Chapter 5 August 17

My research began with a false start: an experience I had at age thirty, an experience I should never have had. In fact, none of the protagonists should have had it. In the past, whenever I wanted to bring it up, I managed to persuade myself it was still too soon.

Of course it is not too soon now. It is almost too late.

It was a Sunday, a Sunday in the summer, in a village in the Mountains. My father had died shortly before dawn, and I had been given the most painful task imaginable—to go to my grandmother’s and hold her hand when she was told she had just lost a son.

My father was her second child, and we had agreed that my uncle, her eldest son, would phone her to give her the news. Told this way, things have a semblance of normality. But in my family, normality is always an illusion. For instance, before that summer I had seen this uncle, who had just turned sixty-seven, only once before in my life.

So I had come in the morning, and my grandmother had clasped me in her arms for a long time, as she always did. Then, inevitably, she asked the question I dreaded most: “How is your father doing this morning?”

I had prepared an answer, coaching myself on my way over.

“I’ve come directly from the house. I didn’t stop by the hospital …”

This was both the absolute truth and the most horrid lie.

A few minutes later the telephone rang. Normally I would have hurried to answer it so my grandmother would be spared the effort of getting up. On that day, I just asked if she wanted me to answer for her.

“If you could just bring the phone closer to me …”

I moved it closer, picked up the receiver, and handed it to her.

I couldn’t hear what was being said on the other end, but I’ll never forget my grandmother’s response.

“Yes, I’m sitting down.”

My uncle was afraid that she might be standing and might fall to the ground after hearing what he was going to tell her.

I also remember the look in her eyes as she said, “Yes, I’m sitting down.” It was the look of someone condemned to death who has just seen the gallows looming in the distance. Later, when I thought about it, I realized it was probably she who had advised her children to make sure a person is sitting down before announcing devastating news. As soon as her son asked the question, she knew to expect the worst.

We cried, she and I, sitting side by side, holding hands, for a long time.

Then she said to me, “I still expected to hear that your father had regained consciousness.”

“No. From the minute he collapsed, it was over.”

•  •  •

My father had fallen in the street, near his car, ten days earlier. The person who was with him had heard him exclaim only a surprised “ah!” before he collapsed, unconscious. A few hours later my telephone rang in Paris. A cousin told me the news, leaving very little room for hope: “He’s in a bad state, a very bad state.”

I returned to my native country on the next flight and found my father in a coma. He seemed to be sleeping peacefully; he was breathing and sometimes moved a hand. It was hard to believe he was no longer alive. I begged the physicians to test his brain once again, then a third time. It was pointless. The encephalogram was flat. He had suffered a massive hemorrhage. We had to resign ourselves.

“I still had hope,” my grandmother whispered. No one had dared tell her the truth till now.

We soon lapsed into silence, our sanctuary. In my family, we speak very little and with deliberation; we are always careful to be restrained, polite, and dignified. While this can sometimes be irritating to others, it is a long-ingrained habit, one that will be passed down to future generations.

We were still holding hands. She let go of mine only to remove her glasses and wipe them in the fold of her dress. As she was putting them back on, she gave a start.

“What day is today?”

“August 17.”

“Your grandfather also died on August 17!”

She frowned in a way that she sometimes did. Then she seemed to get over her outrage and settle into resignation. She didn’t say another word. I took her hand in mine again and held it tight. Though the same loss weighed on our hearts, the images in our minds weren’t the same.

My mind wasn’t on my grandfather that day, or indeed on the following days. I thought only about my father, his large face, his artist’s hands, his serene voice, his Lebanon, his sorrows, and the bed in which he had passed away. For me, and for all those close to him, his death was an emotional cataclysm. The fact that he had had a kind of “rendezvous” with his own father on a predetermined date merely elicited, from those to whom I mentioned it at the time, a brief and banal meditation on the irony of fate and the unfathomable ways of Heaven.

There, that’s all, end of episode.

There should have been a sequel, but there wasn’t. I should have drawn my grandmother into a long conversation about the person who had been the man in her life, but she died five years later without our broaching the subject again. By then she and I didn’t live in the same country. I had settled in France, and she never traveled outside Lebanon again. But I used to come back to see her every so often, and I could have found time to question her. I didn’t. To be honest, I simply didn’t think of it.