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Skeletons

Susie Gharib

    Time creates a distance that cools a scorching memory, encrusting the object of the event with a shroud of contempt. Such memories possess noisome smells too. I do not know why they remind me of mummies. I was only thirteen when we visited the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, and fully unprepared, I found myself in the middle of a hall full of coffins of glass, a transparent cemetery as far as I was concerned. I always wondered whether we had the right to view the bandaged bodies whose faces and nails where exposed to the public – licensed desecration in the name of historic discovery. This is the case with some memories. Would it be a sacrilege to unearth a memory that had undergone putrefaction? Or should the fetid smell linger in the subconscious wreaking havoc there? Many would opt in this instance for ventilation and this entails exposing the people we once thought we loved. I deliberated over the question for years and decided to display memories, while withholding names, only for my own sake.
    When I conjure up his grace, I see a knot of lies wriggling out of his mouth, like a tomb’s coil of worms. He lied about everything, including his age. His smiles trickled amounts of wile and all that was suave about his face was a sheer disgrace. His apparent humility was a faŤade for a very frugal mind that calculated the expenditure of every pence and the amassed and inherited wealth made him believe he had the right to enslave and possess, even to purchase sex. His interests in the Arts was only a cult, a cultural legacy that his so-called class necessitated to impress. I do not think he benefitted from the World Literature he read, saw, or heard. It brought him no inner refinement, only enhanced his arrogance.
    The skeleton of his memory now lies in a drawer in dark-blue ink, nothing that compares to the Egyptian blue of Pharaoh Kings. The smell has evaporated from the remains, but tenacious is the ugliness of his name.

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