Backgammon and Chocolate

As we plan the June 7th tribute to Gazan writer Heba Al-Madhoun, a breakfast meeting mixes sorrow with hope

Join the June 7th Reading of Heba's Poems

Since I committed to bring to English translation the surviving poetry of a Gazan writer, her widower and I have been managing that project together. While advancing the work, we develop a friendship catalyzed by this man’s encounter with our son. Theirs is the original connection. They meet in the capital of the United States of America. A twenty-year-old undergrad approaches a DC campus speaker, a Gazan political analyst who survives a genocide.

The visiting speaker has taken up residence in Massachusetts, where the undergrad was born and raised. The Boston boy’s mother will extend to the newcomer an invitation to drop in for a meal. She is an author raised in the urban Israeli interior.

She is the product of a particular subset of her formative society. Her girlhood situated her in a consequential faction of mystical nationalists, a community defined by redemptive objectives and resilient traditions. Hospitality is a major value.

Her process of disaffiliation begins in kindergarten, sparked by a misuse of power not unique to her theopolitical context. A teacher relies on gratuitous dictates and an intimidatory style. Subsequent teachers prove nicer. An unreasonable tendency prevails.

In her advanced middle age she will live in a neighborhood of Boston adjacent to a huge park and a small hospital. One Sunday, a witness to Gaza’s destruction will walk into her house and sit down for an autumnal lunch.

A winter dinner will include his fourteen-year-old daughter. Next, a restaurant outing coaxing out also his high-school aged son.

Now I have met all who survive of the political analyst’s immediate family. They were six. They are three.

My family persists in our original intactness. We are three. Our only son graduated from a Boston public school some months prior to the interminable season of savagery reshaping his mother’s onetime home region. On his DC campus he encounters a Gazan political analyst, the widower of a poet, Heba. Some of Heba’s literary output survives.
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As new partners in a literary translation project, the political analyst and I communicate now and again via our texting platform of choice. Not every exchange relates to literary translation. We might refer to a talk he will be leading soon or acknowledge it afterward. We might agonize about the New England winter.

And suggest that adaptation is possible. A Middle-Easterner’s shock at the North American winter can be mitigated.

To whatever degree. Repeated exposure will habituate the outraged nervous system in this climate, to some extent. Layering is critical, an effective hat essential, and suitable boots.

A good eye for black ice, invest in that too. Do not give up on the outdoors, however deserted and cold. Persist in the venturesome mode.

Sustain your original motion. Take significant walks, understanding that to the urban Middle Easterner the North American street can seem eerily inanimate, most so in winter. Seek the local life as it occurs.

Trace the telling sounds to unfamiliar birds. Respect the turkeys. Observe squirrel homemaking practices and chipmunk foraging norms.

Pray for an opossum sighting, cognizant of your new avenue to the miraculous. Your diasporic soil is home to a marsupial.

Pause on what is curious or informative or sublime. Fuel your native hope.
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One evening I ping the political analyst with a texted inquiry about his backgammon skills. He responds that he prefers chess. In other words he does not share with my husband a gaming territory.

Sadder than that, the remembrance of perished loved ones that my mention of backgammon prompts from a grieving husband and father. His wife taught their eldest how to play backgammon. For some years that was their game. Eventually the boy switched to chess.

Ultimately the lad favors his father’s analytic game, in which happenstance has no say. As an eighteen-year-old he will perish alongside his mother when their home shatters over them. And over his three siblings, of whom two will survive, the middle children.

On the same occasion they lose a cousin too, and a maternal aunt. A later airstrike will wipe out a branch of their paternal relatives, their father’s sister and her children, a great uncle and his wife, their grandmother.
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At this phase of our friendship with the political analyst, the character of his lastborn child has not yet surfaced. In a future gathering, the little one will rush into my dining room.

The morning sun is maximizing the blaze of our persimmon walls. The presence crashing a working breakfast is a toddler’s. He is responding to his father’s mention of chocolate.

A big-eyed tot barrels over on soft legs, alive with the keenest delight. Even in his earliest days he proves an ardency for chocolate. When he is eight he will be killed when his home shatters over him.

And over a cousin of the same age. The little boys were playmates, presumably. Conceivably they were together in their final moments. Both of their mothers were near.

Perhaps the poet is standing in her kitchen while her sister sits in the same room, at the table. With a cup of hot tea, minted, a plate of refreshments.

Alternatively, the poet is the seated figure. She is not in her kitchen. She is hunkered at her writing desk while her three older children busy themselves in other nooks of their apartment. What is the twelve-year-old up to? Sustaining some fascination. Her sixteen-year-old brother, the same, and the eldest, eighteen. At least one of them is staring at a smartphone.

