“Please have a seat.” I indicated the sofa, picking my nightdress off it. “Make yourselves comfortable.”
But they didn’t respond.
They both stood looking around the sitting room, then Tante Samia hurried over to the dining table and felt its surface. “Don’t worry, my dear. The table’s better!”
Then she seized hold of the tablecloth and said, “Look! Amina’s tablecloth! What a loyal daughter you are!”
I excused myself for a moment and went into my room. What if I lay on the bed and went to sleep or read a book? I knew I was deluding myself, but I wanted to be alone and soak up all the memories of the day, which had been a culmination of such a large slice of the past.
I heard Tante Samia asking Nazik to draw the curtains. She could no longer distinguish between night and day. I regretted letting them come with me, but then wavered again as I remembered all Tante Samia had done for my mother. Bracing myself, I got up. “What would you like to drink?” I asked them.
Tante Samia lit a cigarette. “Don’t go to any trouble, dear,” she said. “Something cold. Lemonade will do fine.”
When she noticed that I was still waiting for an answer from Nazik, who was searching busily through her bag, she gave a dismissive wave of her hand. “Don’t worry Nazik will have the same as me.”
They both downed their lemonade in one gulp and Nazik immediately rose to her feet and picked up the glasses. I begged her not to bother, but she insisted. “The
table must be empty. Who knows, something might get broken.”
Tante Samia leaned close and spoke in a low voice. “You should wash your hands. We must be pure in the spirits presence. Forgive me for asking, but you don’t have a period or anything like that, do you?”
From her bag Nazik produced a square wooden board and a fine china coffee cup without a handle. The letters of the alphabet and the words
yes
and
no
were inscribed on the board, and in the middle of it was a circle; I had seen classmates of mine with exactly the same thing, made out of paper.
“Wood? Not paper?” I heard myself say.
“Paper?” repeated Tante Samia. “Do you think people have time to make a new one each day?”
I decided I would leave them to it and fetch my book. My attitude toward calling up spirits hadn’t changed. At school I had marveled at its popularity, as I was busy with the living people around me. The dead were an illusion. In those years none of my relations had died, nobody I loved, not even anyone I knew. I remembered my incredulity when a boy who had been chasing me for months finally had an excuse to talk to me, and chose instead to join the others calling up the spirits and talking to the dead. But those days when I was bursting with life had passed. Now
that I was moribund, I had no desire to spend time with others like me, and being a spectator at such activities required too much effort.
However, Tante Samia and Nazik considered my presence as an indication that I was happy to participate, and Tante Samia told me to place my index finger on the rim of the cup. She recited some verses from the Quran while Nazik put her finger on the other side of the cup, which appeared to be imprisoned inside the circle on the board. Then Samia summoned my mother’s spirit.
“If you’re there, say yes,” she called.
The cup moved, making a slight whispering sound, and my finger moved with it. It came to rest on the word
yes.
Tante Samia’s features relaxed and she cried, “I’ve really missed you, Amina.”
“You shouldn’t say you’ve missed her,” whispered Nazik. “It’s bad luck.”
“Hallo, Amina. It’s been a long time,” continued Samia. “Today we had a celebration for you. They named the place where you used to live after you. The whole of Cairo was jumping. All the ministers and their deputies were there, and there were flags in the street, and music.”
She winked at me, as if to apologize for her exaggerations, or rather her lies, and then went on, “Can you hear me?” The cup moved again to the word yes.
“Congratulations! Many congratulations!”
Then Tante Samia went on talking as if she were on the telephone. Her red lipstick looked ridiculous. I pictured my mother getting fed up with her: her spirit would be yawning by now. Tante Samia went on without any change in her tone, “We’re in your daughter’s house. Yes, she’s here with us, she’ll say hallo. But, tell me, are you pleased about the
The cup moved to
yes
, and then to the letters
V-E-R-Y.
“What did she say?” Tante Samia asked us, trying to follow the cup. When her face was almost touching the board, Nazik pushed it away and shouted, “She says she’s very pleased.”
Tante Samia then put her finger on the cup to take my place. “Your turn now, dear,” she said.
I forced a few tears out and shook my head.
“Your daughter seems upset,” she resumed. “Never mind. You can go away now, Amina.”
She recited a few more verses from the Quran, then the timbre of her voice changed as she said, almost crossly, “Come on, Nazik, it’s your turn, and then mine again.”
