Though it seems impossible, the boys and I continue with a trip we have long planned, to see grown nieces and nephews with their spouses and young children in Geneva and Avignon. These nieces and nephews loved Ficre profoundly but we all know we must focus on our children, so our bruised souls make our way through the visit, walking through lavender fields and medieval French landscapes, going to an Alpine town to watch cheese being made, and preparing huge pots of spicy stews to eat at a long table underneath the trees. Then, Solo and Simon and I continue on to Joucques, a tiny village in southern France, to see Mona and Rashid and their children Dima and Sim and Lamya: part of my Chicago family to whom I brought Ficre, the miracle. Their family gathers here from Cairo and Marseille and New York and Barcelona and Chicago, and now there is a grandson, Dima’s four-year-old son, Tariq.
The blazing sun there feels like life itself, especially when it still shines strong at six p.m. and we take our aperitifs on the patio. We walk down the dusty hill to the market. Mona makes a huge midday meal of grilled merguez and zucchini, rice, perfect tomatoes, wine. Oh how we sleep after lunch, the boys on their high Yemeni beds that Lamya, who is an archaeologist, has brought back from her work travels. Falling out sleep, the sleep of the ages. This feels like the first real sleep I have had since Ficre died, and after the first day I crave it. I sop it up and sleep and sleep and sleep.
And here, in Joucques, I read the first book I have read since Ficre died. There are books everywhere in this house of intellectuals. I pick up Tony Judt’s The Memory Chalet. Ficre admired Judt’s historical and political writing, but this is another sort of book, where he writes about his remembered childhood, dictated to an assistant after he woke from his dreams and Lou Gehrig’s disease consumed all but mind and memory. To live in memory and in dreams is a cruel comfort. I read the book and then read more, as though discovering for the first time that I actually could read. Reading calls Ficre close.
“There is no one with whom I talked about a wider range of things than with Ficre,” Rashid says. Sim is up on the roof here with his father, and clearing branches seared by the summer heat. I see Rashid and Ficre on Edgehill Road surveying the property, as they loved to do, and deciding which branches overhanging the house needed to come down, and how to bring a pump into the flooded basement. Of course Ficre should be here, we all say. I talk with the young people I loved so much as teenagers, wonderful adults now, on the patio late at night while Solo and Simon sleep inside, and I feel home in my soul. They knew and loved me first, and then they knew and loved him, and we made a family.
Day after day I read books at a sitting and then fall asleep, and wake to pastis over ice and Tariq putting his head in my lap and entertaining us with theatrical French pronunciations of cheese names. There will always be children and there will always be old people. We spend most of our lives somewhere in between. When we produce the children, we get to be royalty for a short while—the world pulls out its chair for the pregnant woman—but soon we are once again worker bees, tending the little ones. “What is birth but death with complexity?” wrote the poet Michael Harper. The beginning, the end, and most of the time in the middle.
Thirteen