Our lives were turned upside down when my sister got sick. My mother was shattered—I’d never seen her like that. She paced back and forth like a caged animal. I saw her grab her head in her hands, come back to Salwa’s bed and touch the back of her hand to her forehead and then stride away again, going nowhere. There was no doctor in Havre-Saint-Pierre: one would stop in town every few weeks, by boat, before heading on to the next village. No one could tell my mother what was wrong with her daughter, or how to help her. Salwa was about twenty-five. I never knew exactly, we never celebrated birthdays. When the doctor finally came and examined her, without a moment’s hesitation he spoke that dreadful word we all knew but didn’t utter because it scared us so much. We were crushed. Lots of people in the Havre and elsewhere die from this terrible disease. My mother had seen her own husband succumb to it. She had seen the signs even before the diagnosis, though she hadn’t wanted to admit it.

My mother felt that we had to get Karam to come over, quickly, so he could see his sister again. So he could say goodbye. How abominable, how inhumane, otherwise. I didn’t quite understand. I was young, I had no sense of the past or future of an immigrant family. Of any family, for that matter. It wasn’t just my age, it was me: it was like I was emotionally stunted. It was like I didn’t live in the same world as my sister and my mother. All I cared about were my friends, hockey and history.

I loved my sister, but I would rather go out with my friends than see her like that, suffering, unrecognizable. I wanted to get out of there so I didn’t have to see my devastated mother cry. It was too much. I just wanted it to be over so the two of them could get back to the store, and I could focus on school, on my friends. It was almost winter, and hockey season. Everything would go back to the way it was. I prayed to the Virgin Mary. Madame Landry prayed with me and asked Jacques to join us.

The store was open every day, I think, except Sunday. A door led to the ground floor of our house—the kitchen, and a room on the right that was Salwa’s and our mother’s bedroom. I had my own room on the second floor, my peace and quiet. They took care of everything. I don’t remember seeing my sister at school, but she did go when I was little. She could read and write. She spoke French with a slight Lebanese accent. The customers liked her a lot, more than they liked my mother.

It was never the men who came to the store. They were all working hard at the titanium mine or fishing. They brought home the money, and the women took care of everything else. Boys my age would often do the shopping for their mothers. Salwa served them in her imperturbable way, with her almost-smile, and asked them questions about school. I could see them blushing, but I didn’t know why. Farid the doofus, not even smart enough to guess the effect his sister’s beauty had on the neighbourhood boys.

My sister was always in the store, so my mother never asked me to help her or to look after things while she was cooking. I was free to do whatever I wanted. I don’t remember seeing Salwa with friends. I have no memory of her outside the house and the store at all. I don’t think I ever saw her go out to see if the weather was nice or to get some sun, except on Sundays, when she went to church. The three of us went to church with the Catholics, even though we were Orthodox—it’s close, our religions are like cousins, my mother used to say.

We had relatives in the Havre, from my father’s side, who came before we did. Maybe my mother moved here because of them. We never saw them, I don’t know why, likely a fight, one of the family secrets my mother kept. They had a store on the waterfront, while ours was downtown, in the heart of Havre-Saint-Pierre. I don’t know how my mother snagged such a beautiful spot.

When I think back now, my mother was tough: she immigrated alone to a village on the other side of the world, with two children in tow, opened a general store and even managed to save money.

I wonder what made her leave. Is the shock of losing a husband enough to make someone run away like that?

He’d promised he would never leave again, that this time he had brought back enough money to ply his trade in our homeland: From now on, darling, I want to live here with you and our children. But as fate would have it, my mother’s long-awaited honeymoon had barely begun when her beloved got sick and died. Three times he left after they got married, and each time she had another child to bring up on her own. But then he disappeared for good, and she lost her mind. I think my mother really went crazy. She probably left to get away from her sorrows, though I don’t think she would have put it that way. That was her, that was her spirit—she fled the village like you might jump off a bridge: if you can swim, you’ll make it. She always knew how to swim.

My mother never told me the story of that departure, which changed my life, all of our lives, but I gleaned bits and pieces here and there.

She could have done what other women did after their husbands died: stay in the village and weep. A weeping widow and her children, asking for help to keep from starving. Anyone who knows my mother at all knows what a stretch that would have been. The land she had wasn’t enough, her dead husband wouldn’t be sending any more money, so she would get some herself, she didn’t need anyone: that was the only solution. Her brothers had immigrated, and her husband had gone abroad, why not her? My mother always hated depending on anyone. She was clever and thrifty, and she saved up. Some might have said she was tight-fisted, but she didn’t hesitate for a second to break the bank and fly Karam here so he could say goodbye to his sister. It was expensive in those days.

That gesture, for me, encapsulates my mother, with all her contradictions. If she hadn’t been able to bring her son over because of a lack of money, I think she would have died. ⁂

Translated from Havre-Saint-Pierre, published by VLB éditeur, 2023. Reprinted with permission from the publisher.

Abla Farhoud was born in Lebanon and came to Montreal with her family in 1951. Four of her plays and one novel have been translated into English, by Jill MacDougall and Judith Weisz Woodsworth respectively. Her work won the Prix Arletty, the Prix de Théâtre et Liberté, the Prix France-Québec and the Prix du roman francophone. Farhoud died in 2021.