His vertebrae tremble. His bones crack. He feels them. His veins, burning. The electric shock of the spasm rushing through his devastated body. He hears them. The poundings of his heart beating one on top of the next until they are a single noise. Strident. Incessant. An endless note.
He bellows.
Loud.
Louder.
Louder still!
His orgasm is so ferocious he blacks out.
ARIK
— Tell me the truth, doctor. How long does he have?
Lips pinched, the doctor gestures for Gilad and Inbal to sit down. They sit across from him, in the same synthetic leather chairs in which they’ve so often heard news, both good and bad, about the state of Arik’s health.
— It’s a matter of hours …
Gilad turns pale. Inbal, with a pained expression, takes her husband’s hand, as much to comfort him as to keep herself from collapsing. Gilad stares at the digital calendar on the corner of the doctor’s desk. The screen says January 11, 2014. Eight years, almost to the day, since Arik went into a coma. Aba. He’s frozen in place, hypnotized by the date. The only indication of shock is his fingers clenching those of his wife. The cold numbers of the clock hammer away at him, marking, without a familiar tick-tock, the passage of time.
The countdown has begun. It actually started a long time ago, but Gilad refused to believe it. His father has been suffering from a persistent urinary infection for a few months already, one of the perverse side effects of the continued use of a catheter to drain the bladder.
— It often occurs with people his age, explains the doctor. Wear and tear on the body is part of the natural order of things, even in the comatose.
Strange. The notion of Arik continuing to age reassures Gilad. Yet another proof that his father is alive, that he’s present, that he belongs to the same world as him. But now the infection is causing renal failure. His organs are giving up one by one. Death is quietly sneaking up on him, consuming his body from within.
— We should tell the family, Gilad murmurs to his wife after a long silence.
Inbal nods in agreement. She takes out her cellphone. Whispers a few words — to family members, to friends. A final call to the children. Before leaving the doctor’s office, she kisses her husband on the forehead.
— Don’t be long …
— I’ll be back with the children as soon as possible.
And she’s gone.
— Will he suffer, doctor? asks Gilad. Is he suffering now?
— Death is not necessarily painful. And is less and less so now, thanks to advances in palliative care. In certain cases, like that of your father, after such a long wait death can be … a relief. Well, a liberation, if you will.
Gilad returns to his father’s room. She’s there. As she always is. At his bedside, a book in hand. The Nightingale. Of all the hospital staff, she’s the one who knows Arik the most intimately. She bathes him once a week. Cuts his hair and nails. And even though a physiotherapist visits him regularly, it’s the Nightingale who massages his arms and legs, all the while whispering things to him that Gilad never quite manages to hear. If his mother were still alive, she’d be green with jealousy.
He’s often surprised the nurse in conversation with his father, responding to questions no one but she could hear. Once Gilad asked her how she knew what ran through the head of a man in a coma. She simply caressed Arik’s cheek and said:
— He speaks to me through his body, his face, his eyes.
— Does he recognize you?
— He sees other women in me. Women he knew. He recognizes the stories I tell him.
She’s certainly told him many stories, thinks Gilad as he contemplates the books burgeoning around his bed. On this day — on what might well be the last day of his life — he lies soothed by the voice of this woman reading to him as she has done every day for years. Sometimes, she recites poems to him. Other times, she reads him novels in Hebrew, in Russian, in Hungarian, in French, in German, even in Arabic. It’s astonishing to think that this woman has kept her secrets from him for eight years.
The Nightingale reading to his father is one of the scenes he’ll miss when … Such insignificant routines come to pass in the most dramatic situations. For all those who gravitate around Arik, the regular beat of the heart monitor has marked time for eight years. The slow ticking away of seconds, minutes, days. How will they keep track of time when Arik is dead? Gilad has been measuring his weeks, his months, his years, by Arik’s breathing.
The nurse looks up at him as though she has read his thoughts.
— Here.
She passes him the book, open to the page she’s been reading.
— Khaled, the rebel, kisses the right hoof of Hamama, his mare. Then the left. Together, they disappear over the horizon. Naked. Free. The two of them are one. I must have read this story to Arik a thousand times, and still he wants to hear it again. And again …
Gilad hesitates.
— He must like hearing it in your voice.
Gilad takes the novel in his hands. Its title is Time of White Horses. The author: Ibrahim Nasrallah. The language, Arabic.
Gilad abruptly puts the book down.
— No! Arabic will not be the last language he hears.
— Arabic is in him, as it is in you.
— Who are you to tell me what’s a part of me!
She smiles.
Palestinian Quebecker YARA EL-GHADBAN is an anthropologist by training but has been writing since she was thirteen. She is the author of three novels, of which I Am Ariel Sharon is the first to be translated into English. In 2017 she won the Canada Council for the Arts’ Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award, and in 2019 she was awarded the Blue Metropolis Literary Diversity Prize. She lives and writes in Montreal.
WAYNE GRADY is an award-winning author, translator, and editor. He has won the John Glassco Translation Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation and was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award two additional times. His debut novel, Emancipation Day, won the Amazon.ca First Novel Award. He lives near Kingston, Ontario, with his wife, novelist Merilyn Simonds.
house of anansi press was founded in 1967 with a mandate to publish Canadian-authored books, a mandate that continues to this day even as the list has branched out to include internationally acclaimed thinkers and writers. The press immediately gained attention for significant titles by notable writers such as Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, George Grant, and Northrop Frye. Since then, Anansi’s commitment to finding, publishing and promoting challenging, excellent writing has won it tremendous acclaim and solid staying power. Today Anansi is Canada’s pre-eminent independent press, and home to nationally and internationally bestselling and acclaimed authors such as Gil Adamson, Margaret Atwood, Ken Babstock, Peter Behrens, Rawi Hage, Misha Glenny, Jim Harrison, A. L. Kennedy, Pasha Malla, Lisa Moore, A. F. Moritz, Eric Siblin, Karen Solie, and Ronald Wright. Anansi is also proud to publish the award-winning nonfiction series The CBC Massey Lectures. In 2007, 2009, 2010, and 2011 Anansi was honoured by the Canadian Booksellers Association as “Publisher of the Year.
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