A Funeral, a Burglary, and a Proposal... and a Tanka: Creative Nonfiction and a Poem by Camilia Darwish

  

Tanka: Father

Father laid me in

The ocean, when I was born.

Like Moses, they said.

But oceans grew between us

And I forgot father's name.

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A Funeral, a Burglary, and a Proposal

The strangest, most cringe-worthy marriage proposal I have ever received from a complete stranger is, without doubt, the one offered to me in 2008 by a police officer amid a burglary investigation in Egypt. The perpetrator (of the marriage proposal, not the break-in) was the unfortunate police officer who dragged his partner to my family apartment in Cairo on one depressing afternoon responding to my mother's seventh call to the local police station. There had been a break-in at our home and the man who conducted the botched "investigation" thought to visit my mother again days after the burglary to try his luck at asking her for my hand out of what seemed to be sheer boredom. I am not claiming that I was not flattered by the half-interested, meh-quality proposal, but let's say it was the wrong stranger in the wrong place at the wrong time.

            The day before the infamous burglary, I had taken the first flight back home from Dubai to Cairo after receiving a life-changing midnight call from my elder sister. She told me that my father had passed away minutes after being placed—despite his objections—on a dialysis machine. He did not want to pursue his fight against cancer any longer. I refused to believe my sister, it must be a mistake, for Dad had convinced me throughout our short phone conversations, using his booming voice and all the proper reassuring medical terms that a well-read Chemistry and Physics teacher like him would use to win an argument, that I should wait another week or so before I would fly back home with my fiancé whom he was looking forward to meet for the first time.

            I rejected my sister's claims of his death and was sure I get back in just enough time to watch my father's ethereal smile sail across his bronze slim face, one last time. For years after my Dad’s death, I felt cheated out of my chance at a proper goodbye and I remained upset at him for not telling me the whole truth about his condition. Eventually, though, that day, I collected my thoughts and few clothes and flew back home—albeit a day too late.

            I think the very first time the guilt hag sank its teeth in my soul was on that long flight home to attend my father's funeral. Right there, as the plane drifted over the bumpy clouds, I felt the crushing weight of guilt coming down on me as I thought of how hurt my father must have felt seeing his last-born child leave home so abruptly. About a year before my father's sudden passing, I had left my teaching job at one of the universities in Egypt to travel to Dubai for work. My father did not say much about it, and I wasn't waiting for permission, for as my parents grew older, they grew out of their own habitual anger, while mine grew bigger over the years until it separated itself from me. With every step I walked in life, anger was walking ahead of me, and all the words left unsaid, the apologies that were never made, filled the space between my parents and I until there was no room for me to stay. So I left, but not for lack of love or care—there was plenty of both between us. I would always call, bring tons of carefully-chosen gifts, beg my parents to let me send money home. I would travel back every few months on every holiday and cook meals, but I would not stay for long, or at least not long enough. 

          The funeral itself was blurry. I only remember shaking strangers' hands and then driving with my mother to the cemetery where I apologized profoundly to the man who was now two worlds out of earshot. After the funeral, my mother and I returned to the family apartment where my father had spent his last few days before being admitted to the hospital. I headed to his cold bed trying to inhale what was left of his existence, hugging his rough wool tiger-print blanket with which he would cover himself even in summer. My family’s apartment was located on the first floor in a five-storey residential brick building in a quiet neighborhood in the heart of Cairo. My Dad's twin-sized squeaking bed had been dragged right next to the large barred window, so that he could watch the small strip of garden separating the building from the curved pavement as he rested in his bed. My mother and I spent the day together laughing and crying as we tried to make amends with the new state-of-being that did not include my father's physical presence.

           My mother laughed hysterically through her tears, her eyes beaming with pride as she was recounting how, despite losing half his body mass in the weeks before his death, my Dad's strong arms and slender body won him a battle against a huge one-eyed male street cat which managed to jump and squeeze itself through this window in a bid to reach Mom's unwilling petite apricot-white fluffy cat for mating. My Dad protected Mom's cat from the attack of the unwanted groom and led the feisty transgressor out.

