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ALI BADER CHAPTER 2 Day two B etween us were the salt cellar and the small peppermill, two glasses of wine, and a box of tissues. As the time passed, the silence started to swallow me up, while chit-chat swallowed up the whole restaurant. You were unable to offer me a helping hand. The autumnal sun was visible through the restaurant window, bathing the centre of the city. The dome and the faded ochre walls of the palace gleamed softly in the light. “Let’s go out,” you said to me. “It’ll be lovely and warm soon.” I shut my eyes in surrender to a rare inertia. I was not used to taking it easy. “That’s a lot to ask, my friend,” I said to you. “Still, don’t be down. Remember the past. Go with it. It’s your only consolation. Pick up your bag and go with the days that have gone. What’s real is what’s gone, not what’s to come. Memory, my friend, memory is what has occupied me night and day since I set foot in Europe.” Right then, I felt I had fallen into a big trap. Silence gaped. You started touching me, trying as best you could to prolong the conversation. I looked at your fingers as they stroked my palm. You talked with me. Your words sounded like grunts. Suddenly everything disappeared. I was elsewhere probing my wounds, plunging backwards into the past. After a short silence I said to you: “Something inside me sometimes makes me go over my mother’s life.” You heard me very well and put your hand over mine. “Stop . . .” I screamed inside as I looked you full in the eyes. That moment I felt happy and confused, like a lemon tree standing alone in the middle of the garden, delirious under the brilliant rays of summer sun. * Before the appearance of the armed extremists, my mother did not leave the house much. In the evenings she would sit in the courtyard or some quiet corner of the house. In the mornings she would flit between the kitchen stove and the room preparing food for us. Only rarely would someone notice her presence. If my father did 12 BANIPAL 53 – SUMMER 2015
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ALI BADER so, it would be to order her to spray insecticide in the toilet or to fill the water tank. My exhausted mother, always sweltering in the heat, had little passion for emotions and love. She barely had enough time to see me or acknowledge me, so I remained little known to her. Even if I had surprised her with the blossoming of my body in adolescence and my metamorphosis into a different being, she would not have known how all that had happened. For my part, I was not clamouring to attract her gaze, nor demanding like other girls. I was silent, shy, always busy in some corner of the house with secret games. I only went out to go to school. My mother did not stop working for a second. She would even mumble what she was going to do the following day in her sleep. The only thing she was proud of was me. She was always bragging in front of the neighbours because I, her daughter, won all the school prizes. She would boast that I had won the top prize every year since I had entered the town school. My mother was very happy with me and prayed every day that I become a doctor. It would have been an honour for her. She pleaded with, begged, cajoled God to recompense her for what she had lost with my father. Perhaps out of hatred and disgust for him, she could never get used to him. Her resentment at him did not stop over time, but festered. The sore did not burst, but seeped. She hated him with every atom of her being, with every thought and feeling her body housed. She wished disaster upon him, illness, accidents, anything provided she did not have to nurse him. Revenge turned out to be sweet. God finally answered her when my father carried out a suicide bombing and killed lots of farmers, and himself too. My mother would wake up at seven to make breakfast, and with her waking the familiar blare of the radio would impinge on me. A mixture of the voice of the broadcaster and the hiss of the samovar. The sound of car engines and the eager chaos of morning. A deep need for the songs of Fairuz and a boundless appetite for morning bustle. After the armed men came and occupied the town, the schools stopped completely. Morning rites stopped. The town fell silent. I spent a few days at home helping her. After my father began working with the armed men, I started helping her at her new job cleaning the armed men’s house. BANIPAL 53 – SUMMER 2015 13

ALI BADER

CHAPTER 2

Day two B

etween us were the salt cellar and the small peppermill, two glasses of wine, and a box of tissues. As the time passed, the silence started to swallow me up, while chit-chat swallowed up the whole restaurant. You were unable to offer me a helping hand. The autumnal sun was visible through the restaurant window, bathing the centre of the city. The dome and the faded ochre walls of the palace gleamed softly in the light.

“Let’s go out,” you said to me. “It’ll be lovely and warm soon.” I shut my eyes in surrender to a rare inertia. I was not used to taking it easy. “That’s a lot to ask, my friend,” I said to you. “Still, don’t be down. Remember the past. Go with it. It’s your only consolation. Pick up your bag and go with the days that have gone. What’s real is what’s gone, not what’s to come. Memory, my friend, memory is what has occupied me night and day since I set foot in Europe.”

Right then, I felt I had fallen into a big trap. Silence gaped. You started touching me, trying as best you could to prolong the conversation. I looked at your fingers as they stroked my palm. You talked with me. Your words sounded like grunts. Suddenly everything disappeared. I was elsewhere probing my wounds, plunging backwards into the past. After a short silence I said to you: “Something inside me sometimes makes me go over my mother’s life.” You heard me very well and put your hand over mine.

“Stop . . .” I screamed inside as I looked you full in the eyes. That moment I felt happy and confused, like a lemon tree standing alone in the middle of the garden, delirious under the brilliant rays of summer sun.

*

Before the appearance of the armed extremists, my mother did not leave the house much. In the evenings she would sit in the courtyard or some quiet corner of the house. In the mornings she would flit between the kitchen stove and the room preparing food for us. Only rarely would someone notice her presence. If my father did

12 BANIPAL 53 – SUMMER 2015

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