The Clothesline Swing. Ahmad Danny Ramadan
breath of air. You spoke about how you felt lonely. Alone you would sit in your old house, after you drove away everyone around you. Cornered in a war zone you didn’t understand and left to fend for yourself.
I don’t know what bothered me more: the fact that you seemed to assume you were still my problem, or the fact that you seemed to have forgotten every moment you abandoned me, every slap on the face I got when I asked for dinner. I felt a shake murmuring through my body, like the whisper of a child in my ear. I felt weak in the knees, as if I were still a young boy, crying for your attention, dying for your approval, hiding behind dumpsters.
An hour later I said my goodbyes and you asked me where I would go next. I answered, honestly, “I don’t know.”
Did she scream? I ask myself. The story I tell my lover feels weak, unprepared. My fantasy stretches through time and place; I see Evelyn falling off the Empire State Building. In my mind’s eyes she doesn’t. She relaxes her body, allowing the wind to carry her, closes her eyes and moves on to the next life. Did she scream? I doubt it. But there must have been a second of a gasp. That moment of uncertainty before she accepted the coming death, a moment when all the logic in the world crumbled and she produced sounds like a squeezed lemon, bitter, ugly sounds, before she calmed down, allowing the wind to carry her softly. Only then the pain stopped, the heart stopped pumping and death came, quick, inviting and final.
For twenty years, my mother was stuck in the first moments of the most beautiful suicide, insanely trying to change the outcome of her decisions, screaming, hitting the air with her fists, angry at the world. Now, as she accepts her unchangeable fate, she clings to the memory of an elegance that was never hers; she adjusts herself, allowing her final portrait to show what she considers her real self: pearls around her neck, perfect hairdo, disregarded high heels and the smile of acceptance on her face.
But I won’t be part of your descent, mother. I’ll meet you at the limousine.
“I feel sad,” you tell me as I finish the story. The sounds around us are filling the air again; it’s a new morning at last. Once more, I managed to keep you alive for another night; I can now sleep in peace. This Scheherazade needs her beauty sleep.
“I’m sorry I made you feel sad,” I respond as I click a button and the curtains slowly close, like the curtains of an old theatre after a well-acted play.
“This story is about your mother, isn’t it.” You state the question like a fact; you don’t wait for a response and you turn your body around, giving me your back. On your back, I see the small burnt bird tattoo.
I smile and I pull the covers toward me. “You’re always a puller,” I say, “leaving me with no covers.”
As I slowly allow my body to welcome the smaller death, enjoying the last waking moments of the day before I let myself depart this world and enter the world of the dreams, I whisper a song to Death, still standing at the door. He smiles at me; under his robes I see her face. She looks at me, sometimes with guilty eyes. Sometimes she blames me for abandoning her back in Damascus as I travelled with you across the world.
“Give me some space,” Death tells me, as he makes his entrance slowly into the room. I hear him, but you don’t. I see him walking there toward our bed, but you’re blinded to his presence. He mirrors your movements sometimes, mocks you while you look him straight in the eyes but can’t see him. He smiles at me like an old friend; he is my own private torturer. He is my constant reminder that you’re soon to be gone. I welcome him to our bed. Like every night since I can remember, he joins us, sleeping in between you and me.
Chapter 2
The Tale of the Lover Who Believed Himself an Adventurer
“There isn’t much time left,” you tell me; in your voice, there is a sense of urgency. “It’s okay. You did your best. We all know we’re going to die.”
I stare blankly into your eyes as I beat eggs in a little white bowl and watch the mix as it fuzzes. I always add a teaspoon or two of flour into my omelette. It makes it lovely and fluffy. The sun is coming softly from outside, the sweet, warming late-summer sun of Vancouver. The teapot is boiling on the stove, and I have already placed two tea bags in the dog-themed black and white mugs.
“Ah. I forgot to add salt to the eggs,” I respond. These conversations of impending death and doom excite you; they give you the feeling that you have a purpose. I am taking the final steps of my journey toward death, you must be thinking. Might as well enjoy the ride.
You rarely break our silent routine except to announce one of your gloomy remarks. You’ve always been a master of keeping your thoughts to yourself. You guard them protectively, like a dragon defending her eggs from the hands of the hungry Sinbad. You build walls of one-word answers, head shakes and dirty looks, and leave me to interpret them.
Am I in love with you, or with the voyage of discovering you? Am I addicted to the emotional puzzle you place before my heart? Have I filled all the missing pieces with accurate representations of you, or was I painting the missing colours from my own canvas? I guess I won’t have time to find out.
I’m annoyed, and you are aware of it. “Fuck,” you say, “you’ve lost your sense of humour.” You’ve always been the funny one.
“No. I just do not appreciate conversations about death while I’m preparing breakfast,” I say while pointing the spoon behind my back, where our constant guest sits at the table in his black cloak, wiggling his fork like a child, waiting for his share of the toast.
The older you got, the shorter our conversations got. We used to talk about gods and kings, songs and beautiful springs, and now we discuss breakfast items and pending deaths. As you got older, your emotional mess became overwhelming for you, as if you were a glass filled to the brim with drop after drop of vile water; now it’s pouring over the sides, slipping onto your tongue, and you spit it on me whenever it devastates you.
You weren’t always this locked in. You were the joy of your family, the youngest of your brothers, the last grape of the cluster. Everyone stood by you, surrounded you with love and attention. Your father would ask your brothers to share their candy with you, and your mother would favour you with the last piece of the cake. I wonder sometimes why you rarely talk to me the way you speak to your brothers and sisters; am I a disappointment to you? Would I be able to make you cake the way your mother did? Did I ever make you feel as special as your family did?
“It smells good,” you say from your side of the table, and I know you’re lying; you lost your sense of smell three years ago. “Back in my days in the Syrian army, freshly cooked eggs were so hard to come by. We would spend weeks, maybe months, before we got any eggs. Have I told you about that officer who investigated an egg theft incident in my unit?” I smile; my back is to you as I lean on the kitchen table, but you know I’m smiling.
“Oh, here we go again with those stories,” I say. “Yes. I even remember the punchline: We calculate everything in the Syrian Arabian Army, my comrades.” I imitate a deeper voice. “If you eat more than one egg per day, you will shit the second one.” We both laugh, then you cough; I look to see if you’re all right and then return to the eggs.
“The worst part was when the officer came by our post,” you say, returning to the story. “We were stationed on the Syrian–Jordanian border, you see, and we would get frequent visits from high-ranked officers. They came around hunting rabbits with military rifles while pretending to investigate smugglers. I was once in my underwear, sitting in the heated bunker room making tea when the officer just emerged through the door.”
“That sounds like the beginning of typical military-themed porn,” I say.
“Fuck you. The guy was an ugly sixty-eight-year-old fat man, I was nineteen.”
“Wow. You certainly have a type,” I say. It takes a second for you to figure out what I mean. You stand up, grabbing the back of a chair, walk slowly toward me, and while I’m elbow-deep