Dreams of Water (15 page)

He takes a circuitous route home, away from the Corniche and on to the parallel street. Many new buildings have gone up since he was last here. There are small hotels and blocks of furnished flats with neon signs on the outside and doormen in uniform. Garages where dozens of vehicles crowd against each other and spill out on to the pavement alternate with clothing and other shops on one side of the street. These are changes that, strangely enough, appeal to him, that make the neighbourhood appear less staid than it did when he was a child.

He has on soft shoes and though the pavements are uneven, with cars parked across them so he has to walk on the street most of the time, he feels himself glide effortlessly across the ground. It is a lightness of being that he has not felt for a long time. I am tied to nothing, Samir thinks to himself. Watch me fly,
baba
.

Salah takes on the housekeeping very soon after his arrival. Samir is at first amused by his father's sudden interest in everything domestic and eventually feels something close to admiration for Salah's newly acquired skills at keeping the house in order.

‘I never knew you cared about such things,' Samir tells him one day. ‘Mother said you were hopeless at it.'

‘That's because she never let me anywhere near the kitchen,' Salah replies with a shrug of his shoulders, ‘or the cupboards and the cleaning things. I always assumed she was right.'

He is loading the dishwasher with the same unconscious grace as he does everything else, Samir thinks as he watches his father. He begins by scraping the plates empty and rinsing them along with mugs and cutlery thoroughly under the tap. Then he bends down carefully to place them neatly on the racks. He is a pleasure to watch, Samir thinks.

‘But we already have someone to clean the place,
baba
,' Samir eventually says. ‘I don't want you to tire yourself out.'

‘There's a lot more to keeping house than just cleaning,
habibi
.'

Salah puts the soap powder in its compartment, shuts the door of the dishwasher and turns it on. Then he straightens up, taps the kitchen worktop with the fingers
of one hand and turns around with a look of great satisfaction on his face.

Thoughts of his childhood come regularly into Samir's mind and sometimes when he least expects them, as he sits in the kitchen folding the laundry or while looking out at the view from the flat's balcony. He suddenly sees himself, small and neatly dressed, walking alongside his mother on a Beirut street, his hand resting on her handbag; or standing in the doorway of his parents' bedroom watching her as she applies her make-up. There is something about the way the boy carries himself, seemingly self-contained, almost defiant, and in the way he looks at his mother, his eyes questioning her every move.

But there are things he does not need to recall for they have stayed with him through adulthood, such as the silence that always pervaded the rooms of the flat, following his parents around so closely that they seemed outlined by it, a kind of glow that encompassed him as well, though it disappeared as soon they stepped outside and into the beckoning world. His aloneness also, not the self-pity sometimes associated with loneliness, but a kind of impatience with things outside his immediate circle, with those who would be friends and events that did not directly affect him.

As an adult, Samir realizes, he has been less than forthcoming, has hidden a measure of arrogance beneath what others sometimes see as mere reticence. It gives him the sense that in everything he feels, even now with the sorrow over the loss of his father, lies a measure of falseness, so that he is often compelled to say, Don't pay
any attention, please, it's just me pretending again, though he does not know who he might say this to.

Now, discovering this humbler, less-assured version of himself settling into Beirut as though it had never belonged anywhere else, Samir wonders what might come next. He is astonished also that this flat which, in his parents' lifetime, had held so much fascination for him, both good sensations and others that were indifferent, has suddenly lost its associations. This, after all, could be any kitchen, he mutters to himself, and these rooms are like many others I have been in. I, Samir concludes as he stands rigid in the centre of the hushed living room, could be anywhere in this wide world.

He walks into the house one evening and finds Salah and a young woman sitting on the Persian carpet in the living room. The coffee table has been pushed to one side and they have their backs against the sofa, with their legs stretched out towards the fireplace. They are both shoeless, Salah in his grey silk socks, and the woman in black matt tights that have a slight run at one heel. They stand up to greet him when he comes in.

‘Hello, I'm Aneesa,' the young woman says.

Her brown hair forms a frizzy halo that frames an already round face and she is wearing a knee-length corduroy dress in an unbecoming shade of purple with a denim jacket buttoned over it. She holds out her hand to him and smiles. He realizes she is the same young woman he saw as he was rushing out of the house weeks earlier. This time, he notices her skin, clear and so radiant it seems as if he has just lifted his head up to the sky and met the moonlight with his eyes.

‘Hello.'

Samir looks at his father.

‘We've already eaten,
habibi
,' says Salah, ‘but I could heat something up for you.'

‘It's all right,
baba
. I had dinner earlier.'

They stand, the three of them, by the fire. He can feel the heat of it on his legs. When he looks down, he sees that Aneesa's toes are curled inwards and Salah's long, thin feet are lined one against the other. His own black shoes, clumsy and awkward, shine in the firelight and complete the circle.

Samir has bought his father a wheelchair to take him out for walks in the park. The first time they go out, Salah asks to wear his suede jacket, the camel hair scarf that goes with it and the gloves that Aneesa gave him. Samir wraps a woollen throw around his father's legs just before they step outside the front door.

The cold is bearable, Samir thinks as he pushes the chair on to the pavement and prepares to go across the road. There aren't too many cars driving past but he nonetheless waits until the road is completely empty before going across it and then up the ramp that leads into the park.

‘Not many leaves left on the trees, are there,
baba
? Still, it's nice to be out again, isn't it?'

It rained earlier in the day and the cement path is still dark and wet. Samir stops and bends down to pull Salah's scarf up around his ears. He looks into his father's eyes for a moment and smiles.

‘You look like I used to when Mum wrapped me up
in all those clothes on our trips to the snow. Do you remember,
baba
?'

