by Dima Wannous
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The last time we saw each other was one year, seven months and twenty days ago. I made him his favourite salad, with lettuce and apple. We opened a bottle of red wine. It feels like it could have been yesterday. He filled his plate with salad, then forcefully speared a piece of lettuce and apple, as if he were plunging his fork into stone. He began stabbing and stabbing; I felt the piercing in my chest. When the fork was filled with all it could hold, he shoved it into his mouth and began to move his jaws alarmingly fast, as if he’d entered a speed-chewing race. He grabbed his glass of wine and gulped it down like water, then gave me the side-eye, implying I should fill it again. I poured him more and he downed it in one go. Fatigue began creeping over me. His fork clattered against the glass plate, and my hands went slack, as if I were the one wielding it, not Naseem. I watched in confusion as he continued his battle with the plate of salad. His jaw moved up and down, chewing the lettuce and apple with the ferocity of someone gnawing at a strip of meat. I felt exhausted. I heard a slow wheeze escape from my chest. Naseem’s eyes were fastened on the plate in front of him. He didn’t look at me until after he’d speared the last piece with his fork. I told him I was hurting, but I couldn’t tell where the pain was. It wasn’t a physical pain, like a headache or stomach ache, a sore hand or tired heart. This was deeper, as if something had welled up from my soul and begun coursing through my veins. Naseem nodded, signalling that he had heard me.
When I realised that Naseem wasn’t going to ask me to go away with him, I begged him not to leave me. He never said, as the father in his novel says dozens of times to his daughter: “I won’t leave you. I’ll stay with you.” Naseem said nothing. Maybe because he wasn’t my father. Maybe because he’d lost a parent. He gave me the key to his house and left. He told me I could come and go whenever I wanted. That made me feel secure: I get attached to places. If I possessed the key to his house, I thought that meant I possessed him. Or at least that I wouldn’t lose him. It was our house now, and I had the key. Naseem left it empty instead of selling or renting it, and now the house, ready for his return, was mine. Even then I didn’t know that houses meant nothing to Naseem, that he might forget there was a house waiting for him in the Italian quarter. The same neighbourhood where, in his novel, Saffeya lived, the woman who politely kicked a girl out of her home to spend time with her lover.
Suddenly I felt jealous. Did Naseem know his narrator? Were they close? Was he cheating on me and stealing my stories to hide his infidelity? He’d not only left me his house, but everything in it too. He had left his papers and notebooks and photographs, his memories, himself. Naseem had managed to let go of all his memories at once. Didn’t he realise I was going to miss him, that my curiosity and longing would lead me to look through his notebooks and papers? Didn’t he think of my feelings? Or did he trust that I wouldn’t go near them? Perhaps the worst part was how certain he must have been that I wouldn’t touch them, or even be interested. Or maybe he thought that if I discovered what I did by snooping through his things, he would be relieved of the burden of telling me. “Take it…read it…then decide whether you would have stayed with me.” That’s what I imagined him saying to me, again and again, and it brought the thought of losing him sharply back. He wasn’t lost; I was the one who had lost him. I lost him the moment I opened his desk drawer, the moment I began reading his journals and papers and looking through his photographs.
So many photos of women, ranging in age from their twenties to their forties. They were carefully arranged in neat stacks. (I don’t know whether Naseem had a system for sorting them. Alphabetically by name? Or by date of their relationship, the first to the most recent, or vice versa? Or according to how attached he was to them? It didn’t matter.) Envy seared through me; I felt its flame pass through my stomach, rise to my chest and then my throat. I studied the faces. Naseem was with them in some of the photographs; others appeared alone. I looked away, and the searing sensation shot through my fingertips. I took a deep breath. I rummaged agitatedly through my purse. I went to the kitchen and poured myself a glass of water from the fridge, then swallowed half a Xanax. I’d stocked the fridge as if I were living there, or as if Naseem might return any day. I avoided his bedroom, with the open drawer and his things across the floor. I went into the living room and sat on the sofa where we’d often been together. I sat on his side of the sofa, as if by doing so I could draw some of his cold stoicism into my own body and breathe normally again.
