by Dima Wannous
I said nothing.
My mother had been sitting on the sofa reading page 24 for days. Suddenly she had aged. I couldn’t comprehend it. When we’d gone to bed she had been a young woman, and when we woke up she was old. I told myself I was lucky she had aged overnight and not at midday; that would have been terrifying. (If she had gone into the kitchen to make breakfast, for instance, and come out a few minutes later, having grown old. Or if she’d said, in her exasperatingly soft voice, “Suleima, I’m going to take a shower,” and then emerged from the bathroom an old woman.) It really was lucky that my mother had aged overnight, and we’d only woken up to find she was old.
Who’s “us”? Just her and me now. My brother, Fouad, disappeared two and a half years ago. When that happened, my mother didn’t age: she cried a lot, but she didn’t grow older.
Was it the tears? Maybe. Tears cleanse the soul, as my mother says. Or maybe she cried instead of ageing, maybe she could only do one of the two. She cried a lot, so feverishly that her tears dried up. (This often happens to me too.) And then, when the last of her tears were gone, my mother fell asleep a young woman and awoke an elderly one. I didn’t tell her that I hadn’t slept since Fouad disappeared. I didn’t tell her that every night, every day and every moment, I was wishing for him to die. I prayed, pleaded with God and memorised verses of the Quran, so the Lord would hear my prayers and respond. I tried in vain to push my brother’s image from my mind.
In the first few months after his disappearance, I thought that I’d see him in my imagination if I shut my eyes, so I didn’t. Night after night I kept myself from closing my eyes, until I was so exhausted that I became weak and finally slept for a few hours. I woke up somewhat re-energized, and then kept my eyes open again, night and day, for weeks…and on, and on. I said nothing to my mother about this, and she said nothing to me. I felt certain she wished he would die too. How could a mother’s heart rest if her son were alive, being tortured endlessly? To ease my mind, I told myself that a mother’s heart knows, that she could sense whether Fouad was gone from this world, that’s how she could sleep in peace. She must know…how else could she have kept going all those months? But now she’d aged overnight, even if she was calmly sitting on the sofa and reading page 24.
I once told Kamil that when I was little, I imagined my father and brother being abused, beaten and tortured. I imagined them drowning. Not in nature, the way Naseem feared; I imagined bad guys drowning and torturing them with delight. Alone in my bed at night, I cried, even though I knew they were nearby in their beds. Kamil and I examined the source of these thoughts and ideas. How was it that a girl of nine or ten, living in a quiet home, not lacking for love or security, had such violent thoughts in her mind? I don’t remember how Kamil responded, not exactly. But I do remember him describing this as self-flagellation. Yes, I was self-flagellating, and still am. I saw my father on his knees, kissing someone’s feet. Today, I think that person must have been an officer. But I’m not sure if I imagined him as an officer when I was a child, or if the idea of an officer took hold over time, after seeing so many real images like that. Images that are no longer imaginary! There are people forced to kiss officers’ feet every second, every day, in this country! Is it that simple? Could you believe it? Don’t we discuss in our sessions the fact that someone in the world is dying every minute? Don’t we say that every second a mother somewhere is losing her child? We’ve also started to say that there’s a Syrian on his knees every minute of each day, being forced to kiss an officer’s feet.
When Fouad disappeared, I blamed myself. What good had my obsessive childhood self-flagellation done? Should I do it again now, for real reasons, not imaginary ones? If I’d known, though, if I’d really expected it to happen, I wouldn’t have let myself drown in those thoughts before it was time. I would have enjoyed many peaceful nights’ sleep, untroubled by a sick imagination.
I also consoled myself over my father’s death. He passed away ten years ago. He didn’t die under torture, wasn’t beaten like I often imagined. My mother says it was fear that killed him. I don’t believe her. Maybe I’d just rather not. My father died. He was seventy. He went to bed and didn’t wake up. Not unlike my mother, who went to bed and woke up an old woman. He tried to leap between two worlds, failed and tumbled down into death. Maybe he preferred dying to growing old. In the end, the “self-flagellation” that I couldn’t disentangle from him passed when he did. After his death, I only imagined him dressed elegantly, and standing, never sitting or kneeling.
