Paradiso 17

1

Back to the beginning

Beyond the curtain of the final room Sufien was exiled to, a monsoon was developing at the edge of his desert. The clouds were bruised and the immigrant palm trees swayed and sang. It was the end of days. On his deathbed, he wished to see beyond all that mundane lightning, touch Allah’s golden dimensions. And though his desert nearly intimated the beyond, the brilliant sun aflame in a black-­and-­blue sky, he couldn’t see paradise yet. We are just covered by the skin of this world. The worst he had known in a life of war, diaspora, poverty, bankruptcy, was this final retribution: cancer. What if this is the reward? he thought. The only reward.

Sufien heard his ancient cat, Caesar II, flee to the closet from fright of the thunder, and Sufien understood why. Sound infiltrated directly to the heart. Sound is the last sense that remains to us, the hospice nurses kept telling his wife Sarah, his daughter Layla, so keep talking to him, he’ll hear you, as if Sufien was dead already. They had all maneuvered around him for so long, like a cumbersome object.

It was that big with no brains son-­in-­law of his, James, the tawil wa ahbal, who said the beautiful thing then, a thing which so surprised Sufien. What he said was, It isn’t because sound is the last sense to leave us. It’s because sound draws our souls out to the next world, and into the music.

*

It seemed impossible to Sufien that he could end. Not his story, no that was his wife Sarah, always thinking about him in terms of his story. What he was thinking about was himself ending, and what was he even? He was that silent thing which had dogged him late in the night after everyone else went to bed. That staticky hum beneath his vitals, beneath his heartbeat, his blood pressure, his want for another cigarette. He had always hated to go to sleep because he would be alone with it, that him that was him. What did he really find there? What are we made of, beneath the whirring fans, the droning AC, the murmuring trees, the creaking pipes, all this relentless news? Down there, in the quietest quiet, he was made only of death. Just like the rest of us.

Five months previous, his doctor, Dr. Scott, had given him six months to live. (This was the cruelest blow Sufien had ever received, crueler than even the decades-­long specter of his stolen homeland.) At first, hearing his middle-­aged oncologist, with his bleached teeth, say, Well, Sufien, you’ve done your darndest, put up a good fight, Sufien thought he was cured, in remission again. Then his wife had to ask for further clarification.

Sufien felt a sudden vertigo—­that’s what dying felt like, like falling from an unfathomable height.

I would guess he has about six months, Dr. Scott said then, looking at Sarah rather than at Sufien. But I’ve been wrong before!

For a long time, Sufien didn’t say anything. There was nothing left in him, no fight, he was too weak, too thin, too nauseated, except to say something mean. Words. At least he still had words.

Kus emmak, Sufien said to the doctor who had once promised to save his life. And he said it again, kus emmak. When he said it, Sufien hoped his face looked mean but he was too withered to look anything except pathetic.

What’s that, Dr. Scott asked, maybe a little scared, as if maybe his stage four cancer patient wearing designer cologne, cologne Sufien had bought specifically for this occasion (he left the apartment now to only go to the oncology ward), had a bomb hiding in his wheelchair after all.

Sufien wanted to tell Dr. Scott the truth about what he’d said, and wouldn’t that be a fine retort given the way Dr. Scott had tortured him, had manipulated him into accepting hormone therapy which had destroyed his manhood, then rounds of chemo which had taken his hair, and god almighty, the pain in his jaw when they gave him the radiation, and now after all of that, Scott had brandished the final sword. He had announced Sufien’s death sentence with a smile. Why had Sufien survived all that he had just to surrender like this, in this last war, being waged beneath the hospital office’s fluorescent lamps? Sufien wanted to tell the truth, that he had cursed the doctor’s mother’s cunt, but he didn’t, because even after all of that he still hoped that this motherfucker could save his life.

What I said was: Is there something else? Sufien forced a grin. We’ll try something else?

It surprised Sufien how much, in the end, he wanted to live.

