Inheritors of Silence (ورثة الصمت) is about the mutually reinforcing relationship between private catastrophes and the collective trauma of political repression. Tragedy metastasizes across time and space—from one generation of women to the next, and from the family’s origins in Homs, Syria, to Nice, and then to Montreal, where the narrator, Sami, and his daughter, Jano, now live. In this excerpt from the opening chapter, Sami is groping through the first hours after his daughter’s attempted suicide. As a Syrian immigrant in Quebec, he is one kind of outsider, a foreigner (though, as Sami himself points out, his neighborhood is full of foreigners like him living lives that are symmetrical but rarely touching). Suddenly, Sami realizes that he is an outsider when it comes to his daughter’s life, too. After a lifetime of loss, he is desperate to find a way back in. Arabic has a great capacity for metaphor, especially metaphors of sentiment, and capturing the full metaphorical repertoire of this text in English while maintaining the fluidity of the prose is challenging. But this allusive vocabulary is a cornerstone of Sami’s narrative voice. He is a poet, and even his quotidian surroundings conjure a stream of images that allow him, and the reader, to wander out of exile—if only for a sentence or two.
—Chloe Bordewich
The morning came with dull normality. A bright light pierced the windowpane as huge plows rumbled past, emitting a ceaseless stream of high-pitched beeps. The day before, a storm had inundated Montreal with snow, stuffing the city’s streets. I woke now to concussive rumbling and tried to shake the previous night’s madness from my body. Exhausted from insomnia, I remembered that what had happened the day before was not a dream. Without so much as a suitcase or a word of farewell, my daughter had, of her own free will, tried to go to her death. My daughter, only in her twenties, had been infused with the poison of knowledge she couldn’t bear and decided not to go on.
I leaped from bed as if stung by the memory of a torture chamber full of scorpions and traitors. I had to face the morning and confront reality in all its baseness, the depravity of events wilder than a wedding of lunatics. Fearing the darkness of night, as well as the light of day, I put my head underwater and fumbled like a slumbering blind man until the world stopped breathing. A deadly silence descended, and I groped for noise.
Unusually for November, the temperature in Montreal was a shameless 22 degrees below zero, a number that might perhaps seem inhumane. Yet like all who live in exile, I have learned that the cold does not come from snow alone; there is a shiver that dwells in my soul. I gave the shudder of a coward, for everything about the day ahead was frightening to me. The foggy windowpanes of my house had left me as gloomy as a soldier watching cabbage stew boil in a Siberian prison camp. Jano hated these windows, which looked out not on city life but the dark depths of the housing complex. My neighbors would head up to their apartments loaded with black bags better suited to carrying corpses than fruits and vegetables, like actors in a low-grade horror film. They did not greet each other in the evening or grasp a child’s hand to affirm their humanity. My neighbors lived, as I did, in ugly apartments with tiny kitchens separated by cardboard walls. Their aromas wafted out through air shafts of notorious repute, vents that carried the sounds of despairing souls crying in the dark just as my blind grandmother, Maria, used to cry for the home she had left in the village. The sobs reverberating inside my head did not come from strangers’ chatter; they came, as usual, from my memory, like the rasps of Old Testament murderers who had too many victims to count.
With the reluctance of a man headed to his own funeral, I dressed too deliberately for the snowstorm I could smell approaching. I drank a tasteless coffee, put on some cheap cologne, and went out into a wind I was unaccustomed to encountering at this time of winter in Montreal. Hands frozen, I cleared off the mounds of white that had accumulated on my crummy old car and shoveled patiently, like a monk who is but a few centimeters of snow away from heresy. Then I dug a path for the car and pushed its worn-out wheels against the snow until it began to budge under the vehicle’s crushing weight. I wished, foolishly, that the alienation of life in exile had not had the same effect on my soul.
This was the scene on a morning distinguished by nothing but the weather and a daughter’s attempt to die. I looked at the snow-laden sidewalk in concert with others I could see doing the same. They looked toward me with laughter leaping from their eyes and a bitter sense of irony oozing from their non-white skin, from their nationalities forged under the blazing suns they had long endured in countries mapped as exotic lands. They were laughing at the contradiction, sensing the comedy in it. It was that complicit laugh of fellow foreigners, sharing the warmth that leaked from their colorful clothes, from their poverty, from sunbaked souls weighted, like mine, with memories as searing as the cold. They lived with a perpetual sense of foreignness for which there was no cure. After a lifetime, little was left of Africa or Asia but their hues, their smiles, and the look in their eyes. The foreigners moved about rigidly, just as I did, as if they were afraid of breaking. The wind struck mercilessly at their faces; the snowflakes cut into their lids like broken glass. Their knuckles, like my own, had gone stiff, cracking audibly as they shoveled mounds of snow frozen harder than steel by the nighttime cold.
