She wouldn’t leave with us. She says that life here is no different than people’s lives elsewhere. Though she’s never traveled, she can imagine the cities of the whole world. She can imagine the people there — how they cross the streets and wear their clothes and what they eat. She doesn’t need to go anywhere to understand all that, she sees it all from her spot in her mountain house. After the death of my grandfather Hamza, Nahil returned to this mountain house and stayed here, leaving the house in Zuqaq al-Blat to my father. She carries the whole world in her soul without ever changing her location. She never goes to see anything. She says that she can imagine everything. She invents her own pictures from the news and the images on the television that she has finally allowed into her room. I return and find Nahil exactly as I’ve imagined her, surrounded by religious books handwritten in a large script I can’t decipher. She is sitting in her bed, the Hikmeh in her hands. It wasn’t easy for her to get a hold of this book — when my grandmother requested a handwritten copy of the Hikmeh, the presence in the house of a Christian, Olga, created some difficulties for the Druze religious men. I’ve never turned the pages of the Hikmeh in my life. My mother had one but it disappeared when we left the house in Zuqaq al-Blat after my brother Baha’’s death. The bombs started falling on the roofs of the buildings and we had to flee our home to take refuge in the house in the mountains. We left, taking nothing with us except a few clothes, our passports and the documents that we needed to travel.
I come back and find Nahil unchanged, as if she hasn’t grown older. A mild case of Parkinson’s, which comes and goes, restricts her movements. When it comes on, her whole body shakes and she can’t be still. Her head jerks awkwardly to the left and right, her tongue gets thick but she insists on talking. She hasn’t changed, though she’s started covering her head with a long, white mandil. In my memory, she’s a woman who never covered her head, her thick, wavy hair that’s a color between gray and black. She would go out without her head covered even in the winter, leaving her white mandil draped over her shoulders. She went out like that, in front of people, without a care and then came back all wet, soaking from head to toe. Her face would glow a little then return to normal, though deep in her womb a little climax had burst forth, then just as quickly dried up and disappeared. She wasn’t afraid of anyone and in fact felt she was stronger than everyone else. Perhaps these feelings were simply the result of what people used to say about her. She could be stronger than everyone else because they knew about her powerful curses. “God save us from Nahil’s curses!” is what people said. They’d say this and repeat the famous tale about the army officer her curses killed.
This was in 1958, when a soldier entered the house by force to arrest my father and interrogate him about a shooting in Hadath. The soldier pushed my father roughly to get him into the jeep. My grandmother Nahil went to talk to the officer who’d remained sitting in the jeep, urging him to release my father, begging him to let him stay with his family because he was an only son, with no brothers, and because his wife, that is to say my mother Nadia, was that very day about to give birth to her second child, my brother Baha’. But the officer wouldn’t listen to Nahil and she started assailing him with curses, a group of people gathering around her: “May curses befall you and go with you to your grave… May they go with you to your grave…” She repeated this over and over, holding her head in her hands as if she were afraid it would fall off. My father wasn’t detained long, but he did receive many blows to the head there. And my brother was born while my father was in prison. The men of the family always say that on the day my father was released, the soldier entered the officer’s room to bring him his usual cup of coffee and found him dead in his bed.
Nahil laughs when she hears these accounts of her power to affect the destinies of men. One day, before my brother Baha’ was killed, she told me, “There’s no magic, none at all, don’t believe it, it’s all lies. It’s just that there hasn’t been any goodness in this house for a long time, even before the war started.”
This is what she told me, adding that since she moved to Beirut and stopped visiting al-Sayyid Abdullah and the Prophet Job’s holy tomb in the mountains, a series of crises have befallen not only this house but also its family’s health, finances and offspring. My grandmother then criticized my mother, saying that my mother had taught us nothing about religion, that she never opened the Hikmeh even once, though it’s constantly been in her sight. Nadia never answered these accusations. It’s as though she didn’t care, as though neither Nahil nor anyone else could touch on what actually preoccupied her. Nahil never once said that it was because of how Hamza lived his life that the family left religion; she has never made such an accusation. I’ve always believed, however, that Hamza was extremely far from any kind of belief in the presence of the sacred. From the stories we’ve heard about him, it seems to me he was always ready to defile anything sacred to fulfill his own ambitions. Hamza lived his life convinced that life on earth was both paradise and hell, that people’s lives begin and end here — that the things we don’t live don’t exist. He used to say that, on the whole, people are a bunch of errors and mistakes. This view of life and the world is his legacy to his son Salama… and then it was our turn, Baha’’s and mine. Hamza didn’t realize that we no longer believe in the idea of prophets or holy men because of this inheritance, his way of thinking.
My grandmother has lived her whole life making a place for the sacred in our house, but it has vanished, its place taken by an existential anxiety that sleeps in our beds and shares our dreams. Thinking about this always takes me back to my mother Nadia’s silence. Sometimes my imagination starts working and I say that Nadia is silent not because of my brother’s death but because she can’t be a prophet like a man can. Her words will never be carved into the walls of the house so all our visitors can read them. Her silence is simply a protest against this. One evening, in our secret apartment near the Arab university, I found myself asking Georges why I couldn’t be a prophet, but a man could. He didn’t answer and instead jokingly whispered things like, “Why aren’t your questions ever like other women’s questions?” “How did my luck bring me a woman like you?” he asked theatrically, lifting his hands up as though imploring a third party there in the room with us… that third person being God! He approached me, bent over and kissed my lips, “You’re my very own prophet!” he said and sprang onto the bed. I didn’t feel his words or kisses because at that moment my head was filled with the question of prophethood!
Throughout my childhood and adolescence, Nadia’s silence preoccupied me; I couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t stand up to Nahil and defend herself. Why does she never say anything but the words necessary to run our household affairs, words to do with food, health and school? I never know if she’s happy or joyful, sad or in pain. She never once talks about what she’s feeling. Only about things outside of her body and soul. Things she has no relationship to. To me, Nadia’s like a visitor to earth— she doesn’t want to change anything, inherit anything or leave anything behind; she doesn’t want to take or to give. When I think about her now, the only impression I have is the one she gave us: that she had no power or strength and that we could take advantage of her — in the way that all children my age and my brother’s age take advantage— we could do what we wanted and we could tell her anything we wanted. Perhaps my mother’s silence is derived from her belief that perfection is found only in religious books; it has no relationship to real life. In this way, she isn’t so different than my grandfather and his opinions of the world we live in. She is different from him, though, because she sees and knows and doesn’t do anything. I have never once seen Nadia read the Hikmeh. I’ve seen her read newspapers, novels, magazines and any kind of stories that fall into her hands. Deep inside of herself she believes that religion is love. That’s what she gives us, unconditional love, nothing else.