From Asmaa Azaizeh’s ‘The Year of Small Museums’

The Year of Small Museums

A Daughter’s Memoir

 By Asmaa Azaizeh

Translated by Sara Elkamel

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  The sweeping rivers of my fear for my father meet at this pool. The echoes of the hydrotherapy jets, the sounds of limbs hitting the water in this enclosed place, devoid of a single window—all of it creates a clamor evocative of doomsday. Whenever I come here with my father and his stiff foot, or my mother and her curved spine, all I think about is death. I’m not sure if these compulsive thoughts spring from my fear of them dying, or from my fear of the water itself. After much thought, I concluded that, in a past life, I must have drowned. As a child, I was terrified of bath time—of the moment water streamed down my face. And even in the scenes furthest from death, this fear still finds a way to emerge. As she swims, my mother’s tender neck surfaces above the water. From the back, her wrinkled face concealed, she could be mistaken for a girl in her twenties. But still, I look at her and imagine her death, or the death of my paternal grandmother. And I am overcome with a murderous sympathy for the child deprived of the blessing of remembering her face; she had died of tuberculosis when he was six, so nothing could cling to his memory but her scent.

I accompany my father to the hydrotherapy pool in the village of Iksal every Wednesday. Water is a natural remedy for rheumatoid arthritis, which has plagued him for over two decades. In the past few years, his right foot has grown heavier and started dragging across the floor, until he had no choice but to rely on a cane. The pool is located a few kilometers from our home in Daburiyya—kilometers spanning the base of Mount Al-Qafzeh, on the northern edge of the great Marj Ibn Amer plain. Every time we cross the plain, its serenity invites us to laugh and rattle on, but as soon as we arrive at the pool, doomsday takes center stage.

My father leaves his three-pronged cane at the edge of the pool and descends into the water as though to salvation; he abandons his dependence on life as we know it and dips into this pool of death. Perhaps our ancestors had conceived of underwater graves before they invented graves of dirt that throttle the breath. “Don’t the dead suffocate in their graves?” my father once asked me, like a curious child.

We arrived at Iksal’s pool at noon, following two eventful days during which my father briefly abandoned his beloved village to spend time with me and my sister in Haifa. It had been a damp spring morning, winter’s grip not yet lax—a miraculous morning, its light somehow reviving my father’s dragging foot. Just like that, it had woken up weightless, suddenly rebelling against time and the cane that corroborates its disability with every passing minute. Sipping coffee, it felt like we were having a party, an exuberant celebration of his plausible independence from the walking stick, from rheumatoid treatments, acupuncture needles, and this pool of death. We tried to find an explanation for this miracle, but we quit as soon as we started; we all know that the only thing the therapy and medications can do is temporarily relieve and manage pain. They cannot heal an 82-year-old man’s foot, ravaged by rheumatoid arthritis for 20 years. We tied the change to emotional causes: “It’s because you’re happy, Baba,” we said, and the happy child agreed. Since birth, he had been nicknamed “Abu al-Saeed,” after his father, who had orphaned him with an early death. Eventually, the party ended, and we left Haifa.

As I turned off the ignition, I said, “I haven’t seen you pray since yesterday!” with feigned naivete. “Maybe I’m taking a break!” he said, without a hint of guilt. I thought: Maybe it had truly been a vacation—and what harm was there in a worshiper taking a break? I had stopped the car in the spot closest to the pool’s door, but I felt no urge to rush—as I usually did—to open the front door and hand him the cane. This was not necessary to begin with; he always called it “coddling.” He got out of the car with ease and walked, the cane in his right hand. In his left was a black bag containing a comb, a towel, and a swimsuit. I returned to the car, drove it to the parking lot, then raced to open the door before he reached it. I sat on one of the plastic chairs around the pool as he went to get changed. He emerged from the bathroom barefoot and walked slowly along the edge of the pool before climbing down into the water from the opposite end. His bare back was as clear as a child’s. As curved as a cavernous past. He will find tens of topics to discuss with Mansour, the therapist, among them the tens of family trees in the surrounding villages, including Mansour’s—which my father undoubtedly knows more about than Mansour. My father will wrench his family tree from its roots and chart its every branch. I waited for him in the nearby garden. I took a seat in the sun and dove into a dismal novel kindling dark, wintry times, set in the cold of northern Europe. But warmth and light were what filled my heart. It was as though I was waving goodbye to the fear that had walked by my side like a vexing shadow: my fear of his paralysis. My fear of the bed becoming his home. My fear of him withering in his bed just like my husband Adam’s mother, Anat, had wasted away in hers.