`           Feeling completely burned out, my mother and I retired to my old bedroom which had two small beds. Finding peace in each other's company, we both surrendered to a coma-like sleep but not before putting all our worldly possessions in our two dandy handbags and then—for reasons still mysterious to me today—we both placed our bags neatly on a rocking chair at the end of our beds as if unconsciously preparing a Muslim-version of an early Christmas gift to the thief. The two bags that the night thief happily snatched contained my mother's retirement salary and her white gold zircon ring as well as my foreign-currency salary, my trendy Motorola mobile, my Guess wallet and a love note from my fiancé. I remember I held my passport between my hands that night and decided to put it under my pillow, keeping my ticket out of disaster at a close range.

             We both slept like logs through the thief’s sawing of the window bars and his tour of the apartment. My family home had two doors: a wooden one and an exterior iron door. We learned later that the unwelcome night visitor had planned to slide into our apartment through the window and open the doors for his partners to trickle out our home’s contents, in which case my mother and I would have certainly been awakened and would have probably joined my father. However, our thief failed to open one of the doors and so slipped away, content with the loot bags.

             In the morning, I woke up to my mother's Godzilla scream when she realized that our two bags were gone. Of course being a typical Egyptian woman with a natural built-in inclination to over-estimate the character of the male figure in the family, my mother decided to call my elder brother. I have always been puzzled at my mother's renewed faith in her first-born; for my brother has always remained true to his status as an authentic cad. So since I, for genetic reasons, fell short of the saviour role requirements, my beautiful five-foot tall mother rushed to the landline phone to summon her son. With tears racing down her white rosy cheeks, eagerly holding the phone in her petite veined hand, pressing it hard against her red ear while she nervously ran her free hand over her Afro-textured hair, Mom finally got hold of my brother and succeeded in receiving the usual scolding for whatever reason he thought of to give him the right to yell at her, one more time. She breathed hard and surrendered to the disappointment, while the insides of me burned with the usual rage.

           However, my mother had a stubborn head over her plump shoulders; and so against my all-knowing brother's advice, she called the police. Then, over the next five hours of waiting for the "SWAT team," my mother and I were gradually transforming into "woke" women as we restored our fading knowledge of what a disappointment our police system was. After being threatened with a case of harassment, my mother finally stopped calling the police station. She called my elder sister instead who, excited by all the sudden action and out of a spike of wild imagination, told her husband that we were both rape which led him to race in his car to our home after he threw an elegant slim-fit blue shirt over his pyjama pants.

          When my disoriented brother-in-law arrived with my sister to our apartment, my mother and I had to reassure him a million times that "I kid you not" there was no rape involved, at which he was immensely relieved but started immediately considering a divorce from my sister who scared the life out of him with her incredible ability to make up stories and her crazy family that never failed in being such a huge magnet of disasters.

           To our surprise, two very annoyed policemen finally arrived. They were not in uniform, but both of them wore mismatched items that screamed “I slept in that jeans and shirt last night!” There was no way for any of us to confirm that these men, who were disinterestedly browsing our well-preserved crime scene, were actually police officers expect for their impatient you-disrupted-my-idyllic-existence look that always adorned the face of the archetypal police officer in my home country. I made the mistake of asking whether any of them had tools for lifting fingerprints. Naturally, the question earned me the accusation of watching too much TV followed by a callous look from the alpha officer whom my mother referred to later as “the Romeo who asked her for my hand” despite telling him that we were mourning and rather uninterested.

          At one point in the burglary investigation (as in my mother and I being investigated), Mr. Alpha Romeo insinuated that my mother and I made-up the whole burglary story because he did not see how the thief could have managed to enter our apartment. My brother-in-law, his hair still looking even more frantic that he himself was, went on a quick tour around the apartment till he reached the iron-barred window and found the sawed bar that our perfectionist thief magically placed back before fleeing without disturbing our sleeping-beauty sleep. After the discovery of the how's and wherefores, a police report was filed and a couple of days later a marriage proposal was made but not an arrest.

          While my mother, sister, brother-in-law and I were grappling with the question of what's wrong with police in our country and why the thief left my mother's keys in the iron door lock without opening it, a heavy knock announced that my brother and his wife had arrived. After shaking hands with my brother-in-law and casting an inexplicably angry look at my mother and I, my brother, wearing a fur-collared black leather jacket and heavy French cologne, assumed his seat in the center of the guests' room, while his wife acknowledged our presence with a nod. My mother slapped a nervous smile on her face that did not fade away despite my brother continuously grilling her for calling the useless police. He was not wrong about the policemen, but as he continued pouring his insults over my mother who was pretending to be busy with pouring and serving coffee, and as my brother pulled his coffee cup from Mom's gentle hands, years of anger unleashed inside me and my voice hovered like a dark cloud and I rained on my brother with my roaring. I demanded that he respected his mother, while at the same time blaming her for putting-up with his unwavering unkindness. My voice became even louder in order to hush the child inside me who had always been brilliantly successful at masking her fear of her own brother. My brother charged at me like a bull, I stomped my feet down like a torero, coffee cups clinked and flew in the air, my sister-in-law cursed us all, bodies stood between us, and all ties between him and I were severed forever.