Salah nods and smiles weakly back at Samir. Then he points ahead and they begin to move again. Samir leans into the chair and pushes hard. Salah has lost a great deal of weight but the wheelchair is heavy. There are no children playing in the park because it is still relatively early in the morning. The two men go past the green field that footballers use as a pitch at weekends and over the stream and the small bridge leading to the other side of the park. Salah points again.

‘Do you want to go and sit by the pond,
baba
?' Samir asks. ‘It might be too cold but we'll try anyway.'

They move leisurely down to the water and when they get there Samir stops and puts on the wheelchair brakes.

‘It's a beautiful view, isn't it,
baba
? Look at those geese over there. They've come all the way from Canada, you know. And there is a duck diving into the water.'

The pond is dark and still except where the birds are quietly moving across its surface and leaving a faint ripple of light behind them. A squirrel scampers up to the chair and sits up on its luxuriant tail.

Salah looks up at Samir and Samir nods with a smile. Salah hangs his head and frowns. He holds out his hand.

‘Bread?'

‘We didn't bring any bread with us,
baba
. Did you want to feed the animals?'

Salah continues to look at Samir.

‘I'm sorry,
habibi
. I'll be sure to bring something for them next time we come. I didn't think of it.'

Salah turns his head away to look at the pond once again. Samir steps up behind him and places a hand on
his father's shoulder. The park has turned suddenly quiet and Samir decides it is time to go back home.

His parents took him on trips to the mountains when he was a child. They would get into the car, Samir sitting up on his knees by the window in the back, and drive up winding roads, past hills covered in trees and bush. If he opened the window just a little and lifted his head towards it, Samir could feel the air that came through, changing and emptying him somehow, so that when he breathed it in it created a big hollow inside him that was impossible to fill.

As soon as they reached a village, Samir's father would slow the car down so that they could look at the houses, stone with red roofs, on either side of the street and further up in the hills.

‘Look at that one,
habibi
,' his mother would say. ‘Can you see it all the way up there? It's so well hidden behind the trees, isn't it?'

And Samir would strain to see what had fascinated her so much, feeling a familiar disappointment when it proved to be just another old house among the tall umbrella pines.

‘Can we go get some water from the spring now?'

They would drive around looking for the spring that most mountain villages had and Salah would stop the car as soon as they found it, motioning to Samir to come out and help. In the trunk of the car, Samir would pull out the big blue plastic container with a red top and make his way down the stone steps of the spring with it.

‘Don't worry,
baba
. I'll do it on my own. You don't need to come with me.'

He unscrewed the top and placed the container underneath the spout. The water came out in a constant stream and was somewhere between a trickle and a gush. What didn't go into the container poured into a stone bowl and down a drain at the side. He wondered where it went after that.

As the container filled up, the sound the water made going into it changed, echoing loudly and becoming deeper. Samir bent down, cupped a hand over the spout and brought it to his mouth. The water was cold and very good.

When the container was filled up, he screwed its cap back on, stood up and lifted it with both hands before making his way up the steps. It was very heavy and hung low close to his feet. Samir had to lift both his elbows up so he wouldn't trip over the container as he climbed up the steps again and past the people who were waiting their turn. His parents stood at the top of the steps watching him and, for a moment, Samir could almost hear them urging him on though they said nothing. He tripped and heard his mother's gasp. Then he straightened up and started up the steps again.

‘Here you go,
baba
,' he said once he reached the top.

‘Well done,
habibi
. I'll put the container in the back and you two get in. We've got a long way to go yet.'

Then they would go to have lunch in a restaurant in one of the larger towns in the area and on the drive home later in the afternoon, Samir would imagine he could hear the water sloshing back and forth in its container in the boot of the moving car.

It is autumn and the beaches, long and white, are deserted. Samir has made a trip to the south to visit the cities of Sidon and Tyre that his father had always loved. The sun appears reluctantly from behind clouds to warm the sand and here, surrounded by sea and verdant valleys, his heart lurching as he walks, Samir thinks of death: his mother's passing and Salah's sudden demise.

Where do they go, he wonders, those who die? It is impossible for him to think of anywhere that is not a place, and impossible too to imagine that those he had known so well could suddenly disappear.

When his mother died, he had not been there, had not seen her slowly weaken into something else, something not so strong or enduring, so that he has never quite been able to believe her absence. She appeared to Samir in a dream on the night his father told him of her death, not a shadow of the woman he had known, but an evanescent being that he instantly recognized as Huda before and after death. They sat together, Samir and his mother, in that quiet time between lives, and spoke of everything that had happened between them, without urgency and with complete acceptance. In reminding him of their life together, she had also intimated that he was everything she had ever wanted in a son. When Samir finally awoke early the next morning, he had felt almost happy with relief.

But with his father, Samir suddenly realizes, there had been no acknowledgement of parting and Salah has already slipped into a shapeless past, an essential part of the man Samir has become but elusive nonetheless.

He is surprised at the extent of his pleasure in the feeble sunlight. The sand makes his feet heavy as he walks and he has to bend forward with the effort. It is Sunday
and he is in shorts and a T-shirt with a sweater over his shoulders. He stops and looks down at his legs, at the light covering of dark hair against white skin. I am fading too, he mutters, rubbing his hands roughly back and forth along his thighs before straightening up again. He wonders what it would be like to have someone with him, a woman, perhaps. He thinks of Aneesa again. She is dressed in a long shift dress and bare feet and is walking towards him across the sand, one hand up, waving, the setting sun behind her. The horizon stretches outwards before him, a grey-blue emptiness above a distant line of water. Samir nods in approval and moves on.

Aneesa has not yet arrived when Samir returns to the house from work.

‘Are we sitting at the table in here?' he asks his father as he walks into the kitchen.