* * *
I was five when we left our hometown of Hama for Damascus. It was 1982, the year of the massacre. I don’t remember anything from that period except a handful of images. I go back and forth about whether they’re my memories, or memories my mother told me. When it comes to my childhood, I can’t distinguish any more between what I remember myself and stories I heard or was told. My mother told me that my father wet himself, asked her to pack up their things and told her they were taking the children and leaving for Damascus. My mother was lost for words. The crotch of my father’s brown trousers darkened. I think now about how my mother told us this story one morning after he had passed away. Why did she tell us after he’d died? Why did she want us to know? To convince us that fear was what killed him? She also said that he decided to leave their hometown of Hama even though he was a doctor! That’s exactly how she said it. When she finished the sentence, I imagined her mouth being sealed with an exclamation point. She raised her eyebrows and shook her head wryly.
To this day I don’t know if she misses him. I have a feeling that when he died, she relaxed. She never says that his death made her happy, but I can see it in her eyes, body and soul. Another time she told us that our father was tormented by the exhausting nature of fear. She said she’d lived through thirty-two years of fear with him, and when my mother said the number, she ground her teeth on each consonant, rending the syllables apart, as if to make us feel the impact of each year, its oppressive weight. “Thirty-two years!” Yes, Father left his hometown, afraid of the indiscriminate killing he’d witnessed in the streets. He took his family and fled to Damascus, where we stayed after the massacre ended, when everyone else who’d survived returned home and to their former lives. Of course they returned home, but did they really return to their former lives? Could life straighten itself out and settle back into its old rhythm, as if nothing had happened? Can someone who has smelled the scent of death go back to the way things were? My father never spoke to us of Hama. Maybe he managed to do something I haven’t been able to: erase it from his memory. He managed to hold on to the memories he wanted.
In Damascus we lived in an area called Ain al-Kirish, and my father rented space for his office in the building we lived in. “How can he treat patients from Damascus when he turned his back on people from his own city?” This question began to echo in my mind because of how often I heard my mother say it. I felt bad for my father. When I imagined him, my mother and Fouad being tortured, it was my father for whom my heart ached most. I’d watch him, more affected than the others by the pain. I saw his face scrunched up in agony. What crushed me more than anything was the pleading, and the weary muttering, that emerged from his battered mouth. “Kill me already,” I imagined him saying. “Oh God, make it stop, I can’t take it any more.” And I cried. I missed him at night, so I’d slip out of my bed and into their room, and go to the right side of the bed, where my father slept. I stood at the head of their bed. Stretched out my little finger and held it to his nose to be sure he was still alive, even after that bloody torture. (When I read a similar passage in Naseem’s manuscript, I saw myself. Naseem stole me and wrote me into his novel. But I don’t tell him this.) My mother and Fouad, on the other hand, always resisted! Their expressions never elicited my sympathy. Just the opposite; they were stubbornly brave. My father was the only one who, with just a look, could set my soul afire. Luckily, he died before he was ever s
topped at a checkpoint, forced to prove his identity or subjected to humiliating questions.
Did Kamil connect my tendency towards self-flagellation with the Hama massacre and our move to Damascus? I don’t think so. When I was young, I hadn’t known exactly what was happening in Hama, and our lives in Damascus had always been stable. I remember the President’s portrait hanging in my father’s office. And how it made my mother endlessly angry. “You hang a portrait of the man who murdered your family? Does that make you happy? It wasn’t enough to run away, huh? What kind of man kills someone and shows up at the funeral?” She often asked him this, but never felt the need to answer; she never said, “You’re the kind of man who kills someone and shows up at the funeral.” I imagine that her constant browbeating wounded and confused him. “Can you blame other Syrians for shutting their doors in our faces?” she’d mutter. She never called their reaction unwarranted. No, their fellow townspeople had fled Hama, leaving their kin to die alone, and my father had been first out the door. They hadn’t aided them, or even stopped by their sides, inhaled the scent of their death, or stared at still-bleeding bodies strewn by the roadside. To this my father would gravely respond: “It’s because I’m from Hama that I hang his portrait. Because my sin is greater.” He’d say something like that and then leave the house for his office or the coffee shop where he met with friends. To a certain degree, the portrait was a confession that he didn’t belong in Damascus. That he’d broken certain bonds, and then uprooted those memories from his mind. He was tolerant and forgiving, and worked to make amends.
