Art of War by Rashed Aqrabawi

 Art of War

 

I

 

Before she died, we dressed my grandmother

every morning in finer and finer clothes.

The sicker she got, the stiffer her shirt.

 

We coiffed her hair.

It hung on her head like a mahogany helmet.

 

Figs appeared like stillborns beneath the trees.

My mother picked each one then hired a woman

with rough hands to peel them.

 

The nurse arrived, her face wreathed in paint.

Every day she came dressed for murder.

White foundation, eyebrows arched in pencil,

a headscarf like children’s crayons.

 

She complained about her many children.

Her daughter was getting beat

by her husband, she informed me,

while manicuring my dying grandmother’s nails.

 

My daughter is the fool, she hissed.

The one who stays is the fool.

 

I encounter my grandmother’s illness

with this woman’s life. This strange woman

who came every day from her house in Ashrafiyeh to ours.

 

I was reading the Greek myths. Every day,

my grandmother was Persephone.

My mother was Hades.

The nurse crossing the Styx

at noon, the water lapping

at the doors of the house

as on the edges of a boat.

 

One morning, the nurse came pregnant.

She said it was a surprise, given her husband

was in a wheelchair. She praised the healing

properties of ginger. The next week she was barren.

 

Muslims do not clothe the dead. We bury them nude

wrapped in white like righting a broken bone.

 

 

 

II

 

Before my grandmother became mute,

we used to take her to the ice cream parlor.

 

She would cry into her ice cream,

and call for Mohammad.

 

Where is he?

Where is my son?

 

She wailed.

 

Mohammad,

Mohammad.

 

People stared, smiled.

 

He died when he was eighteen,

Mohammad.

 

Mothers in our language

are often called by their firstborn sons.

 

They called her by his name long after.

 

Umm-Mohammad

Mother of Mohammad

Mother of the dead.

 

 

 

III

 

My grandmother spoke of Akka,

as if it were still there.

 

It is October. They interrogated me

for six hours at the border. What are

you here to do? The officer asked.

 

I hear the nightlife is spectacular, I answered.

I also want to see the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

 

I rode in the van that operated on the Sabbath,

when the Jewish god forbade his children

from their crime, her port city.

 

A man sat like an ending

at the beginning of the old town.

 

I asked him where I was.

Akka, he said, swatting flies away.

 

Women with yellowed teeth,

howled after their sons,

in that tone women use

when there is a chance

they are calling for the dead.  

 

I tried to find something of hers. Her walls.

Napoleon himself could not get through! she’d yell.

I was carrying an old photo of her in my pocket.

I was searching for a missing person.

 

 

 

IV

 

What happens when the old go mute?

Senile is an English word.

 

We do not have an equivalent.

For the earth after an old woman was exiled

from her mind. Her four daughters huddled around

her like they were waiting for their hair to be combed.

 

 

When she refused to eat or drink,

the nurse suggested force-feeding.

 

We had seen civilizations collapse.

What was a woman’s body

 

when she had taught us to watch cities fall?

We ordained a famine.

 

She gathered the decades she had lost

overnight, these decades of mimesis,

in which I learned to read and write

 

but what have I done with those cities? The ones you left us.

Was that your death? I love

 

I love I love

the house it has made of me.