The Story of the Month: An Unexpected Letter

He wrote to her, saying:

Salwa, it is from me — so do not stare long at the signature, and do not tire your eyes traveling up and down between the lines.

It is from me, after a proud silence that lasted long and that I did not wish to break until someone came to me saying: "Salwa has become a mother."

Then the impulses to write grew strong in me, that some of what I have felt, and feel still, might be lifted from me... But why do I begin at the end??

Let me draw myself out of what I am in, and close my eyes to a world I disown — and behold, I am Salem, that Salem of old... walking proudly with the arm of a beautiful bride, who was you, tucked in his, so carried away with joy that his feet scarcely touched the ground.

How near that picture lies to my mind; it comes to me whenever I summon it, that I may live on the memories of its sweetness and linger over it for hours; and my mind rebels against me if I summon any other, as though my life had ended there.

And we walk together to that house of ours... and existence ends. Do I stir in you the memories of our house? Do I waken them, when you have crowded them into a corner of yourself and wrapped them in a thousand veils... just as oysters secrete a pearly substance to coat every strange intruding body and ward off its sting?

I will not stand long before a single picture, for there are dozens... all of them sweet... all of them happy... all of them brimming with color... And these come to an end... our store of them runs out, and we come upon other, gloomy pictures... This one reminds me of the day I carried you to the maternity hospital... and left you to the hands of the delivering doctor... to return an hour later and kiss your marble brow and scald your cheeks with the tears of my feeling, while you gently moved me away, saying: Won't you look at the little one?

And I looked... a bundle of flesh wrapped in swaddling clothes; and when I held it and pressed on my little one's head my first kiss, the muscles of his face did not quiver in that way the faces of newborn babies do.

And I remember I said: What a dull little fellow...

And days later I came home with him... and this little one had become for us something tremendous, giving wings to our hopes and teaching them to stray to far horizons... Now we pictured him a boisterous boy, now a nimble lad... now a young man cutting his way through life and shouldering the passersby aside.

But that quietness in the child, that dullness, gave no assurance that our little one would have any of that... And what astonished us most was how little he cried...

And I remember the hour when I came home from my work one day at noon and you met me on the stairs, agitated and trembling, to say: Salem! I have noticed something about our child... He does not see... His eyes do not respond to the light even when it pours into them, and never once does an eyelid flicker...

Come...

And you took me to him, and I picked him up — he was forty days old — and stared into his eyes and read in them no meaning of life... I brought him near the window, and the glare pouring in with the rays of the noonday sun did not dazzle him...

Dread wrapped me too, and I summoned the nearest doctor; he examined the child and turned to face us with the cruelest truth two parents can hear... The child is blind — or so the outward signs declare... And there was more than one sign that troubled the doctor: the little one's limbs did not move with suppleness...

As for you... a stupor seized you that made me fear for you... As for me, the thing was a thunderbolt... I fancied it ringing in my ears with the old parable: The fathers eat sour grapes...

And you know, Salwa, that I was never one of the eaters of sour grapes... You know what a clean life I lived... But the disease ran in my arteries with my blood... For I am the son of a man who fathered, besides me, a brother born dead... and a sister who carried in her body what my child carries; then Death saw no place for her among the children of life, and gave her rest.

And here I am, seized for another's offense... casting out into the world one of those misfits for whom the world of the strong has no room...

And this was the truth that admitted no second face...

Scarcely a month had passed before the natural fate that awaited my son overtook him, and he died after a brief illness...

And my teeth were set on edge by the sour grapes my father had eaten...

And you remember, Salwa — you remember how I tore from your tender embrace a lifeless piece of us... and carried it to the cemetery... and laid it to rest in a wide pit in which I buried our dreams as well; then I came back with anguished eyes and parched lips, saying: Salwa... we want no more children...

And you said nothing... for your wounded motherhood was too weak to rise up... And when I dried your tears with my lips, I heard you speaking of life and death in the voice of the philosophers...

And we lived, Salwa, distracting ourselves with ourselves, with our food and our drink... with our daily needs; and I drowned you in clothes and jewels... and we frequented the places of amusement, that I might fill your empty world so you would not say: I want a child...

But you did want... your motherhood wanted, and your nature wanted — that nature I defied and treated harshly with my insistence... Yet — to speak the truth — you were generous in your silence... and I was grateful to you for understanding and forbearing... even though every glance of yours toward a child told the measure of my cruelty... the measure of my tyranny over you...

I would see you playing with your brothers' children and never having your fill... stroking the sweet, innocent faces with yearning fingers, then taking the little girls aside and tying their blond locks with colored ribbons...

And I would notice you passing the shops and staring long at the toys and dolls, then sighing like one who says: If only!!

How many and many a time I came upon you before a heap of our dead child's clothes, breathing in their scent and wiping your tears with them; and I would go out, finding my presence beside you hideous, and despising in myself this selfishness...

Yes — you yourself, without being able to help it, gave me no help... My keen sensitivity was wounded time after time, and my bitterness grew against myself... against my father, who forced me to be afflicted through no offense of my own...

And what fault was it of yours, that you should endure, and live with your pride stabbed as a woman and your mission cut short as a mother, because when I ventured to marry you I did not take the long view of the matter...

Indeed, it never crossed my mind that the curse living in my blood would work its work in my children...

And how cruel you were, Salwa, when you came to me on a day whose daylight you had spent with your sisters at the house of one of them, returning in the evening to say... Salem! Why do you not adopt a child, to be a help to us in life... And I answered you dryly... but then I came back to myself and excused you. Emptiness was killing you, and nothing availed to silence your longing to hear a lilting word called out to you by a little one clinging to your skirts...

It was a fresh stab, and that night my eyes knew no sleep... In the morning I rose with an idea... an idea — how cruel it was to us

both... Yes: what right has a man who can beget nothing but misfits to bind you to him?

A woman sees in a man a means to an end... for motherhood is in her the strongest emotion of all... A woman may weary of a man, but we have never heard of the mother who hated her child. Divorce...

And I went on wrestling with the resolve, and it wrestled with me... I lived a month in the hell of hesitation... And I went searching for the philosophy of strength, a philosophy that does not acknowledge the weak... I found it in Nietzsche, and with it I silenced the promptings of hesitation within myself...

It was not easy to give you up, being to you what you know I was... And I reckoned the news would be a blow to you as it was to me... And yet I went ahead.

For the anguish of some months is nothing beside your living without children your whole life long. And I settled the matter in an hour when my impulses evaporated and nothing remained of me but a lofty, idealistic thought...

I sent you the bill of divorce and took my way to the nearest travel office, where I bought a ticket to Europe. Without a word to explain this sudden resolve — not even to my partner in business...

I did not doubt that this strange conduct had leapt me, in your eyes and in the eyes of people, onto the list of madmen and misfits, and that the seas of bewilderment in which I left you tossing had all but drowned you. I stayed there three years, during which there was no lack of someone to tell me of your marriage — a happy match... And I was not surprised... for your sweetness, your wealth, and your father's social position were enough to secure you a good man who might not bear you a love as great as mine, but who was able to give you a son...

And you were blessed with the child...

And I came back...

I came back not to bar your path... nor to make of myself a hero in your mind...

Rather to erase some of what I reckoned might have clung to your thoughts of me... and to live in your soul as a clean thought... And now it is enough for me in life that you should have the delight of fulfillment. So kiss for me this little one who has granted you what my love and my devotion, and all I did for your sake, could not — he has beaten me with one lilting word...