The Clothesline Swing. Ahmad Danny Ramadan
t-shirt. “For me, you will be forever young,” you say.
You toy with my emotions. You take me into your darkness with a swift sentence, then pull me to your sunny light with a gesture. Like a fool, I follow. I’m hopelessly attached to your enigmatic love. The fact that I was your first lover remains a sign of danger that glows red in the corner of my mind—even now, after a million years together. I worry that I’m imprinting upon you. I worry that I’m stealing you from your destiny to meet someone else.
Did I fail you? Was I supposed to work harder, to make you happier? Was I supposed to let you slip away from my complex history and my own burdens? Maybe if I did, someone else might have brought you happiness I couldn’t. Maybe if I did, you wouldn’t be dying, tumbling away from me as we speak.
“You don’t have to bring me flowers,” you say at dinner. “To the grave, I mean.” The dim light of the late sunset is still evading the shadows of our house, slipping inside through the cracks of the windows. On the radio, an old jazz song is playing. I add some Arabian spices to yesterday’s Chinese leftovers and reheat them.
“Are we back to that topic?” I say, tired, sleepy, trying to eat my food in peace, not in the mood for another debate. Death abandons the table, answering phone calls from his agents around the world. “How many times do we need to have this conversation?” I say once again. You silently watch as my emotions get tangled on my face. I hold my tongue for a second, but a final statement escapes: “It’s pointless to talk to you sometimes.”
At night, you show your true colours. You take off your smile like a wet raincoat. Your morning cheerfulness is a beautiful nothing, like a counterfeit coin. You get trapped inside the darkness of your fate, lying helplessly in bed, waiting for a sleep that will never come. You start dreading that moment just before sundown, as the reality rushes faster to you that this will be another sleepless night. This will be another night when the pills and potions will be useless. I see you, like a vampire, metamorphosing into a dark creature greedy for attention and conflict. Your mood slips into the blackness of the night, just like the sun on the final lines of the horizon, changing colour from warm fuzzy orange to dark, gloomy blue.
Depending on the night, this is either the time of day when you and I get together and commiserate, or when I tell you a story that will silence the beast within you and allow us a steady stream of motion to a warm friendly bed, where another story sends you to a blissful sleep. These glorious nights, however, are numbered.
After an appropriate amount of sulkiness on my side, matched by an equivalent amount of bitterness on yours, I decide to test the waters and see which way this evening will go. “When we’re at odds,” I whisper from the other side of the table, “I feel like my life is a slightly tilted painting on a white wall. I can ignore the painting for a short while. But at one point I have to give in, reach out of my comfortable chair and adjust it.” In my hand rests a glass of whisky that I filled in a theatrical way moments ago.
Is that a crack of a smile I see on your lips? Will it be a night of peaceful dreamless sleep? I push further. “You’re my most valuable painting, my rebel against angles and lines. I can’t leave us in a moment of unbalanced anger.”
I don’t tell you, but although our fight started with your constant reminders of death during every meal, which are getting obnoxious, another reason why I never leave things tangled between the two of us is that I am too capable of seeing how Death occupies our future as he does chores around our house. What if I carried on a fight and woke up tomorrow without you? Since every moment between us could be our last, each moment has to be a grand finale.
“Have I ever told you about the morning I got lost when I was a child?” you say from across the table. I smile: yes, you have. “No, you haven’t. What happened?”
“I know what reminded me of it,” you smile. Your eyes brighten as you recall the distant memory. “It was all the talk about graves.”
You say that as if you’re not the one who brings all that talk to our dinner table.
You were eleven, maybe thirteen, when you woke up one day in a state of trance; you felt the need to explore the limits of the unknown world around you. It was a morning when your mind allowed you to wander as far as you could within the protected zone, the bubble your family surrounded you with. You had travelled within it far enough to reach its inner walls. Everything outside looked colourful and easily reached, and you wanted to pop the bubble and explore what lay beyond it.
You didn’t want to escape, like I did. You felt comfort in your kingdom, and you wanted to expand. Your family gave you the world. Your mother, who spent her nights giggling in her sleep, dreaming of ways to treat you better, always made your favourite meals on Mondays and Thursdays, foul b’zayt and mlokhieha. Your older brothers were there to teach you how to hunt for mice and how to care for cats, and where to buy the best meat for your mother’s kebbeh nayeh. Your aunt, married to a distant cousin, would come back from the deserts of Saudi Arabia carrying gifts for you: Nike shoes and toys that require batteries to work. She singled you out among all the youngsters of the family with that magnificent blue horse figure: it galloped upon a touch of a button, then neighed and snorted at the end of its race. The world around you was a safe haven. Damascus opened her arms to you, and you rushed to her embrace.
At the time, Syria was enjoying a change of course. The country was blooming economically after President Hafez al-Assad ended years of tense relations with the West and accepted an invitation to a peace conference with Israel. In the eighties, the lines at the government-subsidized markets had been long and tiring as the country ached under US-led sanctions, but now people stopped buying cheap rice and sugar that never sweetened their tea from the government, and started to buy imported goods. Your father’s factory, producing paper to print books on and to box gifts within, was profitable again. He returned from his long day at the office carrying apples, oranges and kenafieh from the Nabil Nafiseh sweetshop at the corner of Malki and Arnous streets. He even bought a car for your older brother, a 1961 Mercedes that roared across the street and scared the girls in hijabs as they left the Islamic school in Bab Sharki.
Damascus felt clean, soapy and filled with possibilities. The people shed their seven-year-old jackets with rotten elbows covered in fabric patches and managed to afford some new clothes. The shops in Hamidiyeh were filled again with children’s toys and decorated backgammon sets.
The farthest that you had explored was when your mother took you to Zanket el-Setat market. Women bought fabrics there to make their own dresses. The market was narrow and filled with tables outside the shops, making it even more crowded. Women pulled the hands of their children and powered through the crowds looking for their prized fabrics and the latest styles in hijabs and niqabs.
Your mother bumped into an older woman who she knew well. The old woman was carrying a lot of bags; she had blue eyes and a sweet smile. “This is Samira the tailor,” your mother explained. “She is the best in her business. She makes dresses for the rich wives of police officers and government officials.” You looked at the old woman as she walked away, and forgot her name instantly.
Your mother pulled your hand into a corner in that tight street, avoiding the eyes of the men bargaining and advertising, and slipped with you into a shop with a low door that she needed to lower her head to enter. Inside, on the walls and under a glass table, you saw women’s lingerie organized neatly according to size and colour. Your mother pointed to one of them; it flickered with gold and fake diamonds, and she asked for its price while your face turned red.
“Tomorrow, your woman will also buy herself stuff like this,” your mother whispered wickedly in your ear, a smile on her face. “Don’t be shy, son. This will be your marital right. Your woman will be the queen of all brides. She will wear all the gold in the world for you.”
You walked out of that shop knowing that you were a righteous king on the throne of your future. Damascus became your kingdom, and you wanted to explore it further.
That fateful morning the rain, generous back in those days before