*

Now his daughter was calling for him, asking Sufien if he wanted James to help him into the wheelchair. That dinner was ready.

You’re shaking, baba, his daughter said, drawing into his room.

Sufien asked her if Tarique had come yet.

Tarique? his daughter asked.

Sufien just shook his head, confused. In these last days, it felt like everything was written for him, and yet the morphine made it impossible to hold on to the text. He wanted to tell Layla something, to be emphatic, tell them all something, anyone who would listen, something they couldn’t forget, but it was all so imprecise, his windshield was coated in fog. No, he wasn’t driving anymore. It had been a long time since he had been in his car. The Volvo. It was turquoise. They didn’t make them like that anymore. What had they done with it? Sharmuta, he called out for his old cat. But this one was the wrong color. Not a Siamese. Earlier that day, he had called his daughter his wife’s name. Where was he actually? It seemed like the desert. He did not know. Where were his brothers? Or his mother and father? Why hadn’t they come for him yet? He was surrounded by only the living, and he wasn’t sure what hurt more: their crying or their laughing. He knew they were all waiting for him to die. And so, he felt he better get on with it.

Before that, though, just one last time, he wanted to go back to the beginning.

2

That war had already begun

Sufien never knew the exact date of his birth, but he did know that he was born in December like the prophet Isa, otherwise known as Jesus Christ.

Yes, his mother Amal loved to torture her son often with the story of his delivery, that when she was laboring with him—­ a labor made more painful and more dangerous by the fact that he came ass rather than head first—­she was in such hallucinatory pain that she swore she could hear the church bells ringing all the way from Nazareth. With Sufien dropping down, their song became so exquisite, she told the midwife she could hear the stars above singing. The midwife told her to stop dreaming and start pushing, that if she did not get that baby out fast he would be sent back to the seventh heaven, that this one’s an arrogant fool, worse, the kind stupid enough to think too much, you know that’s why his head is up, proud and stubborn, the kind bound for a perilous, suicidal, hopeless path, all the babies who refuse to look down to the Earth to get born are, so good luck with this one even if he is born, so Amal pushed and pushed and pushed, screaming at her to shut up, and the midwife kept talking at her, saying, Besides it’s nothing special, those Christians always ring their bells all night long around the holiday of the birth of Isa, adding that she herself heard nothing spectacular whatsoever.

Later, when the French officers at the refugee camp in Syria asked about Sufien’s date of birth for his Document de Voyage (Pour les Réfugiés Palestiniens), Amal, now called Um Sufien, replied that it was in the time of year of their savior’s birthday, remembering the hills of Safad disappeared by mist that first day nursing Sufien, how the land itself looked like it was dreaming in that season, and remembering so vividly the music of those bells. Life is a plot of its own, the story always rises then descends, and unfortunately the same purported messianic soundtrack of Sufien’s birth would not grace the ears of those who witnessed his death. He would pass away to the tune of distant police sirens.

*

Back then, though, in Sufien’s first memory, his end was still decades away, and after suffering through listening to the interminable story of his birth once more (his mother had been talking to a neighbor, rubbing her pregnant belly to conclude her tale, praying that the one coming wouldn’t torment her the way he had), Um Sufien finally let him go play.

Sufien and his friends had all climbed up to the roof, and from it, they could see Buhayret Tabariyeh, the lake where Isa once walked on water. It was a beautiful, clear day, early spring, and the hallowed lake was visible from Safad only on days like it. A very strong feeling overtook Sufien. Perhaps it was the heights. Or that spell of a sea. He wanted to fly. There had been talk of flying—­his friends engaged in this kind of magical thinking so customary to the fancy of childhood. Yet, no one else heard the jinn chanting seductively. Here one was; she was the color of sunset.

Come fly with me, she said.

So he did it. He jumped off the roof. And he felt the brief caress of the wind, and in falling, believed he was being held up by the sky. It was the olive tree in the courtyard which slowed his descent. He was captured in its branches before it too flung him off. Then there was that landing back on Earth. Now he understood pain. And gravity.