She had her first date with Prasanna over the phone. They had one long talk and fell in love, especially after they exchanged pictures. She went to Sri Lanka and they got married. Then she left him there and came back to continue working here cleaning houses. She still sends him new pictures every now and then. The first batch she sent was of their marriage day and of the day before, which she had developed in Lebanon. I saw those pictures. In them, Koko was wearing magical dresses. Colorful saris, tight cloths wrapped around her belly, a stern look that rarely relaxed into a smile, and an expressive pose. One picture remained fixed in my mind—Koko with her girlfriends the day before her wedding. She was sitting slightly higher than the rest of them, her legs rigidly fixed on the ground, and her friends were sitting on the floor around her, all looking at the camera, including her with her arms draped around them as though she were their mother or guardian. She was looking defiantly at the camera, like a protective goddess. She doesn’t smile in photographs. Photographs are supposed to be formal.
In one of the non-formal photographs that Koko had taken of herself in a photography studio in Lebanon, she is wearing green contact lenses. Her eyes pierce through the photo, alien-like. I laugh every time I see it, and she laughs at my laugh and asks me what I think of her sex appeal, and I say: “A queen!” Then we laugh together.
When I asked her how far her husband lived from her family in Sri Lanka, she told me very far, which I found to be strange. I asked her: “Aren’t you worried he might cheat on you?” She waved her hands around anxiously and her voice rose as if trying to jump out of her throat, then she threw words around until she finally put a useful sentence together: “Listen to me, a man will step out on woman if she is there, and he will step out on her if she’s not. He wants to step out? Let him do it! Correct?”
A result of economic independence, I suppose.
Her ability to provide and put a roof over the heads of the men and women in her family, young and old, made her independent. “If he wants to come live with me here, welcome. If not, then I going to live my life.” I was a little hurt to find out that in Sri Lanka her first husband took a second wife without telling her, a Muslim, to please his family. She divorced him. She lived with him in the same house after the divorce for about a year, because the occupants of the building where he worked as a janitor were fond of her and refused to keep him if he was single. They wanted a family to guard their building. So she stayed with him platonically. She kept her divorce a secret until he brought his wife to Lebanon. And during that year, Koko didn’t fall for any of his attempts to wheedle her back. Nothing could change her mind, even though she loved him and knew he loved her. She made up her mind and stuck to it. “Enough.”
This independence, I think, is what drives the women of my generation away from marriage.
Add to that the many divorces we keep hearing about, and the “I’m satisfied with what I’ve got” types of marriages that are filled with constant nagging:
He smokes cigars, Dalal’s husband. Dalal has told him over and over that she can’t stand the smell of cigars. At first, in the first flush of their relationship, he used to put out his cigar whenever she got bothered by it, assuring her that he would do anything to please her, even fly to the moon. Oh yes, a parade for putting out a cigar. Then the days passed and the honeymoon was over, and they were no longer stars to their families and friends. Their glow faded and they became another normal couple, naturally. And that’s when he stopped putting out his cigar for her. That’s the main reason she’s so annoyed by him now. Early in the morning he fills the air around her with cigar smoke that suffocates her. And then the whole idea of it suffocates her even more. And her life becomes a cycle wrapped round and round like the body of a cigar. The cigar has become the purpose for Saeed’s (her husband’s name is Saeed) existence. His life is meaningless without the thing he cherishes most—his cigar.
Then he would go on about the thighs of the Cuban women who rolled his cigar especially for him, the Cuban women whose beauty Lebanese women only dream of. Oh my, those Cubans.
Dalal would make fun of him: “Beautiful, yeah, but they rolled that cigar for you? Just for you? Some Cuban girl rolled that cigar especially for you? Believe me, one look at you and she’d quit her job. God, if she met you, she’d light herself on fire.”
Dalal defends her feminism in the face of Saeed’s attacks. She is repulsed when he struts around the house like a peacock. But where should he strut if not in his own house?
Their shared life has become a living hell.
I am certain that the cigar is not the main reason for their marital troubles, even though I myself go crazy every time I get stuck in a bar or café with someone smoking a cigar. I don’t understand this invasion of personal space. It’s the same with the sound of smacking gum. How can people invade other people’s personal space like that? So carelessly and without hesitation, unaware that they are committing assault.
Nevertheless, I am sure that the problem between Dalal and Saeed is not the cigar. The problem is their coexistence. Such a life is no longer comfortable or possible, and the thought of marriage is no longer seductive. They both started hating each other and their lives turned into constant daily revenge on each other. As if, now that she was his, he no longer needed to be mindful of her. And she felt as if she had lost her connection to her true self, and she could no longer tolerate his getting in the way.
I’m aware that there are more serious divorces where the couples tear each other apart, but Saeed and Dalal’s divorce was more of a retreat than a divorce. They wanted their old lives back and no longer wished to live as they were living.
And that’s when old age usually came up in our conversations.
