The Clothesline Swing. Ahmad Danny Ramadan
mother welcomed him with kisses. Her eyes were teary and her heart was skipping a beat as she pulled him closer and gave him a hug. She smiled at him and stepped back to allow him to reach his father’s wheelchair. He approached his father without speaking a word, and kissed his father’s fingers in a respectful gesture. The father, however, looked away before demanding Bassem come and take him to his bedroom, closing the door behind them with a slam that sounded like a bullet.
Twenty-three! Twenty-four! Twenty-five!
The artist woke up frightened in his old room and looked around to make sure he was in his family’s home. He jumped off his bed, but that made him dizzy. He opened the curtains, allowing his homeland’s warm, calm sun to enter the room, and he felt it like warm water spilled over his body. He smiled and scratched his chest with his fingers. He took a step back and looked at his reflection in the mirror before he started to take off his brother’s pajamas and put on the same outfit he was wearing yesterday.
His mother entered the room, unannounced, while he was still in his underwear, and she gasped in surprise, commanding him to stop what he was doing this very minute. She left the room and came back with a set of clean, shiny clothes. She started to help him put them on, just like when he was a child still learning how to button his shirt.
He felt serenity that he hadn’t felt in ages, and he tilted his mother’s head to his chest and printed a kiss on her forehead before going outside with her.
As he entered the living room, he saw all of his family members sitting there: his father, brother and his widowed sister’s daughters. He felt their eyes examining him, so he avoided their gazes and reached for the landline, calling the embassy to ask for his stuff, which they had promised to send to him. When the phone went on ringing without an answer, he remembered that today was one of the glorious national holidays, celebrating a revolution of the past.
Twenty-six! Twenty-seven! Twenty-eight! Twenty-nine! Thirty!
He tried to reach Amal on the cell phone that he had sent her on her last birthday, but he couldn’t reach her. He remembered asking her to put a ringtone especially for him on her new mobile: “Kiss,” by Prince. He didn’t know its lyrics exactly, but he had seen it once on a TV show, and the TV presenter translated the lyrics, providing him with a vivid lyrical memory of the whole song. He could imagine her shiny new phone, asking for a simple kiss from the love of his life, over and over.
When she didn’t pick up, he knew he had to call her mother.
The old lady picked up the phone, but she wasn’t the carrier of good news. Amal had left the house and escaped with a lover days ago. The old mother was in shock when it happened, slapping her face repeatedly and crying the name of her daughter time and time again; but now, she had come to peace with the news, after speaking about it seven thousand times to seven thousand different female neighbours. She told him that Amal had taken all the money he used to send her for their wedding and escaped with Saad, who was barely twenty-one years of age.
He wished the mother well and hung up the phone before he started laughing hard.
Thirty-one! Thirty-two! Thirty-three! Thirty-four!
He opened his old painting case, pulled some white paper from the drawer and started to unleash the colours from their little prisons. He tried to speak to the colours the way he used to, and he tried to imagine each one of them stretching out perfectly over the white paper, drawing a new naked body aching for freedom.
After an hour, he lost hope; he had just splashed his colours on the painting, creating a faceless figure of colours.
His back was acting up again, so he went to his parents’ room, knocked softly on the door and opened it. From the small crack he managed to see his sleeping father and his mother sitting on a chair, giving him her back, gazing out of a wooden window with her hands touching softly in her lap.
He murmured her name and she woke up, as if coming out of a coma, and followed him to his room, where he took off his shirt and she grabbed the ointment.
Thirty-five! Thirty-six! Thirty-seven! Thirty-eight! Thirty-nine!
While his mother was placing the ointment softly on the burning wounds on his back, his mind wandered, against his will, to the moment when they took off his shirt in the middle of the desert. There were two men witnessing him sitting on his knees and begging for mercy, while a judge was standing apart. “For your crimes against the decency of society, you’re sentenced to forty lashes,” the judge said. “May Allah have mercy on you.”
A man wearing a black mask held the whip high, praised Allah the merciful, and started counting.
Forty!
“You slept?” I say, whispering.
…
“Are you awake?” in the quietest range of voice I can possibly produce.
…
“I love you,” I say, not expecting an answer.
“I love you too.” Your voice comes from a land within a dream.
Chapter 3
The Tale of the Man Who Never Slept for the Rest of His Days
“Where did you leave the doughnuts?” I hear you screaming from the kitchen.
“I haven’t the foggiest!” I respond, sitting by my desk, rolling a joint.
“The show must go on,” Death says in his deep voice. From the Greek tales he comes, and decides to join me for a puff. I finish rolling the joint with experienced movements, licking the paper and smoothly attaching it to form the perfectly shaped tunnel of happiness, held together with a paper roach.
“If I don’t entertain him,” I ask, “who will?”
I worked my magic on the smoke detector in my office years ago. When friends come over the scent of marijuana, mixed with the smell of old furniture and whisky, is the first thing they notice. Some of them never ask, others ask directly. “Do you smoke up?” they say with wide anticipating eyes and a wicked look on their faces. I smile, and I usually answer by opening my small stash and rolling a new joint.
I used to have a dealer here in Vancouver; it was the first contact I asked for when we immigrated here. He was this tall white man with a sweet smile who always came by on his bike and delivered the weed to our house. He carried a big bag on his back and when he opened it, the smell of weed would fill out my whole house. He spoke beautifully about the different strains he brought, expertly explaining the effects of each, suggesting a certain sativa for the early morning hours, a specific indica for an intimate late-night gathering. “Love Potion,” he murmured admiringly, pulling out a jar filled to the brim with well-sealed bags of eighths, “this little bitch has got me into so much trouble.” We used to laugh, and I used to buy whatever he suggested.
I buy my weed from big pharmacies now; I walk there, and I carry my little prescription permit card. A young girl with a tattoo on the side of her face asks me to tap my credit card on her machine, and never cares about what I bought; she never tells me stories of sexual encounters fuelled with the grey smoke of marijuana.
Death, anxiously waiting for his puff, provides me with the lighter. “Light that bitch up!” he says. I pull the first smooth line of smoke, reaching deep within my lungs, rushing with my blood, hitting the inside walls of my skull. I cough and Death, eager to please, tells me, “Salamtak—bless you!” I take another pull. It fires my eyes. My phone rings, some silly message from an advertisement service; I disregard it. I pass the joint to Death, who holds it in his fingers. “Watch those cold fingers,” I smirk. “The joint might set you ablaze.”
“I’ve done that before,” Death says as he places the joint between his teeth and pulls a puff. I see the smoke escaping into his bony mouth, then I see it filling his ribcage, hovering there for a second or two, before