In this graveyard of cars, we smiled in reproach of an absent god. We were not strong enough to cry in front of him, nor brave enough to curse him. It would have taken more nerve than immigrants like us possess. The snowy morning after the storm said more than years of propaganda brochures promoting assimilation, more than the immigration officials, the language course directors, the self-help coaches. From the white depths, we glimpsed each other’s lives—an incoherent human mass shouldering a destiny written by the snow. There I was, just like the others, holding a giant shovel. There I was, like them, digging out my car in the direction of a less congested street so I could relieve the car graveyard of my load. I decided then to venture out into the day and be part of a community. I would face, like anyone who is poor, divorced, lonely, and broke, what my daughter had done to herself and to me.
I knew what was on her mind. I knew that a furious storm was brewing beneath the tigress’s smooth flesh. My daughter had chosen to flee life as though it were a prison camp. How could she do it, though, when she was confined by white walls and under forced supervision by a team of doctors and nurses who would not stop asking stupid questions? I went to her room with the knowledge that she was about to explode, that she would not tolerate the suggestion that someone could save her. She scolded her boyfriend as one does a toddler, filling his eyes with tears. She had decided to kick him to the curb.
I never once thought my daughter had the capacity to love. I think she claimed she did to make us stop suffocating her with questions. When Jano had passed everything she knew through the sieve of her consciousness, she had realized just how great the deception was. She did not rebel the way we had, but instead went silent until she could no longer stand it. She had borne it for years—my illness, the scandal of my divorce, the premature loss of her mother, and then her aunt’s suicide. She had reached the conclusion that this aunt, whom she had gotten to know growing up, deserved no other death. Perhaps it had preserved her dignity in the face of the curse of exile, the absurdity of love, the madness of geography, and the cruelty of religion and all its sects.
After Jano’s boyfriend, whose name I could never remember and thus called Vincent, had rescued her, she seemed more self-possessed than he was. She was calmer and more stable than the confused blond boy whose hands trembled when he embraced her, uncertain how just a day earlier she had teetered on the brink of death right in front of him. He could not believe that the girl who had been curled up face-down on the ground, floating in a pool of vomit, was the same one now calmly asking him to pack his bags and move out of her apartment.
Under my foolish little chickie’s stern gaze, the boy froze into a wax sculpture. Though he was a child of the Canadian frost, he had never experienced such hardness, never felt such frigidity. Not even the suicide literature of a nihilistic West renowned for its absurdity could have prepared him for it. Nor could he recall any comparable story in his own family’s history, although it was all too familiar with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. For all the books he had read and the films he had watched, Vincent had never imagined that his beloved might have the traits of a killer—not the sort who carries a gun or a sword to kill other people, but the kind who carries her personal history, her experience, and her yearning for the future, and who has had enough of life. Jano had the witchy inheritance of women, the ability to prophesy good and evil. She could see far ahead, where she saw what Zarqa al-Yamama had seen and what had terrified Joan of Arc, and calmly tried to kill herself.
The young man expected his tears and broken adolescent heart to pressure my daughter into relenting. He asked her about love, about memories, about the lame-footed cat they had rescued from the shelter, about the wooden IKEA cabinets they had waited hours for and then assembled upside down, drowning in giggles. He asked her about the Persian rug they had paid for with their grocery money, about cactus pots, about spring flowers. He asked her if she remembered when and where they had met. With his heart in torment, he asked her: did she love him? Like any proud father, I knew that nothing would soften the steel inside her. Jano’s heart would not yield until it had sensed the end of things, until it had felt the pangs of loss and wallowed in oblivion.
From looking at Vincent, I could tell the boy’s heart had crumbled beyond repair. Given his limited intelligence, he could not come up with anything to say that would stir within my foolish little chickie an iota of regret or a change of heart. She had made her decision wholeheartedly, and that was that. Her face was rigid, her hands clenched, her eyes filled with reproach meant not for him but for a universe that had mocked her, leaving her to be rescued by a simple boy who had thought she could love and let others love her in return. Everything—-the gaze she kept angled away from him, toward no one, the tears that wouldn’t fall, the pulse that did not throb yet still whispered like a snake—all of it told him he should go away and leave her alone, so he did.
