 35 degrees Celsius, and the air grew unbearably sticky and humid. He would call to me as he always did, “Oh, Grandpa! Cold, so cold! Forget that skirt, eh, go and put on some trousers…Better than catching your death of a cold with the next slap of wind. No one wants that, eh?” I never paid attention to what he said and insisted on wearing clothes I was not allowed to wear in Damascus. My father was not the one who forbade revealing clothing; it was my mother who feared me being harassed in the bustling neighbourhood where we lived.

  Mostly, my grandfather maintained an outward indifference towards me, as if I were an unexpected visitor simply passing through, translucent and elusive. But I knew that of all his grandchildren, I was dearest to his heart. There were a few reasons for this. First and foremost, I was the daughter of his only son by his second wife—not just any son, but one they rarely saw, the one who had left them at the age of twe
lve and rarely visited. My grandfather was also known for his tight-fistedness: the amount of time he spent sitting in his garden, or wandering between the grapevines and lemon, orange, fig and pomegranate trees, counting the fruits to see whether a grandchild had stolen a lemon or an orange, was not insignificant. But he always encouraged me to pick and eat them, even though I had never loved citrus. He also hid bunches of bananas on top of the fridge and lifted me up to eat one whenever I wanted. I thought, somewhat amused, that he did so because he knew I had a small appetite and wouldn’t eat much. On holidays, he gave my aunt’s daughters, all several years older than me, three lira. But me, I got ten. At the time, a bottle of fizzy Kazouza cost five lira. A box of biscuits was two and a half. In other words, what seemed to him an enormous sum was actually worth rather little. My grandfather’s understanding of economics was stuck in the feudal era; in his mind, the value of money did not change. He thought us extravagant if we spent fifty or one hundred lira in a single day. He was never ashamed to ask what his children’s salaries were, or those of their friends. For him, a man’s worth was his net worth. When my youngest cousin married a man from a different sect years later, my grandfather became angry and refused to welcome them into his home. He did not let the matter go, either, until he learned that her husband’s monthly salary was ten thousand Syrian lira, which at the time was around two hundred dollars. This was below average, given the slow creep of inflation, but in my grandfather’s eyes it was a fortune. He raised his eyebrows in disbelief and yelped, “O Creation! How’s a man to spend a sum like that? What do you do with ten thousand?” To him, a salary like that was enough to buy a plot of land and build a house. The figure single-handedly conquered his sectarianism, and any concerns that a future grandchild might squander the family’s wealth and property. (That “property” amounted to nothing more than his house and a small plot of land in al-Wata worth less than an old jalopy.) Not only did my cousin’s husband make ten thousand lira a month—a fantastical sum as far as my grandfather was concerned—he also renounced Sunnism and converted to Alawism! Sheikhs from our village and surrounding ones paid him visits, he learned the Alawite tenets, and soon began boasting about his ascent through the social ranks. Eventually he went to the Aleppo records office and officially changed his name from Dibo to Ali. He was vigilant about the change, and snapped at anyone who forgot his new name and called him by the old one.

  As I’ve said, according to my aunt, bad luck was to blame for all her misfortune. It was also to blame for the fact that her three daughters were still unmarried and living at home, having failed in all their relationships with men. At that time, the eldest was thirty-five, the middle one was thirty and the youngest one was twenty-six. Three girls who, apart from the eldest, had not finished their education, who lounged around all day and only helped with housework when their mother unleashed a storm of shouting that burst through the house, filled our street and engulfed the whole neighbourhood. I remember my youngest cousin (the one who eventually married Dibo, who would become a “mighty Alawite-y”) for her thunderous voice, which also echoed through the side streets when she was angry. And I remember how careful my aunt always was to contain her daughter’s voice, for fear of causing a scandal. “Oh, won’t you shut up, shut up! D’you want to disgrace us in front of the entire neighbourhood?” It was a phrase I soon knew by heart, even though I did not understand what my aunt meant by “disgrace.” It seemed she was always trying to keep some scandal or another from reaching the ears of “our chatty neighbours,” as she called them. But the phrase was not enough to contain my youngest cousin, or the voice that burst from her chest and boiled up through her white skin, turning it beet-red. No power on earth could contain her voice.

  My aunt’s husband was never quite able to steer life the way he wanted. He taught Arabic at a primary school and largely enjoyed respect—from everyone except his wife and daughters. He died young, so I never knew him well. My memories of him feel distant, sheathed in a layer of dust. I remember the smile that never left his lips, as if it were a permanent feature. I remember something he often said when he came across me in the house or on the street, a phrase always accompanied by a sigh and a shake of his head: “Ya, ya, ya…What can we do? God knows, God knows.” I had no idea what he was talking about.

  I remember him with a book in his hand, reading and shaking his head. He was the only one who read in that great listless house, where the walls were bleak beige and a suppurating smell emanated from the furniture. The sofas arranged in the living and dining rooms gave off the scent of decay, of layers of skin accumulating and gradually disintegrating, day after day, and then being absorbed by the fabric. My aunt’s husband never sat on the sofas, as if he had seen the skin cells sloughing off his children, relatives and visitors every day. Instead, he always dragged a wicker chair from his room and positioned it alongside. He sat there reading peacefully, occasionally nodding and smiling. Medium height, with sagging skin around his forearms and neck. A small paunch rounded out his slender frame. He was soft-spoken and moved through the house slowly, within carefully charted bounds, as if those circumscribed paths were the only way he belonged to this place, the only one he had. As if he were a transient, unwelcome visitor. I never understood why the family found his presence so burdensome, when he was as light as an apparition, barely rippling across the surface of their lives. It vexed them, how different he was. Not only were there differences of opinion, but also a deep, fundamental distinction that permeated their outlooks on life, their moral compasses. His presence was a constant reminder of their own failures and deficiencies, of the void where they frolicked flippantly, unconcerned with where destiny was leading them. It made them uneasy, the way he never surrendered to misfortune.

