My sister-in-law tries to move my lowing mother forward, and the scream returns. I cover my ears.
“Take her back,” shouts Fadia. “Leave and take her with you. Take her back.”
I lean against the glazed door separating the crowded foyer from the rest of my apartment. I wish to be transported to another dimension. Nothing makes sense. I watch the proceedings as if I were at a screening of an Antonioni movie without subtitles. My hands, usually so calm, tremble slightly, and my left eye moves restlessly, independently. In my head, and only in my head, I hear a fast rendition of one of Liszt’s transcendental études, played by Sviatoslav Richter on 78 rpm.
There is a remoteness to the air about me. I am off kilter.
Take her back.
I am slowly beginning to regain my composure, to collect its dispersed shards, when I realize that my neighbors and I are emphatically forcing my mother out of the house — my own mother. How rude it is.
Kicking your mother out — your dying mother.
Now, describing my mother as dying doesn’t mean much, signifies almost nothing. All of us are dying; all days are numbered. My mother has been at death’s door for quite a while, but has willfully managed to keep from opening it, or knocking for that matter. Yet that body, that vessel, can’t withstand life much longer.
Above her head a ticktocking alarm clock should be floating, one of the old ones with a metal dome on top.
At the end of every summer, my mother cooked lamb fat in salt to store for winter, and kept up this ritual even with the advent of refrigeration and the availability of meats year-round. She shouldn’t cook lamb fat this year. No green bananas. She’ll soon be departing this building, my life, and this world. But not soon enough.
“Take her back,” Fadia keeps repeating, “take her back,” in an unrelenting tone that brooks no discussion, no disagreement, a tone that grows stronger and more insistent with each repetition. “Take her back.”
Let me go; take back thy gift.
Of all the lovely phrases and images, the bright jewels embedded in Tennyson’s “Tithonus,” this sentence, “take back thy gift,” is my favorite. Lodged in my memory from the moment I first read it, it quickens my essence.
I wither slowly in thine arms,
Here at the quiet limit of the world.
Joumana and her broom remain silent as Fadia talks and talks. How she, a university professor, can be so close to Fadia, who was unable to pass her baccalaureate, is difficult to understand, a most odd pairing. They’re conjoined like an orange and its navel.
Fadia, arms wide like wings, guides the invaders out the door. Her offensively bright housedress, Yellow Submarine palette, is long enough to sweep the floor as she moves. My sister-in-law seems dispirited, like a weary actress in a failed play.
Take her back.
Here at the quiet limit of the world it isn’t so quiet.
Untangling my feelings toward Fadia is as challenging as any of Psyche’s tasks, and more difficult still is trying to understand hers toward me. The child looked up to me as a young bride; she despised me as a divorcée. Yet as we aged, after she married and had her own family, she seemed to soften. She became civil; she may not like me, but she doesn’t loathe me either, and from time to time she exhibits a kindness and generosity so profound as to confound me.
The war forced us to be strangers no more. We helped and supported each other during the battles, though that didn’t transform our relationship into any recognizable kind of friendship. Other than uttering polite meaningless words, we hardly spoke. A word here, a phrase there.
The longest exchange we ever had was on a cold morning in 1995 as I was heading to work. Coming out my door, I surprised her, cheeks ruddy with cold and good health as she ascended the stairs to the daily gathering of the witches, having bought a warm tray of kenafeh, its smell hunger inducing even wrapped in waxy paper. Good morning, good morning, and Fadia suggested I wear an overcoat on such a cold day. I told her I was warm-blooded, but she insisted that once I was out on the street the wind was freezing cold.
“Once you’re out there,” she said as her hands stroked her camelhair coat, “you’ll thank Fadia.”
She was right that day.
I stopped dismissing her as inconsequential early on. Fadia was outrageously frivolous as a child, and remains so as an adult, yet she possesses a courage, a gumption, that few of her generation have. One night years ago — she was nineteen, possibly twenty, definitely no longer a student — the sky was inky, India ink, and she was outside her door fuming much too loudly. Sartre wrote, “Hell is the Other,” which I agree with, of course, but I also agree with Fernando Vallejo: “the torment of Hell is noise.” That night Fadia was the inferno of my soul.
At the time, Fadia was causing her father, Hajj Wardeh, great concern, and concerned he should have been, as it turned out. The favorite and the youngest, she was the only one of his three daughters who was still unmarried. Worse yet, her delight in Egyptian romantic movies, her obsession with them, banished sleep from his nights. He correctly worried that she not only watched them with her girlfriends but was also sneaking into theaters by herself when she had the chance. Having watched a few of these films himself, he understood that they were breeding grounds of illusion, planting misbegotten seeds in the minds of impressionable young Arab girls and sowing unhappiness and discontent when life turned out to be less ideal than it appeared on those cursed screens.
He tried to forbid her from going with her girlfriends, but the truth was, and he was fully aware of it, that his family had reached the point where his daughter ruled the realm. She could inveigle her father to agree to whatever she wanted, within reason, of course. She considered his demands mere suggestions. She possessed a potent weapon: her pout. He loved her so deeply that all it took was for her to curl her lips and push them out, squint her eyes and stare at him, and he would hastily rescind whatever it was that he had merely suggested.
Hajj Wardeh arrived at the most expected of solutions: it was high time she was married. He found the perfect suitor, a son of a good friend of his. The husband-to-be’s name was Abdallah, a handsome twenty-six-year-old, educated, intelligent, decent, a good Muslim, an engineer who had graduated from the American University of Beirut with high honors. When Hajj Wardeh invited his good friend’s family for dinner, he noticed with great glee that Abdallah practically fell over every time Fadia looked at him. He kept expecting the poor young man’s eyes to jump out of their sockets as in the popular cartoons. Nothing was said during the dinner, of course, but he foresaw a full proposal by the next day.
Joy caressed his heart, if only briefly.
That night, after she figured out the purpose of the dinner, Fadia the noisemaker threw her infamous tantrum, which the entire neighborhood heard. She would not marry just anybody, and certainly not this son of her father’s good friend. She would marry for love, and only for love. She would not reenter the apartment until her father promised he wouldn’t give her to that man. She didn’t care who heard her night cries. She’d sleep on the landing. All of Beirut would know her father was an indecent man for forcing her to marry against her will. She didn’t care how he was to tell his best friend that she wasn’t interested. She wouldn’t set foot inside her home unless her father relented. The poor man did, and a suddenly meek Fadia was smart enough not to gloat in her triumph.
What Hajj Wardeh didn’t know at the time, although he was wise enough to understand it later, was that Fadia already had her eyes set on a future husband. Yes, she would marry for love. She and her girlfriends had noticed a young man at the theaters, attending the same movies they were. They approached him the third or fourth time they saw him. They found him charming and delightful, as enamored of Egyptian movies as they were. He was a gentleman from a good family and treated them with the utmost respect. All of Fadia’s girlfriends wanted him as a husband, this well-mannered, considerate man with a good job who had the same interests they did. What girl would want anything more?