It was my turn to put my arms around her and hold her to me. During all the nights she'd been away, I had, I confess, been terrified by the thought that she might send someone to fetch Viorel, and then they would never come back.
After she'd eaten, had a bath, told us about the meeting with her birth mother, and described the Transylvanian countryside (I could barely remember it, since all I was interested in, at the time, was finding an orphanage), I asked her when she was going back to Dubai.
"Next week, but first I have to go to Scotland to see someone."
A man!
"A woman," she said at once, perhaps in response to my knowing smile. "I feel that I have a mission. While we were celebrating life and nature, I discovered things I didn't even know existed. What I thought could be found only through dance is everywhere. And it has the face of a woman. I saw in the..."
I felt frightened. Her mission, I told her, was to bring up her son, do well at her job, earn more money, remarry, and respect God as we know him.
But Sherine wasn't listening.
"It was one night when we were sitting round the fire, drinking, telling funny stories, and listening to music. Apart from in the restaurant, I hadn't felt the need to dance all the time I was there, as if I were storing up energy for something different. Suddenly I felt as if everything around me were alive and pulsating, as if the Creation and I were one and the same thing. I wept with joy when the flames of the fire seemed to take on the form of a woman's face, full of compassion, smiling at me."
I shuddered. It was probably gypsy witchcraft. And at the same time, the image came back to me of the little girl at school, who said she'd seen "a woman in white."
"Don't get caught up in things like that, they're the Devil's work. We've always set you a good example, so why can't you lead a normal life?"
I'd obviously been too hasty when I thought the journey in search of her birth mother had done her good. However, instead of reacting aggressively, as she usually did, she smiled and went on.
"What is normal? Why is Dad always laden down with work, when we have money enough to support three generations? He's an honest man and he deserves the money he earns, but he always says, with a certain pride, that he's got far too much work. Why? What for?"
"He's a man who lives a dignified, hardworking life."
"When I lived at home, the first thing he'd ask me when he got back every evening was how my homework was going, and he'd give me a few examples illustrating how important his work was to the world. Then he'd turn on the TV, make a few comments about the political situation in Lebanon, and read some technical book before going to sleep. But he was always busy. And it was the same thing with you. I was the best-dressed girl at school; you took me to parties; you kept the house spick-and-span; you were always kind and loving and brought me up impeccably. But what happens now that you're getting older? What are you going to do with your life now that I've grown up and am independent?"
"We're going to travel the world and enjoy a well-earned rest."
"But why don't you do that now, while your health is still good?"
I'd asked myself the same question, but I felt that my husband needed his work, not because of the money, but out of a need to feel useful, to prove that an exile also honors his commitments. Whenever he took a holiday and stayed in town, he always found some excuse to slip into the office, to talk to his colleagues and make some decision that could easily have waited. I tried to make him go to the theater, to the cinema, to museums, and he'd do as I asked, but I always had the feeling that it bored him. His only interest was the company, work, business.
For the first time, I talked to her as if she were a friend and not my daughter, but I chose my words carefully and spoke in a way that she could understand.
"Are you saying that your father is also trying to fill in what you call the 'blank spaces'?"
"The day he retires, although I really don't think that day will ever come, he'll fall into a deep depression. I'm sure of it. What to do with that hard-won freedom? Everyone will congratulate him on a brilliant career, on the legacy he leaves behind him because of the integrity with which he ran his company, but no one will have time for him anymore--life flows on, and everyone is caught up in that flow. Dad will feel like he is an exile again, but this time he won't have a country where he can seek refuge."
"Have you got a better idea?"
"Only one: I don't want the same thing to happen to me. I'm too restless, and please don't take this the wrong way, because I'm not blaming you and Dad at all for the example you set me, but I need to change, and change fast."
DEIDRE O'NEILL, KNOWN AS EDDA
She's sitting in the pitch-black.
The boy, of course, left the room at once--the night is the kingdom of terror, of monsters from the past, of the days when we wandered like gypsies, like my former teacher--may the Mother have mercy on his soul, and may he be loved and cherished until it is time for him to return.
Athena hasn't known what to do since I switched off the light. She asks about her son, and I tell her not to worry, to leave
everything to me. I go out, put the TV on, find a cartoon channel, and turn off the sound; the child sits there hypnotized--problem solved. I wonder how it must have been in the past, because the women who came to perform the same ritual Athena is about to take part in would have brought their children, and in those days there was no TV. What did teachers do then?
Fortunately, I don't have to worry about that.
What the boy is experiencing in front of the television--a gateway into a different reality--is the same state I am going to induce in Athena. Everything is at once so simple and so complicated! It's simple because all it takes is a change of attitude: I'm not going to look for happiness anymore. From now on, I'm independent; I see life through my eyes and not through other people's. I'm going in search of the adventure of being alive.
And it's complicated: Why am I not looking for happiness when everyone has taught me that happiness is the only goal worth pursuing? Why am I going to risk taking a path that no one else is taking?