
Seven Lists
2X17
It took seventeen minutes for the policemen to arrive. I was standing at the edge of the front lawn, balancing on the curb, encumbered by both the dread of learning what had been stolen from this house, and the recollection of what this house had stolen from me. I studied my sister; how she seemed taller tonight, the cold air escaping her mouth in the shape of ghosts. She had come back from the regular night walk with a stack of more mail to add to father’s collection of loose change and hairpins by the front door. Father saves the mail “just in case.” He would keep the offers from MoneyMart to take out a ten-thousand-dollar loan, a frequent occurrence since mother’s week-long silence after I’d marked “Yes” on the scholarship application question “Are you in need of financial assistance?”, which I’d immediately undone and two months later taken a loan from the dingy corner money exchange to pay for stale bagels and coffee to fuel solitary all-nighters at the library. Father would keep the thank you report from Médecins Sans Frontières with its photos of fatigued children receiving chickenpox shots addressed in my name AFRA ABED or, before we lost our apostrophes, ‘AFRA’ ‘ABED. RAGHAD got to keep her first name intact and I got used to shedding layers of my skin. It’s all junk mail, I would tell him, discard it. The front door was swaying in the wind when Raghad returned.
Officer after officer questioned the two of us in turn. where were you? who has keys to the house? who was the last person to leave the house? can you produce an itemized list of what was stolen?
‘07
Please hand me the itemized list, mother said to us. A long line-up behind us of families with immigration visas stamped in passports and worries heavy as the uniforms shielding the officers. Raghad flipped through the expanding file folder: copies of birth certificates, original vaccination records, a booklet of school registrations and report cards, official university transcripts, citizenship documents, personal identification cards, all dented and worn out but never neglected. She pulled out a bundle of stapled sheets of paper that was 131 items long. The officer handed mother a single sheet of paper, the “Personal Effects” form. She turned it over front and back, there are only 8 spaces on this list, she said. He pointed to a ledge crowded with more forms and ballpoint pens on ball chains, group them. Placing her thumb under the monochrome flag in the top corner of the page, mother paused, calculating.
A friend of a friend, who did her landing seven years ago, warned mother that she would be asked to declare all valuable belongings upon entry. Every day for months she crouched down over brown packaging, carefully listing the delicate collection of life items like a gallery curator. Her list began with the heavy linen bedding, gifted to her on the birth of her first daughter, once salt-stained, marking that day as the first she saw her own mother cry; the red and orange carpets, bought on their last trip north from a street vendor who described each symbol hand-woven into his stock of woollen tapestries and rugs; the brass doorknob shaped like a lion’s open mouth, saved from the expropriation of her grandfather’s house at the onset of the umpteenth coup d’état.
She recorded with a slowness not out of reluctance, but out of the wise assuredness of someone who had done this a thousand times before and survived.
At the quiet pace of heartbeat and breath, mother compressed her life into the blue boxes on the form. Item 1: Furniture, she wrote. She turned back to her lined notepaper with its carefully trimmed long edge. She filled in the second, and third, and fourth, and fifth, and sixth blue rows, not even the entire width of the paper. She recorded with a slowness not out of reluctance, but out of the wise assuredness of someone who had done this a thousand times before and survived. Finally, she came to the listing of two white gold wedding bands with my parents’ initials engraved on the insides, a marker of their victory in a long saga of secret love and determination; pearl grape earrings I secretly wished to inherit someday; a gold Ottoman lira, minted in Constantinople in 1327 Hijri and passed down for seven generations … Item 7: Jewelry.
The officer handed us a flimsy sheet printed in typewriter font, titled in bold caps, “CONFIRMATION OF PERMANENT RESIDENCE”; beside that in smaller text, “CLIENT ID: 523707477”; and underneath, in the smallest text, our names. Never lose your landed immigration document, mother told us. She folded her 131-item sheet neatly in half, seven times until it disappeared sinking into the curving lifeline of her left palm.
ninety-seven
When Bibi was packing to leave I inhabited her room like a brown summer moth lingering quietly in the corner. I watched her fold a single bag of clothes, empty out her drawers and closet, uproot every night cream and perfume on the pink bathroom windowsill that she and I shared. I watched my mother drop rings from the jewelry refrigerator into a shampoo bottle, and shake it once by her right ear to check for sound, then wrap it in plastic and wedge it between a tailored skirt and Bibi’s nightgown that she wore when we slept in the garden on nights when the power was out. On those nights in the garden, where we fed stray cats and played cards, we would take turns watering the grass with long, green hoses so that the mist evaporating in the heat would cool us off into sleep.
