A Return at Christmas (A Story from Real Experience)

From real experience

Among the halves and quarters... or the three-quarter heads that showed themselves to me from the belly of the electric bus — as I surveyed from the sidewalk that living nightmare, crammed to choking as it discharged itself, and my turn came to board — I made out something familiar in one of the faces; and to my surprise the face's owner returned my recognition and greeted me first, the moment she touched the ground, hurrying toward me for fear of losing me, while I was still slow to believe my own eyes: that "Hiyam" should appear before me in that cold late afternoon and address me, earnest and brief:

"I was just now on my way to your house. I have business with you."

I said:

"Then let us walk. What news do you bring?"

This was our first meeting in three years — since the day Hiyam deserted her husband and her child, who lived in the apartment facing our house, after a long and violent quarrel; afterward she vanished from sight, and it was said she was working in the asylum for the feeble-minded.

She said:

"Longing for my son has settled upon my heart, and I have come to console myself with one look at him. I must have a companion on this errand, so come with me to the school."

It was Christmas Eve, and Fouad was then a year old. So we set about cutting our way, Hiyam and I, through the crowds, the gifts heaped high on parents' arms; and I shrank from letting my words strike against the wreckage of her tormented heart, so I forbore to ask her about a gift for Fouad. The traffic choked; the roaring of the cars rose; it was impossible for us to take one, so fierce was the scramble and so short the hours — until it seemed the very day of the "enrolling of all the world," as it stands in the sacred story.

At the school we were told that Fouad was suffering from pneumonia — that pernicious scourge which struck so many children that winter — and had been moved to the hospital some days before. The mother received the shattering news with meekness and resignation. But I felt that her thwarted errand had laid the danger bare, and that the sweeping terror for her son's health was now wrestling in her breast with a barrier that had long stood between her and the sight of him — the more so since a charge from his father kept watch over him.

The world darkened before our faces when we reached the hospital — with its calm, clean air — for all our comfort in the thought that penicillin treatment conquers infection with the millions of its merciful fighting armies. Yet those white halls and luxuriant gardens did not quench the outcast mother's thirst; they sharpened it — for Fouad's name was no longer on the lists: he had left the place that very morning for his father's house.

She asked the nurse, all eagerness:

"Then perhaps he is cured?!"

But he had been moved home at his father's wish, on the eve of the feast, as though some wariness had warned the man to gather the boy into his keeping — balking the mother of her object and barring the road she had taken. As we retraced our steps, a mother's sobbing reached our ears, and I cried out without thinking:

"Is it 'Rachel weeping for her children' before the 'King' is born? It is as though sickness and separation had conspired together against your Fouad. Has your resolve failed, then? Have you turned back from your purpose? Or will you go on to the house, come what may?!"

She answered me without a change of color, without the flicker of an eye, without a tremor in her voice:

"Is not Christmas the feast of pure motherhood? And is it any crime that I should seek my boy on his sickbed, wherever he may be?"

Before such insistence I followed her like a shadow, wondering what voice had called to the outcast mother to bring her back to the fold that was forbidden her. How many questions, indeed, came crowding upon my thoughts, which I held back when I was on the very point of flinging them at her:

Why had she fled in the first place? Where had she stayed? And what had happened, that she should repent her straying and live a life of austerity and drudgery?

For no one knew the secrets of this broken family; no man had ever put his finger on where the wrong lay or which of the two spouses it had struck. People's talk explained the husband's rage only by her infatuation with a lover, who soon cast her off, leaving her to wander where she would and to take shelter within the walls of the home for the crippled, in expiation of her sin.

And today she had come back to visit her sick son, whom the fever scorched, while a burning for home and hearth consumed her. We entered the house, she straining toward him with suspended breath; and when she reached him she threw herself on the floor at his side, touching his hands and his chest, his neck and his cheeks, his forehead and his hair. In a moment she had gathered him into her arms, kissing the sweat that streamed from him, panting with her passion, tossed between joy and terror, union and parting, washing the phantoms of her forebodings in her pouring tears, broken by sighs of prayer...

