Mona stepped out of the car, holding her purse in one hand and a few flowers in the other. The sun was brilliant in the sky, its rays indiscriminately scorching every naked surface. She stood beside a tall pine tree next to the iron gate—the very gate that had witnessed the dirges of misery and pain in the face of death too many times to recount.
Mona looked around and drew a deep breath. For a moment she stood at the doorstep of her childhood, unable to prevent painful memories from fluttering through her mind. She remembered the iron gate. She remembered Ali and his wife. She remembered four men carrying her father’s casket and she remembered a little girl whose life had been shattered to pieces. Mona took another deep breath but the memory was too painful, provoking sighs of grief to emerge from her inner being.
She fetched a tissue from her purse, wiped away a few tears, and proceeded through the graveyard gates. Right away she was faced with a sea of graves far as her eyes could see. She walked slowly down a short, hilly path lined with the graves of people, now mute but who at one time spoke loudly their parts in the theater of life.
Twenty minutes later, as she was still searching for her parents’ graves, Mona spotted a man in a distance. She breathed a sigh of relief as she walked quickly toward him.
“Mister!” she called. The man turned around, holding a shovel in his hand—an elderly man with white hair and a white mustache. He was tall, wide-shouldered, and strong. Mona stopped a few feet from him. “I’m sorry to interrupt you,” she said breathing heavily. “I’m looking for two graves but I can’t seem to find them.”
The old man looked at Mona intently, appraising her appearance with his steady gaze. ”Whose graves are you looking for?” he questioned.
“Suha and Ramsey Salem,” she answered, without hesitating.
The old man nodded. Then he pointed to his right. “Go look there, and you’ll find the graves you’re looking for.”
“Thank you,” Mona responded.”
She looked in the direction that the old man pointed and then rushed up the hilly path lined with cypress and willow trees. Her heart was pounding fast by now and she was breathless. Arriving at some level ground, she feverishly began searching for the tombstones. When her eyes spotted a stone with the name Salem on it, she ran to it and stared intently. The grave on the right was her father’s, the one on the left, her mother’s. Mona stepped between the two gravestones and fell to her knees. Again, memories flooded her head and she was back to the day her father was buried. Intense feelings overtook her as the little girl in her came back to life. She was standing between Ali and his wife while the coffin was being placed in the ground. There were a few people she recognized, mostly the neighbors who had known her mother and father. Their faces were dark and wrinkled, reflecting the hard life their owners had lived. There was no comfort looking at them. Then the little girl looked up again, and there was that rich man, standing not too far off, next to the big shiny car. He was gazing at the small crowd and then looked right at her.
As quickly as she had been transported to the past, she came back to the reality of the two graves before her eyes. She gazed at the tombstones. They were encrusted with dried dirt, barely permitting the names to show through.
Mona took a tissue from her purse and started to wipe the dirt off the stones. The intensity of her emotions outpaced the speed of her hand, and the tissue tore and crumpled up. Instantaneously, she pulled the tight ribbon from her long, shiny black hair and began wiping the tombstones with her tresses. Before long, the names on the stones were legible once more.
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