         After retiring to my room to spare my mother the agony of seeing her delusional image of loving siblings shattered, my brother stomped into my room and everyone around me just left, assuming that we would have a moment together. My brother said that I had no respect for him despite him being a decade older than I was, and I suggested that he would talk himself out of the habit of calling his own mother names. He attempted to pat my shoulder, perhaps it was his oversized watch which stood in the way, but he insistently whispered that I might have been the one to speed-up my father's death.

           My words burned  my throat as, this time, I swallowed my anger and sat there trying to straighten my back where my brother's dagger had sunk so deeply. My brother left the apartment and we never saw each other again, not even at my mother's death bed about ten years later. Once he left, my mother's smile was restored.  She told me that my father's last prayer was for God to spare him some extra time so that he could attend my wedding. She playfully said that my father had a nickname for my brother: "shit-bag." My mother broke into a laugh that was soon clouded by a memory of my brother's cold-hearted treatment of Dad just few nights before his death. She made sure to be clear, however, that, nevertheless, Dad had always loved his son.

          My mother told me that parents only remember the love their children give them and that all is forgiven in a parent's heart. For the rest of that day my mother flipped through her memory of Dad's funny habits, the many electric shocks he got when attempting to fix a plug or a machine, and how he never failed at completely ruining everything he tried to repair.

            At that moment, overwhelmed by a realization, my mother stood up, took her bulky keychain and attempted to open the iron door that our thief mercifully failed to open. I watched my mother as she tried many times to turn the key in the door's lock without success. I asked whether we were locked in and how was it that we managed to open that door in the morning when she couldn't do so now. She turned to me holding her hands up in a silent celebration saying that my father installed the lock on that door himself and that she argued with him every time the lock failed her, accusing him then of having a sort of anti-Midas touch and of ruining everything he laid his hands on. My Mom said that Dad was watching over us and that his terrible handyman skills had saved our lives.

          For years after my father passed away, I could perfectly visualize him sitting on my mother's favorite Louis XV chair in the living room at home, not taking much space on the chair, crossing his long legs, leaning forward with both hands and forearms meeting at the wrists forming an x shape while he holds between his piano-player fingers his seventh-in-a-row local cigarette. He is laughing at one of his own recycled jokes, his Adam’s apple moving like it had a life of its own, while his laughter forces one of his big eyes shut in a playful wink. I could see him, but I could never hear the sound of his laugh. I thought maybe if I had taken the flight back home a little bit earlier, I would have heard his laugh one last time, and I would have held his cuddling rough hands and let him know, in words not just actions, that I loved him and that I would never be complete again without his warm presence.

          After many agonizing years of soul-searching and spirit-lashing in which I lived off feelings of guilt and lost myself hundreds of times to the question of why my father did not call me to his death bed, I realized that he did not want me or my now-husband to see him so fragile, and that he had absolute faith in his strength and was taken by surprise when death knocked the door.

           Twelve years have passed since the "triangular events" took place back in Cairo, but burnt bridges were not rebuilt and so, once again, I was cheated out of a proper goodbye when my mother died. It did take me years, however, of rebuilding before I managed to understand. In their mind, my parents were sparing me the agony of a goodbye; and to me, I needed that goodbye. However, there is some peace in the realization that I needed to give up my "proper goodbye" so that my parents were able to have their last moment in this life the way they wanted it to be.

           The very fabric of life is made of broken connections, broken pieces, infiltrated by moments of happiness and confirmations of love. Sometimes, when the end comes, it is as unexpected as an unwarranted proposal. Sometimes death is just an unwanted stranger coming at the wrong time. But is there any good time for it? Death does not hand out proper goodbyes or a written absolution from guilt. If love exists in our hearts in abundance, nothing can change that, not even death or the lack of words and apologies.

_____________ Camilia Darwish is a first year Creative Writing and Publishing student at Sheridan College.