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Re: تــراجـم (Re: هشام آدم)
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الجزء الثاني من قصة ( أحلام )
The church is full, and some guests have to stand outside, huddled under umbrellas to hear you tell Obi (in a voice thick with tears of joy) that you will be his forever and forever and forever. His! His! His! It is a vow that is easy for you to make because you cannot imagine ever wanting to be with anyone else. Obi is the zenith. Your soul mate. Your perfect fate. He is where you want to be. When you walk down the aisle, holding to the hem of your cream wedding dress, the flower girls spray you with confetti and rice. You do not mind that a grain of rice gets into your left eye and that you have to rub and rub to get it out (which makes that eye puffy and red and makes it look as if you have apollo, conjuctivitis, in the wedding pictures).
The pregnancies come soon after. You have three healthy children in two years: twin beautiful girls with their father's smile and their mother's nose (the perfect nose, Obi calls it) and a son who is the apple of your eye (he looks very much like Obi) and who, your mother delights, has secured your place in your husband's home. They are the kind of children who strangers like to coo over, pinching their cheeks and rubbing their #########, saying how very healthy they look:
Chei! These are very beautiful children. They are as healthy as okuko agriculture, those chickens that are so plump all over. You must be proud of such children. See how their skin glows with health and good living. Ndi uwa oma!
You have a house. A duplex in a quiet part of town. Your house is proof of the comfortable lives you live inside: wall to wall carpeting with a rug so deep and so lush that your feet practically disappear as soon as you step in, a huge colour television (that guests admire and your neighbour tells you jealously looks like a cinema screen and says she does not know what you need such a huge screen for anyway, it looks out of place in a sitting-room), and a Sony CD player, on which you and Obi play all your favourite tunes (you are both in love with Barry White, and when you hear that he is dead, you actually cry). The children have a room each with air-conditioning to protect them from the temperature that goes as high as a high fever (and the guest room your mother uses has air-conditioning too, but she never uses it, saying it makes her feel as if she is in a mortuary and even though she is old, she is not dead yet, thank you very much!).
But when Obi dies at thirty-six (and you are thirty-four), your life shatters like china. You cannot even begin to pick up the pieces.
Obi is too young to die, and your mother-in-law wants to know why his fate has been so cruel to him. She invites the prophet of her church to your house and demands from him the answer to the question that is burning her, threatening to consume her. Who is to blame for her healthy son's death? The wild-haired prophet burns incense in all the rooms, his white prophet's gown sweeping the rug that has swallowed his bare feet. He rings his little bell and chants incantations in a loud, strange voice that sounds like he is singing (but he is not singing). He sways from side to side and points the finger of blame at you (it is his index finger on his right hand, its nail bandaged with a browning bandaid, and when he points it at you, it looks as if he is offering you a cigar). He tells her you have a binding marriage in the ocean with a water spirit. A water spirit who is jealous of Obi. It is this spirit who afflicts him with an illness. This marriage is news to you, but nobody believes you. You do not know whether to laugh or cry. How can anyone believe that marriages are contracted between spirits and humans? Your mother-in-law claps her hands in your face and almost spits at you for daring to cast aspersion on the prophet. The prophet shakes his head, sending his locks gently flying from side to side, and accepts the glass of cola Obi's mother brings for him.
"A young man like that, he just died in his sleep. That's not normal," your mother-in-law proclaims as she gathers support from relatives to turn you out of your home, the duplex on the quiet side of town with the air-conditioned rooms.
"The doctors say he had a heart attack. The autopsy concluded that," you protest, but nobody is listening to you.
Obi's incensed mother shouts above your voice, "You killed my son. Why did you not just stay with your water-spirit husband? Why? You may deceive everybody else, but you cannot deceive the prophet. He has seen you for what you are," she sobs as Obi's uncle assures her that you will pay for your evil. Evil of which you know nothing. How could you begin to pay for the prophet's imagination, an imagination as wild as his over-grown hair?
You move out with nothing but your clothes and your two wailing daughters, out of the comfortable duplex with the air-conditioned rooms. Obi's family will keep your four year-old son. He is theirs. Heir to the family name. But your five year-old twin daughters are yours. They do not want the burden of raising the female children of an evil mother.
Obi's mother swaggers her way into the house with his two younger brothers. From now on, your mother-in-law will hold court in your former house. You will no longer be welcome. Not even to see your son, the perfect image of his father. That bit of Obi that you hold onto at his funeral, crying until your eyes swell like bunched-up fists.
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العنوان |
الكاتب |
Date |
تــراجـم | هشام آدم | 07-01-07, 05:17 PM |
Re: تــراجـم | هشام آدم | 07-01-07, 05:21 PM |
Re: تــراجـم | mohmed khalail | 07-02-07, 05:51 AM |
Re: تــراجـم | هشام آدم | 07-02-07, 06:35 AM |
Re: تــراجـم | هشام آدم | 07-02-07, 01:34 PM |
Re: تــراجـم | هشام آدم | 07-02-07, 01:36 PM |
Re: تــراجـم | هشام آدم | 07-03-07, 02:36 PM |
Re: تــراجـم | هشام آدم | 07-03-07, 02:37 PM |
Re: تــراجـم | omer almahi | 07-03-07, 03:02 PM |
Re: تــراجـم | هشام آدم | 07-03-07, 04:55 PM |
Re: تــراجـم | هشام آدم | 07-04-07, 01:18 PM |
Re: تــراجـم | غادة عبدالعزيز خالد | 07-04-07, 01:32 PM |
Re: تــراجـم | lana mahdi | 07-04-07, 01:51 PM |
Re: تــراجـم | omer almahi | 07-14-07, 09:53 AM |
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