When I was about to leave our apartment in the Gulf, Sarah put her thin arms around my neck. She did not want to be separated from me. My husband Rachad, on the other hand, wanted to get me to the airport as quickly as possible. On the plane, I thought I saw Sarah’s hair. She has golden, curly locks like her father. I jumped up from my seat and ran down the aisle toward the first-class compartment, knowing she would be there waiting for me; but she was not. How could she possibly have been? I looked around me carefully, scrutinising the face of every passenger. Sarah simply wasn’t there. She had disappeared like a magician’s handkerchief.
When the fighting intensified, my friend Maha came to stay at my place. Every time the ceasefire ends and fighting resumes, I wait for her. In fact, I dream of her company so as to break the monotony of my loneliness. Sometimes I even get the urge to take her in my arms, to hug her tightly. At night we sleep pressed against each other. We are not intimidated by the shelling. Every time she comes over, I open my photo album and show her my daughter’s pictures. It has been two years since I was forced to leave the Gulf and return to war-torn Lebanon, two years since I’ve seen Sarah. She was eight years old at the time. Every summer I beg Rachad to let her come to Beirut, but he won’t hear of it.
Recently, my other friend, Josepha, took me to the shrine of the Virgin Mary in Dekwaneh, where the Virgin began to appear in the winter of 1986. I had been planning to visit her for quite a while. You see I was sure that if I begged her enough she would hear my prayers. That night when mass ended, Josepha took my hand and briskly led me to the Naf ‘a roundabout.
We had to walk through a crowded and dark alleyway. A soft breeze was blowing small bits of humid soil into the air as people’s feet sank deeper in the muddy ground. I took my place at the end of the line. There I stood very still. All eyes were glued to one spot, to the familiar silhouette inundated with celestial light. She did not look back at them. Instead, she searched for me among the crowd and fixed her gaze upon my face. My cheeks turned fiery crimson and I felt like a hot cloud of boiling vapour. My heart hammered fiercely against my chest while bitter tears ran down my cheeks.
I tried desperately to make my way through the crowd in the hope of touching her. I stretched my hand toward the holy figure, but was petrified by the seemingly forbidding light that seemed to emanate from her reflection on the icy glass pane behind which she stood. Have all my tears, all my suffering, all my anguish been necessary for her to hear me? For a few more seconds, I could feel her looking at me and then I stopped seeing her altogether. Why does she appear to me more clearly in my dreams? Why is it that suddenly I can no longer discern her face, the colour of her eyes? She must dislike being surrounded by so many people. Still she looked at me and I’m sure I heard her whisper, ‘I am with you; fear nothing and remain here!’ The thought of her words intensified my sobs. ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, deliver me from this torment. Give me back my daughter.’ At first, I could only hear my own impassioned voice. Then the Virgin Mary calmly said, ‘Sarah is here in Beirut.’
‘So it’s Najla, my sister-in-law,’ I screamed to Josepha. ‘Najla has kidnapped my daughter. I’ve known it all along. Now I’m convinced that Najla has lied to me. She and her brother must have agreed to never let me see my daughter again.’
‘My daughter is here,’ I say to Najla the next day.
Her reply is prompt and malicious: ‘I swear you’re mad, completely mad.’
Why does she keep saying that? And why does the wife of the concierge hold the same opinion? I remember the day I gave her husband money to buy some grilled chicken for my dog. ‘Take Blacky for a walk and feed him the chicken,’ I said. Blacky never liked the concierge much, but after being cooped up in the apartment for so long he was happy to leap down the stairs after him. The stupefied man paused a moment on his way back to show the chicken to his wife. ‘Give it to me! Give it to me! The children will eat it. The bones should be enough for the dog,’ she yelled. ‘That poor woman is completely mad.’
I am scared of growing old alone. So old and wrinkled that Sarah will not recognise me. I am Warda, Warda who has suffered greatly, Warda who brought a child into this world but is prevented from seeing her. Will we ever meet again? Will she place her face against my chest and inhale the smell of my skin as she did when she was little? I remember how she used to close her eyes when we cuddled in bed, ‘I love the way you smell, Mummy.’ I wonder if she misses me. What if some foreign nanny has erased her memory of me?
Suddenly the phone rings. ‘Hello? Hello?’ I say frantically, but there is no answer. ‘Hello?’ I say again to the silence on the other end. I never get an answer, yet I hear breathing. Perhaps it’s Sarah’s kidnapper? He must have wanted my daughter to have a word with me and then changed his mind at the last moment.
‘Hello … This is Warda speaking … Please let me speak to Sarah? Sarah, this is your Mummy.’ There is static on the line and then it goes dead.
Translated by Sleiman El-Hajj