by Hoda Barakat
Waking up at dawn, I felt completely recovered. I asked for breakfast in my room and I ate everything on that large tray. I pulled back the heavy curtain. It was still raining.
Nothing to do, but in a good mood all the same.
If you were here, you would be watching this sparrow with me. He hops about below in the empty street, in the rain, as if the downpour hasn’t soaked him. A little bird without a flock to follow or be part of. A lone sparrow in high spirits in a big city of which he sees nothing. Maybe he is so old that he no longer needs anyone, though a sparrow never looks to us like it’s all grown up, let alone elderly. A little bird is always young and never ages, as far as we’re concerned.
Strange, isn’t it?
No one knows why it is impossible for us to think about a sparrow growing elderly, to the point where the infirmities of old age carry him off to a natural death, like any other living creature whose life runs its course. Perhaps it’s because we have never seen an old sparrow, or one that does the sorts of things we do that show we are getting on in life. For example, the way we stop erasing the names, or the addresses and telephone numbers, from the pages of our diaries even though they’re the names and addresses of friends who have died. We don’t feel we need to erase them in order to create more room on the page. Instead, we leave new names and addresses on the little scraps of paper where they were first written, scattered here and there, not transferring them to the diary. We’re not afraid that they might go missing. What I mean is, we no longer care if they go missing.
Another example. I went to buy a new mattress, hoping it would relieve me of my chronic back pain. Looking at a mattress, I told the keen, solicitous salesperson that I really did not wish to pay for one guaranteed to maintain its quality and form for the impressive number of years covered by the warranty, surely many more years than I would be alive. In other words, I was not interested in spending a huge sum of money on a bed that would still be in excellent condition long after my death. I would be lying on it dead, and it would probably still look brand new, my body as stiff as the fine-quality wood frame. As one says of wood, it would still be ‘breathing’ under my corpse. ‘I hate this bed,’ I said, ‘and I’m not interested in buying it.’ And I walked out of the showroom.
It would be like having someone crucify you, telling you as he did so that this cross was made of the highest quality wood or that he was using only the most dependably rust-free nails. Analogous things happen frequently in our daily lives but we are not always paying attention, or if we are aware of such things, we do not know how to handle them. It’s like a man in love destroying the woman he loves deliberately and methodically – precisely because he loves her so much he can’t stand it. In my case, for instance, it really began to pain me to hear a man promise he would love me ‘forever’. Such words terrify me, because that man is leaving me no space to change my mind, or to change, full stop. It’s like being sent to prison for life. What if I were to cease loving him ‘forever’? What price will be settled on the beautiful durability of the nails with which his passion fixes me to a cross?
You and I, we would have laughed and laughed if I had told you the story of the mattress, or of the cross. That is because you’re about the same age as me, or a few years older. And after all that laughter, we would remember (perhaps) the great quantities of medlar fruits we ate as we walked the streets, which we continued to eat in the car that took us from the big square in downtown Beirut, from Sahat al-Bourj, to the Jabal – I don’t remember now exactly whereabouts in the heights it was – so that you could meet up with a friend of yours. When we got there, I began searching for a rubbish bin or a barrel where I could toss my carrier bag now that it was full of medlar pits. I don’t remember anything about that little excursion except how sick and tired I got of looking for somewhere to deposit that bag of pits, which left my palms wet and sticky. No, that’s not quite true – I also remember the succulence of the medlar, which would never again taste as sweet.
This sweetness has nothing to do with the act of remembering. It’s not delicious and sweet because it is linked to the past, to the time of our youth, where nostalgia for that time gives everything we can’t bring back a more beautiful sheen. Nothing in my childhood or my adolescence has ever prompted a longing for the past, a past that seems to me more like a prison than anything else. I am not here in this room in order to return to what was, nor to see you and thus see with you the charming young woman I was, or how lovely and robust the springtime was that year, there in my home country. That country is gone now, it is finished, toppled over and shattered like a huge glass vase, leaving only shards scattered across the ground. To attempt to bring any of this back would end only in tragedy. It could produce only a pure, unadulterated grief, an unbearable bitterness. And anyway, seeing you, at the age you are now, is precisely what will immobilize my imagination, preventing it from ever again playing games with the image of myself that I’ve kept in my head, and forcing me to see that image very clearly and accurately – indeed, turning it into something nearly like my mirror.
I don’t put on my glasses when I’m standing in front of the mirror, before I wash my face or apply kohl. That is not because I’m afraid of what my image in the mirror would look like if I were to see it unadorned and unblurred, but because I know that I am much handsomer than that image is, vastly so, and that the precision with which it reflects the pores and wrinkles, the thin layers of loosely hanging skin below my chin, is all simply an illusion, an exaggeration of reality, a ‘scientific assessment’ that is unwarranted and unnecessary. For who would come close enough anyway to see those details! What could tempt a person to do that? What reason could anyone have to breathe into my face while peering intently at my skin and features? No one apart from the dentist, but the dentist looks only into one’s mouth. In any case, wrinkles aren’t an accurate guide to how old one is. Teeth are. When the teeth recede, a little, but enough so they can no longer give you the pleasure of biting into a medlar fruit as you sit in the back of a taxi, so that its juice runs down over your chin and drips onto your clothing… When the problem is no longer one of where to throw the medlar pits. At least, that’s no longer the only problem.