All my father ever wanted was to keep himself and his small family alive. What did my mother hope to gain from all those years of tormenting him, of blame, shame and constant reminders of his “great betrayal”? What did she want, aside from regaining our dignity? Did she wish we’d stayed in Hama and her husband had been killed? And if he’d been murdered like so many others, would the memory of them be imprinted on her mind? Could death clear the ground for a dignified life? Would my mother have preferred life as an honourable widow to the one she led alongside a “weak” and “cowardly” husband “for thirty-two years”—gritting her teeth on each consonant and the spaces in between?
I once teased Naseem, telling him that he should write about my father, but he never responded to humour unless we were already joking. Yes, Naseem was tediously serious. He wasn’t even good at banter. Even when telling jokes or riddles he maintained his monotone and his sternly knitted brows. The stitch in the centre that pulled them together was permanent, as if he’d been born with it. The knot between his brows was firmly tied, as if his soul hadn’t sprung from his mother’s womb, as if it didn’t reside in his chest, but here in this Gordian knot.
* * *
—
Naseem hasn’t written my father’s story. My mother isn’t in the manuscript either. It’s me he’s stolen. I haven’t told him this. If I did, he’d be sure to deny it. He’d say that his narrator’s story doesn’t follow mine at all. And then I’d become flustered and lose my words, because no matter how hard I might try, I wouldn’t be able to find tangible proof that I am this unnamed narrator. Why hasn’t he given her a name? Is it because he wants to write about me, and while he doesn’t dare call her Suleima, he also knows that if he chooses a different name, it would disrupt his creative process? That’s probably why he’s left her nameless. But she is me! It’s true that her family is different, as are her memories, but our souls clearly spin in the same orbit. I don’t say anything to him: I don’t have strong enough evidence. If I do, he might say that she and I belong to the same generation and have both lived in Damascus, and have general features in common with all Syrians. We both saw Kamil too. I don’t know how to explain that it’s not these traits that make us similar, not even our visits to Kamil. There’s something deeper than our generation, country or therapist.
The language of the manuscript also makes an impression on me. It just seems like a diary, written in a somewhat impressionistic and improvisatory style. Maybe he couldn’t manage to write a novel about the revolution, and dealt with this weakness by composing a fictional diary instead.
NASEEM’S MANUSCRIPT
Back when I lived in Damascus, when the sun rose I felt downcast and alone. But if it hid behind thick, supple clouds, I was thrilled. At night, when it slipped from the sky, I would often take my computer and go to a coffee shop near our house. Perhaps when the sun dipped past the horizon, it was setting in my soul, illuminating me from within, so I could shine onto the page? At dawn, when I could see that the sky’s radiance was there to stay, I would gather my things and return home, dejected.
I abandoned this routine when I arrived in Beirut. I was unable to write any more. I began to feel frustrated at the sight of clouds and fell out of the habit of reading too—books had once lined our living-room shelves, but in this house there were only a few, which made me feel even more inadequate. I used to spend most of my time reading; now I was fed up with it, and felt books exposed things in me that I was not ready to reveal. My emotions were held hostage by events in Syria. I hated the Beiruti clouds and rain. They made my true home feel further away, and I hated that I couldn’t go back whenever I wanted. Even if I had no immediate plans to return, just thinking about the thick snow and blocked roads made Beirut feel like an airless prison. I remember spending hours browsing Google Earth late into the night. I would zoom further and further out until Damascus appeared on the map too. I liked knowing that it was not all that far away. Damascus could almost be closer than Tyre.
