www.rondavid.net  (© Ron David)

ARABSONG: Celebrations of Life

A journal of truth, humor and occasional beauty dedicated to the principle that every

human life --black, white, arab, jew, american, non-american-- is equally valuable.

"The Autobiography of Muriel Sharon"

--a novel by Ron David--

o HOME

  Chapter 6

I am a boy, five, six, seven.  I crawl through a hole in the foundation to my hiding place under our front porch.  I sit on the damp dirt, looking out through an opening in the bricks.

              I hide. pray, think, wait...

Sweden, 1982

Every other time that Sarah and I had an issue that had to be resolved between us, we’d talk it out or fight it out or ball it out until it was settled.  But for three weeks after that PLO night, Sarah and I just kind of...waited.  It was as if we trusted our love enough to know that we would reconnect somehow, sooner or later, but we had no idea how or when.  So at first, it was a relief when it was time for her to go to Uppsala to teach the seminar.

The most conspicuous thing about the first three days without her was how long they were, especially the nights.  I would walk into the bathroom to take a three-drop leak and she wouldn't be there.  I would go into the kitchen pretending to search for a sandwich and she wouldn't be there.  Then I would go to our bed, which felt empty even when I was in it, and have another shitty night's sleep and then go to work making cars out of clay like an overgrown child.

When Kim asked me if Sarah and I would like to come by for dinner, I told him she was teaching a seminar in Uppsala for a couple weeks.  He said, "You're more than welcome to stay a few nights with the family and me."

"I appreciate the offer, but I have a lot to do." 

He gave me a lecherous wink and said he understood.

I spent the nights half awake so I’d hear the phone if she called.  When the phone did ring, it wasn't Sarah, it was my brother bitching me out: "I've been calling you twice a day.  You're so damned irresponsible, don't you think you should let people know where you are in case they have to get hold of you!" 

When he was finished I called my mother.  "Are you okay?"

She said she was in a way that let you know she wasn't.

"Is dad as bad as Ben says?"

Mom sort of explained things.  I said, "Do you need me?  If you want me to come home, I'll come."  She said she was fine and she'd let me know if she needed me.

I tried to imagine the reality of what my mother had told me: A week ago dad began acting especially crazy, then gone into a semi-coma.  The doctors were considering putting a shunt in dad's skull to drain the fluid that was pressing on his brain. (They were ninety percent sure he wouldn't die.)  Ben and my sisters were taking turns sitting up all night with him.  Mom said there was nothing I could do that wasn't already being done and she promised she'd tell me if she needed me at home.   Dad? 

Mom was the one who always told the story:

When dad was a little boy (I don't remember how old),

he woke up in the middle of the night and

saw a rat standing on his chest. 

Friday, about two minutes after I came in from work, Solange phoned and asked if I was in the mood to stop by for coffee.  Before I could weasel out of it she began sobbing, explaining that she had tried several times to phone Lebanon but the calls to her family and friends wouldn't go through.  She was so upset that she had told Kim to get the children out of the house for a few hours or she'd kill the lot of them.  She said that only another Lebanese could understand her anguish.  She couldn't get hold of her family so she had phoned to tell me, because I was Lebanese, that Bashir Gemayel was dead.   Three weeks ago Bashir was elected President of Lebanon, today he was assassinated.  I didn't know anything about Bashir Gemayel except what Solange had told me.  "Bashir is dead," she said over and over, followed by "Lebanon is dead."  She couldn't stop crying.  I told her I'd be right over. I made two peanut butter sandwiches and ate them on the way to her house.

Solange didn't look pathetic when she came to the door, she looked dangerous.  She blew her nose twice like she was pissed off at it and put the kleenex into the pocket of her emerald green bathrobe.  "Tell me the truth," she said. "Do you love your country?"

"I came here to make you feel better."  I smiled. "I'm prepared to lie if that'll help."

"You bastard."  She shook her head in disbelief.  "Do you love America so much that there no room for Lebanon?"

"I think America's a pretty great country in many ways—so is Sweden—but love?"  I smelled coffee coming to life in the kitchen.  "I love Sarah and a few friends and family.  I love music but it's..."

"Why do you give complicated answers to simple questions?"

"I'm trying to dig through all the crap that I'm supposed..."

"Stop digging, stop thinking.  Do you love America?"

"I love people, not countries.  Anyone who loves a country has bought a load of some politician's bullshit."  (The smell of fresh perking coffee was driving me crazy.)

