MY FATHERS CHILDREN

There are certain moments in my daily life when my fathers voice still
refuses to be silent in my head. Every time I take a shower and reach for the
shampoo, for example, I hear: The first shampooing only takes the grease away.
Youve got to do it twice to really get it clean. The same words, every time, like an
automatic recording, as if a button were pressed. Or when Im backing up a car, out
come those disciplinarian tones: Turn your head completely around to see through
the rear window. At times, Ive wished that the recordings could be erased.
He died fifteen years ago, in the Ottawa General Hospital. His liver finally
disintegrated from a deadly hepatitis bug that he had picked up on an extended
diplomatic stay in Nigeria. During those last days, as he moved gracefully and
peacefully in and out of a coma, his native tongue began to reclaim him. He died
speaking Arabic.
Daddy, please try to speak English, I would implore him. I dont
understand you!
When I returned home that last day from the hospital, with my Syrian stepmother, we were greeted by the chanting of the Koran echoing through the silent
house. Someone had brought the case of cassettes over a week earlier and had
seen to it that the Holy Scripture resounded in our ears, twenty-four hours a day, day
after day. It was driving me mad, all that incomprehensible babble. It was my own
father who was dying, but I had already lost him to his native culture, the words of
the canned Koran seemed to be saying, years before.
Three days ago, I accompanied my half-sister and half-brother to the train
station in Venice, Italy, where I now live. It was the first time I had met them since
my fathers death, fifteen years ago. The last time I had seen them they were little
children: a solemn, seven-year old girl, with curls bobbed tightly around her ears,
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and big black eyes like her dads; a perpetually squirming four-year-old boy, slim and
tiny, full of mischief and energy.
That little girl is now a telecommunications product manager in the
Netherlands. Her hair spirals down in sensuous coils over her shouldersthe kind of
hair Ive always wanted to haveand her bubbling charm is impossible to resist.
The little boy is now a football player at Ottawa U, handsome, tall and taut, exuding
intelligence and character. He says he doesnt remember much about me, except
that I had a silver flute, and that I played it all the time when I came to visit them.
You took us to the park, they told me, over coffee in the square. You were
the one who told us that Daddy had died.
I ask myself how it is possible that I didnt remember that scene. But I do,
now, vaguely. There were trees, swishing in the summer wind, and a flat, vast
expanse of grass. We sat in a circle on the ground. My older brother, I remember
now, stayed in the car. He took care of business, while I took care of the heart. That
much hasnt changed. What I still dont remember, though, is why me, and not their
mother? Why was I chosenor did I choseto be the harbinger of truth in these
childrens lives?
The harbinger of truth. My half-brother managed to take me aside on the
ferry boat as we were crossing the lagoon, back from a daytrip to the Venetian
islands. When he asked me what our father was really like, I was caught in a
dilemna.
Look, he explained. All Ive ever been given is a perfect picture. All my life
I have been striving to live up to the image I have been given of my father. No one
will ever tell me anything bad. I need to know. What was he really like?
I looked around to see where his sister had gotten to. She was perched over
the balustrade at the far end of the deck, taking pictures of the setting sun. She had

already warned me the day before that there was no reason, no reason at all, to
meddle with history. Let bygones be bygones, she had told me. And I had agreed.
But I could understand his frustration. My older brother had come to a similar
decision about me, refusing to let me read some letters between my parents that he
had discovered in a cupboard, the day after my fathers death. He still had those
letters in his possession and, to this day, had refused to let me read them. He said
there was nothing of interest in them, for me. I would never be able to understand
his decision to protect me from my past. It was my right to know. No one should be
protected from a past that they need and want to make their own.
He was a great man, I began cautiously. That much is true. Just look at
us, how weve turned out. Genes dont lie...
My half-brother searched my face, willing me to go on. Our father was also a
terrible man, in some ways, I thought to myself. He had terrified me with his angry
outbursts when I was a child. When he and my mother divorced, I was ten; at
sixteen I had already left home. The scars from that legacy of fear had taken years
for me to heal. Should I really tell my truth to this remarkably serene young man?
And was it his truth, too, or was I just being selfish, wanting to unburden a past to
someone who had been spared similar memories by the tragic intervention of
premature death?
He was a great man, I continued, but...he was frustrated, professionally.
He had an awful temper that he never learned to control. If he had lived, maybe he
would have adapted to the changing times. He wouldnt have been able to play the
pater familias with such impunity. The truth is, sometimes he was a terrifying man,
to me.
My half-brother sucked in his breath and looked out to the sea. He let it out
slowly, then turned his head back towards me to find my eyes, forcing me to look up
into his gaze.
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Thank you, he said.

