The Clothesline Swing. Ahmad Danny Ramadan
that damned Syrian pun so many million times, didn’t you? “Tou’borni enshallah.” May you dig my grave.
You say it jokingly, and I respond with “beed el-shar.” May evil remain away. How did our grandfathers, and their grandfathers before them, find this endearing? Gambling with death has consequences, and Death, it seems, has a wicked sense of humour.
I can see the surprise on your face as well. You’re wondering the same things. Why me, you must be asking, why would Death pick me? Death is an act of randomness in its own right. A woman with children died once outside our home here in the West End. A car hit her. You said you could see her spirit escaping from her body as people gathered around her. I couldn’t see her soul, which you claimed to be glowing like a thousand suns. I blamed this whole version of reality on your medications; they were pushing you deeper down the rabbit hole.
It has been almost forty years since we left Syria in 2012. We grew up in a city we weren’t born in. We breathed air that wasn’t meant for us. We pushed and pulled each other through a life we did not anticipate. We held deep within us the memories of Syria as we watched each other lose hair, grow wrinkles and become an agitated version of our young, restless selves. We had a simple life here in Canada; almost uneventful, as if all our lived experiences gathered in the first four decades of our existence. We spent our final thirty-something years mesmerized by our earlier adult life, and we forgot to live our new life to the maximum. Now, we’re two old men sitting on the edge of the forgotten, ready to jump into the abyss of what’s gone.
Waiting for your final moment has me drifting through my own final moments in life: I feel like I’m floating on my back in the middle of a calm sea, the sun in my eyes charming me into relaxing into the waves—wave after wave carrying me to the unknown. I can’t see the sands on the horizon, but I accept the cool waters; they invite me to the dark depths of the sea. “You belong with the creatures of the cold,” say the voices. Like a burn victim, my nerve ends are exposed to the world, and the waters are my salvation. “But I can’t leave yet,” I whisper back, my voice shallow and weak. “He still needs me.” The voices insist, and it feels like the right thing to do, just surrender to the cold. Just allow your tired self to disappear into the final abyss. I argue and the waves get angry, they carry me high, and leave me trembling for air on the sand.
The treatment lately has put you on edge; you rarely talk to me, you rarely sleep and you demand attention all the time. The only relief you find is in my stories. You ignored my stories all through your life with me; you thought I included too many details, you discarded them and you interrupted many of them. Now, in the wee hours of the night, you wake up, slowly lifting your body, turning the light on, and you wake me up. “I can’t sleep. Tell me a story,” you tell me. “I always loved your stories.”
You become my Shahryār, and I’m your Scheherazade. Death is the swordsman at our door; he will behead me if I allow my sleepy brain cells to disobey your orders for entertainment. We’re the reincarnation of three characters we know so well. I somehow feel that, just like Scheherazade spared her own life by keeping the king curious for tomorrow’s tale, you’re also keeping your soul from departing your body, waiting for the story to be over. Like a TV-show addict, you are waiting for the series finale.
When I was a boy, I used to write stories to save my own life; now I’m telling you those same stories in hopes of saving yours. You open your eyes; you’re awake. You lift your body, you turn on the light and you look at me. “Tell me a story,” you say.
Chapter 1
The Hakawati’s Tale of Himself
There are tremors around us; it’s like an unwritten piece of music. That hidden melody is creating a routine for us. Every action we take in our lives is like a gentle touch on the strings of a violin. We create a symphony of traditions and daily practices that mimic life; yet it’s not life, it’s a motion across the musical scale. The sound of your steps as you leave the bed in the late morning hours, heading to the bathroom; the whistle of the electronic water heater as I prepare your coffee; the sounds of pain I make as I walk up the stairs to our room—they all join together with the endless sounds coming from across our old house. They create a life that we can feel within us even when we’re not paying attention to the noise.
I have grown attuned to this music, and now I cannot imagine my life without it. It’s a secret joy of mine to allow my mind to wander around, drawing pictures of your heavy white-haired eyebrows in my head as you look in the mirror for an old, beautiful self that you’ve lost. Even when I’m sitting in the garden with the dogs, I can see you trying to slowly take another step on the stairs, the fifth stair always creaking a bit; I have to find time to fix it.
Our garden is vast, with greedy trees and bushes growing around it like a bracelet surrounding a wrist. In the numbered sunny days of Vancouver, it turns green, with flowers eyeing each other, preparing for another mating season. During the rainy days of winter that last too long and bind us to the house, it gets muddy, with small pools of water gathering in its corners. The heavy rain adds to the symphony, producing a rhythm of endless drums when it hits the ponds around our garden.
Our house used to be white when we bought it twenty-something years ago. We painted it red back then. We thought it looked lively and sweet, and then decided to turn it green. The colour reminded you of your family’s home back in Damascus. Finally, as we got older, we abandoned the happy colours and resigned ourselves to a dark shade of grey for the walls, the same colour I see in your eyes in the early morning hours as you wake, asking for your medicine and your breakfast.
The wind used to hit the southern side of the house, opening windows and cracking doors. It freaked the dogs out and woke us up in the middle of the night. The wind whistled like an amused stranger catcalling us. It brought in the smells of English Bay and Sunset Beach. It carried the flavours of the doughnuts from the nearby Tim Hortons and made you desire them almost every morning.
We don’t feel the wind hitting the house anymore, taking away one of our symphony’s main instruments. Tall skyscrapers ganged up around our little two-storey home and surrounded it slowly but aggressively over the years.
You used to fill the house with paintings, mosaic pieces and traditional seating areas, like your own family home back in Damascus. You used to spend weeks moving furniture pieces around, then standing in a corner, silently making calculations in your head for all the possible social gatherings that we never held. You would wonder if your grandfather’s black and white framed photo should be centred on one wall or tucked away in a small corner of your den. You suggested a blue carpet for the living room, then replaced it with a dark yellow one, which you regretted days after you bought it. You used to work in the garden and enjoyed watering the plants.
You don’t wonder anymore. You don’t garden. You haven’t moved a single piece of furniture in five years. The living room has no carpet and your grandfather’s photo is collecting dust, where you left it in an abandoned corner of our storage room.
At night the sounds of our lives disappear, opening the air for sounds of the unknown, which escape through the windows into our home. At night you sleep and I keep awake, listening to their voices and trying to decode their messages. Will they tell me a story for you? Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. Your rhythmic inhale and exhale keeps me awake, and I wonder. Are you dreaming of your own paradise?
When you were just a boy, you expected the world to be yours for the picking. You opened your heart with laughter and cracked jokes. You showed me an old video of yours, recorded on a camera borrowed from a wedding planner your father knew. You were standing there, listening silently to the beat of a reggae song that got too famous in Syria in the early nineties. You were wearing a white jacket and a red bowtie. You suddenly started to dance, unaware of the people around you, unhinged by the laughter of your father. You started imitating the movements of the dancers in the music video, swaying left and right to the song, repeating its chorus loudly. You moved your feet as fast as you could and shook your head to the beat.
That, you’ve told me, is your heaven. That was the time you were still yourself, before you escaped the reality of life and imprisoned your thoughts inside your skull.