They said to come back in two days.
I could have postponed any further response, but as I opened the other door—the one leading into the room where I received my guests—I turned back and corrected myself.
In two or three days. That’s what the doctor said.
She followed me in, silent, and stood facing me. She didn’t move or speak, just gazed at me steadily as I lifted my turban off my head and took off my abaya. She was waiting for me to finish saying what I had to say. When I collapsed onto the armchair, my body feeling heavy and lifeless, the look on her face informed me that her thin store of patience, which she had been holding valiantly in reserve, had now run out.
Two or three days? What happens after two or three days?
I don’t know. He said I am sick.
Gradually, one feature at a time, her face went from blank neutrality to curiosity and then to the expression I knew so well, her way of showing surprise and disbelief. I knew she had finally reached the point where she couldn’t avoid knowing what my illness was, and acknowledging it, calling it by its name at least in her head.
Is the doctor going to put you in the hospital?
I don’t know. He said I should come back in two or three days.
She knew, as well, that she must—right now, in this very moment—stop asking these questions of hers that left me craning my head from one side to the other, unsure of where to direct my eyes. I will make you tea, she said, turning to go into the kitchen.
Sitting in my usual armchair, my thoughts turned to the photograph on the opposite wall. Long ago I should have brought it lower, I reflected. Every time he had come to visit, my brother Adnan had teased me about it. Why had I hung the three of them so high up there, as if they were strung up on the gallows? That picture—their picture—hung at such an elevation that its frame nearly touched the ceiling. Adnan went on telling me that I must bring it far enough down that it would be at eye level for a normal man. He was right, I thought. After all, I could no longer make out their faces, whether or not I had my glasses on, though it was clear enough that there were three men in the picture and they were the men I knew. Whenever I glanced at it, as high overhead as it was, and as tiny as it looked way up there in its braided silver frame, memories of them as they were when that photograph was taken would fill my head.
From where I sat I mused about what it would be like to see that picture from close up. To see my father at the age of thirty, the figure he made then, his narrow eyes staring at the photographer as if urging him to hurry, as if he wanted this stranger to pick up his camera and go away. Trying to compensate for the smallness of his eyes, or perhaps just to explain why they were as narrow as they were, my mother always used to say that those eyes held enough terror to frighten anyone on whom they happened to fall. Even the two cats who had lived with us since they were tiny kittens used to back off, one leg raised slightly off the ground, before scurrying away as if they were little boys. That’s the example my mother always gave, sketching the scene of him coming out of the house and going over to the paved area between the house and the garden to give his eyes some temporary relief from the darkness of his room, as if he needed to stand up and assure himself that his legs were still working after the fatigue of sitting in that gloomy room with its row of square cushions that imams sat cross-legged on.
Do we have a ladder in the house?
My wife gave me one of her usual looks. She was standing over the little side table that she had just lifted off the floor in order to bring it over to where I sat.
Ladder? Why the ladder?
I’m going to move the photograph lower down on the wall. It’s so high, no one can see who is in it.
She swiveled her head to stare up at the picture even though she was still half bent over the table where she had set down the tea. Without straightening up she looked over at me again.
You are going to move it down? Now?
Not right now. But that’s where it should go, down there.
She twisted around again, this time presumably to look where I was pointing. But she made it obvious that she was staring into empty space as if to let me know that she was thinking about something else and that I too ought to be thinking about other things.
Well. Anyway. He got sick while you were there in the hospital.
Got sick the same way he always does?
Got sick like he always does, her voice intimating that he had worn her out as he usually did, and she wanted me to know it. A thought forced itself on me. Maybe what had made him ill this time was my being away.
Did he sleep in his own bed?
In his bed one night and on his easy chair one night. Drink your tea first, she said as she saw me set my hands down, palms open and flat, bracing myself to get up.
It’s not just my being away, though. It’s that he sits there in his easy chair all the time and no one ever comes in to talk to him.
The boys . . . I was going to ask her if the boys had entertained him by playing with their sister somewhere near enough that he could see them, but it suddenly dawned on me that I had not even asked her about them.
Where are they?
Out. When your father was willing to eat, it was Ahmad who fed him from a spoon.
I pictured my son Ahmad standing in front of my father, a plate of food in his hands, waiting for his grandfather to swallow what he had in his mouth before bringing the spoon close again. The spoon would be heaped with food. My father would not know how to take only as much as he could chew and swallow at one time.
Did he eat?
Who?
My father. Did he have lunch?
Feed him now. That was what I must do. And doing it would surely make me feel a bit better. Good, I thought. Coming into the room carrying his food will make it seem as though I was never away from him after all.
It’s as though I am silencing him by putting this in his mouth. His lips take what is on the spoon but his eyes keep returning to me, staring at my face. He knows I will manage to dampen whatever curiosity he has, to keep him silent with these words I repeat time and again. Eat, Father. In good health, Father. Here, take this one, too. This will give you strength. But with every word I say, he makes me sense how much I am tiring him out. He even makes me feel I’m causing him pain.
Eat, Father, I say, even if I am just waiting for the insistence in his eyes to grow sharper, until it is so intense that I think I can see him summoning all the strength he has left to speak, and I imagine that forceful voice of his that he has kept imprisoned inside his body all these months. He is about to say to me, Where were you? Tell me—where were you?
Still, the voice I will hear would not be that first voice of his, that angry bellow ripping through his listeners to give them a good scolding. You two, over there, quiet! he would roar at two men murmuring together in the back as he delivered a sermon at the Hussainiya. If they did not stop talking immediately he would say to them—just like that, in front of everyone sitting in there—Get out! They would make a show of looking around, to let everyone know how genuinely chagrined they were and how they felt the awkwardness of actually getting up and leaving. And they would stay like that until the other people in the Hussainiya made it clear that they had to leave. He would not resume his homily until he saw their backs vanish, going down the stairs. He who knows God and worships Him . . . , he would bark, going back to his explanation of the passages he had recited from Abu Dharr.
You did well . . . you did well. That’s what he began saying to me as I gave my first sermon on one of my trips back from Najaf. I did not deserve his praise. My legs, concealed by the pulpit behind which I stood, were shaking and my voice came out hesitant, careening unpredictably between my own normal voice and the more forceful voice of a seasoned sermon-giver. Good, you