I think of Siham and try to sleep. I go with her to Denmark and become a prince like Hamlet. Hamlet lived in a rotten state, and I live in a rotten state. Hamlet’s father died, and my father died. True, my uncle didn’t kill my father and marry my mother, but what happened to my mother was perhaps more horrible. Hamlet went mad because he was incapable of taking revenge, and I’m on the verge of going mad because someone wants to take revenge on me. Hamlet was a prince watching the world rot around him, and I, too, am watching mine rot. Hamlet went mad, so will I.
When you told me about Ibrahim, your eldest son, with his curly hair, black eyes and long eyelashes, Hamlet came to mind. You say Ibrahim, and I see Hamlet.
The image of Hamlet started to form when you told me of your son’s death. At the time it amazed me that people could recall such painful things. Why wouldn’t they forget? And a terrible thought crossed my mind — that people are only the phantoms of their memories. Ibrahim’s story came up when you were telling me about the beneficial qualities of olive oil and how your mother never used any other remedy.
“Drugs never entered our house,” you told me. “My mother treated herself and us with olive oil. If she felt a pain in her belly, she’d dip a piece of cotton wool in the oil jar and swallow it, and if my father came back from the fields with his feet covered in cuts, she’d dab oil on them, and if her son was crying in pain, she’d run to the demijohn of oil, for the perfect cure.”
When Nahilah told you that three-year-old Ibrahim only liked to eat bread dipped in oil, you told her the boy was like his grandmother. He would dip his bread in oil and eat it with onions, only onions, never any thyme or labneh.* Only onions — but he liked honey, too.
You didn’t know your son.
His mother brought him to the cave several times, and you saw him swaddled in his diapers by candlelight, but you didn’t really see him. All that stuck in your memory was a white face and half-closed eyes. You loved him, of course — could any man not love his firstborn son? You would hold him in your arms and kiss him and then, when his mother came close, forget about him. When he got a little older, Nahilah no longer brought him to the cave.
She would describe him to her husband and imitate his walk, his movements, and his words, but she adamantly refused to bring him to the cave. She said he could understand now and talk, and that the child shouldn’t be exposed to danger. The village was full of informers. You’d agree with her, ask her to imitate the way he talked, and then forget the boy in your feverish efforts to hold onto time as it drained out of the cave. You’d bury your head in her hair and tell her you wanted to sleep with your head resting there, but you wouldn’t sleep.
One day, when Nahilah was telling him about her son, Yunes left the cave. He left his wife with her talk and went off. Nahilah knew he’d go to the house, but she didn’t go after him. Later she’ll tell him she’d been rooted to the spot with fear.
Yunes reached the house, pushed open the old wooden door, went into his wife’s room, turned on the electric light, and saw for himself. The boy was sleeping on his left side, his head resting on his hand, which was curled under the pillow, and his curly black hair covered his face.
Years after that visit, he would tell his wife that when he stood in front of the bed, he forgot where he was and was overwhelmed by beauty. He would tell her that beauty was curly hair flowing over a sleeping face on its pillow.
Yunes doesn’t recall how long he’d stood there before hearing his mother’s footsteps. The old woman had been awakened by the light; she climbed out of bed and went toward the bedroom, asking Nahilah if something had happened.
“When I heard her, I turned off the light,” he told his wife, “and tiptoed out of the house.”
Nahilah would tell him that his mother never stopped interrogating her. “Your mother hates me,” she said.
“You know she’s hated me since day one because she was convinced I was to blame for the mess-up that forced her to cut my finger and bloody the bed sheet, and for the rest of her life she would say she never felt such shame as on that night. But the night you visited, everything changed. I came back, and she was sitting in my room waiting for me. I saw something gentle in her eyes. I opened the door — it was four in the morning — and I heard her voice. She was walking up and down in the room talking to herself. I came in as the last shadows before dawn were slipping from the house.
“‘Was it him?’ she asked. ‘He was here, and you were with him?’
“I asked her to keep her voice down, afraid she’d wake Ibrahim. She lowered it, but it still seemed loud. She shook with excitement as she talked, her words tumbling over one another. She didn’t ask me anything, and I don’t remember what she said. Then she calmed down. She went to the kitchen and returned with two cups of tea and sat down on the floor. I was sleepy and felt my body slipping away. I drank the tea quickly so I could go to bed. Looking at me affectionately, she told me not to worry, she’d take care of Ibrahim when he woke up.
“‘Go and get some sleep,’ she said.
“I felt her eyes boring into my belly — from that night on, her gaze always fell on my belly first. I lay down on my bed. She came and sat on the edge of it and asked me to take her there with me. She didn’t ask me where I went, or how, or where ‘there’ was.
“‘Tell Yunes his mother wants to see him before she dies. I know he doesn’t have much time, Daughter, but tell him.’”
Nahilah told Yunes, but he warned her, “Don’t bring that woman here. I’ll go and see her.”
He didn’t go, though, except when his father died, and after he’d been, his mother said it was like she hadn’t seen him.
You didn’t go, you told me, because after Ibrahim’s accident you were no longer capable of going. “How could you expect me to enter that house after Ibrahim died?”
“His mother,” you said. “His poor mother. I saw how Nahilah died and came to life again. I somehow knew he’d died; nobody told me, I swear. I heard his voice calling for help. I went and found that he was dead. After my only visit to the house, when I saw him sleeping, a special bond grew between us. You could say I started to love him, and I started to find a place in my pack for small presents. Nahilah didn’t understand at first why I insisted she dress him in the pajamas I’d stuffed into the pack. She said they were too big for him, so I asked her to shorten them, and when I explained why, she laughed. She said I was crazy, wanting my son and me to wear the same pajamas. Then she took things one step further. She started buying us the same outfits. I told her I wouldn’t wear Israeli clothes, and she said they weren’t, she sewed them herself. She said, ‘This shirt’s just like Ibrahim’s,’ and that when I wore it I looked amazingly like my son. She would make us matching clothes and say that when Ibrahim grew up we’d be like twins. I started wearing my clothes and imagining my son wearing his. She’d dress him, and then speak to him as if he were me. We became like one man divided in two, one half in the cave, the other at home.”
That was your favorite game.
Nahilah used to say that when she missed her husband, she’d dress Ibrahim in his pajamas, and that would take care of it. And Yunes would tell her that when he didn’t change his shirt for a while, it meant he was longing for her and her son. “See, the shirt’s torn and I haven’t changed it. That means I really am homesick. Plus it means you need to make us some new clothes.”
Clothes became the prime subject of the meetings of husband and wife in that cave suspended above the village of Deir al-Asad. The husband would bring cloth from Lebanon and the wife would sew it while protesting that she didn’t want to turn into a tailor, she had to take care of the unborn child growing in her belly.