I was short of breath now, but it hadn’t prevented me from noticing certain details in the photos. I tried to shut my eyes and get rid of what I’d seen, but in vain. Cruel memory! If only we could sift through it to erase certain images and feelings, like a computer. Was his nameless narrator one of these women? I was angry that there were no pictures of me! But where would he have got one—we’d never taken a picture together because Naseem hated photographs and memories, at least that’s what he’d told me more than once. If you hate photographs, Naseem, why the need to pose for so many with these other women? Then, from the depths of my panic, a kind of joy emerged. I don’t know where it came from: How can panic give birth to joy? I thought about it. His past had always been so hazy to me, but the photos I’d held in my hands a few minutes earlier had brought a glimpse of it, at least, into focus.
The half Xanax, small and rosy-hued, began flowing through my veins, rising to my head and leaving a fragile sense of reassurance in its wake. I took a deep breath, and tried to stay calm. I went back to his room. I sat cross-legged on the floor next to the drawer and the photographs and picked them up again. I gazed into those eyes, so still it felt like they were gazing back at me, like they might emerge from the photograph to draw even closer to my own, to stare into my eyes even as they brimmed with fear (to use Kamil’s phrase). But there was something about Naseem’s expression. It was always exactly the same! As if all the photos had been taken at the same moment, just with different outfits and different women. His gaze was distant, indifferent, drifting from one empty space into another, as if it belonged nowhere. Wouldn’t love have made him a different person every time—or did he keep his soul shuttered in?
I felt the jealousy burrow deeper and deeper. I hadn’t known anything about these women, all different ages, different kinds of beautiful, different eyes and skin colour. I envied Naseem’s stoicism, indifference and ability to let go, as if nothing existed beyond his own body. As if everything else were a separate planet that meant nothing to him at all. What made this being so removed from his surroundings? Was he the father in the story? Didn’t he resemble him? Had the woman who inspired Naseem’s novel loved him because he was like her father, a distant writer?
And for myself, do I love you because you resemble my father, a doctor who was afraid of fear?
NASEEM’S MANUSCRIPT
I was fourteen years old…and still am. The doorbell rang at my father’s cousin’s house. I do not remember whether anyone else was awake—I cannot recall for sure. When I think of that scene, I see only myself, sitting in their house, and my father, lying in a bed in room 203. I crossed the short distance from the freezer, where the spoon was, to the front door. Firm steps, obscured by a haze of anxiety. I opened the door. A family friend was standing there. She looked tired. She kissed me neutrally, a normal kiss as if it were a normal day. She said nothing, and I asked no questions. There was no need for words. She remained standing at the front door and I headed to the room I had just exited. I dressed quickly. Tied back my long hair as I always did. Put on my shoes. And left with her. The taxi was waiting for us out front. Ever gentle, she did not utter a word the whole way there, from the house at the end of Mezzeh Highway to Shami Hospital. I looked out the window at the illuminated streets and was surprised to see that the traffic lights were still working. They shone green, then orange, then red. I thought life would stop when it happened. Traffic lights would stop changing, cars would freeze i
n the streets, and everyone in this huge city would retreat into their homes and disappear behind walls. There would be nothing but silence.
I was fourteen years old…and still am…and I knew! Had I not spent the whole day drying my tears and begging him not to go? We arrived at the hospital. We went up to the second floor and walked down a corridor that looked the same as it had for years. But it wasn’t the same. It was packed with friends. They greeted me silently. They looked at me with glistening eyes, as if they were gazing into the distant past. Was the past that long ago? The past was just a few hours ago, Baba! Was I the only one still in this distant past? I searched for news of him in their eyes and looked around for my mother. I couldn’t see her. I remember being pushed firmly towards room 203. I said nothing. I fought back. I said I did not want to go in. I could not bear to see his body. How could a being so full of life become just a body, with eyes that stared into endless space? Then the walls vanished; I imagined him lying in the hospital room. Mama was with him. She asked the doctor to give them a few minutes. She washed his body, while singing him his favourite song: “Oh how under the howdah, oh how we embraced…”
“Where’s Mama?” I asked fearfully. (I could not handle them both passing away on the same day; I had never imagined I could survive even one of them dying.) Mama emerged from the room. She had finished whatever she was doing and handed her husband’s body to Dr. Soufjan, entrusting him to the medical team and their lonely procedures. Slowly, she walked down the narrow corridor. Her eyes were swollen with tears. (Grief stretched over everything, like a web, and many years later it is still with me, because I am fourteen still. I could not grow up. Could not leave the corridor on the second floor: my soul is still suspended there, in that tunnel.) Mama came up to me. She hugged me. I could not make the tears come. I tried. And failed. I hugged her, trying to envelop her, her whole skinny, feeble body sapped by fatigue. “It’s over.” Those were the only two words I caught between her tears: “It’s over.”
