“I can’t be sure what happened to his mother,” Death said, his voice phlegmy and burlapy after so many cigarettes. A hoary cloud of smoke had settled above his head, making him appear even grimmer and gloomier than usual. “I too drink from Lethe every now and then. I am unable to keep track of everyone.”
“It would help Jacob if you could bring yourself to remember,” Satan said. “This remains an open wound.”
“I don’t do wounds,” Death said, “or windows, for that matter. Ask one of your saints.” The flick of his hand caused his cape to drop from his shoulder. It remained wedged between his back and the chair. “Why do you care? When did his mother disappear, forty years ago? So he forgets about her for decades, then you prod him with your spade-fork? You stress him out, and now you need help relieving him of said stress. And people think I’m the one who’s uncaring. Listen, do you know how many of those working ladies he grew up with in Cairo disappeared? A woman would go to the store one day and never return, another would visit home, and whoopsie, we no longer know where she is. The aunties were interchangeable, and most of them had more time for the boy than his mother did. But no, a million times he should ask her pardon, five million ways the cats meow about how much he missed her. How poetic! How pathetic! Spare me, please. Do you know how many Arabs vanish every day? Every prison in the region is filled with breathing corpses who were once human, with full lives or semi-full, since they are Arabs, you know. Syrian jails, Moroccan, Israeli, Saudi, Iraqi, all overflowing with the they-were-once-human. But no, he wants his mommy. How ridiculous! Remember Joseph, the boy’s tormentor in school? You must remember him, the one who always ran pencil lead under his fingernails hoping to appear less bourgeois, a reverse French manicure. He disappeared after the war. He tried to pass for a civilian, the idiot, and the Syrians simply snatched him and left the taxicab he drove on the side of the road. He has been rotting in Mezzeh for over twenty years, but who pays attention to someone like him? No, your boy makes sure to paint her face in his memory. Why? Because he’s not sure he remembers her as she was, all he has is an impression, as if anyone’s remembrances are anything more than fuzzy impressions. He suffers because it’s his mother, the same one who sent him away to the lands of oblivion.”
“You mock me,” Satan said.
“All in good fun,” Margaret said, ever immaculate and self-possessed.
She jiggled the string in her hand, and above her the baby dragon balloon flapped its wings, changed colors from red to iridescent green depending on the angle. The cross at the end of her staff lay upon her lap, within the folds of her skirt. The helium dragon’s flight called their attention to the window and its sky: cold blue and grays, ordinary, the sun on its deathbed, indifferent and lukewarm, bankrupt.
“This interview would be better if it were raining, don’t you think?” Margaret said. “I would prefer a day more remarkable, for the boy’s sake, if nothing else, more memorable.” Her gaze left the window and fixed on her interviewer. “I must say I did not quite like the way cruel Death went on and on about Jacob’s mother, and moreover, he was quite wrong. Jacob’s remembrances of his mother shaped him the way the outline of a shore is crafted by its ocean. They resurfaced often. You can ask me. I know. I was there. Maybe the lord of heartlessness meant that the boy did not spend enough time with his remembrances, did not contemplate them much or wallow in them, but isn’t that Death’s work? He rarely takes souls in full bloom. People give him pieces of their souls gladly, and continue doing so until the end, when they no longer have much of their life to keep, so little to fight him with. Here, take this part of me, I don’t like it, take this memory, you can have that trait.”
“Whenever someone mentions him,” Satan said, “a little piece of me dies.”
“Clever,” Margaret said. “I like that. When the boy’s mother disappeared, he thought about her every day, every moment. His memories were still fresh, and then too, a year or so after, Badeea sent him a parcel filled with memorabilia. So on top of the sophomoric Stockholm snow globe, he had photographs, few as they were, anklets, the besequined veil, the sleep mask. Those items were easily able to prompt recollections, to revivify his sense organs: the touch of her lace, the scent of her veil, the feel of her lush lipstick on his lips.”
“His mother’s blood flooded his eyes,” Satan said.
“Exactly,” she said. “But then those things were taken from him. The shoe box with the black-and-white snapshots was the first to vanish. Those lost items transformed into little more than impressions, their effects on his senses much diminished. Some items were misplaced, some mispacked, others taken, but it was not his fault. It wasn’t. After those horrid classmates assaulted him at graduation, he was flown out of Beirut in the middle of a civil war, flown to Stockholm never to return. His belongings were packed for him, the poor boy. Death cannot blame him for this.”
“And yet he does,” Satan said. “May I ask why you are defending the boy so earnestly?”
“I loved his mother,” Margaret said. “I thought you knew that. She could have been one of mine had she called on me while pregnant. She should have been mine. I failed her. The poet was born on the day he discovered her disappearance.”
“Oh, yes,” Satan said. “Remember this:
Snuff the candles,
Break the cups.
Roll up the carpet, dear heart,
And bury your grace.
No one returns.
One of my favorites.”
“I miss that boy terribly.” Margaret gazed out the window once more, the wrench of tears could be seen in her eyes, but none dropped. “Yes, I would have preferred a rainy day to this, thick irrational rain as in the days of Noah.”
“How many rains must fall before the stains are washed clean once more?” Satan asked.
Atop her bosom, the antique medal depicting her and a majestic conquered dragon lifted up and down with each long breath.
“Bring him back,” she said.
“He gave up on poetry,” Satan said.
“What poet hasn’t?”
“He is writing prose now,” he said.
“Just ramblings,” she said.
“The flights of a mind on its last wings.”
“No,” Margaret said, “not last. Tired wings—the flights of a mind with exhausted wings. A poet is tormented by the horrors of this world, as well as its beauty, but he can be refreshed, reborn even; he can take to the sky once more. Think phoenix, not Icarus.”