Damazine – Pollywogs – Serene Taleb-Agha

Raya was doing a good job grieving. I had expected tears, which I could handle. I would be cheerful, crack a few jokes, and she would fight back the smile, just like in the old days. But she didn’t even cry. She just sat there in her velour housedress with her eyes aimlessly scanning the floor tiles while her kids threw plastic toys all over the place. It was Mom’s idea that I fly out here and cheer her up. You’re her only brother, she’s close to you, she said. But so far, Raya seemed to walk around in an invisible mist that nothing I said would clear.

There was no point in getting up this morning, though I could tell it was almost noon by the sunlight streaming through the broken slat in the shutters. I turned over and threw the blanket over my face, trying to press my body further into my slab of a mattress. After three days, I was still badly jet-lagged. Why couldn’t they make decent mattresses in this country?

I heard Raya’s slow shuffle make its way to the door of my room. She had slowed down since having kids, the way it seems all women do. But when I peeked out of the blanket, I saw that she had brushed her hair and her eyes were a little brighter.

“Are you awake?” she asked. “I was thinking of taking us on a picnic today.”

We used to have picnics together when we were in high school. I was teaching her how to drive, we would take the car on a weekend morning and drive out to a meadow, or to the shores of Lake Michigan. Once we came upon a huge flock of Canada geese and chased them, and I even got one to bite me. I didn’t expect as much excitement today, of course, but I got up to get ready. Maybe she was remembering too.

Raya wrapped herself up in a dull blue coat and scarf. She looked so Syrian that way. Then we crumpled ourselves into her tiny black car. I offered to drive and she didn’t refuse, although she warned me that in Syria, the only driving rule was, keep your eyes open. Her two kids sat on their knees in the back seat, facing the rear window. The boy looked a lot like Munzer, even down to the permanent frown that had always given Munzer an air of disapproval. But he laughed with his sister, happy to be out of the house.

Raya lived in Bloudan because Munzer’s parents owned a summer house there, and when he decided suddenly to move to Syria for good, he couldn’t afford to buy a house of his own. In the winter, Raya had told me earlier, the snows can reach your waist and the dry cold air zaps its way into your very core. But now the trees lining the hilly streets were in full leaf and there were pedestrians everywhere. At the top of one hill, Raya told me to stop the car, and we looked down on the valley, carpeted with orchards.

We drove off again and Raya directed me to a small shop on the roadside selling roasted chicken off a spit. She ordered two from the window and we continued on, banging hard each time we hit one of the numerous potholes.

Keep your eyes open, I told myself. I wondered if Munzer had been keeping his eyes open when he had crossed the street, just before the taxi sent him sailing into an apartment building wall.

We finally reached a place that had no name, a cross between a picnic area and an outdoor café, occupying one bank of a small river. The owners had ranged a single row of folding tables and plastic chairs along the railing that followed the riverbank. I sat gingerly on one chair; years of dirt had become one with the plastic.

“Tell me what’s better, this or KFC,” said Raya, and she tore off a quarter of one chicken and handed it to me on top of a sopping piece of pita bread.

With shiny fingers, she guided mouthfuls of chicken to her daughter. A couple of times I tried to talk to her, but I found it disconcerting, like I wasn’t sure if she were really paying attention to what I said. So I concentrated on the chicken, which really was delicious.

“If my mother-in-law finds out I was here, I’m in trouble,” said Raya. “I’m not supposed to be out of mourning yet.”

“They’re a bit old-fashioned, think I shouldn’t leave the house until the forty days are up. But you’re only here for a week so I don’t care. Can’t you extend your stay?”

“I suppose if you hadn’t lost the old one, you wouldn’t even be here. Thanks for making it anyways.”

Raya began gathering the bones and crumpled napkins into one pile. She avoided my eyes.

“It’s okay. That’s what Mom and Dad think too, right? That Munzer dragged me here?”

She was right. It had been hard on them, especially since there was no chance of them ever visiting her in Syria. Mom’s bad back made long plane rides out of the question, and Dad had made the wrong friends back when he was a young man and ended up on a government blacklist. He hadn’t been to Syria for 36 years.

Raya leaned her forehead on her hands. “He was a good man,” she said quietly. “Stubborn maybe, but a good man.”

I wanted to slap myself. I had to remind her again, on the first day she was starting to feel normal. A breeze ruffled the leaves, then stilled. I said nothing, hoping the silence would soothe her and erase my misdeed. The kids had run off to play, though I couldn’t see a playground anywhere. They had been babies when Raya left the States. Munzer was insistent that Syria was a better place to raise children, that sending them to an American public school was like saying good-bye. I always thought he was paranoid. I mean, look, Raya and I came out okay. I could even speak a bit of Arabic.

It took me a while to notice the smell, a damp, fungal smell, coming from the river. I stood up and leaned over the railing. It was a ribbon of green moistness flanked by a tangle of tree roots and rotten reeds. Soda cans studded the banks here and there, and plastic bags, their clean crackle long gone, lay embedded in the mud.

“Of course you are,” she said. “I was a wreck before you came. And I haven’t seen you for three years. Hell, does something awful have to happen for me to see you?”

“Maybe you need to come back to the States. At least for a while. Mom and Dad would love it.”

“Why don’t you come back with me now? It would be great, remembering the old times.”

“Do you know Mom still hasn’t changed your room from the day you got married? There’s even that old ballerina poster.”

“And the lowest octave still doesn’t work on your piano from when I spilled soda all over it.”

“The kids would probably finish the job for you. They’ve never even seen a piano.”

“So what do you say? If money’s a problem, don’t worry about it. Dad and I will figure something out.”

She looked down, her arms crossed over her chest. “I can’t,” she said finally. “It’s too soon.”

I watched an ice cream bar wrapper float down the stream, in no hurry to get to its final destination, wherever that was, and start to decay. How long did ice cream wrappers take to decay? A hundred years?

The kids ran up, slapping wet footprints behind them. The boy was excited; he put the sawed-off bottom half of a plastic water bottle on the table in front of Raya and fired off words I couldn’t make out. All I could see in the bottle was some kind of weak cloudy tea, but then Raya said, “Neat! Show your uncle.” He pushed the bottle to me shyly. I saw black spots moving in the water, at least ten of them. They were pollywogs, frantically crisscrossing the surface.

The kids begged Raya to come see their fishing location, and she let them pull her up off the chair. I walked along with them to a gap in the railing at the far end of the café. Raya stopped at the edge of the muddy ground.

She looked at me. “This will mean I’ll have to wash and iron my coat when I get home. Tell me,” she said. “Is it worth it?”

“What kind of question is that?” I put on a stupid smile and took three strides down the muddy river bank.

“Those look like nice shoes,” she said. “Don’t be surprised if they smell for a week.”

I kneeled down at the edge of the stream and saw them, thousands of them, pollywogs swimming ecstatically in the murky green.

Serene Taleb-Agha writes fiction from her home in Damascus, Syria, where she has lived for the past four years. Most recently, she has been published in Azizah Magazine. She also edits Damazine, serves as mother to her three children, and every now and then takes an all-day hiking trip to preserve her sanity.