When therapy ended, we went into the bathroom together. As soon as I opened the tap, the hot water collided with his arched back. “That’s enough,” he said. I withdrew and waited barely a meter from the bathroom door. The image of him slipping and falling was an omnipresent monster. He had always filed helping him get dressed under “coddling,” and probably under other labels I knew nothing about. He put on his pants, and I automatically started to pull up his zipper. “Seriously?” I realized what I had done and let go of the zipper. I dressed him in a white undershirt and socks, and we buttoned up his shirt together. I held down the vamp of his shoe, fixing it to the floor, and he slipped his foot in with ease. The performance was accompanied by a certain exuberance, as though it were the first day of school. I made the mistake of reaching for the brush. “No. The comb is much better.” Black combs are landmarks of my childhood. They were everywhere until the massive brush invaded our lives. He used to sell them in his shop, where they resembled rows of identical soldiers. For years, he kept one on an elevated shelf in the store, a green hand-mirror by its side. A man’s hair had to be neatly cut and brushed, like a school principal’s. He never did understand the trend of men keeping their hair long—how could they expect it to stay manageable and clean? One must meet the day, and its inhabitants, with a neat head of hair and a tidy beard. Shirt collars must shine like swords, he always said. These were the tokens of respect and prestige. I would shake like a leaf every time I introduced him to a friend who seemed “lacking in prestige,” wearing his long hair in a bun or sporting an earring. Fortunately, Adam was able to circumvent my father’s litmus test of prestige; despite his long hair, his strong physique and the graceful grey hairs on his head and beard came to the rescue. As my father combed his hair in the mirror, I stared into it intently. His pupils nearly leapt out as he eyed his hair’s acquiescence to the comb. We both greeted the man who had entered the bathroom. We thanked Mansour, and his tree. Then we left the pool and headed toward Daburiyya; we headed home.

“If city councils really existed, they would have turned this into a main road; expanded and renovated it. But they did nothing. It’s a very sad nation,” he said. He was referring to the unpaved road between Iksal and Daburiyya. He prolonged the “a” in “saaaad,” as he does every time he mentions any of the Arab nations. His criticism is usually accompanied by a vivid scene of his own invention: Arabs dancing with their swords, mucus leaking from their noses and ears, as the world collapses and wars rage around them. Then he moves on to another topic: “Do you see that stone over there?” pointing to the facade of one of the buildings. “When I fitted these stones, I told Nader I wanted the best. Back then, I had a lot of money. I had just sold a piece of land to Abu Al-Sukkar. It’s black now—I want to get it re-polished.” These are the conversations we can have forever: he likes everything done properly, and I find perfection superfluous. He likes the car shiny both on the inside and the outside, and he dreads getting into my neglected car. “By God, I feel like I’m doing better. It looks like I’ve healed,” he said. It was I who had been healed when I heard this. “The most important thing is to die without having to be dependent on anyone.” We both knew that that this sentence, this dependence, had a visual accompaniment. An image that terrified us more than death itself: my father lays in bed, his two feet motionless and atrophied, as we bring food and medicine up to his lips like an animal. He stares at the wall for hours, days, and maybe years, until he closes his eyes forever.

We made it home. I hurried him along the stairs outside the house so we could eat lunch together before I rushed back to Haifa. He moved like he had not in years. “Don’t let your feet get too excited and knock you down. Watch out,” I said. Hungry, we split a large fish in silence. He pulled a scale out of his mouth before it could choke him. I kissed him, and I left before the sun could sink into the unknown.

My car and I sloped down the mountain, passing the houses of the last village at its base and the road the knights had not paved. The light of the sinking sun withered evenly above the stretch of Marj Ibn Amer. I passed Iksal again. I passed the pool of death. I took it in. There was a chance we might never come back here.

I made it to my home in Haifa, flung myself on the couch, and let out a sigh that had been trapped for a full year. On its way out, the sigh expunged images of hospital beds, wheelchairs, and endless canes—with one leg, three legs, four legs—and whispered confessions to my sister of the fear that pricks my heart like a woodpecker. This must be the same leisurely outbreath that my father’s chest had just released. With it, the fear of his dragging foot betraying us dissipates. I declared my relief to Adam. I thought of how fortunate it would be if, unlike Anat, my father did not end up dying a slow death in his bed. Adam had grown accustomed to canes and wheelchairs and beds that metamorphosed into entire worlds. Whenever he noticed a regression in my father’s foot, he would encourage me to take the necessary precautions and buy equipment preemptively. I rejected his conjectures, deciding they were bad omens. It was bad enough that my father had started using his left hand to lean against walls and the edges of things. It was bad enough that he was using this cane, which was mutating like a strange animal. It had one leg, then it had three. It was bad enough that I felt I was one with the cane. Since my fear grew as it grew, I now imagined it had 10 feet.

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