He put his strong, capable arm around my shoulders, leading me back across
the deck to join our sister.

This meeting of the siblings had all been arranged and engineered, singlehandedly, by her. She has a genius for networking and organization that would
make my erstwhile-diplomat father proud. When she came to work in Europe, a year
before, she had begun by creating an e-mail relationship with my brother in Asia,
where he has been living with his Chinese wife and their two daughters for the past
twelve years. Although he and I rarely cross paths and, by mutual consent, do not
keep in touch, he was able to pass my e-mail address onto her. Imagine my
astonishment, one sunny Easter morning, when I turned on my computer and found
a message from someone claiming to be my long-lost sister!
Its me, the message said. Im all grown-up now, and I want to get to know
you.
I found her to be a delightful correspondent, and told her so. That was when
the whole idea of the sibling reunion began to form in her mind, I think.
Not many families are as geographically dispersed as ours. My maternal
grandparents were perpetual world-travelers, working and living on every continent
of the Earth before they died, spanning sixty years of professional globe-trotting. My
mother was born and brought up in Africa, caught in Northern Rhodesia, as it was
called then, by the outbreak of the Second World War. My father was a member of
the Palestinian diaspora and like many of his compatriots, chose to integrate into
another culture, rather than perpetuate a hopeless yearning for a lost homeland. I,
myself, had swung back and forth between Canada and Europe, living in the States
for many years, before finally settling in Venice. My half-sister and -brother were

taken to the Middle East after my fathers death, to their mothers family home.
There they passed a good part of their childhood, attending the American school in
downtown Damascus, before they were brought back to Ottawa, which they now
consider their permanent home.
The idea of getting all my fathers children in one place, at one time, seemed
an impossible dream when she first proposed it to me. Apart from my brother, none
of us are rich. His absence at our historic meeting was understandable, though. He
has never been comfortable with emotional encounters and had every right to plead
pressing business in order to avoid what could have turned out to be a mushy,
messy affair of the heart. My half-siblings and I did shed a lot of tears together
during the three days that we spent in Venice catching up with the past. It was
certainly mushy, and deliciously so, but it wasnt messy. Thats thanks to the savvy
and experience that my half-siblings have with extended families, having grown up
with scads of cousins and uncles and aunts in the Middle East and Canada. I let
them set the tone because I have so little concrete experience with family: Im a
loner, first by destiny, and later, by choice.
What I most feared from this meeting was not what my brother feared, and
which ultimately kept him away, I think. Im no stranger to heart-rending emotions.
What I feared, on the contrary, was a sense of alienation, a lack of ability to relate
adequately to the sorts of kinship expectations that my half-sister seemed to take for
granted.
Family, for me, has always meant something very abstract and impersonal:
Christmas or Chinese New Years cards that arrive annually in my mail-box, stamped
with some faraway postal destination. Or something so terribly intimate, a hidden
secret, that must remain shut up in the memory: the sorts of things you tell your
lover or your spouse, late at night, in order to explain the bizzarre aversions and
compulsions that make relationships so unpredictable and challenging. In any case,
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family has never been a particularly good word in my personal vocabulary: just
something that you are saddled with at birth and which it behooves you to come to
terms with. Apart from my mother, with whom I maintain a close e-mail
correspondence, it would never have occurred to me, until this meeting, to seek out
family members for the pure pleasure of companionship.
The night before my half-siblings left to continue their tour of European
capitals, I stayed up into the wee hours of the morning to talk with my new brother,
while my new sister slept in the other room. We polished off a couple of bottles of
red wine for the occasion, squeezing each moment of this extraordinary,
geographical convergence to the last drop of time. We talked about everything that
matters: the meaning of life; good and evil; how to be a worthy person while still
getting on in the world; books, and films, and politics.
By the time we had exhausted all the words we knew how to exchange, I had
discovered the finest part of my father, refined and distilled, in his son.
When they left, I was amazed to find that I felt lonely. Thanks to my sisters
impossible dream of bringing together our fathers children, I have been gifted with
a family, in the best sense of the word: people you are related to by blood and by
affection.
Maybe those recordings in my mind of my fathers words, the ones that play
automatically every time I take a shower or park a car, wont bother me so much
anymore. If truth be told, Im beginning to get to like them.