My grandmother died some months after the death of my father. I rang my aunt and let her know that I would not be able to travel and join her in the ritual observations, because the twins were down with fever, and because in just a matter of days I was to take my final examinations for the year. She heard me out, without comment. Years later, however, she chastised me roundly for my conduct. ‘Auntie,’ I told her, ‘I loved and respected my grandmother very much — you know how much you all mean to me!’ The truth is, I don’t know whether what I said was sincere, or a mixture of sincerity and flattery, for I had surprised myself with my own words.
I rarely see my aunt, and we have spent only the odd week here and there under the same roof — which does not explain the closeness that draws us together, which is rather like a secret understanding, something that goes without saying. Maybe the reason for it is the strength of our mutual attachment to the same man, perhaps a shared, tacit admiration. We go for years without meeting; then we get together and the talk flows freely, as if we were picking up where we’d left off on a conversation already begun. I move familiarly around her house, sleep peacefully at night, and awake surrounded by a calm that amazes me. I contemplated this, wondering whether I was unwittingly replicating a romantic scene that had stolen into my consciousness from early nineteenth-century French novels and poems: the state of yearning to return to one’s roots and antecedents, to escape from the city to the innocence of the countryside… and so forth and so on. I laughed at this notion, amused because I knew that there was nothing etherial or romantic about my aunt, who was realistic, practical, and earthly; to do justice to a description of her I would have to add all the synonyms the language has to offer. There was no place in my aunt’s life for fragility. Ten times she had given birth, and of those she had borne five survived. She married young, and by the time my father had me, my aunt — two years his junior — had a daughter who was already married. (I no longer remember how many grandchildren and great-grandchildren my aunt had.) Her house was frequented by young and old alike, some who were connected to the household, guests who were as good as connected, others who really were just visitors, people in need of something or seekers of advice, those who came to assist ‘al-Hagga’ or who wanted to enjoy her company and exchange a few words with her. She, meanwhile, was like a bee, never stopping from dawn until dusk — working, issuing orders, arranging, directing, advising, remonstrating, scolding, rebuking, welcoming, and brandishing her sarcasm. (Did I get my own sarcastic tongue from her?)
Early on in my days as a student in the French Department I found myself laughing while leafing through books that contained pictures of Oriental women drawn by French nineteenth-century artists. Their imaginations running wild, all they could come up with was naked or near-naked women, and gauzy, diaphanous veils that covered without concealing anything of the Venus-like bodies. Black-eyed women of the East — and of the artists’ fancy. My aunt’s body was lush, tall, and full-figured, seeming all the more so because of the prominence of her breasts and buttocks, draped in her voluminous jilbaab. At night, she would seat herself on the ground with her legs extended before her, and I would sit close to her so we could chat. It bothered her that I wasn’t married. She would declare she couldn’t believe the young men were so blind that none of them had proposed to me. I would laugh and tell her some had proposed, but that I had turned them down. ‘Bad move,’ she would say. ‘You raised your brothers, and now they’ve grown — what are you waiting for?’ Then she would abruptly cover her mouth with her left hand as if concealing her laughter, or to prevent it escaping from her. ‘Why don’t you marry Salem?’ I didn’t know who Salem was, so I asked her, and she said, ‘Salem is my daughter’s boy!’ She got carried away with enumerating his virtues, and I laughed.
‘Auntie,’ I said, ‘Salem is six years younger than me.’
‘But he’s a doctor and he’s very good,’ she said. I can’t think of anyone but you who would suit him. What do you say? Shall I fix it?’
‘I’m six years older than he is!’ I repeated.
‘What’s wrong with that?’ she said. ‘My grandfather, may he rest in peace, at the age of sixty married a virgin forty years his junior — younger than his youngest daughter. She gave him three sons and he lived past the age of ninety. Her whole life, his wife had nothing but good things to say about him. If you like Salem, take him!’
I hugged her and drew her off on another conversational tack, to get away from the subject of marriage. I asked her her views on life, anticipating the pronouncement with which she usually professed a reluctance that did not succeed in hiding her readiness for a conversation she actually found interesting: ‘You ask strange questions, Niece!’ She held back for a few moments, then replied, ‘Life is both wide-open and narrow. When we spend it sowing and reaping, nurturing and raising, picking up and putting down, coming and going, going up and going down, loving and hating, enduring hardship and anticipating relief, it’s wide-open. And as long as we’re in the thick of it, with folks to the right and left of us, on top and underneath, everyone oppressed or overjoyed — everyone in it together — it stays wide-open. But if we stand back, we say it’s as narrow as the eye of a needle, we say, “Why do we live, only to die? Why build when building ends in demolition? Why cultivate what the wind will only take away? Why expand, only to open our hands and find them empty?” I say, when we’re living life, we find it wide-open even if it’s confining, and when we step back and look at it we find it narrow and suffocating, meaningless and pointless. For instance, when I buy chicks and look at them while they’re little with their pretty yellow fluff, and I get to know them, and each chick is delightful, and I feed and water them, clean their pens, and keep company with them every day, watching them grow, my heart leaps. Look, Nada, if you think I buy chicks in order to butcher them after they grow up — me and everyone else — it doesn’t change my pleasure in them or the fact that my heart leaps with tenderness toward them. Having children isn’t like having chicks, and yet it is. I mean, I carry them for nine months, and my soul hangs on the baby, and our Lord takes him. If life didn’t have its hold on me, I wouldn’t conceive, bear, nurture, and rear another child after that. But life takes me and pulls me onward, and I go along with it. It gives, and I’m happy with what it gives; it bestows a second child on me, and a third; a fourth comes and goes, but the fifth stays. Wide and narrow, child of my brother.
‘All my life, my body has given up before my brain. I go to bed because my legs are tired and my body is wrecked. In bed my mind keeps circling, it won’t slow down or settle. When they took your father to prison, I kept thinking — all night long I would lie there thinking. Then I’d get up in the morning feeling suffocated, anxious and miserable. I had no desire to cook, or wash, or say, “Good morning.” I asked him when he got out, “Did they beat you, dear heart?” He said, “They beat us, my sister, but we didn’t give up. We learned, we built, we expanded, and we lived.” Afterward I said to myself, “He was nearby, inside. I was outside, far away, standing on the shore and thinking, he’s drowning, and my heart was distraught, but he was there in the sea, a drowning man, swimming.” ’