by Hoda Barakat
How many of those who’ve stayed in this room have spent as much time as I have contemplating every one of its objects? Apart from whoever it was who left the letter inserted between the pages of the hotel directory. And that directory is surely not something most guests would open. In the first place, there’s no need for a directory in a hotel as small as this. No need for it in any hotel, in fact, now that people have smartphones. It must be the owners’ attempt at giving their hotel a veneer of luxury, a touch of the dignity of age. The directory looks old, its pages slightly crumpled and eaten away. Neglected and forgotten here, like the Bible.
The letter I found inside the hotel directory perplexed me. It worried me, actually. It talks about a young man, the letter writer himself. He wrote it in a cheaply rented furnished room in a street nearby, a rather run-down one, it seems. So how did the letter get here? Plus, it comes to an abrupt stop: it doesn’t really end. All in all, because of this letter, I’m feeling very uneasy about the writer. It’s not hard to imagine that he’s in prison, for instance. The letter has it that he was full of terrible imaginings about the secret police from his country of origin mounting surveillance on him. So it looks like he went to talk to their man, and it must have ended very badly, and that’s why he couldn’t finish his letter. The letter is written to the woman he loves but she… I’m convinced that it was this woman who hid the letter, to prevent anyone who might have been looking into his activities from coming across it. Because, among other things, this writer confessed that he was living in this city illegally, and that he was taking drugs – things that could get him in trouble with the law. That woman might be why the letter landed in this hotel room, though I can’t fathom how it happened, not exactly. And then probably she forgot about it, or maybe she hid it and then couldn’t recall where she had put it. Whatever happened, the man never did return to the letter he had started. This might mean that his meeting with the man from the secret police – or the man he imagined was from the secret police – ended in some calamity. Maybe even a tragedy.
It’s possible, instead, that it was the man from the secret police who took this room, in order to carry out surveillance on the young man who wrote the letter. And it was he who found the letter – that is, if he went to the fellow’s flat searching for documents or papers – but then he forgot and left it behind here, perhaps because, in the end, it wasn’t of much interest to him.
It’s all this empty time, nothing to do. Idleness, the master of silly imaginings, stoking the explanations one comes up with for things.
Reading that letter, though, I could almost hear his voice. I could almost see that lonely, miserable, wounded man standing at his window, looking out at the emptiness of the night, alone without her – I mean, without that woman he loves, or who he won’t…
The letter sounded like a goodbye letter, it really did. But who knows if he ever meant to send it, since he didn’t finish writing it.
I’m more inclined to think it was the man from the secret police who got hold of the letter and hid it here, but then misplaced or forgot it. I mean right here in this hotel room, which does in fact overlook an area that must have a pretty bad name – all these dilapidated buildings bulging with furnished flats.
Why am I telling you all this? To entertain myself a little while I’m waiting, and also because the loneliness of that man, the letter writer, sounds a lot like my loneliness. Even if his story doesn’t resemble my life in any way. But I sensed, I felt, his cry of pain as though I were an old friend, or as though I myself was the woman to whom he was complaining. Maybe I felt that way because after reading his letter, there were things I thought about telling him, things I wished I could say to him, and because I wanted so much to wrap my arms around him.
This is so strange. Especially because I didn’t like her at all, that woman. If I were ever to meet her – which is a ridiculous thought, of course – I would give her a piece of my mind. I can even see myself accusing her of stealing the letter and concealing it here, so that it would be inaccessible to anyone searching her home, since possibly it was she who killed the letter writer and not the man from the secret police. Or maybe it was her husband. Hmmm. He discovered their relationship and sent a hired killer. The murdered man believed this fellow was an agent of the secret police from his own country.
Yes, true enough, I’m hopeless. I’m always like this, swinging easily between my fertile imagination – the fantasies I construct, that is – and the reality of things, without giving much thought to what I’m doing. I’m always mixing up what happens in my head with what happens in the real world, but that doesn’t worry me particularly. Actually, it keeps me amused. It’s like having a dream at night and then being completely immersed in the details of it for the whole of the next day, and maybe longer. A friend who died some time ago might return to me in a dream, and then for days his presence goes on comforting me. It’s not that I’m getting mixed up about whether he’s alive or dead. I mean, I haven’t forgotten that he did die. It’s just that he seems to be with me, and that gives me comfort even though I’m well aware that ‘comfort’ might not be the most appropriate thing to feel, since the situation really calls for feelings of loss and grief – after all, I do know perfectly well that he’s dead. It’s as if he has come to visit me because I missed him, or perhaps because he was missing me. He comes to visit me, but free now of the things that were so painful to me before, the images I had of each stage of decomposition as his body lay in the grave – swelling flesh, worms laying eggs, things like that.
But…what could be prompting me to write in this way? Such thoughts might scare you off, or convince you that I’m a bit ‘fragile’, a bit feeble-minded, perhaps. I think it’s the letter that man wrote. I think it’s the letter – that’s what has tugged at me, made me spin these tales that are so… Yes.