In your last letter, you mentioned some shared memories. My brain struggled to return to that past, and when it got there I didn’t find anything. I tried hard to imagine that puzzling house that apparently we visited together, which you said belonged to a relative of mine. I couldn’t come up with anything. And why would I have taken you to one of my relatives, anyway? And then, why were we eating shwarma from a spit, standing in front of the butcher’s shop, if there was a family home only a few metres away? What girl from the village would ever do that – something only foreign tourists like you would do? Are you the one who is inventing things? Or am I the one who is erasing things from memory? Are you getting me confused with another girl whom you met in that country and then forgot? What you’ve said about me doesn’t sound like me at all.
Or does the engine that keeps memories turning work differently for men’s minds than it does for women’s? For example, I remember very clearly that moment you brought your head close to mine, when we were sitting on the ground under a tree. I thought you were going to kiss me, but you didn’t. Was it because I didn’t respond by bringing my mouth any closer to yours? Where I’m from, girls don’t bring their mouths closer. Maybe they do that in Canada, and that’s what confused you, so that you thought I simply wasn’t open to a kiss like that. Maybe that’s it. Even now, and however much the desire might overpower me, I don’t believe I would dare to kiss a man in the open air. But this kiss – or the absence of it – is not a tale, or an incident, that we remember in common or have ever talked about.
All of this is why it will really be a disaster if you don’t remember that excursion to the Jabal. The medlar outing. It will be a huge disappointment to discover that you don’t remember it, because I won’t be able to think of any other expeditions we made
, or things we did together that turned out to be fun. Or even any that weren’t much fun. I might not be able to dredge up any memories at all, of any sort. Then it will be up to you to tell me again what you remember, in greater detail this time, to help me out a little with inventing things to say. Because we will have to say something.
Whatever the circumstances, once one has got past the age of fifty this business of remembering becomes quite easy sometimes, but it is also pointless. The life you’ve led so far can come back to you with staggering clarity, an unending stream of memories flooding over you even if you’ve made no effort to summon any of it back. Things that are remote, completely forgotten, turn up as if of their own accord, as if there’s something automatic about the process. Places, smells, people’s faces, details that have no importance whatsoever. Such as what a neighbour said many years ago about the benefits of rubbing copper with lemon and ashes when you don’t have any copper pans or basins anyway… That sort of thing. Anyway, what use are memories like this when, even if you have learned certain lessons from the past, it is already too late to apply that knowledge? It’s all far behind you.
It’s very strange how much I want to see you.
By the way, I rarely travel. The few countries I have been to all disappointed me. They were true disappointments. Not because my country is more attractive – especially at war, going up in flames – but rather because the promises made by the travel companies were all lies. They have no shame, the way they lie! Total cheek. They come up with images of places that don’t exist, or they bang together scenes of places that do exist, in a montage, and then they Photoshop the montage into a single image. Besides that, I have no sense of direction. Almost immediately I lose my way, and then, once I’m lost and panicking, I can no longer find any of the landmarks I’d picked out in order to avoid getting lost. I can’t even see well, and in my fright I feel like a blind person groping along. I don’t dare ask anyone in the street how to get back to my hotel – that’s assuming I can even speak so much as a word of the native language. I don’t dare ask, because I am so certain that I must be just around the corner from the hotel – so close that it will stir up their suspicions if I ask. Or they will try to help me with gestures alone, by sketching out a mental map, and none of it will stick in my mind.
Despite all of this, I’ve travelled all this way to meet you. Yes, I’ve come here to see you as if I really miss you. And I do. A lot. How do you explain that? Longing arises from distance, a distance that has separated two individuals who lived happily together for a time, a period when they did things together and spent whole days that were full of the two of them, and only them; days that united them in a togetherness that was both sweet and bitter, for better and for worse. What was it between the two of us? And what remains of what was between us? And why might you come? What sort of misplaced longing for days gone by might propel you back to me? Can you tell me how many days they were? Myself, I don’t remember.
Whenever your features come to mind I get a lump in my throat, and the image of your face, so close to mine, your eyes gazing into mine, squeezes my heart.
The face I’m thinking of, naturally, belongs to a very young man, a man young enough to be my son now. If we were characters in an Arabic-language film, sensations like this would signal a hunch, an intuition, and then as the story went on, it would turn out that I really was that young man’s mother, and she had lost him or been torn violently from him by the Pasha – because, in these films, there is always a tyrannical Pasha who dispossesses mothers. And that mother – that is, me – would be guided wholly and absolutely by her heart throughout the entire long, tragic tale. It happens in life too. Why not? I love these films which you know nothing about. For I’m – no, rather we – we are…we are all sentimental creatures. I believe that you know about the Egyptian diva, Umm Kulthum, as far as I can remember, but you don’t know Abd al-Halim. Maybe I’ll tell you about my boundless love for Abd al-Halim, and how this passion for that beautiful young Egyptian singer led me to ruin… No, I won’t, because it is a very sad subject and it depresses people. And we didn’t come here for tragic confessions. But, in short, this man – Abd al-Halim, the handsome Egyptian singer – destroyed my life. Of course, you’d probably think that a silly thing to say, or just a stupid joke uttered by a woman keen to come across as original.