We went home that night to a house we had not lived in for nearly a month. We entered cautiously. A vacant house, empty of life and the lives we had lived there. Then everyone else left, and my mother and I were alone.
We could not find words. The silence arched over our heads, filled with sorrow. Only two heads now, not three. We went into their bedroom. It was past three in the morning. We laid down next to each other in his bed, and slept for an hour, maybe two. I don’t remember.
When we woke again, suddenly, we did not speak. Mother went into the kitchen to make coffee. I was in the living room, opening shutters that had been closed for months. Our first-floor neighbour was hanging clothes out to dry in her little garden. Her lips stretched into a smile when she saw me. “How’s the Mister?” she asked. I smiled back and replied, “He passed.” I still had not shed a single tear.
I went into my room. Closed the door. The atmosphere in the house was different. Not even my room was the same: it felt like the waiting room in an airport or train station. I looked in the mirror and did not see my reflection—only my father staring back at me. “How could you leave me?” I asked. “Can you hear me? Help me cry.” But he did not. I put on the black clothes my mother had told me to buy a few days earlier. The loose fabric felt like gravel on my skin. The house began to fill with friends. All I remember from that day was the rush of people and friends filling every room. I remember my mother sitting and wailing, her eyelids swollen with a weariness that had been building up for years, their skin faintly blue like the open sky. I remember glimpsing her pure exhaustion that day, brimming up and streaming from her eyes. And from this well of weariness, my mother drew strength. She tried to steel herself, and only relaxed when a deluge of tears fell down her face.
And me? How could I walk through life without him? How could I live without him next to me in his bed, without kissing his neck and telling him everything that came to mind? How could I live, who would I be, without him? How could he go and leave me? The huge void in my soul—what could fill it?
(How can I breathe without going into your room on tiptoe to count your breaths, to check that you are still breathing? Am I still breathing? “You won’t grow up until you’re able to say that he’s dead…” Kamil tells me. “Your father didn’t pass away…he died.”)
A certain insouciance, I realised, was beginning to drift up from beneath the pain. My fear of death was gone, because my greatest fear had come true. No more need for sleepless nights, afraid of him leaving me. Now he was gone, and I was alone. No more need to fear fear. I had lived my whole childhood afraid of fear, of walking behind his coffin, averting my eyes from where he lay wrapped in a white shroud, sleeping in a hole just big enough for his body. A hole that was not big enough for me too. When the funeral was over, when night had fallen and we arrived back home, that was when I began to cry. Tears poured from my eyes. I called out for my mother. She came. She held me. I threw myself into her arms, trying to absorb her warmth, trying to catch my breath, which had been lost with his.
The house changed; it began to take different forms. It even smelled different. In the beginning, his passing (I refuse to say “death,” and I hear Kamil banging his head against the wall, but I do not want to grow up) became a source of conflict for my mother and me. We were lost, alone, clutching painful memories in our souls, and pain beyond anything a body could hold. At first we did not know how to be without him. He had been our reason for living, the engine of our projects and imaginations. Now we were alone in a house so bitter and cold, fighting over every little thing, unable to make sense of our lives and continue. Nothing was the same, and we could not go on as normal. But we persevered. We continued this battle for nearly two years without reaching a truce, until finally we tired and both surrendered.