Nazik looked unenthusiastic, but called upon her mother’s spirit a couple of times before saying in a hopeless voice, “I knew there wouldn’t be an answer. Perhaps her spirit’s lost or something.”
It was true, the cup was motionless on the board. She tried again. She exhaled noisily, then said, “What if I sum
mon that man who appeared to us once before? What was his name? Fadil.”
“What man? Who’s Fadil?” demanded Tante Samia impatiently.
“The man who answered us by mistake when I was summoning my mother’s spirit. The last time we tried it.”
“Oh, I remember,” said Tante Samia in a bored voice.
Nazik called on him again to ask about her mother. “I’m her daughter. I spoke to you last time. Please, let me talk to her. I’m waiting.”
Then the cup moved and she bent over it, reading the letters it spelled out. “
E-N-G-A-G-E-D.
What did you say?
Engaged?
That’s impossible. Oh, she’s not there?”
Tante Samia removed her cigarette agitatedly from between her lips. “He’s making fun of us. Talking to someone else I Not in! Where’s she going to go? That’s the first time I’ve heard of a spirit being busy. It’s impossible. She must still be annoyed with you, Nazik. Don’t take no for an answer. Tell him she must be angry because you buried her in Cairo instead of her hometown. Let him explain to her that it was so that you could visit her more often.”
Nazik repeated Tante Samia’s words parrot-fashion to the spirit Fadil, and the two of them waited for the cup to move. When nothing happened, Nazik dismissed the man’s spirit and sat looking vague.
Had my finger really moved over the letters, endowed
with the spirit’s ferocious energy, or was it Nazik or Tante Samia dragging the cup along? Although I swung between credulity and disbelief, images of figures in white sheets continued to float through my mind.
I was brought back to reality by the sound of Tante Samia calling on the spirit of her nephew Afeef. Her voice was different this time, tearful and imploring. She asked him how he was, if there was anyone with him, and whether he could hear her clearly. When the cup stopped on the word
yes
, she wept, asking him to forgive her, then regained her composure and dried her face on her sleeve. How small her pupils looked, like pinheads! She put her glasses back on so that she could talk seriously and give him detailed news of his children, Ahmad, Muhammad, Mustafa and Nora, tell him what marks they’d got in school, and report that their mother, his wife, was as mean as ever, God forgive her.
She apologized for saying this, then rattled on. “We slaughtered a sheep at the Feast. We fed it on early clover to fatten it up. I’m talking to you from Amina’s daughter’s place. Amina had a street named after her. The minister was there and he said he’d seen me on stage and was an admirer of mine. I talked to him because of the cataract operation.”
I felt the cup being pulled along with unaccustomed force. Even Nazik felt it and shouted, “Come on, Samia, let him go. He’s fed up. He’s pulling the cup.”
Tante Samia paused for breath, then asked quickly, “Are you in a hurry, dear? Good-bye. Take care of yourself, dear.”
Then she dismissed him and turned to us, yelling hysterically, her painted mouth and dark glasses strangely at odds with her grief. “I know he hasn’t forgiven me. Did you see how much of a hurry he was in? He hasn’t forgiven me. He’s right. Before he died he said to me, ‘I’m ill, Auntie.’ I didn’t believe him. No one did. He started to walk with a stick and he couldn’t stop shaking. I imitated him, and everybody laughed. A week before he died, he said to me, ‘Let me stay with you for a few days, Auntie, with my family, until things sort themselves out.’ I wouldn’t have him. I said a few days will turn into a few years and told him to look for a job. He had a bad reputation. Horses and the lottery. He’s right not to forgive me. The poor man gambled to get money to live on.”
“Heavens! It’s nine o’clock!” said Nazik, looking at her watch. She picked up the board and returned it to her bag. I felt anxious. I had become involved with what was going on in the room and almost ceased to be a spectator. I no longer wondered whether Nazik was cheating and pulling the cup toward the letters that suited her. I was trying to work out the reasons for my change of heart, to understand what Samia and Nazik were doing. They wanted to arrive
at some point of reconciliation with the dead, so that they could be at peace with the living.
My head was starting to hurt. Hesitantly I asked Tante Samia if I would be able to summon the spirit of someone precious to me without speaking out loud.
