I’m coming. Tell her I’m coming. I wanted to hurry him out so that I could quickly put on my clothes. All of them.
They stood together at the door. She waited there until I got the car moving. Bilal was waving at me, first with one hand and then with both. I gave them a smile, turning my face to them before craning my head back to look at the road behind me so that I could back my car out of the drive. I was feeling slightly abashed about this visit, even though nothing at all had happened and I had not done anything wrong. I was embarrassed that, sitting with them at the dining table, I had launched into now one subject and now another, as though I were acting something out, and uncomfortable with the way I had spun out the time as I stood at the door, offering my effusive words of thanks and my goodbyes.
I needed to hear what Bilal would say about this. I wished he were sitting here with me in the car, next to me, giving me the words I wanted to hear. I needed him here, to tell me what she had said after she turned back from the door to go inside the house. To repeat to me the words she had said even if they likely didn’t amount to more than a phrase or two. I wanted to hear this so badly that before I had even reached the main road, I was already thinking about reversing my car and sounding the horn, just once, so that Bilal would hear it and come out. What did your mother say? I would ask him, and he would know exactly what to say in response. And I would understand whatever he did say, since I didn’t need anything more than those few words in order to send me off on my journey.
A single word, or even just a smile, on Bilal’s face: that would be enough for me. After all, what I had felt embarrassed about might not really be so embarrassing. And what I saw as overdoing it, as I stood there at the door, might possibly have brought her closer to me. A single word or a smile that would tell me everything. It would tell me how my sitting there at the table had seemed, how my appearance had been, as I sat there with my back perfectly straight against the chairback, conscious that my turbaned head rose much higher than their bare heads. How I was in the moments when I thought I might be having some success at bringing her nearer to me, although I had no indication of that at all other than my own slightly feverish speculations.
One of the things I felt embarrassed and pained about, as I drove down the road, was how I couldn’t stop thinking about my illness. Surely my acute consciousness of it showed. It seemed to me that having this illness had added years to my age, and there in that house I had behaved and spoken in ways that weren’t appropriate for me. Or maybe my sickness had added a new burden on top of the things that were already weighing heavily on me, leaving me—month after month after month—stuck where I was, unable to alter in the slightest any of what I had gotten so accustomed to saying in front of her. As I was driving, I closed my eyes, snapping my lids down over them suddenly and hard as if to put an end, once and for all, to this kind of thinking that wore me out. Think about something else, we always used to say in Najaf. That was what we advised each other to do even though at the same time we were joking about the stupidity of even giving such advice. Think about something else, Sayyid Mudar would say to me whenever he saw me looking pensive. I would toss his words back at him. You, Sayyid—you think about something else! Of course I was alluding to his everlasting preoccupation with women, which exhausted him and depleted the forces in his body.
Chapter Two
What would go missing in my body: the answer to this puzzle would require another trip to the clinic, another session standing there facing the doctor behind his desk. One body part, I knew, would not be enough for him. And I knew that all the while he was running through the list of the pieces he would extract from my body, I would be feeling this news like successive little lumps in my throat, to be swallowed not once but again and again. He would stare into my face, that wide-open gaze piercing me. He would pause after every word he said as if he were waiting for me to consent to what he was going to do. Or he would be studying me intently, trying (in a very obvious way) to gauge how bad my qualms were, listening to me stumble uncertainly from one word to the next even though in reality I would have little choice in this matter. I would not really be able to say no to anything he suggested. Choosing death over living with a loss of some kind is an event we see only in films or read in novels now and then. Meaning, choosing certain death. I figured that no one who lived before our era could ever be as certain about when and how death would happen as I was now. Those people in the past whom we read about, people who had every reason to expect or even hope to die before long, still knew that a space of time separated them from death. For death was hidden. It lay in their bodies but they didn’t know exactly where it was. In the worst of circumstances they could believe that it might happen, or then again, it might not. It could come now or it could wait a year or even a few years. In those days they didn’t have doctors who studied images and documents and marked out for their patients—in centimeters, no less—exactly how much distance still remained between them and their deaths. My grandfather Sayyid Murtada went on for many months tossing between life and death. One day those around him would be saying, He will certainly be dead by evening. And then on the next day they would say, Well, he opened his eyes and called out to my Aunt Hasiba to fetch him a glass of water.
Curses on this life, how it stretches out! my grandfather would moan. And then after he had been wakeful and alert for two hours, he would ask her to bring him some food, perhaps it would give his body a little strength. Eat, brother, eat, this will give you strength, she would say, bringing a carefully filled spoon to his mouth.
Eat, eat . . . it will give you strength. This is what I say to my father and he obeys me, for the sake of that slight lingering spark of life, though the amount he eats is never enough to give him the strength even to raise himself off the couch where he has slumped or to utter a word, which goes on rising from his belly up to his throat like a bubble of spume that he can’t quite spit out. Eat, Father, this will make you well. Here, this bite will give you some strength. I say these things to him as I gaze into his face, which has gone so pale and wan, his skin as thin and dry and semi-transparent as parchment. I do no different when I start thinking about how this sickly paleness of his might go away, or at least stop getting worse, if only we would take him out every day into the sunshine for an hour or even half an hour. Staying inside alone like this will rot him, I say to my wife when I’ve finished feeding him and I come out of the room carrying his plate. She no longer even turns to me with that look that says: And so why don’t you take him into the sunshine, he’s your father, so go on now, take him out there.
Even when they lifted their rifles skyward, preparing to fire, my father strode forward toward them, his hand raised to slap whoever crossed his path first. Not even the sound of the bullets they began firing into the air diverted him. I stepped back, away from him—one step, and then another—as I tried to balance the fear that was sending me into retreat against my sense of shame at leaving him to go ahead on his own. When one of them put the megaphone to his mouth and started threatening us by saying that they were going to start shooting people, I leapt forward but only to grab him by the edges of his cloak to try yanking him back. But I couldn’t. I was afraid that I might only agitate him further; that any action I took would just encourage him to surge forward even more quickly, determined to shake off the hand that was trying to hold him back. When they lowered their rifles just enough that the mouths were level with our heads, I don’t know exactly how it happened but I let out a scream and began to retreat, now not just a step or two but enough strides that I separated myself completely from the group that still surrounded and followed him, those people who were not frightened by the thought that the soldiers were about to send their bullets roaring into real bodies and heads. I was afraid and ashamed of myself all at the same time. From back there—from where I was now, a distance apart from the last stragglers among those who were following him—that scream came out of me again but now it was addressed to all of them and not only to my father. They’ll get you with their bullets! I was shouting. They’re going to hit you! I don’t know if he heard me, over there in the masses of dust that rose from the ground as soon as he and his companions reached them and began to engage them head on. I could still see him amid the swirls of dust, his tall thin body looming over the others unnaturally as though he were getting as much height as possible in order to bring his hand down sharply onto one of the soldiers. As far as I could make out, they seemed to be in retreat, but they weren’t lowering