Over time, we came to terms with our loneliness. We learned to deal with it without fighting, and to love each other again. For so many years we had focused only on loving him. I know I was often combative or passive-aggressive. For the first two years, my mother’s presence in the house just reminded me of my father’s absence. I was rude to her, as if punishing her for his passing. I would tell her something the way I would have told him, and then blame her for not having his patience or responding as he would have done. I had no compassion for her loss, and did not think about her sadness. I was preoccupied with my own. I had no empathy for her pain, as if I were the only one dealing with grief. But then I would feel terribly guilty, apologise and make a miserable attempt to demonstrate how much I loved and needed her.
Showing my feelings for my mother did not come easily to me. I often sat across from her and gazed at her sad face, looking into her eyes and concentrating on what to say, but then the words crumbled and their meaning disintegrated. I was unable to express my thoughts. Words became dirt in my mouth, so I stayed silent. And before long I would again be struck with remorse and make another awkward attempt—because surely if I made such an effort to say something, love would sprout anew—but when my words emerged, they sounded as manufactured and formulaic as a composition lesson from school.
Physically I was a girl of fourteen, but my soul had matured into its thirties. It is so hard when one’s soul outpaces one’s body, slipping away at the beginning of the day, growing up on its own and developing new characteristics, only to be forced to return each night to inhabit the same body. No matter how much I leaped and flailed, pretended, rebelled, I could find no other home for my soul than my still-young body. To my mother, I was simply fourteen. It was as if all the years Baba had packed into the short time he had left had somehow eluded her.
My mother had, in crucial ways, been absent. She had become obsessed with reading about nutrition and strengthening the immune system, and with her phone, which connected her to the world, from America to China to Japan to Korea to France. When she heard about a new type of treatment discovered abroad, she began searching for a way to obtain whatever nutritional or
medicinal substances or plants they were. She had been attached to his body, not his soul; concerned with saving his body so that it could still house his soul. What use was the soul if the body could no longer go on? I, on the other hand, I was attached to his soul. We soared through time together, flying past the thresholds of twenty, then thirty years old. We grew up together, even though he had passed on.
My fourteen-year-old body held a thirty-year-old soul, and my mother did not realise at all. She might not even have known that I had turned fourteen. Once, we were walking in the street together through our bustling neighbourhood, alongside the narrow pavement. I was holding her hand, as if I were her mother. Suddenly, she looked at me and said, “Hey, little Mama, step down from the pavement. Walk next to me.” I had not been walking on the pavement. My hand was higher than hers, so she must have thought I was on the pavement, a step higher than her! She had not noticed that I had grown older and taller. I was one step taller than her, a step in time.
So, the house became a prison and I never missed an opportunity to escape. I returned to our cousin’s house, and the room where I had left my soul in tears that day. I stayed with them and left my mother, not thinking about what she would do all day, alone. I figured she was used to my absence. After that I went to stay with another cousin and her husband. Then—it was maybe three years after my father had passed—I became sick and stopped going to school. There was not a doctor in Damascus my mother didn’t take me to. Not an X-ray or MRI she did not have performed. But they showed nothing. She was beside herself. How could nothing incapacitate me for days? My headaches were so vicious that I beat my head against the wall. I lost consciousness again and again. My extremities shook and my tongue trembled, and I lost the ability to stand or speak.
One time I was at my aunt’s apartment on the eleventh floor. I went out onto the balcony, sat on the green balustrade, and dangled my feet off the edge. I stared at the street far below and at the passers-by, so small from that towering height, and thought about throwing myself off. I was not nervous or afraid. I did not start to sweat or think of my mother. I didn’t even imagine my body falling from the eleventh floor, flailing awkwardly in the air, then finally colliding with the asphalt, where it would burst. I didn’t consider whether I would still be alive when I hit the ground, if I would feel pain on impact. Did not think about what it would mean to throw myself off, for it all to be over in the space of seconds. I just thought that the moment had come for me to join my father. I thought he was waiting for me, that we would spend the rest of time together. My soul was in my thirties, and he was still fifty-five: he had stopped ageing the day he passed. Both of us were where we had been when his soul departed, he in room 203, and I in my room at our cousin’s house.