No, no, we will stay on happy topics. Maybe we’ll talk about those lovely spring days when we first met. About the streets and squares we strolled through, how we ate medlar fruits, drank freshly pressed juice, and all the rest. I hope you won’t go on about your job or your family or your country, or what your life is like now. Because if you do I will die of boredom, and I won’t be capable of hiding how disappointed I am, especially if you launch into questions about my job and my family and my country. That would be very disheartening! Fatal, even. What I mean is, it would bring our planned rendezvous to a sudden and dramatic end. Because probably the whole point of our meeting is precisely not to learn much of anything, and not to use words that carry any meaning. The point is just to have the kind of conversations that you hear between strangers: light, inconsequential, as quick to disappear as a feather in the breeze, no sooner lying stationary on the ground than picked up again, wafting upwards to circle overhead once more.
Forget about Abd al-Halim. We’ll find a lot to say on subjects we do both know something about. In the first place, there’s this music that plays constantly in the hotel corridors, and the lift, and the reception area, even in the en suite bathrooms. We know all about this music, you and me. They’ve chosen Chopin, a Romantic composer who will tickle the hearts of lovers who have their trysts here. They must be hoping this will motivate those lovers to extend their bookings. From Chopin, we might move on to cinema. You must have seen The Pianist by now, with its Ballade No. 1 (Opus 23). The Nazi officer will let the musician live because beauty has some power to lance even a Nazi’s heart. No, forget about that too. I expect way over in your region of the world, you have views about things we’d disagree on.
Any of the items in this room could furnish us with something to talk about. Any of it could launch a pleasant conversation. For example, you might pry open the little fridge in here, and then I would start telling you how, at night, I sit at home in the faint light of the fridge in my kitchen, and I eat whatever my hand falls on, in an agreeable state somewhere between sleep and wakefulness. My sense of pleasure floats free – it is unconnected with my hunger or my insomnia, and I don’t feel any guilt about it. I feel secure and quiet and pleasantly lethargic. It’s a primitive sort of stillness, like the sense of well-being animal cubs feel. Then, once my stomach and heart are both nicely full, I go back to bed. And you?
Or, if you go into the bathroom, I might ask you, for instance, whether you normally use shampoo like the kind they provide in little bottles here, made with herbal ingredients to preserve the oil secreted by the roots of the hair, so it doesn’t dry up and lose its shine, and the ends don’t split. Do you? Or perhaps by now your hair is receding, or maybe you’ve gone bald?
If I go on talking to myself like this, I really will begin to look mad.
Yet we do have to say something, you know. Especially in the first quarter of an hour, if only to make out that we aren’t really so shocked by each other’s appearance, by how much we’ve changed and how old we’ve become, that we can’t say a word. So many years have come between who we are now and that long-ago spring. So many years that you won’t need your glasses to see, for example, that I have shrunk slightly – if you still remember how tall I was – and that now I am a bit stooped, my shoulders slumping and rounding. It’s the back pain caused by poor alignment in my upper spine and neck.
Since you never knew my father, you won’t be able to see how much I’ve come to resemble him. Yes of course, my father was a man, true, but with age my body has come to look like his, maybe like the physique of men in general. Now, when I cough, I think I’m hearing him. My lips are
slightly lopsided, pulling my face down a little on the left side, exactly like his. Even the way I lie in bed when I’m going to sleep, or the shape of my toes: all his. At my age, I can’t help thinking how many female hormones I’ve lost and how I’m now at that crossroads where male characteristics start taking over, before we – men and women – come to look more and more like each other. And you? Don’t you have breasts by now, or hints of them?
I will try to orchestrate things – if you do come – so that I’m not standing up when you enter the room. So that I’m sitting on the bed or on the chair where I am sitting now to write. I’ll be in a far better position than you, because it will be your physique that’s in plain view, and it will be you who is nervous about facing my stare. But we are not in a contest! We’re not afraid of each other. I think perhaps this apprehension formed in me when I read the letter I found here. The letter’s lovesick writer is still a young man, as far as I can tell, or at least he is younger than we are, you and me.
True, passion has nothing to do with age. Right. But I myself don’t believe that. Of course it has something to do with age. If, say, I am in love and greatly attracted to you, in some sense at least, or if you are the same, enough to make you fly halfway around the world to come to me, enough to get you all the way to this room, that means that we, the two of us, are attracted to each other enough to go to bed together. But that will reveal things, details that will extinguish the ‘flame’ of this attraction, or this love, if that is what it is. We will quickly deduce that due to my back pain, lying beneath you I cannot bend my body enough so that you can penetrate. Or you yourself won’t be flexible enough to find a solution to this intimate dilemma. And if we keep trying and it just leaves us frustrated and tired, I will tell you that really, honestly, I don’t want it. I’ll suggest that we do something else, something more enjoyable. But what?
