By Sam Vaknin
Author of "Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited"
My grandfather sat on a divan, back stiff and eyes tight-shut, when the news arrived. At the age of seventy, his body still preserved the womanizer's tensile, proud, virility. He dyed his hair jet black. Original Moroccan music, wistful and lusty, the desert's guttural refrain, poured forth from a patinated gramophone. The yearning tarred his cheeks with bloodied brush, a capillary network that poured into his sockets.
Now, facing him distraught, my father was reciting gingerly the information about his little sister, confessing abject failure as the clan's firstborn. His elder sister died in youth but even had she lived she wouldn't have qualified to supervise the brood due to her gender. It was my father's role to oversee his younger siblings, especially the females, the thus preserve the honor of his kinfolk.
Being a melancholy and guarded man, he blamed them for conspiring against him. He envied them instead of loving. He kept strict ledgers of help received and given. He felt deprived, begrudging their successes. They drifted apart and my father turned into unwelcome recluse, visited only by my tyrannical grandfather. On such occasions, my father was again a battered, chided, frightened child.
That day, with manifest obsequiousness, he served the patriarch with tea and home-made pastry arranged on brightly illustrated tin trays. My grandpa muttered balefully, as was his wont, and sank his dentures into the steamy dough, not bothering to thank him.
As dusk gave way to night, my father fetched the grouser's embroidered slippers and gently placed his venous, chalky feet on a dilapidated stool. He wrapped them in a blanket. Thus shoed and well-ensconced, the old man fell asleep.
These loving gestures - my father's whole repertoire - were taken by my grandpa as his due, a pillar of the hierarchy that let him beat his toddler son and send him, in eerie pre-dawn hours, to shoulder bursting wineskins. This is the order of the world: one generation serves another and elder brothers rule their womenfolk.
"Whore" - my grandpa sneered. His voice subdued, only his face conveyed his crimson wrath. My father nodded his assent and sat opposed, sighing in weariness and resignation.
"Whose is it, do we know?" - my grandpa probed at last. My father snuffed the ornamental music and shrugged uncertainly. My grandpa rubbed his reddened eyelids and then slumped.
"We need to find him and arrange a wedding" - he ruled. My father winced, propelled by the incisive diction into the grimy alleys of his childhood, the wine tide and ebbing in the pelt containers, the origin of his recurrent nightmares, nocturnal shrieks, sweaty relief when nestled in my mother's arms, his brow soaked, his heart in wild percussion.
"Today it's different, Abuya" - my father mumbled, using the Moroccan epithet. My grandpa whipped him with a withering glower.
"I will depart tomorrow" - my father whispered - "But I don't wish to talk to her."
"Don't do it" - consented grandpa, his eyes still shut, waving a steady hand in the general direction of the decimated music - "Just salvage our dignity and hers."
The next day, father packed his crumbling cardboard suitcase, the one he used when he fled Morocco, a disillusioned adolescent. He neatly folded in some underwear and faded-blue construction worker's sleeveless garments. On top he placed a rusting razor and other necessaries.
I watched him from the porch, he waning, a child size figure, going to the Negev, the heartless desert, to restore through a defiled sister the family's blemished honor. He stood there, leaning on the shed, patiently awaiting the tardy transport. The bus digested him with eager exhalation.