When had my daughter grown up? Her sarcasm had turned harsher than a frostbitten child, her laugh so rebellious. When had she nurtured this restlessness inside her, mastering ennui to its nihilistic end? How had she cultivated such knowledge while only in her twenties? She had been initiated into the unsolvable truths of existence–how? She had slipped from my hands, from the embrace of my affections, from my beating heart. This heart of mine had tended to her distress when it consisted of nothing but the mocking words of an adolescent, directed at me and at the world. Now I wondered when she had left behind the world of fun and laughter and joined the world of adults. This was a sad and serious world, with darkly shaded colors. A world sad without reason—and distant, like happiness.
*
Fate led me aimlessly through overcrowded hallways and corridors haunted by the smell of death. I wanted nothing but for the day to end so I could lay my head down somewhere solid, somewhere firm and definitive. It was then that I came up behind the nurse. Amid the din, everything seemed at once like an illusion. Time stopped inside me, as if a magnetic rod of heavy steel were dragging me through the heavily sterilized corridors. I was suffocating from the smell of medicine and cleaning supplies, held captive behind a woman whose disciplined footsteps, rather than her uniform, told me she was a nurse. She was not wearing scrubs but, instead, a severe outfit that made her look like an Anglican nun. All she was missing was the head covering and she would have beaten the sisters at their own austerity. Everything about her was short: her hair, her nails, even her sympathy. How I wished she would spare me her impartiality—let go, if only for a moment, of her prickly manner and chat about the weather, the post, the high electric bills from Hydro-Québec. I wished she would complain about expensive bank fees or how our income taxes kept going up and up. But she didn’t. She led me between various offices in search of the resident doctor while curtly explaining the schedule for the psychiatrist’s rounds. I was like a lost boy who had found his guide. I did not dare ask her name, but the doctor called out, “Lucille!” and thus she acquired one. Meanwhile, I gritted my teeth and signed my name to a binding contract stating that I would accompany Jano to all her appointments. When Lucille asked who would look after “the patient” once this was over, I explained in the studied tone of an accountant that my daughter would remain in my care until she and I had flushed this memory from our pores.
I signed mountains of paperwork in a sleepwalker’s daze. When I left, I realized that they were going to latch onto my daughter and keep her marching to the beat of their health system’s drum. In the hospital’s files, Jano would remain the fragile girl who had tried to commit suicide. She would not be reproached for this deed of hers, but it would cling to every medical document and every psychiatric evaluation. The stigma would taint her forever. She would be treated with artificial caution and care because she carried the stigma of insanity, the extra burden of a suicidal person who has failed to die. I wanted to tell the universe that Jano was not crazy and that I, crushed by my love for my daughter, would wipe this stigma of suicide and all memory of the attempt from her brow. I wanted to beg Lucille to have a coffee with me so I could tell her the story of our family and its beautiful women who were enamored of death. Maybe then her indifference would crack. Maybe she would understand our motives and stop treating us with the treacly fakeness of people here who talk about diversity as the essence of humanity, the rhetoric of civil society initiatives and H&M posters with their rainbows of white, Black and Asian faces blending into an anonymous mass while the obstacles of life in exile pile up between them, high as the Great Wall of China.
This was the way I had been since the divorce had destroyed me. I was a beggar for affirmation and a prisoner with a plan of action; I had a manifesto composed of every story I wanted to tell, every subject I wanted to educate people about. I was a creature who tried to satiate his craving for affirmation by demanding forgiveness from people who didn’t care who I was, nor I them. All I wanted was for them to notice me, to acknowledge that they had heard about someone like me, that they had encountered a story like mine—even if this meant drowning them in the gory details of stories about my country’s dead.
Before I could pester an emotionally detached nurse into listening to me, I had fallen into an unforgiving abyss of isolation. I wanted to know people’s names, stockpile their features like alms for the poor. Maybe someone would remember me, and I would be able to tell him that I had once encountered a woman called Lucille, and that my daughter had dumped a young man named Vincent. I wanted to tether myself to some reality through small talk with the locals, the people of this land, even if the land had vomited me up like stomach acid. I wanted to blow myself up and scatter my story among all living beings like the grains of a broken mirror, leaving its mark on every impassive face. I try to run away from everyone, away from the thoughts of the weak and suicidal, away even from my own thoughts, but I am paralyzed by my terror.