"Your country will be gone before you know what you have lost."

I was going to say that Lebanon wasn’t my country but she began crying. When someone cries, my first impulse is to wrap my arms around them, so I did.  Then I wished I hadn’t.  Solange asked me why I was smiling but within a second she felt the answer poking her in the robe.  “You pig!”  she howled. 

I laughed, blushed, pulled my hips back a foot while maintaining a mock-brotherly hug.  “It’s nothing personal, Solange.  Just my biology’s way of paying you a compliment.  I have no intention of using it.”

“You’re telling me!” as she pushed me halfway across the room.  “I open my heart to you, and you respond by—”

"I didn't come here to argue with you, Solange, I came to help you."   

"You've helped me enough for one day, thank you."  Her smile was so kick-you-in-the-crotch bitter that I looked away from it.  Both Solange and my father loved a country that was dying and I was the deaf ear to whom they sang their laments.  (So that's what it means to be Lebanese: I turn into Kahlil Gibran and choke on my own purple poesy!)

I said, "The smell of that coffee is driving me crazy."  She told me to help myself.   I poured a cup for each of us and burned my mouth on the first sip. 

"There is something you can do for me," she said, "but you might be reluctant...” 

I waited for her to tell me what I might be reluctant to do. 

"I would like to tell you about Lebanon."       

I asked her why.   Solange shrugged, then in slow, sad stages, like the Wolfman becoming Lon Chaney, the bitterness left her face. She said, "Have you ever loved something so much that you had to share it or give it away or tell someone about it?"   

“I sure have.”

"And if I tell you of things that strike you as cruel or crazy or unspeakable, will you try to understand?" 

After a couple seconds I said, "If I can say what I think."

"Could I stop you?"  She said.  "Has anyone ever been able to stop you?" 

"Israel," I said.  I felt like my mother, answering a question that was asked a half hour ago: "Israel is the only country that I have ever come close to loving."    

She told me to get the hell out of her house.

Back home: Everything in our apartment (including me) had a hole in it that only Sarah could fill, but I had to find out about dad.  I called my sister Michelle.  She said they were exhausted from working days and staying up nights with dad but that wasn't the main problem: "The main problem is what to do when dad comes out of the coma.  No matter what she says, mom can't take it.  She's going to have a breakdown unless she puts him into a home."

"So why doesn't she?"

"We had her talked into it, then Ben says he'd be damned if he'd let us put our father into a nursing home.  I told him that none of us want to put dad in one of those places but it's better than losing mom too.  Ben said mom was a lot stronger than she acted.  I reminded him of what happened to mom when she tried taking care of aunt Judy."

"I hope that shut him up."

"Ben?  That'll be the day!  He said aunt Judy wasn't mom's husband, so I reminded him that dad's a bigger pain in the ass than aunt Judy ever was and if it meant so much to him why didn't he live with dad and try taking care of him."

"I bet that shut him up."  

"Don't I wish.  Benny said that was exactly what he was going to do if he had to and he hasn't talked to any of us since.  Any ideas, big brother?"    

"Not offhand.  Would you like me there?  Should I come home?" 

"No.  You're the only one of us with enough sense to escape.  If we need you, I'll call."

“You promise?”  She promised.  

I thought of my father.  I tried to imagine what would go through his mind as he lay there in a coma.  All I could think of was the same hideous story—

when dad was a little boy

he woke up in the middle of the night

and saw a huge rat standing on his chest. 

I tried to think things through but I don't think very well inside my head.  I need a dialogue.  Talking to Sarah always helped but Sarah wasn’t here.  I closed my eyes and imagined her sitting opposite me.  I described the situation and asked her what she thought.  In my imagination, she answered in exactly the same door-slamming way she'd been answering since the PLO night: ‘What do you think?' 

I was tired of trying to sleep, so I decided the hell with sleep and I went for a long walk.  When I came home the phone was ringing but it stopped before I could get to it.  I took two steps toward the bathroom and the phone started ringing again.  It was Sarah: “Something’s wrong with dad.  I can feel it.  The dumb stuff that you and I have been going through for the last few weeks is absolutely meaningless compared to what dad is going through...and compared to the enormity of our love.  Daniel, I love you so much...”  Everything that I had been holding in came out.  All the love, worry, helplessness and confusion over dad...and the pride and exaltation and terror over the fact that I loved a woman with everything I had, loved her so much that I really might, literally, not be able to live without her.  Jesus!  I was either the most exalted dude in the world or I was out of my fucking mind.