That first winter in Beirut, I did go back every two weeks, despite the accumulating snow. We got stuck in Dahr al-Baydar on more than one occasion. One time in particular the road was completely obscured and snow was everywhere. I remember even the air was white, infused with falling flakes. Slowly, the light grew softer. Darkness fell. No street lamps to illuminate the roadsides, no signs of life. We were suspended in a place without houses, coffee shops or pharmacies. Just piles of snow, thick flakes on the wind, biting cold, a taxi with the headlights turned off so the driver could save what little petrol remained in the tank, and a wait so long I felt I could not breathe. I felt flushed with anxiety so I opened a window. But it was cold, so I shut it again. Feeling agitated, I got out to walk across the snow, between all the cars stuck behind us and in front of us. I was thirsty, but didn’t know where I’d put the water I had brought with me and had been sipping while growing more and more nervous. I got back in the cab. And suddenly I panicked. I was afraid of dying in this enclosed space, afraid of being buried under the snow with all the other cars and their passengers, afraid we would die en masse like Syrians were dying en masse back home. Suddenly, like a miracle, the cars began to move. One by one, we made it down to Chtaura, and by the time we arrived, the sense of danger had dissipated. My heart began to beat again. I knew I would soon be home.
I saw Kamil every time I visited Damascus. My appointments were on Saturdays, and it reassured me to make the next one for two weeks’ time. Leila told me it was not necessary, that all I had to do was call two days before my next visit. But I insisted. Maybe having an appointment made it easier to return to Beirut. I continued making appointments until my last trip to Damascus, though I had not known beforehand that it would be my last. “Enough,” Kamil said to me. There was no need to see him any more. I asked him if he had finally pieced me together: bit by bit, memory on top of memory, cell after cell. He nodded. Thinking about it now, maybe he only said “enough” to give me the opportunity to adjust to Beirut. Maybe he knew how dependent I was on our regular appointments and that this was making it harder for me to adjust to my new life. That it disrupted my growing sense of continuity. Why did I think this? Maybe because my need for him was constant, and my mental state was worsening every day. My breath still caught in my chest. I still wrestled with fear and panic attacks. I still counted the number of steps I took, from early morning until
night descended. Anxiety still ran rampant through my body, from the moment the sun rose until it was extinguished, announcing the end of another day. What did I have to look forward to? Nothing, not any more. Not to writing in the mornings, reading books or meeting up with friends. Nothing fun. And it was clear that moving back to Damascus was just a fantasy. War toyed with geography, redrawing roads and borders. My home retreated further every day, until it may as well have been as far as Paris, or London, or Germany.
* * *
I don’t know how the rift with my relatives began. Honestly. Cannot remember what started it. There was no clear beginning, no precise date or time. As if we had entered a tacit agreement, without exchanging words, opinions or anything at all. It was a one-sided arrangement, though. One day I discovered that a rift had occurred. At the time, I didn’t want to sever our relationship. No blood had been shed, and in my heart I still had ample room for our differences. We could listen to each other and maybe, just maybe (I was not completely sure) we could understand each other’s points of view, and forgive. We had always been different, that was true. But our differences had never been political. They just teased me for being brown and took pride in their white skin and blue eyes—and if not blue, at least hazel. Their insults went beyond skin colour to constant accusations that I “came from nothing” and didn’t acknowledge my own history or connection to them. No wonder I never felt I belonged.
There were only a few family members to whom I felt connected. My cousin Farid, for example, was closest to my heart. He was my father’s sister’s eldest son. I was young when he got married, and he took me with him when he went to his wife’s family to ask for her hand. I attended their wedding, and was fifteen when Farid’s wife became pregnant with the first of their three children. I visited them often, and we would stay up late on the balcony, which had overlooked the sea until other buildings crowded out the view. Farid, his wife and I would sit around, drinking arak and talking about the family and politics. We held similar views, and only disagreed on superficial things. Farid tended to agree with the opposition, though his reasons were different from mine or most others’. He was a boy from the village who read books, studied philosophy and shared what he learned; he was a boy who had dreams…and then found himself trapped in a job at the cement factory, day in, day out, his health failing from exposure to carcinogens. He ended up there because it was the only way to support his family. But the salary was not enough, so he was forced to open a shop selling clothes imported from Turkey. Farid sided with the opposition because he had studied philosophy, though it had little connection with his day-to-day, running himself ragged to ensure his family had a good life.