Back in her room, Jano was as radiant as the springtime sun, the glow of her skin contrasting with the gray, snow-choked morning outside. She stood up like a flower in bloom, her hair blond and curly, eyes ocean blue. For a moment I could see only Nana, and the vision shocked me. My daughter’s resemblance to her aunt was overwhelming. The smell of death; the taste of sorrow! The curse had been passed from one generation to the next, and that was all there was to it.
At the door of Jano’s room, I took her little bag from her hand, which was thin and bluish from the needle, and let her walk ahead of me while I carried her coat. Perhaps its thick fur would protect her from the delirium of the snow when it came to sweep us away. Smiling appreciatively, we bid farewell to the doctor and nurses–including Lucille, of course. Even the sick old man of seventy-something who had called Jano’s orange dress “impractical” grinned at us kindly and winked at my chickie, saying: “Ne le laisse pas gagner.”
Under the awning outside the Jewish Hospital in the lively neighborhood of Côte-Sainte-Cathérine, my little girl acted as if nothing were wrong. She took over driving my rickety old car, stepping into its muddy footwell and wiping away the condensation from the driver-side window. She looked at me with the most profound expression of puzzlement a daughter could give her father and a question she left unspoken: How did you let it get this bad? I said nothing, of course.
On the way home, my beloved daughter searched for a song popular among people her age. But once she had despaired of my old-fashioned taste in music, scattered across scratched-up CDs, she gave up and turned on the boring old radio. She took the collar of my coat and fixed it, making fun of my unkempt hair as she ran her fingers through it like a comb. Then she pressed her heel down on my shoe, laughing as she remarked maliciously:
“Can’t you find something that’s less of a disaster to wear?”
She waited for me to laugh, but I didn’t. My daughter wanted to go back to the life she had before, her old pattern of work and play. Her tone was lighthearted, as if everything were normal—as if she hadn’t attempted suicide only the day before, hadn’t tried to cast off life’s burdens like a cheap dress, hadn’t tested the force of life in her slender body, hadn’t butchered the heart of a twenty-something boy I called Vincent, hadn’t strangled a father who would struggle to breathe if the slightest thing hurt her.
Jano drowned me in small talk. I, the grieving father, was not yet ready to accept what she had done, nor had I come up with enough excuses to stick around. I was exhausted and angry. I wanted us to share a home like we once had, as a family. I wanted to tuck her in at night and lay out her damp clothes to dry by the heater. I wanted to brush her hair, maybe even braid it. I wished we would go back to being father and daughter. She would be sitting on my lap as I tapped out jazz tunes on the piano and imitated the voices of Marge, Lisa, and Maggie, the protagonists of the adult TV series The Simpsons, or spluttered to her in the voice of Donald Duck or Scrooge using her pet name, which had simmered for a while before we had settled on “chickie.” And she would dissolve into laughter once again. This is what I wished for more than anything.
I begged her to come with me; she refused. Finally, I yelled: “You have to understand, my dear—I can’t leave you alone!”
My outburst startled her. I think she thought I was teasing her the way I used to, but today in particular, I was in no mood for games. After some back and forth, bickering, threats, cajoling, pleading for sympathy, and the stirring of a little something in my eye which I would not dare to shed, I eventually convinced her to host me at her place. I claimed I was depressed in my tiny apartment, humble and dirty, and which she knew well, so she agreed to take me in.
Translated from the Arabic by Chloe Bordewich
Abeer Dagher Esber is a Syrian novelist and director living in Canada. She has written literary and film criticism as well as directed several documentary and narrative films. She is the recipient of numerous literary grants and prizes. Her novel Lulu (لولو) (Riyad al-Rayyis, 2003) was the 2003 winner of Syria’s Hanna Mina Book Award, while Houses of Absence (منازل الغياب) (Ihtifaliyat Dimashq, 2008) was awarded first prize during the Damascus-Capital of Arab Culture celebrations in 2008. She is also the author of the novels Paper Cutouts (قصقص ورق) (Riyad al-Rayyis, 2009) and Freefall (سقوط حرّ) (Dar Naufal, 2019).
Chloe Bordewich is a historian, editor, and translator based in Montreal. Originally from the United States, she holds a PhD in modern Egyptian history from Harvard University and is co-founder of the Boston Little Syria Project.
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