I filled Sarah in on the situation with dad, we decided that she’d stay in Uppsala for now but that we’d have to take Uppsala and everything else one day at a time. 

Lying in bed faking sleep about thirty minutes after talking with Sarah, it occurred to me that Sarah had phoned because she knew that something bad was happening to dad.  She didn’t think that it had or wonder if it had—she knew that it had.  Sarah’s mother did that kind of thing a couple times a year, but Sarah had never done anything that was even remotely pre-cognitive or extra-sensory.  On the contrary, she was almost obstinately rational.  Now, suddenly, she has this sort of telepathic, sort of mystical, definitely extra-sensory knowledge ... and she’s so sure of it that she doesn’t hedge or waffle or beat around the bush.  She KNOWS it. 

If Sarah could suddenly do that, maybe I could get some insight into the Lebanese stuff.  What does it mean to be Lebanese?

I don't know a damned thing about being Lebanese.  I don't feel any special kinship for the Lebanese, or for any other Arabs—I feel closer to blacks and Jews.  Miles and Mahler and Toni Morrison and Malamud resonate with whatever strength or beauty might be inside me.  Kahlil Gibran makes me want to beat up Girl Scouts.  I’d feel a lot more enthusiastic about the whole thing if I could find at least one piece of Lebanese or Arab art that blew me right out of my shoes.  One book or painting or some damned thing that raptured the brains right out of me ... just one.  I'm the last person in the world who should be stuck with this but I promised him I'd find out.  I promised him.  I don't consciously know what it means to be Lebanese but everything I believe in tells me that something inside me must know some-damned-thing...?

It must be in there somewhere—in me somewhere—so I tried what had worked a few other times when I'd felt blocked by my own efforts to break through to the truths inside me.  I tried to untie myself, to submit to the beat of my blood, to feel safe enough to stop pretending that I believed there were any great revelations inside me (faking faith is exhausting as hell) so I feel around for the safest, warmest place inside me, I open, I submit, I curl up inside of the safest place in my imagination...

I am a boy, five, six, seven, dark with dark hair almost down to my eyebrows and eyes, dark and bright with mischief.  I smile at everyone who sees me.  When they are gone I crawl quickly, elbows first, like a soldier under bullets, through the tiny hole under our front porch.

I sit on damp dirt beneath our porch.  It is dark under here.   You can't see me.  I wrap my arms around my legs.  I squeeze my knees into my chest.  I look out through an opening in the bricks but there is nothing to see, everybody is gone and the damp dirt smells like when you sprinkle the basement floor before you sweep... behind me, neatly arranged, are an old baseball wrapped with black electrical tape, a small bag of Jordan almonds and two rolls of toilet paper that I stole from my grandmother to give to my mother to even-up the world a little.      

I take a Jordan almond from the bag and put it in my mouth.           

I can taste it with my whole body.

I hear singing and something moves inside me.                 

I do not think of or remember the following events one at a time, I feel them all at once, all together, in one huge gush of feeling and hearing and remembering ...

... my father's parents died before I was born. 

... i am told that my mother's father was an interesting man: he came from Lebanon and opened a general store in West Virginia.  They say he was smart and strong and generous‑‑too generous: that's what drove him out of business; he couldn't refuse credit to poor people.  The West Virginians didn't fuss about fine distinctions: they called my mother's family Jews.

... somewhere along the line my mom's family came to Detroit where I was born.  They love to tell me that I slept in a dresser drawer and that my grandfather doted on me--I was his first grandchild--before he died of a stroke behind a locked bathroom door.

... don't remember him but I remember my grandmother.

... my grandmother went to Mass every morning wearing a babushka and an old cloth overcoat and carrying a huge rosary like the nuns have.  She had come to America when she was twelve or thirteen but when she died in my arms at about the age of sixty she looked like she'd just stepped off the boat.  I cannot remember ever seeing her smile.     

... i don't think anyone liked her but, God, did she fill a room.  Being in a room with my grandmother was not like being in a room with a person, in was like being in a room with one of the monoliths from Stonehenge or one of the pyramids or with the empty eyesockets of Oedipus.  She usually said nothing, just sat there with her rosary, praying and filling the room with her huge gloomy presence.

... you hear a lot nowadays about how Arab women are wimps who are abused by their pig husbands but my grandmother was as unwimpy as a person could be.  Not only was she as physically strong as her roughneck sons but, to support herself and her children after my grandfather died, she opened a restaurant.  It failed and she opened another one.  That eventually failed too. 

