This passage from Zuahir al-Jezairy’s “The Devil You Don’t Know: Going Back to Iraq,” occurred to me as I read Christoper Hitchen’s latest contribution to Vanity Fair.

They discussed everything in those daily sessions Abu Saad’s shop except death.   Death lurked shrouded in grey, sitting side by side with them as they played backgammon, these old men, waiting to pounce on one of them. They all knew he was there and they all avoided him. But when one of the old men was late, all the others would get worried and start wondering,..They all had the illness of old age which had no cure. Any absence meant a great deal and sounded the alarm bell for the rest. The conversation and games would go on, but taut and nervous. Suddenly one of them would ask the question they were all avoiding: “Where is Abu Hind? Did he tell you he wasn’t coming?”

Hitchens, himself, begins with a quote from Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
—T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

And then, in his always bracing, if mordant, wit:

Like so many of life’s varieties of experience, the novelty of a diagnosis of malignant cancer has a tendency to wear off. The thing begins to pall, even to become banal. One can become quite used to the specter of the eternal Footman, like some lethal old bore lurking in the hallway at the end of the evening, hoping for the chance to have a word. And I don’t so much object to his holding my coat in that marked manner, as if mutely reminding me that it’s time to be on my way. No, it’s the snickering that gets me down.

On a much-too-regular basis, the disease serves me up with a teasing special of the day, or a flavor of the month. It might be random sores and ulcers, on the tongue or in the mouth. Or why not a touch of peripheral neuropathy, involving numb and chilly feet? Daily existence becomes a babyish thing, measured out not in Prufrock’s coffee spoons but in tiny doses of nourishment, accompanied by heartening noises from onlookers, or solemn discussions of the operations of the digestive system, conducted with motherly strangers. On the less good days, I feel like that wooden-legged piglet belonging to a sadistically sentimental family that could bear to eat him only a chunk at a time. Except that cancer isn’t so … considerate.

Hitchens: Vanity Fair

[thx to Joyce Cole for the find.]

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