“Why not, dear?” answered Tante Samia briskly. “Nazik and I will go out on the balcony.” Then, checking herself, she went on, “No, you can’t do it alone. What if you talk to the spirit in your head? I’m sure it would be able to hear you.”
“She can’t. That’s not allowed,” interrupted Nazik.
Tante Samia turned to her sharply. “Of course she can’t,” she said sarcastically. “Otherwise you won’t be able to hear what’s said and that’ll keep you awake all night. You’re so nosy!”
Nazik shrugged her shoulders indifferently. “Do as you please,” she said.
I felt hot with embarrassment at what I was thinking of saying, then I seemed to hear a voice ordering me to speak.
“Is it true that you were sorry you left me?” I whispered.
The cup shot across the board. When I saw it landing on the word
yes
, I relaxed.
My voice grew louder. “Was Sana the one who …?”
Yes.
“Did you know you had a bad heart before you divorced me?”
No.
“Did you divorce me because you’d stopped loving me altogether?”
No.
“Do you love her?
No.
“Do you love me?”
Yes.
My eyes flew from one side of the board to the other as if I were watching a tennis ball and the sweat ran down my back.
“Are you sorry?”
Yes. Yes.
I burst into tears and tried to leave the table, but Tante Samia protested, at first in a stifled, fearful voice, then with a shriek that made me drop back into my seat.
“You mustn’t leave the spirit suspended in the cup, child. Say good-bye to it. Dismiss it.”
I sobbed uncontrollably.
“God help us,” she shouted, struggling to compose herself. “The spirit’s still hanging in the cup, child.”
She said a prayer, recited a few verses from the Quran, said another prayer. “The spirit doesn’t want to go. You’ll have to dismiss it yourself.” Then she started to shout:
“Please, I know what I’m talking about. Once the spirit of a woman we didn’t know turned up by mistake and stayed with us the whole night.”
The two women began repeating “In the Name of God the Compassionate, the Merciful” in chorus. The fear that dominated their faces frightened me, but I buried my head in
my
hands, hoping they’d go away and leave me. I was thinking, If his spirit stays around, I can talk to it instead of listening to the radio all the time.
Since he left me, the radio had become
my
constant companion. Samia and Nazik were trying to pull my hands away from my face. I could smell Samia’s breath and feel her spit spraying over me. They shook me, gently at first, then more violently. I didn’t respond to them. Better to have his spirit to talk to than to debate constantly with myself about him, being too easy on myself sometimes and on him at others, exaggerating either the love or the unkindness.
Samia slapped my face. “That’s to bring you to your senses. Do you feel better now? The spirit’s still hanging in the cup. You must dismiss it. Please.”
He had told our daughter to give me a tranquilizer and force me to come to the hospital so that he could say goodbye. I hadn’t believed her. So he had died loving me. Sana herself had admitted as much to my daughter.
I heard Tante Samia reciting verses from the Quran and ordering the spirit to leave. I had the impression she was
doing it over and over again. “It won’t go,” she shouted, almost sobbing by now.
Then Nazik intervened. She seemed to think she could outsmart the spirit and said loudly, “Go easy on him, Samia! Don’t you know it’s her husband she’s talking to? How can he leave her? Her face is as beautiful as the moon. I’m sure he’s not going to go unless she tells him to. Don’t forget that she was the one who summoned him.”
If he didn’t want to leave me now, how had he managed to tell me that he couldn’t live without Sana, my best friend, and make me feel as if I had been wrung out like laundry? I hadn’t said good-bye to him or gone to his funeral. I hadn’t grieved and wept with the others and so his death had remained an unsolved riddle, an event on the borders of reality.
Samia slapped me again. A rock that had been sitting on my chest for months had suddenly rolled off. Another slap, and Tante Samia was shouting, “Dismiss the spirit, girl. For my sake, and Nazik’s. We’ve got other relatives we want to stay in contact with. Do you want me to get a bad reputation in the spirit world?”
If only they would leave me at this table, where we used to eat. I can see his hands resting on it now, nursing his glass of whisky, his newspaper spread out in front of him. He used to sit on that chair, although he was always ready
to offer it to visitors, because it was the most comfortable. He would put old records of Umm Kulthum on the turntable, and her voice would echo sweetly around the room. If only these two weeping, wailing women, afraid for the spirit suspended in the cup, would leave me now. I want it to stay there. I’ve lived through years of love and marriage with it.