  When their youngest son failed his graduation exams for three years in a row, my uncle said it was because the boy was lazy and uninterested in schoolwork. Luck had nothing to do with it. But my aunt insisted that bad fortune had played a part, and that his fellow students “did him in,” though who knew why. That’s how she was, my aunt. Year in and year out, her sense of injustice swelled in her soul, and her grievances blossomed into one failure after another. I don’t know why she felt that way. She never spoke candidly about it; she would just shake her head and press her lips in a forced, aggrieved smile. Then she would sigh, open her small eyes wide and usually end up in tears.

  She was my grandmother’s only daughter, and had been married off to a cousin whom I was never sure she loved. Her father gave her a house next door to his with two rooms facing the street, so she could turn one into a shop and the other into the storeroom. Through all of this, my aunt never abandoned her sense of having been wronged. Maybe she dreamed of a better marriage. Her kind cousin was not the right fit for her; she wished he was more of a hustler, quick to grab things by the horns and exploit the corrupt system in which they lived, to improve their lot in life. She complained constantly, was never content or satisfied. Her shop was among the first in the little village, and children from streets near and far came to buy things, especially on weekends and holidays. Women in the village found it a burden to travel to Tartus to do their shopping and began coming to her even if they were not on speaking terms. But I saw how she overcharged customers, even as her long-suffering tears flowed. The shop barely brought in enough to make ends meet, she complained, but I knew it was always crowded. I remember the storeroom we passed through to exit my grandfather’s house, and how she filled it with boxes of Kazouza, beer and moonshine, and bags of snacks and dry goods. When her husband passed away, my aunt stopped crying. She became more fickle. They all became more fickle.

  Back in Damascus, my father spent four days in the hospital each month, lying in a narrow bed, under an ocean of nausea from the weeks of chemotherapy. My mother spent nights on the wards with him, and since I was only ten at the time, my aunt came all the way from Tartus to stay with me. They were incredibly lonely times. Right from m
y return to school, my aunt talked non-stop about the hardships she faced. I remember how exhausting it was to have her around. The way her presence filled a room, then overflowed, leaving no space in the house for anyone else. She slept in my bed, next to me. I could never fall asleep. I would feel my body sliding towards the middle where she lay sleeping, her body carving a canyon into the mattress. I would press my body against the rough, cold wall, as tight as I could, all while she snored and snored. Then in the morning she would say, “I didn’t shut my eyes all night…I don’t know why I couldn’t sleep…Maybe it’s the pillow…Oh, not a wink.” My aunt snored all night but had not managed to sleep! Neither did she eat. Nor defecate. An angel in human form! That was the self-image she sought. Despite her hefty build and ample belly, she would say that her stomach was so empty, she felt dizzy. In the evenings we sat in the living room, watching a series on one of the few Syrian TV channels there were at that time. Her head slowly drooped and she would slip into a deep slumber. I always nudged her awake so that she could go to bed and she would say, “I wasn’t sleeping…I wasn’t sleeping…I just closed my eyes to rest…Why don’t you watch the show?” At the time, I had no idea what it meant for a woman brushing fifty to leave her home in the village and come to Damascus every month to stay with her brother’s only daughter.

  * * *

  I have not spoken to Kamil for an entire year. It has been four and a half years since I moved to Beirut. I am afraid of calling and being unable to reach him. I just swallowed half a Xanax as I write this. The urge to cry moves through my chest. But not just the urge to cry. Something deeper. The urge to rip up my memories by the roots—all of them. My memories pain me; they cannot be placated. They bubble up and gallop around so suddenly, colliding with each other and boiling over, and I become a tortured soul confined within my body. Has Kamil left Damascus? Has he closed the door to his office and left like everyone else? How could he abandon us? Who will keep me on track? And the thick white pages he wrote on, where he disentangled and scattered me, are they still in his white metal filing cabinet? Or has he burned them? The cabinet looks like a morgue refrigerator. In its drawers rest dozens, perhaps hundreds, of souls. Records of their lives written in shorthand. I can see Kamil gently opening the drawer and searching nonchalantly for my page. I am terrified that my life can be reduced to a page. A single page for six years? That’s how long I had been seeing Kamil. He never needed another one, and there was still room to write more. I told him my memories were haunting me, I told him about the tumult in my head, I told him how afraid I was of falling to pieces. And every time, he gave that cryptic smile, one that even after all those visits I still cannot decipher. An even smile, which blended subtle mockery of my fears (his way of trying to ease my terror and calm me down) with a studied dose of compassion so faint I could barely sense it before it vanished. Then his smile would vanish too, as suddenly as always, behind the thick smoke that seeped from his nostrils and lips. He would give an understanding nod, as if holding my hand to help me cross to a different topic or memory. As if opening the door to my soul and vanquishing the fears he found there. Then he would nod again, to a different tempo this time, something between evasion and conclusion. Only Kamil could end the session. I was not allowed to end it when I felt like it. My feelings were second to his, which came to mirror my soul. It was complicated. I still am not brave enough to contact him.