...people are always telling me that the Lebanese are good at business but I have enough cousins and aunts and uncles to fill a concentration camp and none of them, not one single one of them, is good at business.    

... the first time I remember liking my grandmother was when I saw her watching an old Hercules movie.  When she watched Hercules, something about my grandmother's body--'Body' is the wrong word.  I doubt that even God has seen her naked.  When she watched Hercules, something about my grandmother's huge forearms, large calves and enormous dress told you that she was a young girl back in Lebanon.  She never quite got the hang of America.  She could handle the cars and crowds and supermarkets and airplanes and the language but she could never understand a country where they choose Humphrey Bogart over Hercules.  Never.       

... when I grew my first beard at the age of eighteen and everyone in the family grouched at me, my grandmother defended me: she said that my beard made her think of Hercules.  That was the second time I liked her.     

... the third time was when she died in my arms with courage and dignity.  If she were here she would be the first person I’d ask what it means to be Lebanese but I never asked her when she was alive and that makes me nervous about myself.  I know nothing about my grandmother's life in Lebanon, only that she once rode a camel.

... when you're as curious as I am and you don't know something-- especially something so close you could hear it sing--you probably didn't want to know it.     

... maybe I was so busy being a good little American student and such a fine little American athlete that the last thing I needed was to come home and see this mournful old fat broad who spoke shitty English and had tattoos on her arms and gold bracelets that she'd worn since she was a slim girl in Lebanon grotesquely indenting her massive foreign forearms.  Maybe her irreducible foreignness was the main thing that kept me from her but it wasn't the only thing: she wasn't warm and open like my mother, she was cold and private and, frankly, I thought she was a bullshitter--I didn't believe in the authenticity of her constant praying --as far as I was concerned, she was trying to con God.

... she was not one of my favorite people ... until she began to sing.

... every month or two my grandmother would go into her living room, close the shades, turn off the lights, sit in a dark corner, eyes closed, and begin to sing.  I almost involuntarily found myself tip-toeing into the room, sitting in a dark corner, listening as her dark voice enters me.  I have no idea what she is singing about ... the songs are in Arabic and she says they are 'given' to her as she goes along ... but whatever it is fills me not only with her anguish and longing ... that would be incomprehensible enough to a bleachbrained allAmerican kid like me ... but it also, somehow, satisfies those longings at the same time it arouses them.  It is almost exactly like sexual arousal and satisfac­tion except that it isn't merely genital. It is as if I can feel agitated movement in every cell of my self, as if every dark hole in me has inhaled pepper and needs to wiggle and scream and sneeze its way out of my merely human skin and then her itchy vibrating voice detonates something deeper inside me and my soul, whether I believe in it or not, glories in its own sacramental logic and has its own fizzy orgasm.

... since childhood, my body's reaction to her singing has been the way that I have defined Ecstasy.  That is what every new work of art and every new act of love has to stand alongside in my memory and if it doesn't measure up I look for something that does.                

... it is only a feeling but it is real.  It is the most real thing I have. 

... it is the most real thing that I am. 

... is that what it means to be Lebanese...or to be an Arab? 

... she will know.

... 'please help me,' I ask.

... my grandmother stops singing. 

... she opens her eyes slowly.  Her eyes are in deep, dark sockets that look like they've been burned into her face and still hurt.  She kisses Jesus, nailed to the cross on her rosary, she slowly makes the Sign of the Cross and since she is a simple woman who can only think one thought at a time, she gives her only thought to me: ‘Jesus is terrified.  He is so frightened He can’t even scream.’

When I awoke an hour or so later, from either sleep, dream meditation, prayer or the closest I had ever come to a mystical insight, I knew two things for sure: the Ecstasy was so intense that I had to follow its truth; and the story about my father was no longer a collection of words, the words had become visible—

When he awoke in the middle of the night

and saw a rat standing on his chest, 

dad was so frightened he couldn't scream.

He couldn't even scream, that's how scared he was.

  I didn't know if I could be of any real use to my father or to anyone else but one thing I knew for sure: If it were ME lying unconscious in that hospital and HIM in another country, HE wouldn't sit around flipping coins over whether he should come to me or not. 

  He would rush to me like a crazy man and annoy doctors and drive nurses crazy and go to church and nag, badger and lecture God and offer his life for mine and never leave my side until he knew I was okay.

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The

Autobiography

of

Muriel Sharon