It’s just that I started writing to you as a way to fill up the time while I’m waiting. I don’t have any idea what people find to do when they have to wait.
What I would have told you, if you were here, is this: I am not someone who waits. I mean, never, not even at the dentist’s. Or what I mean is, when I’ve got to wait, I go to sleep. I have a really good nap. I wasn’t like this before. If someone was late for an appointment we’d made, I would have no patience at all. I would be on edge, livid in fact, and I would stack up all the angry rebukes I could think of in my head. For a while now, though, I’ve been forgetting who it is I’m waiting for, and why I am waiting for whoever it is I am waiting for, and then my eyelids start feeling heavy. If I am waiting in a café, my head drops between my shoulders and I slump down in the chair, spreading my bag across my lap like a little blanket, and I go to sleep. It’s not deep slumber, not like the way one sleeps at night. It’s more like retiring into a dark interior space where the day outside disappears completely, or like the soporific state one is in after drinking heavily.
Yes…once you’re here, I will be as chatty as I can, trying to entertain you, and also because you will ask me whether I got bored waiting for you. You’ll ask because you’ll be feeling a bit rattled, and a little apologetic, about being late. ‘It was the snowstorms,’ you’ll say. Because what words will you find to say, anyway, when you enter this room and you look at me, and then you see me, like this, just me, all alone? I’m a lot older now. I’m old and I’m not like I was. I mean, after all these years. What I would have been trying to think about, waiting for you, was what to say first. What to start with and how to say it.
Someone who is waiting knows something, even if only a very little, about the person or the thing they’re waiting for. Thinking about that person or thing keeps them amused, or distracted. Now, it’s not that I know nothing about you. It’s just that what I do know isn’t very much, and it’s ancient, and my memories are hazy. And anyway, when I’m mulling over what I know, bringing you to mind, I can’t disentangle my memories from my inventions. This puts me on edge; it’s not a pleasant distraction at all. This m
ight sound odd to you, but to be frank about it, I can only keep myself happily distracted when I’m truly alone. To the point that even when I’m leaving the house, before going out I put on some music I like, because then I feel like I’m lingering a bit longer at home, in my solitude. As I’m returning, I can hear the music from outside, and as I’m turning the key in the door, I can think to myself, ‘There it is, the same music, my music.’ And while I’ve been out, no one has come in and stirred up the air in there. And so, really, I was there all the time, alone, with nothing to disturb me.
Little by little, day after day, my solitude has become the height of luxury. I cherish it. To be alone in air that no one else is breathing. It’s become so important that I react terribly if someone happens to touch me or brush against me or knock into anything of mine, unintentionally, in the street or on the bus or in the lift. It’s as though a terrible electric charge goes through me; I shudder and jump as if I’ve been bitten by a snake, and it is all I can do not to cry out with pain and anger. For example, this is what happens when someone stumbles and then seizes hold of my arm to keep from falling. I’m always aware that it’s insane to react as I do. So I take a deep breath, I smile, and I accept their apologies magnanimously, trying all the while to hide that I’ve broken out in a sweat and my heart is pounding, and I’m sure my colour has changed as well. There must be many people who suffer as I do when other bodies touch them or even come too close. Like me, those people behave politely without showing any sign of aversion or disgust. In restaurants, many people – and not just me – look for the shadows of fingerprints on clean plates or glasses, not because they are passionate about cleanliness but to convince themselves that the table bears no traces of anyone who sat there before.
Even so, the letter I found here, stuck inside the hotel directory, did not give me the feeling that anyone else was in the room with me, or that he had been here before me. Hotel rooms are forever inhabited by those who have passed through. Each new occupant enters cautiously, apprehensively, as though expecting to find certain traces of the last person who was here. But I found this room completely empty of any stranger’s presence. It was as if, as soon as my fingers even touched the written page, I sensed that the man who had left it here was someone familiar, a person I already knew. Even though it was written in a language foreign to this country, and it was complicated to read. There were words I could barely make out, and I had to read the whole thing several times. Not to mention his poor handwriting, letters curling into themselves like dead insects.
But why am I returning to that letter?
Probably I felt like telling you this because I had begun moving about in this room as he was doing in his room – his ‘home’. So I went over to the window as if we were going to it together. He and I. Then I pushed aside the curtains so that we could look out at the rain. As I was doing this, I nearly even spoke to him out loud, but then I came to, and I thought, ‘That’s the last thing I need!’ At least I haven’t begun talking to ghosts yet. Maybe I just wanted my voice to block out the sound of the rain. There’s been no break in this heavy rain since coming from the airport. The sound of it has filled my head with noise. Its relentless pounding must have melted the snow that covered the city before I arrived. Or, more likely, it didn’t snow at all here and I was just confusing this place with Canada, where immense snowstorms have moved in. Or perhaps I invented the snow as I journeyed from the airport as a way to tell myself that you would not be coming after all, not from Canada, since any snowstorm there would keep aeroplanes on the ground.
