What We Owe

Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781328995117
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

The winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize "about mothers and daughters, nation and exile, and the way forward with hope and pain . . . a masterpiece" (Tayari Jones, The Times).
 
A gut punch of a novel that asks us to consider: what do we pass on to our children? What do we owe those we love? And without roots, can you ever truly be free?
 
Nahid has six months left to live. Or so the doctors say. At fifty, she is no stranger to loss. But now, as she stands on the precipice of her own death—just as she has learned that her daughter Aram is pregnant with her first child—Nahid is filled with both new fury and long dormant rage. Her life back home in Iran, and living as a refugee in Sweden, has been about survival at any cost. How to actually live, she doesn't know; she has never had the ability or opportunity to learn.
 
Here is an extraordinary story of exile, dislocation, and the emotional minefields between mothers and daughters; a story of love, guilt and dreams for a better future, vibrating with both sorrow and an unquenchable joie de vivre. With its startling honesty, dark wit, and irresistible momentum, What We Owe introduces a fierce and necessary new voice in international fiction.
 
"One of the best books I've read about the psychological horror of being from post-revolutionary Iran . . . Gorgeous and vital, this story will haunt its readers."—Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, for  The Rumpus
"Spare and devastating . . . Always arresting, never sentimental; gut-wrenching, though not without hope."— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

I’ve always carried my death with me. perhaps saying so is trite, an observation the dying always make. But I’m not like other people, in this as in everything else, or so I like to believe. And I do believe it, truly. I said as much when Masood died. Our time was always borrowed. We weren’t supposed to be alive. We should have died in the revolution. In its aftermath. In the war. But I was given thirty more years. More than half my life. It’s a considerable length of time, something to be grateful for. The same length as my daughter’s life. Yes, that’s one way to see it. I was allowed to create her. But she didn’t need me this long. No one did. You think because you’re a parent, you’re needed. It’s not true. People find a way to get by. Who says I was worth more than the trouble I caused? I don’t believe it. I’m not the type who gives more than I take. I should be. I’m a mother, after all. It’s my job to bear the weight, bear it for others. But I never have, not for anyone.

“You have at most six months left to live,” the fucking witch says to me. She says it like she’s delivering some trivial but unfortunate news. In the same tone of voice the daycare teacher used to tell me that someone hit Aram. A little bit sad. A little bit guilty. And the witch doesn’t even look at me while she says it, just stares into her computer screen. As if that contains the truth. As if the screen were the one being harmed. Then the tears start running down her cheeks, and she stares down at her lap. Now she’s the victim. She needs comfort.

Shut up! I want to scream. Who are you to tell me I’m going to die. Who are you to weep, as if my life has anything to do with you. But I don’t scream. Not this time. I surprise myself.

“I want to speak to your supervisor,” I say instead.

She seems taken aback. Probably thinks that was the wrong reaction. Thinks I should be weeping too.

“I know this is hard . . . hard to hear. But it doesn’t matter who you talk to,” she says. “The CT scan, the test results. They’re indisputable. You have cancer. And it’s . . . it’s quite advanced.”

She falls silent and looks at me. Waiting for my face to confirm that I understand. But it doesn’t, so she continues.

“It’s stage four. Cancer. That means you don’t have much time.”

“Shut up!” Now I do say it. “I’m a nurse. I’ve worked in health care for twenty-five years. I know you’re not allowed to say that to me. You have no idea how long I have left. You’re not God!”

She backs up in her chair, upset. She must be in her thirties, with her hair held high in two childish pigtails. A photo of a baby stands on her desktop. I shake my head. She has no clue what she knows or doesn’t know.

We sit in silence, until she wipes her tears onto her sleeve and leaves. I sit frozen for a moment, then reach for my purse and take out my phone. I should call someone. I should call my daughter. Say: Hello, my cursed little crow. Now your mother is going to die too.

Damn. I try to write a text message to Zahra instead. But I erase it. What do you say? Hello, friend, so much struggle, and now it’s over. I can’t.

I hear two voices approaching, the doctor and her supervisor. They stop outside the door. Whispering. It’s obvious they don’t face death often here at this GP clinic. They’re discussing who should go inside and talk to me. I understand. They want to get on with their day. Move on to the next patient. Not fall behind. The last thing they want to do is take shit from some dying woman. I consider my options. Should I just pack up and go? Spare them. Spare myself. I grab my coat. It’s red. I reach for my purse. Also red. I look down at my boots. Red. All the banalities I care about. Cared about. My hands start to shake, then my shoulders. I drop my purse onto the floor. Trying to hold back the sob rising in my body. At that very moment, they open the door. Step inside. Look at me. I see how they’d like to turn and go. I don’t want to scare them. I try to smile. But it washes over me. What they don’t know. What nobody in this fucking country knows, even when they know so much. About pain and loss and struggle. I start to cry. I cry, and I cry. She cries too, the first doctor. Poor thing. She thinks she has something to cry about.

