“Come, Fate, a friend at need / Come with all speed! / Come, my best friend, / And speed my end! / Away, away! / Let me not look upon another day!”
Nora felt the spirit breathe those words down her spine. She chased Sophocles’ scattered words through the cemetery, searching for a hidden gravestone.
“When I have suffered my doom, I shall come to know my sin; but if the sin is with my judges, I could wish them no fuller measure of evil than they, on their part, mete wrongfully to me.”
— Antigone.
She flinched, as though those words were a message directed at her. It made Rafa hesitate before translating the words of Oedipus on another gravestone:
“When he discovers the truth of his actions, he is wrought with horror and self-loathing. He now devotes himself to his own punishment. He plans to walk the earth as an outcast until the end of his days.”
— Oedipus.
Rafa shivered at the echo of those words, augmented by her deep silence. He sensed she longed to hear more of the tormenting messages. She turned to face Zoroaster’s words on the gravestone behind her:
“What am I? and how and whence am I? and whither do I go?”
— Zoroaster.
That summed up her mood. Trying to avoid Rafa’s inquisitive look, Nora noticed some Hebrew lines:
“A loving son and father, I am to be remembered as number 10, creating and animating matter, expressed by 0, which, alone, is of no value.”
She found refuge in that zero, surrounded by invisible voices and emotions unfolding within her. She was connected to the longing in those messages, finding some vindication in Neruda’s lines:
“Dies slowly he who avoids a passion, / who prefers the dots on the i to a whirlpool of emotions.”
Near the gate she met another Arabic inscription:
“Here lies an Iraqi poet who faced many winters, stuffing his clothes with Arabic newspapers, ruminating on their defeats, and still dreaming here, amid the kindled ashes of outcasts, of a land that seeks respite so it may catch its breath and gather the ashes of its scattered sons.”
Nora usually ended up resting under the poplar tree. There, she discovered an unmarked grave hidden deep in the grass, a sheet of gray stone blending into the earth as though it wasn’t a grave but the torso of a man who’d laid down for a short rest, leaning his head against the poplar trunk, and then turned into stone. There was an old key affixed to the stone with two hooks, beside which an Arabic inscription read “The Keyholder.” The deceased’s name was buried beneath a thick protrusion of poplar roots and Nora didn’t bother to try to uncover it.
“Very few burials take place here now because the site’s full, but they do allow people to bury ashes still,” Rafa said.
“The idea of a land saturated with dead, the soil closing over their faces — it’s horrifying. Where I come from graves are filled and emptied continuously, like buckets, so that every newcomer has a place to rest.”
“Here, people own their burial plots.” The idea did seem odd at that moment even to him.
Over the course of their visits to the cemetery, Rafa could see the change in Nora. It was as if a door had opened between her and those people, as if she had been smuggled through the usually sealed door in the back of her head. Rafa was sure that some kind of barrier separated her from her past.
“So you grew up without a dad. What’s it like to be fatherless?” The question came out as naturally as a line on one of those stones, and his answer was equally spontaneous:
“Cancer was there with me and my mother from the second I opened my eyes. We made such a compact little triangle. Between my mother’s needs and school, I didn’t have a spare second to pity myself. All I wanted was for the chemotherapy to stop the disease advancing in Mom’s liver, but they eventually had to remove it.”
Nora saw her own face in the mirror of his; death was the morning coffee they shared under that poplar tree. “Was it easy to find a donor?”
“They used a piece of mine. It’s amazing. You can grow a whole new liver from a tiny piece of someone else’s!”
“Like the will to live. Even when you chop off its head, it grows leaves again.” The gravestones around them listened, sucking on their peeled hearts. “Was she sick for long?”
“We were very close for a long time. We didn’t think of those years as years of sickness but as years when we were close to each other. I considered her an extension of my own liver! You might say I got to know her better than I’d ever been able to get to know myself. Taking care of a sick body is totally different from taking my obliviously healthy body for granted. I knew her needs better than my own. Anyway, the piece of liver lasted ten years before it finally failed us both.”
The surrounding graves felt restless, and pigeons flapped in the air. The dead were eavesdropping, releasing their stories to provoke the memories and nostalgia of the living.
“Do the graves make you think of the torment going on inside of them?” she asked. “I grew up thinking of death as a date with torment.”
Looking around, all Rafa could see was the abstract map of his life: the dreams he’d left behind, the children he hadn’t brought into the world.
“Graves remind me of the torment that happens on the outside, to tell you the truth.” His answer revealed in front of her eyes a map whose contours spiraled out from inside the grave, to show that those who’d died weren’t cut off from the world they’d once inhabited. They carried their ordeals with them and smuggled them into their graves, into their dry bones and sodden soil, constantly pushing and spreading their death into the outside world. Death was a re-reading of the map.
“Sometimes I think death’s a decision we make with our eyes all the time.” The fine drizzle faded away and the sun poured through the clouds, freshly washed and shimmering. Nora continued, “When the eye fails to see, the heart follows, dragging the whole body down. Death is blindness, a total eclipse of insight.” She was absentmindedly rolling a lock of her hair around her forefinger, bringing it up to her nose and sniffing. Lately, her hair had begun to smell like grass warmed in the sun.
A way off, a homeless man was kneeling at a grave with a bouquet of yellow roses. Nora watched him taking the bouquets from grave to grave, kneeling, mumbling verses and moving on, joining each grave together in his prayer of yellow flowers. The row of graves he visited looked like they’d been freshly dug that morning, but she knew that no burials took place there any more.
Like the birds chattering helplessly, Nora went on. “It might have been a blessing if my father had got cancer. But he was above cancer — in the sense of the rapid proliferation of cells. For him, any excessive growth at all was considered a sin.”
Rafa breathed slowly; by breathing he allowed her to dip farther into the past. A poplar leaf blew at Nora and she squeezed its juice between thumb and index finger. “I remember the lemon leaves that the woman who raised me used to crush and rub under my armpits before sending me to say good morning to my father at dawn on feast days. I’d sit there itching all over in my gold brocade dress while my father lay in the corner, dozing, oblivious to my existence. I would wait breathlessly for it to be morning, tugging at him to take me to the special holiday prayer at the Holy Mosque. I remember one particular morning, with the silence heaped in mountains separating me from him. In the darkness I knew what was wrong: father never looked me in the eye, never really saw me. He saw nothing but the male heir I’d deprived him of. That dawn, I wanted him to see me. I came so close with the gas lantern, peering into his closed eyes, that suddenly his beard caught fire, waking him up and startling us both. I put it out with my bare hands.” She opened her palms wide for Rafa to see the traces of burn. The lines on her palms, for life, heart, and head, were gone. “I don’t think Father ever forgave me for it. He haunted me with that pale, charcoal-blackened face, a permanent nightmare.”