a Train. Let us suppose that a locomotive stands with steam up … steam up … ready to make the run to the next station … the next station … When it starts, we notice that at first it moves slowly …”
A soft knock at the bedroom door. “Good morning, Midhat,” came Jeannette’s voice.
“Ah,” he said, up and turning the handle, “come in, come in,” his legs seemed to have no bones; he saw Jeannette’s face and her hair pinned, her hands holding a book, and his anger fell away, overcome by that Arab impulse to encourage strangers over thresholds. Jeannette looked taken aback. Yet, what else could she have expected, knocking on his door? She stepped inside and stood next to the prayer mat.
“I wanted to show you something.”
“Please, please.”
He pulled out the chair for her, then sat on the bed and locked his hands as though they were in public. To calm himself, he breathed out slowly through narrowed lips.
“I found this the other day when I was going through old photographs,” she said.
She pulled two pieces of pale green paper from the book but did not hand them to him. He was delighted to realise she was trembling.
“It is a doctor’s report.”
“About your mother?”
She looked him in the eyes. “They didn’t diagnose her with hysteria, it says here. But with ‘hystero-neurasthenia.’ Do you know what that is?”
“I can find out.”
“Do you think I’m ridiculous?”
“Of course not. Of course I don’t think you’re ridiculous. I think”—he bent forward, speaking gently—“we have faith that life means something, and the attempt to resolve it, to seek it out, this is what keeps us going. And that’s the same for things in the past, if they are important to us.”
“Well, that is very rational. Here, this is the list. Nausea, migraine, headaches. Intercostal neuralgia, cramp, tinglings, prickings … rheumatism, pains in the forehead, the gums, the back of the neck, the throat … occasionally in arms, chest, loins, stomach, knees, feet, ankles … upon examination genital parts all tender.” Jeannette made a little shocked motion of her eyebrows—she had been reading without processing, he saw, and perhaps had not intended to read that part aloud.
“This is a long list,” he said. He had learned from his grandmother to skip over shameful things. At the same time he was playing a doctor, with a doctor’s dispassionate attitude to matters of the body. He could not help admiring himself.
“And this,” Jeannette continued, “this one is a list of symptoms she seems to have written herself, in her own handwriting. I’ll read it to you—she says: ‘The walls of my father’s house were totally transformed. I was woken up by the sensation of weight on my leg, my bed being beside the window, the man had stepped onto it. I screamed and quickly he climbed back out again. It took a while to settle as my sleeping mind woke fully, and when it did, I saw the walls had vanished. Or rather, they had become simply walls, plaster and wood and brick, just a structure with no inside or outside. Inside and outside were an illusion.’ That’s that one, and here, another, she says: ‘There is little keeping me alive. When I am well I cannot be from too high a height or I will make myself fall on purpose.’ Let me know if there’s any word you don’t understand, by the way.”
“What does that mean, do you think? I understood it, I mean, but generally, what is she saying.”
“What she means … I don’t know if it’s something we can necessarily …” She left off.
Midhat loved that we. “It sounds,” he said, “as though she was in pain all the time, most of the time. Physical pain. Even when she was healthy. Don’t you think?”
She turned over the page and read from the bottom. “Listen: ‘I feel sometimes as though my head were being stirred with a stick, and at other times as though my head were being alternately opened and closed. Nausea, almost daily. Sometimes it feels like motion sickness, as if I were going somewhere. Often it is in the nose again, and I have the old dreams.’”
“She is mad.”
Jeannette gave him an irked expression.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. It seems, I think, that being alive is to stay inside the body.” He could hear, returning into his voice, that note of glib certainty. He tried a more tentative intonation. “This is one way to look at it. And if