Still, she apologizes. the older doctor. Says they have no idea how long I’ll live. Could be a few weeks, or a few years.

“But you will die from this cancer,” she says. “It’s best you’re open about it, tell your nearest and dearest. Especially your children . . .”

You tell my child, I think. But I must not say it out loud, because she continues.

“It will be difficult, of course. Being honest with your children can be very difficult. But they deserve to know. They need to prepare themselves.”

I look questioningly at her. She doesn’t understand what I’m wondering, but I assume she knows there’s no other way I can look at her.

“Masood just died . . . her father. He died very recently,” I say.

She nods.

“He died suddenly. Don’t you think that’s better? For Aram, for my daughter? Than having to live with this death. Wait for it. Wouldn’t it be better if I just up and die one day?”

“I don’t know,” she says. As if I were expecting a real answer. “But you’re going to need your daughter. This won’t be easy.”

She holds out a brochure. How to prepare for death, or something like that. I shake my head.

“I’m not going to die! I’m going to fight. I want to start treatment right away!”

She hesitates.

“Yes, we’re referring you to an oncologist. But you’ll have to wait a bit to get in. It’s the Easter holiday soon. It may take a while before you’re in treatment, Nahid.”

I lean forward in my chair.

“But you told me I’m going to die. I’ll die if we do nothing. This is an emergency!”

She shakes her head.

“Cancer is not an emergency. A few weeks won’t matter, Nahid.”

“What do you mean, what is it if it’s not an emergency?”

“Well, cancer is considered a chronic disease.”

I raise my eyebrows.

“Chronic? How can it be chronic if I’m going to die soon?”

“I’m sorry.”

She leans against the doorjamb. She hasn’t even stepped into the room. She stopped there, on the other side of the room. As if it were contagious. Cancer. Death.

“I’m sorry.”

I stand up.

“Don’t apologize. I’m not dead yet.”

I pull out my lipstick and apply it to my lips. Show her I’m strong. Then I leave. Walk right past her. They call after me, but I walk on. Hurrying, hurrying to keep myself from turning around and throwing myself into her arms to beg for comfort. Beg for sincere promises and solace.

It’s only when I get home that I see the mascara running down my face. The lipstick smeared outside the edges of my lips. I look frightening. Like I’m the witch. A scarecrow. A dummy. A dead person. Someone who has no idea what it’s like to be alive.

I have six months left to live. or a few weeks. Or a few years. I sit down on the sofa without washing my face. Just sit there with my hands in my lap wondering what to do now. What do you do when they tell you you’re dying.

Hampers of paper stand on the rug. They’ve been there for months, maybe years. I’ve always supposed if I leave them out I’ll finally get around to sorting them. Solving them. Perhaps that’s what I should do now. Go through my papers. Make sure everything’s in order. Old phone bills. Account statements. Tax forms. It occurs to me there was never any reason for those hampers after all. Everything can be thrown away. Might as well toss it all.

Aram can do it. Later. Afterward.

I pick up a notebook and pen from the table. Start scribbling. Realize all my notes are in those hampers, too. Maybe I should throw at least the notes away. What will she think if she reads them. She’ll find out how lonely I was. How angry I was. I should want to protect her, but I don’t. Let her! Let her feel my pain. I know it’s wrong, that my maternal instincts should tell me otherwise. But they don’t, so I let it be.

My pen scratches across the paper. I want to know what I’m leaving behind. When I divorced Masood, he took everything. I didn’t get anything. I’ve been collecting ever since. Accumulating, building. Building up my security. My future. And now there isn’t one. I laugh out loud. There is no future. Think if people knew. You put so much time into planning for the future, and then it doesn’t even exist. Who would have thought.

Would I have lived differently if I’d known? Skipped all those back-to-back shifts? Lived on credit cards, left behind huge debts? I’m not sure. Maybe. Probably. I mean, why not. What would have stopped me?

I write it all down. The apartment I live in. The gold jewelry in my safe-deposit box. Those damn Telia shares they tricked us into buying. The money in my savings account. The emergency stash in the closet. I write it all down, count it up. It adds up to a lot. A lot of money!

First I think: That’s a lot of money for somebody like me. But then, no, that’s wrong. There are plenty of people who were born here, who grew up in this country, who don’t, can’t, couldn’t gather that kind of money. They’re too comfortable, too lazy. They don’t have what I have. They’ve left nothing behind.

It’s not just a lot of money for somebody like me. It’s a lot of money. A lot of money for Aram. If she doesn’t think so, she can shove it! A war baby. She should be grateful. She will be grateful, I know that. The money will do her more good than me. She has more of a chance to live, to be alive. Not just because I’m dying. But because I never had it. The ability to just live. What I was born with, born into, was the ability to survive. I grew up to survive. That’s not the same as living. I don’t know if my daughter has the ability to survive. Maybe, she was almost born in an air-raid shelter. But not her friends. Not children born in Sweden.