Every day at work, Dalal would recount to me an episode in her married life. And at that point, we usually started talking about old age. Her parents would say that Saeed would make a good partner for her when they grow old, so she should put up with him. She told me: “What if I tolerate him and he dies of a heart attack ten years from now? Or what if I kill him before he reaches old age? How can I sacrifice the best years of my life, only to grow old and still have to face him, like a bad job? And what if he gets sick, coughing constantly, and ordering me around; me, who’d be old too, and would have to take care of him. And what if he divorces me then? What if he gets run over by a car a year from now? What if I die young and never reach old age? Should I spend the best years of my life waiting for either death or old age? I can’t stand him! Ugh.”
After four years of marriage, they got divorced.
His family dragged her reputation through the mud. Lazy, doesn’t cook, doesn’t keep house, doesn’t want to get pregnant because it would ruin her figure, neglectful, dirty, reckless, goes out too much, works too little, spends too much of both her money and his, etc.
And her family dragged his reputation through the mud too. Grumpy, arrogant, a mama’s boy, cheap, lazy, smokes cigars from dawn to dusk, neurotic, never likes to go anywhere, rarely ever showers, insults her, etc.
I’m aware that there are more dignified and less messy divorces. And I know of mature and conscientious divorces, more like separations than anything. And there are divorces of couples with children that are accompanied by whispered references to the ex’s positive traits. The woman would say: “He’s my son’s father.” And the man would say: “She’s my son’s mother.” And “as we entered this marriage gracefully, we will exit it gracefully.” And as Abu Nuwas once said, “Don’t blame me, for placing blame is tempting.”
And I know of divorces in between: sneering put-downs would hang from the couples’ lips, but their mouths would refuse to utter them. Their supportive listeners would ask for criticism, and our protagonists would offer some but they would hold back from speaking the insult that was on the tip of their tongues, because they’re above that. Cursing each other becomes a matter in which friends must drag it out of them, and wait, and anticipate, just as when the two were prepar
ing for their wedding. And so, they both bask in their own good will. Restraining from calling each other names becomes an indication of their own exceptional morals. More admiration follows, then a round of applause.
I also know of a disastrous divorce where my friend Zumurrud advised the wife (a mother) to stop cursing out the father in front of their four-year-old. The mother, Zena, told Zumurrud that it was hard for her to restrain herself considering what she had gone through with her ex, but that she would try. The main problem was her parents who began to spread more gossip than usual about the ex.
The kid would sit and listen, then he would jump up and start playing manically as if he wanted to run away from the voice destroying his father’s image. After having witnessed one of these moments of madness and after having given up trying to restrain her parents (her providers) who are free to talk about whatever they felt like, Zena resorted to asking her parents to use a nickname for the father (whose original name is Mahmoud) whenever they wanted to pluck his feathers like a chicken, so to speak. She explained to them that her request was purely for the purpose of protecting her son’s emotional health and not to preserve her ex’s image. And, she added that Zumurrud was the one behind these instructions, in order to bolster her credibility.
Two weeks later, Zumurrud visited Zena at her parents’ house where the family gathered in the living room, including the little boy, Abd al-Latif (named after his grandfather) who kept spinning himself around. The grandmother started the conversation laughing (within earshot of the boy): “In order to please our psychoanalyst, Madame Zumurrud, and to put our daughter’s mind at ease, we will refer to that piece of shit as Tarzan.”
And they went on talking about Tarzan, and the conversation intensified and expanded, and Tarzan was sullied, and trampled on, and dragged through the mud, then flushed down the toilet. “Tarzan . . . Mahmoud, woops slipped out, I mean Tarzan . . . even his son, even his own son (gesturing toward Abd al-Latif) . . . Tarzan’s son! Ha.”
I finish my shower, dry my body, and reconnect with time and space.
I remember once again that I’m not in my apartment; I’m at Shwikar’s place—she always takes me in when my electricity goes out. And my electricity goes out often because the building I live in is too old and the landlord refuses to repair it. So, the electricity doesn’t go out in my apartment for the same reason it goes out in the other apartments in Lebanon. I live close to the beach, on the Rawsheh side. And the electricity in Lebanon goes out a lot in the poorer areas but hardly ever does in the richer ones. I’m not rich and own no horses; I live in a shabby little apartment, in a shabby little building that survived the civil war. The owner isn’t Lebanese, so he didn’t sell or renovate the building after the war, and it remained poor-looking, like a janitor’s son at a prestigious school.
Where do I go now? Koko’s going to start her cleaning feast and she’ll surely be more comfortable if I get out of her way now that we’ve had our sobhiyeh morning coffee.
And as soon as Koko asks me about the state of my apartment, I feel the need to leave immediately. I can’t bring myself to talk about it when it’s injured. You know what, Koko? I’m going to go there now. I’m going to sit in my apartment, nag at my landlord, then hug the place and bond with it again.
I don’t want any hard feelings between my apartment and me, not while it’s going through such a hard time. I will stand by it.
I leave. I walk. I lose most of my temper because of a blaring horn then lose whatever is left because of a guy on a moped who crowds me on the sidewalk, and then I lose it all together when he comments on a particular part of my body. I finally reach home.
I tiptoe to my door. I slide the key apprehensively into the keyhole, afraid maybe a dragon will jump out at me from behind the door. I crack open the door and search inside my apartment for that which must not be named: the cockroach.