Two months later I would watch my mother sit in the same garden with a man I’d only seen once before at the wedding of a distant relative, drinking hours-steeped tea and giving him her last pieces of gold jewelry to take across the border in a freight truck that would be less vigilantly inspected than our pockets. When he left with the Ottoman lira later that day, he handed me a bright, aromatic orange from one of the plastic crates that filled his truck.
While Bibi packed to leave I had watched my mother unsewing hard buttons on a suit jacket and twisting thin gold bracelets on the rim of thick fabric to make new buttons. The suit jacket fit my grandmother perfectly the next morning when she left, carrying her gold on her own body. I slept in her bed that night, beside a photo of a woman with a powerful face who did not wear any jewelry except three dots tattooed on her chin.
1987
On the concrete staircase the red tips of my fingers began to feel along the cold gritty slabs, smooth iron bars, dented, dusty cardboard boxes, broken seams, folded fabric, rusted silver, frayed wooden frames, sugar-coated almond pouches from the wedding of a distant relative, textures I memorized from playing this feeling game many times on hot summer afternoons. Crystal chandelier prisms marked the ending of the fingertip treasure hunt; long, oblong icicles, double octagons and teardrop beads from a light fixture that was taken apart upon being taken down in the old dining room whose windows had been shattered from a shrapnel one winter of this ending war. The windows had been taped from all corners and edges in anticipation of the blast and fell whole, breaking only into large pieces. All the surviving remains in the room were stuffed into boxes under the staircase and the door was shut for decades. Slivers of rainbow projections from the crystals fell onto the speckled ceiling and floor tiles. The rainbow bounced, split, dysmorphed over joined surfaces until it lay flat on the slightly convex glossy door of the jewelry refrigerator.
I walked up the stairs heavily, not out of reluctance, but out of a calm assuredness that I had inherited a thousand moments of survival.
Bibi walked into the room with a lighted cigarette between her resilient teeth, its tips stained in red lipstick. Bibi, why is the jewelry refrigerator down here? My grandmother looked at the empty vault. She let out a slow puff that turned into a spiralling cloud of steam above her light mustache. Come with me. I paced myself behind Bibi who walked like she was pushing through a crowd of rioting lovers. The sleeves of her scarlet robe rested on a wooden cabinet standing under a framed, recolored black and white photo of Bibi in her wedding dress. She pulled out of a translucent ivory fabric embroidered with spindly flowers, a golden round coin attached to a thick, tightly woven golden chain. I gave all your other cousins sabayek but you used to pull on this when I carried you around as a baby, she said, fastening the lock and letting it fall on the nape of my neck, the same spot I would show my naturopath twenty years later describing the root pain of all my migraines.
July, 27th 1937
The colour looked like the sun reflected in a circular spot in squinting eyes, frayed and spiked at the edges with spokes sticking out into the whites. It looked like a summer day bowl of mango pudding, the fur of a sleeping lion, two thousand donums of wheat ready for harvest in Mosul, sesame seeds and oil and the calligraphy in the Quran children memorized verbatim. Between her tattooed fingers she handed the polished coin, embossed with the tughra of the Sultan, back to the goldsmith, I want a thick chain added to it.
2X17
We set up to sleep that night in the living room, on stacked blankets and duvets, curtains undone, lights in the hallways and bedrooms bright and guarding. How could we possibly know what went missing in a house that looked like a museum of memories? Mother and father were away, for the first time after accumulating 1,095 days to qualify for a citizenship exam, and waiting double that in process time to answer questions that described colonization as “confederation.” They had boarded an airplane, returning back over the Atlantic to food and family. Perhaps also returning to themselves. The warmth of my parents was the first thing undone in this house. Mother burrowed herself under the thicks of Ontario snow, sintering quickly into a solid mass of depression. Father, between part-time shifts at the gas station and the acute joblessness that awaits many immigrants, found himself confronted by demons he thought had burnt in the exploding sky of wars left behind. We somehow agreed without speaking that we would not burden them with this incident while they were away. In this silent accord, Raghad peeled an orange at the kitchen sink, her nails drawing perfect circles in the rind before pulling them apart from the flesh. Perfect yellow circles.
I walked up the stairs heavily, not out of reluctance, but out of a calm assuredness that I had inherited a thousand moments of survival. I opened the drawer in mother’s bedside table to find the collection of repurposed mesh pouches from the weddings of distant relatives. I emptied the contents of a blue and silver pouch and turned to my sister with the golden, round Ottoman lira in my hand.