The apartment hasn’t changed much since I was last here. When was that? So long ago that I can’t remember. It has always been stuffy, dark and dank. In the corridor, I walk under a strip of flypaper hanging from the ceiling; it’s probably as old as I am, brown now, covered with darker spots — carapaces, one presumes.
My half brother the eldest isn’t home, for which I’m exceedingly grateful. He’s probably playing boyish games with his buddies. I don’t ask about him, nor does his wife offer any information on his whereabouts. She leads me through folding double doors, deeper into her den. I note the miniature ladder running through her dark stockings.
The wallpaper has lost all semblance of color or texture. Last time I saw it, if I remember correctly, it was peachy pink with embossed vertical stripes. Now it’s dirty beige. Two walls in the living room are decorated by carpets, giant machine-made Turcomans, to which age has added nothing of interest or worth. Life-sized portraits litter a third wall, black-and-white photographs of plump-looking men, all mustached, none smiling, all keeping a reproachful, stern eye on me as I enter the room, all of them dead. The portraits ensure that the walls will always be more crowded than the living room, that the dead outnumber the living.
My mother looks dead in the living room, but her chest murmurs. She breathes.
“She’s not dead,” my sister-in law says.
My mother’s head and arms fold into her body like commas; because of her diminutive size and the droop of her head, the floral-patterned armchair (roses and dahlias, thorns and leaves) looks as if it belongs in Alice in Wonderland. Her shoes, low black heels, do not reach the floor — she’s always hated slippers. The strip of white in her hair seems to have expanded. Light from a small window hits her face, but it doesn’t bother her. We are all children when we sleep.
I sit by the window. And while I sit
my youth comes back. Sometimes I’d smile. Or spit.
“I can wake her,” my great-niece says. “It’s not difficult to make her stop sleeping.”
I tell them, my sister-in-law and great-niece, that I don’t want to disturb her, or them either. I can wait for a while. I’ll be out of their way. I drag over a nearby high-backed chair and sit facing my mother, the window behind me. The few leaves on the ficus tree next to me are wilted and scorched, whether from lack of light, or of blessed watering, or of loving attention, I can’t tell. There doesn’t seem to be another potted plant in the apartment.
The armchair’s back faces the rest of the living room. You can watch television without having to be disturbed by the sight of my mother. She can stare out the window toward the world, but not toward her family. Maybe she’s the one who made the choice. Maybe she’s the one who wanted to keep looking out, not in.
There must be a word in some language that describes the anguish you experience upon suddenly coming face-to-face with your terrifying future. I can’t think of one in any of the languages I know.
Maybe it exists in Swahili or Sanskrit.
Maybe I can make one up, like Hamsun’s Kuboaa.
Maybe the word is just mother.
There is a word I know: litost. In Czech, according to Milan Kundera, litost is a state of agony and torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery.
The more I observe my mother, the more I think she looks like a Chekhovian character resting before a long journey, possibly a train trip, though God knows we no longer have passenger trains in Lebanon. Like a constipated creek in dry summer months, the drool of sleep flows leisurely and intermittently from the left corner of her slack mouth as her head falls southeasterly forward. Her breathing comes at me in jagged intervals, a whispery snore.
I don’t wish to be here. She’s contagious. My breathing becomes as serrated as hers.
There’s a milky gash in the dark chestnut coffee table next to her, a table that hasn’t felt the smooth pampering of a coat of varnish in at least a decade. On it, alongside an inopportune desk lamp, sits an old, round, ticktocking alarm clock with a spherical skullcap for a bell. But what captures my attention is another object on the table: a mother-of-pearl-encrusted music box, hand-sized, that I remember well from my childhood. I recall the day she bought it as a gift to herself.
I control my breathing because I feel a flood of emotions rising. I haven’t seen that music box since I was married off.
“I begged of you, O Memory, / to be my best assistant,” wrote Cavafy.
I assess my surroundings. My sister-in-law isn’t in the room. She’s making blustery, demented chopping noises in the kitchen, but her granddaughter spuds on the couch in front of the flickering television while banging the keys of an older-model laptop, studying me out of the corner of her eye. I must restrain myself.
My mother bought the music box because of its oddness; it had two twirling ballerinas, not just one, a pseudo-Sapphic pas de deux. It was Russian, or appeared so, and we all assumed the music it played was Russian too. It isn’t. I may not recall what I had for breakfast this morning or whether I had breakfast at all, but I can whistle that tune note for note, even though I probably haven’t opened the box in sixty years.
The twisted red coils of the heater in the far corner emit a steady electric hum that feels ominous in this situation. I begin to perspire again.
The tinny piano-imitating tune interred within the box is Chopin’s Waltz no. 2 in C-sharp Minor. I had forgotten all about this box, forgotten it even existed. I’d dismembered it in my memories. I’d disremembered it.
No wonder I was so easily infected. The Chopin virus was already latent in my system.
I desperately wish to sneak the Russian box into my handbag, but I resist my shameful urge. There are things I just won’t do, as much as I want to, if I intend to live decently with myself afterward.
I’ll listen to Rubinstein the Pole play the waltzes when I get home.
I distract myself by gazing at the barely perceptible steam rising off a damp pink sweater that’s draped over the top of the heater. The girl must have come in not long before I did, wet from the rain. She chews her gum loudly.
My mother used to call me a praying mantis (the term in Arabic translates to “prophet’s mare,” which is beautiful, if you ask me) because I was tall and scrawny. I think she meant a stick insect, but whether as a child or as a woman, I rarely disabused her of her incorrect assertions. Yet as I sit before her, I realize she’s much thinner than I ever was. She’s gone from Rubens to Schiele.
Many suggest that we close the circle as we age by growing childlike. The way she sits, folded upon herself, I’d go as far as to say that she’s shrinking to fetus form. Her appearance has changed as well, and I don’t mean just the intense reticulation of lines and wrinkles, the true stigmata of life. She wears someone else’s skin, someone much larger, a hand-me-down skin. A bluff of short spiky hairs sprouts on her upper lip, sparse Hitlerian. Her face is both gaunt and puffy; its muscles are completely slack. It has no discernible angles. My mother’s countenance has turned androgynous.
This is what I have to look forward to.
In slumber, my mother is melancholia in human form. I wonder, though, whether I only see this in her because I expect it. For all I know she may be dreaming of flowers and wheat fields, butterflies and Swiss Alps, chocolate and Chanel. Maybe that mind of hers is happy in its insanity. Devoid of worries and responsibility, of mundane earthly concerns, she may have reached Nirvana, without guru or Sherpa.