Is a dead cockroach waiting for me in some corner? And if it is, where’s its family hiding? Living here without paying rent I bet. Sigh. This is a serious matter, but I certainly don’t want to dwell on it. These creatures make me more anxious than Israeli bombs. In fact, what scares me most about shelters is the possibility of finding a C there. It’s as if I see them through a magnifying glass—huge. And I see them through a reducing glass too, invisible, everywhere, and capable of reaching any place. On days when I’m blessed with electricity—may God bring it back safely—I keep the lights on in the apartment, so C will think I’m home and hide from me. I base this theory on my observation that when a foot nears a cockroach on the street, it scurries off panicking in all directions. Then it must be as afraid of me as I am of it. And although this theory doesn’t entirely reassure me, I still put it into action in an attempt to keep C away from me. I always keep the lights on to maintain the illusion of my intimidating presence in the apartment, so that C would remain hidden to avoid contact with me.
And things remained that way for months.
Then one day, as I was about to leave the apartment with a friend, she reached for the switch to turn the light off—as normal people usually do to conserve electricity, perhaps—and I pounced on her, screaming at her to “freeze!” I startled her and she panicked. I calmed her down and explained why I don’t want her to turn the lights off, but she got angry. Why? She said because I’m ignorant. I let the insult slide and didn’t ask her to elaborate, but she went ahead without my having to do so and explained to make her insult sink deeper: “C can’t see the light to know that you’re here and get scared.” Why so confident? “Because C doesn’t have eyes.”
The news struck me like lightning. C doesn’t have eyes? But how can it see? And what am I keeping the light on for then?
I have tried to get a closer look at a cockroach before, whether dead or scurrying down the street. (Of course it’s going to panic, it can’t see where it’s going!) I tried to look for what will rid the cockroach from its negative qualities. Nope, the fear is stronger than me. It’s an obsession, I think. Psychologists must have analyzed by now the reason behind this fear/disgust shared by all humans. It’s irrational for a living being of five foot three and one hundred and sixteen pounds (my weight after extensive workout) to fear a C! And despite it being so irrational, it’s still real. And so, I’ll have to go through extensive therapy to overcome this fear, especially since it hinders my life in the summer when all the Cs come out for fresh air. And as a first step leading to therapy, I must think about this some more and read self-help books. Fine, I will read the books; can we change the subject now?
In short, I’m at my door; I look but I can’t see the cockroach. My muscles relax, but, inside, I know it’s there, I just can’t see it.
I consider the apartment safe. I go in, shut the door behind me, and sit at my comfortable couch. I switch on the TV after plugging it in the bathroom, and relax.
For some reason, the electricity doesn’t go out in my bathroom. At first, I wondered whether my bathroom is electrically connected to a neighbor’s apartment in another building—a thought that troubled me because it meant a connection between one of my most intimate spaces and a nearby complete stranger. This security breach terrified me. So I replaced my uncertainty about the electrical source with the conviction that its source is unknown.
I relax in my spot in front of the television letting the moving pictures distract me from time. I wonder, should I go out today or stay in my apartment? Stay here alone with no electricity and a bunch of books? I wish I was in the mood to read, but I don’t read, and I can live with that guilt. The laptop’s here, and reading on it is less demanding than having to carry a book and abandon the outside world for it. On the laptop, as I change pages, the topics change as well, and so does the level of enjoyment and knowledge along with it. I’m free. Books, on the other hand, are so exclusive: one world with one story that, at best, has many levels. And my imagination flies with it and builds an image. That’s too much work compared to the freedom online.
It’s a
phase. I save my energy and I’m too stingy when it comes to it, as if it would rob me of my prior comfort—being a cheapskate. I hope I grow out of it soon, this phase. But for now, I can lose myself in my laptop while the TV’s on.
I’m going to stay here, comfortable with my house, and society will be comfortable without me.
Maybe I’ll change my mind when night comes.
Scratch scratch.
I can hardly push the laptop off my lap. I surrender to a sweet sleep caressing my eyes as I sit in my comfortable couch. Sleep I have time for. Maybe it’s the shade that’s been darkening my apartment ever since they built a three-story parking garage to supply spaces for the residents of the mighty building adjacent to it. The parking lot blocked my sunlight, and now I have nothing but electricity to provide me with light. And today . . .
Scratch scratch.
Beirut sleeps with me, and I sleep in her lap. A strange comfort fills my subconscious; maybe it’s the security of my apartment and its seclusion. I’m trapped between sleep and waking. My body is floating like that of an astronaut in space. Silence engulfs me like an aura, and it’s not frightening. My forehead is relaxed over the bones of my face. And like sprinkles of water, a smile spreads over my lips.
I surrender to my imagination—a daydream that doesn’t replace reality but covers it like a soothing white cloth draping over places, faces, and stories. Everything inside me unites with all that’s within me to enable me to live my dream, and feel it.
Beirut is asleep.
Magic slices its darkness; its sun rises and light floods its corners, but nobody wakes.
Beirut is asleep.
Silence fills the streets; I get up and walk them.
The shops are closed, and the alleys look as fresh and soft as flowers in the morning.
The main street is empty and the cafés are lifeless.
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