This is what I’ve become now. As I’ve already told you, it makes me happy to find things getting blurred in my head, or, to put it more honestly, to find myself blurring things in my head. So in the confusion of things jostling around in my brain, I’ve agreed to meet you at a certain time on a certain day in a small hotel at this location. But at the same time, I tell myself over and over that you can’t possibly come – even though I am really here, in this place, and I’m waiting. I believe this has something to do with the age I’ve reached. After all, I spent an awful lot of my life trying very hard to do things the way they were supposed to be done according to conventional ways of thinking. It was only after great fatigue and strain that I let go, no longer obliging myself to follow other people’s logic. Ever since my periods stopped coming, or more precisely after my father’s death, all at once I saw a fissure open in the wall of my soul. It’s true that this chasm allowed an icy cold to blow in, but at the same time it freed me from staring only at the blind face of a wall that had gone up around me, without my knowing by whom or when it was erected. It was sudden, this discovery: I began to see how fast the waters were rising around me, how the world was seeping in, pouring in, and how I had almost drowned.
My father had been my armour, protecting every part of my body from the things that threatened me. He was a magic helmet over my head, keeping out the lethal, black thoughts that might otherwise creep in. But because of his protection, and because of my love for him, I was bound in chains. I gave in to this submerged state of mine, protected by my ironclad armour and, for good measure, a full-body diving suit as heavy as lead. I may have been drowning, but I was protected. I was sinking into bottomless depths, where nothing could kill me, and nothing could rescue me.
After my father’s death, I became free to despise people as much as I pleased. Now I could vent my hatred for the men I had fallen for who never did deserve my love. It was as though I had emerged from a past where I glided along on the greased rails of happy security, safe in the railcar of naïve goodness, without exerting any will or desire on my part. It was just that I lost half my life for the sake of keeping someone’s love when I no longer felt anything for that someone. But since then, I’ve wanted to erase those men completely from the pages of my history. From my life.
It was in this spirit, I suppose, that I read the letter. It was a desire to insert myself into the logic of a man I do not know. To seek another place, a different place. An egotistical logic, freed of shackles, liberated and unattached to the point of being dissolute. A logic that doesn’t ask for the consent of others: of the moralists, of all those associations and institutions that come together around principles and laws and ‘the right way of doing things’. Such a logic means having one’s own measuring stick, assessing the balance of courage and feebleness, success and failure, so that in one way or another, frailty itself becomes a source of great strength. Imagine a woman tested daily, abused and worn down, emptied of her soul day by day. Like that woman who killed her husband with his own rifle after a marriage that had lasted decades. In court, she said she felt no remorse. She would be ready to kill him again, without the slightest hesitation or doubt. From that moment, she said, she felt a kind of power fill her heart, and it had raised her above the mundane world for the few years of life that remained to her.
Would you call this revenge? Treachery? Or is it recuperation of one’s most basic and primary right? The right to breathe.
One who is liberated does not have to be strong, nor does the strong person have to be free, as it is in the history books or in those legendary tales of heroes who are always and uniformly steadfast, staunch, courageous and bold, borne on a wave of light that bestows sage leadership on everyone in the vicinity. My neighbour, who threw himself from the fifth floor after his son was killed in front of his eyes, what concern did he have with the people around him, with the whos and the whats, with the priest who afterwards stood over his grave, rebuking his corpse because, he said, ‘Jesus doesn’t love suicides’? But everyone knows about Jesus committing suicide – everyone except the priest. My neighbour was an elderly man, with many ailments, weak in body and mind. But he decided on freedom, flying off the fifth floor. I might tell you, if you come, how I decided on freedom before flying here. We’ll see.
I’m remembering now that I turned off my mobile before leaving the house. I should have left it on until the plane took off. Maybe you tr
ied to reach me, to tell me that you would be badly delayed, or that you had changed your mind and would not be coming. That seems plausible. Although it was you who searched for me, indeed who wore yourself out trying to find me, according to what you told me. Despite my having closed my Facebook account a long time ago, you found me there, somehow, I don’t know through whom. I will ask you, if you come. A person can change his mind, of course. But how will I know if you have changed your mind? The fellow in reception hasn’t informed me of any phone calls. Have the snowstorms cut off the lines of communication where you are? Maybe that’s it. Phone lines are always getting cut where I’m from.
A little before midnight, I remembered that I had not eaten anything all day. When I called down, and before I could order any food, the receptionist answered – even though I hadn’t repeated the question I had asked him earlier – that no one had phoned asking for me, or to say they weren’t coming. No problem! I opened my door and called the lift. I thought I would go out to the nearest bar or restaurant, but suddenly I felt exhausted, just at the idea of pressing through the rain without an umbrella. I was suddenly so tired and lethargic, and drowsy, that I felt almost paralysed. I got undressed and sank into the warm bed, keeping my clothes close by in case you should suddenly appear. I dropped off almost immediately but I woke up less than an hour later, with my knees throbbing and pain shooting through my lower back. ‘I’m not all right,’ I thought. ‘I think I may be about to come down with something, or I’m sick already. I must get back to sleep quickly. Because I would look very poorly if you…’