The eight-year-old cousins are playing noisily on another level of the four-story building. The poet’s sister is keeping an eye on them.

Or else everyone is sleeping, except for the father. An early riser, he has crossed the street for coffees with the neighbor of a similar schedule. Do the hot beverages spill over their hands when an airstrike decimates the adjacent building, or are the cups secured by fingers palsied with horror?

Infinite domestic scenes, every one speculative. I know that both sisters perished alongside their eight-year-old sons, and the poet’s eldest. I am fairly certain that they shared a home address.

I don’t know that the two mothers slain in one airstrike shared an address. I haven’t asked the survivors.

I have dined with the two children rescued from the flaming ruins. I have sat in cognizance of these gentle teens’ emergence from rubble embedded with the corpses of loved ones.
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In our earliest phase of acquaintance, the teen survivors manifest as likable young people. The girl’s anthropologic bent reminds me of my adolescent temper, which would solidify as a definitive trait. The older boy’s reticence is familiar, too. For me this attribute recedes, somewhat, with age. Possibly his wariness stems from his ordeal. As conceivably, it is a fundamental trait. Or both, a basic trait intensified by devastation. I don’t know.

I am disinclined to interview survivors of a genocide about their ordeal and its lasting effects. I do not solicit from survivors of a genocide the particulars of their nightmare and the intricacies of their loss.

My disinclination to interrogate the experience of genocide survivors can be reframed as an ethic. My post-religious soul persists in sensitivity to sacrilege. The entities most sacred to me are human and the forbiddance, this: Do not press devastated people into reportage.

A forbiddance I’ll undermine, of course. I mention backgammon.

I induce in a grieving husband and father a memory of the eldest mentored by his polymath mother. The poet was an architect and teacher, the founder of a university department focused on indigenous crafts, a textiles artisan, a koranic interpreter, a novelist. She trained her firstborn in an ancient game of strategy foiled and assisted by chance.
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It is at a festive breakfast marking a milestone in our translation effort that I invite into my dining room the poet’s chocolate-loving toddler who will perish as a third-grader, alongside his polymath mother and the brother whose gaming tastes switch from backgammon to chess.

I call the youngest child over by referring to his living sister. She was the third of four siblings, now she is the younger of two. She has supped in my home.

She has dined with me at a local restaurant, reveling in the Persian grilling prowess as I do. In her absence I bring up a quality of hers that challenges my imagination. This girl refuses dessert in all settings. She is averse to sweets. Her father acknowledges the marvel. She rejected sweets even in babyhood.

He prompts a vision of my teenage dinner companion in feisty miniature. A diapered sprite rejects oversweetness. She must resist what impedes her exquisite engagement with a complicated world.

Relatedly, my child’s response to his first taste of birthday cake. Perched in a highchair, this big-eyed one-year-old tucks into a layered matter and is stunned. Thunderstruck, electrified, stilled.

In the next instant, released from awing revelation, acting on fantastic news, ecstatic. At this early age, my son does not yet dare to walk freehanded but he throws himself at shocking sweetness. Thereafter he hankers for sweets like most people.

The political analyst can relate. He adds that his littlest was always wild for chocolate.

A Gazan toddler races in. His father said chocolate.

There was no chocolate on hand. We were convening over breakfast. The offerings were savory, except for the minted fruit salad and the Persian carrot preserves and the amethyst and coral sweet potatoes gemming the golden frittata. The cubed radish in the vegetable salad, candy-pink, was not at all sweet.

A multicolored breakfast spread collaborates with the floral pattern of a cotton tablecloth.

Soon I will find out that the egg bake isn’t quite cooked in the middle. Disproportionately anguished, I shove it back in the oven.

The snowy Syrian cheese is greened with a paste of lemoned herbs and spices, an intense Moroccan condiment. The Lebanese pickles are more of a military green. The Armenian flatbreads are crusted with a rust-colored paste based on peppers. The chickpea and eggplant mashes and wholemeal pita contribute the hues of rock and sand.
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We were marking a milestone. We were reviewing the first batch of poems translated from Arabic into English and emerging from our editing process. On this occasion the poet’s widower declares that the original poetic voice has been mediated adequately. He hears Heba in these renditions. We will bring her words to local ears in early summer.

We will welcome the public to consider the poems of an architect whose home shattered over her and her four children.

We have hired a Palestinian oudist and singer to prime the ears beforehand and accompany reflection afterwards. Following the poetry and music, we will offer light refreshments from a Palestinian bakery.

We had best provide some salty options for the poet’s living daughter, whose littlest brother takes part in the planning breakfast, arrested in anticipation. His father said chocolate.

There is no chocolate on offer.

This child won’t tantrum.
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