That reminds me of the doctor at the clinic. And her tears. What does she have to cry about?

My mother was married off when she was nine years old. It’s difficult for me to even say those words. I’m ashamed of them. It’s like I’m condoning it just by mentioning it. So I don’t. She was nine years old, and my father was twenty-seven. That wasn’t unusual, back then. But I don’t think the fact that it was ordinary made any difference to her. That it affected what it felt like for her to be forced to leave her parents and start a sexual relationship with an unknown adult man.

I can’t be angry with my father; he did what one did. But I think of that little girl, who she was, and the thought of her evokes more maternal feelings from me than I’ve had even for my own child. I think of that girl, how if I could have saved her, I’d have also saved myself. If I could save her, I could save my daughter, too.

My mother was twelve when she gave birth to Maryam. My heart bleeds for both of them. A twelve-year-old with a baby in her arms. A baby with a twelve-year-old as her fixed point in the world. I don’t know what happened inside her. But I think she shut down. I think that’s the only thing you can do. A twelve-year-old with a baby in her arms. What good could we do her?

She ended up on her own, young. When my father died, she was only thirty-seven years old and the mother of seven. It made no practical difference that he disappeared. He’d been ill for a long time. Maybe he was just another child to her. I don’t know. She didn’t talk about him. She didn’t talk about men. In all our wedding photos, she holds herself up straight, the proud mother of the bride, but she never smiles. Men and marriage were a necessary evil in her eyes. Or maybe not even necessary—maybe just unavoidable shit.

My mother. How she suffered during the revolution. You think that a woman who’d given birth to seven daughters might get some peace of mind. No sons to send to war. No sons to mourn. But it was the wrong decade, or we were the wrong kind of women. We fought in the streets, and she sat up nights. Waiting, pacing, weeping.

A few weeks. half a year. a few years. does it make a difference? I’m not sure. They are different amounts of time. I understand that. But what difference does time make at this point? What will I do with time? Sick time. Alone time. Time spent waiting to die. What do you do with time, if you’re not building a future? I don’t know. And I think that might be why. Maybe that’s why this is happening to me, maybe that’s why the cancer chose me. Because I don’t know what to do with time. Because I don’t know what to do with life.

I can’t stand it, not that thought.

I get up and grab my phone. Dial a number. It’s the only number I can call.

“Allo!?”

I see her in front of me. See her sink down on the stool by her landline, sighing deeply before picking it up. She expects bad news. She prepares for it in self-defense.

“Salam, Maman.” I swallow hard, trying to push down what’s welling up.

“Nahid? Nahid, is that you? Did something happen, is everything all right?”

“Everything’s fine. Very good. I . . . I just miss you.”

“That’s life, Nahid. That’s life.”

We both fall silent for a moment, then she starts telling me the usual. About her neighbors, the price of tomatoes, her rheumatism. I listen. It’s a conversation exactly like the one we had last week. Just like all our conversations. A conversation that is completely unaffected by this particular day, except I press a pillow to my face to stifle the sound of myself.

“Nahid, are you still there?”

I know my voice won’t hold so I hang up. She’ll think that the call was dropped, like so many of our calls have been dropped over the years. Next time I call, it’ll be forgotten.

It’s getting dark by the time i finally pick up the phone again. I don’t know how I chose whom to call, why I call Zahra. But I do, and it’s such a relief. Such a relief to tell somebody, to hear another human being weep. I’m glad it makes her sad. Glad she’ll miss me. It feels good to hear somebody react the way they’re supposed to. To know you can react like this. I listen quietly for a bit while she weeps, and then I start to comfort her.

“It’s okay,” I say. “I haven’t had a bad life.”

We fall silent. We don’t know if that’s true, but don’t say anything to the contrary. We just listen to each other’s silence, and that’s enough.

“Have you told Aram?” she asks.

I shake my head.

“Hello?”

“Sorry,” I say. “I haven’t told her. Or anyone else.”

She nods. I hear it.

“Do you want me to?”

I sigh in relief.

“Yes. Yes. Thank you. Can you?”

“I don’t know,” she replies.

How much can you really ask of people? Everything, I suppose. I can call in every favor now. Every single one.

“I would be so grateful if you would do it, please.”

I hear her crying again. But she has to take care of it, somehow she has to do it.

“I’m coming over,” she says, and we hang up.

Then I lie on my back. Close my eyes. A few weeks, six months, a few years. Right now I just need to close my eyes.

and they come. my friends all show up. i lie on the couch and look at them through half-closed eyes. They allow it. They don’t say much. They sit with their chins in their hands. Look at each other sometimes, and shake their heads. Shake them slowly, strangely. Like you do when the sorrow is bigger than it looks. When a sorrow stands for all sorrows. I know what they’re thinking. We have lost so much. We have already lost so much. Why should we have to lose mo...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• What We Owe
• About the Author
• Connect with HMH