And it was as if the "solitude of the garden" had come before the birth of the "gentle Lamb"... How true, in such an hour of agony and struggle, the saying: "The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak." And the Almighty willed to grant the grace of life to the child in the hands of his imploring mother... The storm abated; after a while the sighs grew still, when he had settled into a calm and wholesome sleep; and the martyred mother appeared like Raphael's "Sistine Madonna"... with all its beauty of expression and purity of color, with the roundnesses of womanhood, the wakefulness of the features, the surgings of feeling, and the surrender to God.

But happiness gave her no long respite before our straining ears caught a key turning in the lock! The maid motioned us to hide ourselves in the adjoining room — her own — and I was at a loss how we should get out of this trap without scratching the neighborly friendship between my family and Hiyam's husband. Then I stilled my fright and quieted my caution. The father fell to examining the little one with the doctor he had brought, and they found him well on the way to recovery! What a happy surprise — how the searing fever had left him, and the glad tidings of health unfurled their banner beside the banner of peace spread over the earth on that tranquil night! If only the two men had known that the tokens of his precious recovery had been wet with the burning dew of motherhood, whose antidote had overflowed onto his fevered body from the blaze of her chilled heart!

And it was as though her presence in the house that night moved the husband to unburden himself to his friend the doctor. The two men drew apart into a corner of the sickroom, and the two women pressed their ears to the wood, listening to the story as he told it for the first time — the story of his parting from Hiyam. He said:

"I was fiercely jealous and monstrously selfish; I imagined love to be domination, fetters, obedience. I strove to rule her heart, and asked myself why she did not rule mine and pen me within the narrow of her inmost self — me alone and no other among all mankind — that she might drink deep of the springs of my gushing, toiling love! This conduct of mine would fill her now with hurt and pain; now again her merry spirit would get the better of her, and she would pass to and fro between me and our many friends in innocent amusements. I know today that she was innocent, my friend; but in those days a madness seized me whenever she favored anyone with a smile, driving my thoughts to the threshold of the great betrayal. Until one night she insisted on going to a dance. I refused; then I let her go with some friends, and kept to the house, feigning a slight indisposition.

"Toward midnight I slipped into the dance hall in disguise. It was a masked ball; and I went circling among the dancers until I came upon Hiyam, turning in the arms of the doctor who had presided at Fouad's birth! What I saw was enough for me! I gave the devilish fancies free rein to drag me on and hurl me down, fixing my torment upon this: that the man in whose arms she turned knew the charms of her body as I knew them... I was near to madness... And instead of raging and threatening, I walled myself up in an impregnable aloofness, an obstinate stubbornness, and a coldness beyond which there is no coldness... And I — the prey of my own jealousy — drove her out for the doctor to prey upon and carry off. Afterward I put off her divorce again and again, the better to torture her and to glut myself on the ruin of her happiness. The end of it was that her companion — one of my fellows at the university — left her, despairing of ever making her his wife. And she went away to comfort the feeble-minded."

A moment's silence settled on us all, in which there rose before me, far off, the "dreadful height" with its three crosses lashed by the winds! Then the silence was broken by a mellow, plaintive pealing of bells! And my fancy went back to the music of the angels and the nativity hymn of the Lord of love and redemption. The doctor said:

"Do you love her still?"

"That I do, in truth!"

"Could you forgive her?"

"One hour I say yes. And one hour no!"

"Have you remembered the word of the Son of Man: 'Let him among you who is without sin cast the first stone at her'?!"

The maid roused me from my daze, beckoning us out. We slipped from our hiding place onto the balcony that overlooks the back door, then gained the elevator, and the street. And in the night and the cold, alone, she walked, with automatic steps, and entered one of the cars —

— bound for the asylum of the feeble-minded!

And on the happy morning of the feast, as I was going down the stairs on my way to church, I heard a car stop and two figures spring from it. I knew them: Hiyam and her husband — going in to Fouad, their child, to wish him a merry Christmas and to live blessed years at his side.