Ajad

My paternal grandfather is called André. His full name is André Jean Audevard Demaël, so he decided to use the abbreviation A.J.A.D. It seems fitting to use witty wordplay of the sort to refer to him.

Ajad is a doctor, a family doctor. He is a doctor who tends to the human in the patient. The whole realm of “experimental” and “evidence-based” medicine sanctified only by placebo-controlled, double-blind randomised clinical trials is not one that he is concerned with.

These traits are found in the ridges and the creases of his hands. They are long, delicate, with careful fingers and well-kept nails. They have the firmness and resolve of someone who knows what he is doing, but always acts with poise. Although he is frail, he has a vigour to him, in just getting things done. If something is missing from the table, he gets up and goes to fetch it. He walks over firmly across the garden to dispose of bags of dry leaves or close the gate at the end of the day.

He used to receive his patients in an office (cabinet) adjacent to their apartment. There are two mailboxes in the entrance of the apartment building: Dr Demaël and Demaël. They merged the apartments when he retired. The office is still there. In the morning, he still sits at his desk, only now he is reading the newspaper or flicking through a photo album. In their farmhouse in Haute-Savoie, there is also a cabinet. It is just a small room, with a large wooden cupboard, a wooden table, and two wooden shelves, where he keeps an outdated copy of the Merck Manual, alongside a few poetry books and unsharpened pencils.

I do not think that he is desperately clinging to anything, trying to erect an altar to his vanished professional life. I interpret it as a quiet discipline of always showing up, of simply being there everyday, with all the sanctified respect and readiness that this act deserves in his profession.

Ajad has said that he wanted to specialize in paediatrics. He never followed the training to become a specialist though, because of his service militaire. He was sent to Algeria, as a doctor for the Légion Etrangère. After that, it was "getting too late".

We almost never speak about Algeria. I have seen one or two brownish photos, of him standing on the side of a type of caravan, with his frail figure and his moustache. I am very curious about his experience and have asked about it a few times before.

My father has told me that he would rather not speak about it, just like his grandparents didn't speak to him about World War II. He said that the way they rationalised it is to believe they suffered so that their children did not have to. So, they would rather not impose the burden of suffering to them, even through recall in a discussion. There is a trade-off between satisfying your own curiosity and stepping into territory that people are not comfortable sharing. I have understood that, and moved on.

Sometimes though, he likes to sing a few chants from the military, a few songs from the Légion Etrangère. When he does, he seems to do it with a childish joy of togetherness, of having been part of something. I know that his daily life was not the stuff of history books nor of discussions held by generals in offices of marble and gold. It was mostly being in the impoverished Algerian countryside, and providing basic medical treatment to local people. I like to believe that he was made greater by whatever help he could provide to people there.

I was recently told the story of how he met my grandmother, who is also called Andrée, but with an "e". André et Andrée. They met at a wedding in 1959. She was a close friend of the bride, he, on the other hand, was never supposed to go, until his brother got ill at the last minute and suggested that he go in his place. At the wedding, there was apparently a tablecloth or a napkin that everyone signed their first names under. Ajad kept a copy, and wrote all the details he could remember about my now grandma. They then wrote each other letters, frequently. I was told that they only saw each other on seven occasions before they got married, in 1962, in Annecy. This was after the interlude of Algeria. They went on to have three children and thirteen grandchildren.

My grandfather's favourite author is Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Like him, he was a doctor, has lived through war, has an inclination for literature, probably many other things that I am not privy to. Céline has inspired Bukowski, Kerouac, Jean-Luc Godard. From what I have experienced of my grandfather, this has always surprised me though.

I have tried to read Céline, and find his bumpy and crude style quite disagreeable. He is very cynical, pessimistic. Céline has written some pamphlets that have received a lot of controversy in recent years. I tried a few times though. In the oral exam in French Literature for the baccalaureate, the passage I had to present was an extract from Céline's Voyage au Bout de la Nuit, where a horse and soldiers get killed. I remember that Céline describes the blood oozing from their corpses as marmelade in a stockpot. When I left the exam room, my grandfather was the first person I wanted to tell about it.

My grandfather is almost deaf. He has hearing aids and struggles to keep track of conversations, especially when there is background noise. For him to understand you, you must not speak louder in volume, but lower in pitch. He has been like that as a consequence of ear infections as a child. There were no antibiotics back then, he was born in 1932. I had the same infection as him. I, on the other hand, received antibiotics and three surgeries. This example always sparks to my mind when people dolefully complain that c'était mieux avant.

My grandpa loved opera, but he had to stop listening because he could not hear it properly anymore. He rarely participates in conversation at the dinner table. When I call my grandparents, it is always to speak to my grandma, because he does not speak on the phone. This creates an odd disconnect, because the conversations with him are often very surface level. He will answer what you said a few sentences ago, maybe repeat something. Under all of this, you sense his yearning and his bristling intelligence though. I do not think there is any worth wondering how he would be different if he could hear better. He is Ajad, and that is part of being Ajad.

I have never seen my grandfather shout, nor even raise his voice. I have never seen him get angry. I have never seen my grandfather cry.

I do not know many things about my grandfather. One thing over which I believe that we have truly connected is his art. He makes very small paintings, typically on wood or square-shaped canvases. They are often very practical in inspiration and abstract in realisation. He draws the silhouette of a mountain, or a window-frame, or two birds flying over a beach. He uses a palette of two-three colours per painting, almost always choosing colours that are not suited to the actual objects. He has also carved sculptures in wood. They are very simple, typically a rounded branch becomes a face, he simply softens its edges and paints it yellow. His style has inklings of Dali and Magritte.

When I am at their house, I always admire the few paintings he has on the walls. He often switches them around, so if I have not been around in six months or so, the painting in a room will have changed. He usually walks over to me, and asks me whether I like it. He tells me what he was representing, said he found something amusing in that moment. The whole exchange maybe lasts three or four sentences. I smile in silence at the painting. He smiles in silence at the painting.

My grandfather is still alive. We tend to recount the stories of people close to us and to remind ourselves of why we cherished them only when they are gone. Why? Are we so afraid of communicating affection while there is still a chance of reciprocation? Do we not realise how much we love others until their presence is no longer tangible? Do we see it is as morbid to describe someone like the character of a novel although they are alive, as if we were stripping away their living substance to reduce them to an archetype?

I do not know. I wanted to write this simply to celebrate what I have noticed in my grandfather, and what I love about him. He has been ill for a good part of his life. He has a chronic lung infection that has never resolved, and makes the mucus thicken in his lungs. This makes him cough very violently at night. I have always wondered how he managed to sleep through it. Before meals, he always goes to his room to do "gymnastics", some kind of breathing exercises to clear his lungs and throat. I do not know what they are, but they were always the ritual just before meal times.

He is neither invalid nor hospitalised. He is simply petering out like a flame, under this thing weakening him steadily over the years. When his flame extinguishes, it will not be surprising. It will simply be the organic continuation of a process that has spanned across decades.

This does not mean that I will not be sad when my grandfather dies. It will just feel like it was in the order of things. The evident development of everything that preceded it. Death has been walking over at a steady pace, like a travelling scene in a movie. I have neither feared nor sought to fight against its well-oiled cadence. It will simply come to collects its yield, ripe and golden. There will be no point speculating what the yield could have been had if the grain had been given a few more sunlights. Only, to recognise that it was a sturdy grain that tended to the farmer and his family for generations. And that will be enough.