I feel sadness clinging to me and hiding behind my descriptive humor, getting ready to pounce on me. I feel it take over. I’m getting depressed. I’m on the edge. Help!
“I have a secret to tell you all!”
God! It issues proudly from my mouth like the declaration speech of the nationalization of the Suez Canal: “In the name of our nation, the international company of the Suez Canal is hereby nationalized, and all company assets, rights, and obligations shall be transferred to the state. The company is under new management, and the investors and shareholders shall be reimbursed according to the value of their shares in the French stock market, and this reimbursement shall be paid after the state receives the complete assets of the nationalized company of the Suez Canal.”
And instead of the cheers and applause that followed Gamal Abdel Nasser’s speech in 1956, my statement receives nothing.
This damn silence follows me everywhere.
“I said, I have a secret that I want to . . .”
“WHAT IS IT?”
They all, except for Georgios, scream the question at me like I am deliberately stalling. So, I end up doing what I was telling myself not to do seconds ago, which is raise their expectations. I do it very successfully as well.
“Well, it’s not really a secret but I haven’t told anyone yet, which makes it a secret. But it’s really not. It’s only news, more like a joke actually . . .”
Zumurrud: “Can you please shut up and tell us the secret?”
“That’s a contradiction. How can I shut up and speak at the same time?”
Zeezee, angrily: “You love to argue, don’t you?”
“Fine, sorry. So, listen, I’ve been thinking of writing a novel for a while now. Not a novel, just a story, a regular story like one from everyday life. It’s honestly the story of the ordinary days we live. Like, do you remember Zumurrud when you got conned into hiring a gardener to take care of your two lonely plants on your balcony? You ended up paying him a hundred bucks for an hour of work, and completely fell apart, and told him that both you and your plants no longer required his services? And you, Shwikar, do you remember . . .”
Shwikar: “Wait, wait. You’re writing a story?”
“You’re still stuck on that? I’ve been telling you for an hour . . .”
Shwikar: “A story story? Like a novel?”
Me: “I told you it’s not a novel, it’s just a story about . . .”
Shwikar: “Bravooo!”
Zumurrud: “Woohooo!”
Zeezee: “Congrats!”
Georgios: “That’s good.”
What an exceptionally positive response.
Me: “But the story will revolve around you. Aren’t you worried about that?”
Zumurrud: “If they make a movie out of it, I want Sophie Marceau to play me.”
Me: “A movie?”
Zeezee: “What about me? Who will play me?”
Shwikar: “I’ll play myself in the movie. Will it tell the story of my childhood or just my adult life? If it’s about my childhood too, I want my niece to play me, she’s . . .”
Me: “Shwikar, you must have a fever, you’re hallucinating.”
Zumurrud: “God, what will I wear to Cannes?”
Zeezee: “I think I can I think I can . . .”
Me: “My nerves!”
Shwikar: “What about Omar and Layla? And Leila and Zeina? And Maher? And Dana?”
Me: “Mercy!”
Zumurrud sneaks her phone out of her purse, “Oh, I have to tell Francois! And Ali and Remi too, they’re all in France so I’ll tell them to buy me a nice dress and heels! Being a celebrity comes with responsibilities, you know.”
Me: “Kill me now.”
Zeezee: “What’s your problem? Why are you being so negative like we’re asking you to write an obituary?”
Me: “Guys, it’s a story I may or may not write, and others may or may not read, and may not even get published!”
Zumurrud, stunned: “Why are you writing it, then?”
Me: “I don’t know, I’m writing it because I want to. I’m enjoying writing it, so maybe . . .”
Zeezee: “I don’t understand, have you been to bookstores lately and read what people are writing these days? They’re publishing everything!”
Me: “And I don’t want my book to become part of that list. I don’t want to become part of everything else.”
A brief pause, like they’re trying to understand my attitude and think of a way out of my negativity.
Shwikar, seriously: “Fine. What are you writing about?”
I think, then say earnestly: “I’m writing our story, the one we’re living in Beirut today at the age of thirty.”
Zumurrud: “Thirty-two.”
Everyone laughs, and I laugh along.
“I’m writing a story with a lot of events. Events that overlap and follow each other, without a chronological order, some that I remember from the past and others that go back and forth between imagination and reality. A lot of events that don’t connect or lead anywhere, but do describe our reality. Our reality as it is. No, our reality as I see it.”
Georgios: “Good idea.”
“Did you hear me? Was I speaking out loud? Oh God, I lost my internal world!”
Zumurrud: “You’re losing it again.”
It was a busy and delicious day off.
Arak, hummus, tabbouleh, and kebabs of course. But there was also organic cheese, lamb kafta with yogurt, potato and rice kibbeh, and dandelion salad. Should I keep going? No, that’s enough. All this talk of food is giving me a stomachache.
What was important is that we were renewed, heart and mind, at that lunch with a magical view of Sannine. The view stretched across the horizon, removing all the boundaries of buildings and narrow streets and daily noises. The view was lovely in green, blue, and gray. It was calming.
During lunch, I felt like I was in a commercial for tourism. Was I supposed to jump for joy and wear a tarboosh to show my happiness and ethnicity at the same time? No, I stayed calm.
In any case, the meal that moved off the table and into my stomach is keeping me from moving. I’m going to surrender myself to Shwikar’s comfortable couch instead.
I’m alone at her house because she’s at her parents’.
I open my laptop.
Woohoo! Finally a message from her.
I have a friend who lives in Paris. She called me a couple of months ago to tell me about a love she had found at a metro station, but that it did not evolve beyond him letting her get off the train before him.
I asked her if she happened to forget her brain on that train. She laughed and told me that she’s been living love stories of this kind, suspended in the air, woven from the imagination, nourished by passing glances and kindness.
Her stories weren’t this hypothetical before. In love, she was a professional, even before reaching a first-name basis. But recently she’s been feeling suffocated and depressed, which I’m hoping is only a phase. She told me that she has despaired of the human race and from having sex with its people, after having “tried” its men and women, the old and the young, Arab and foreign, believers and blasphemers, extremists and moderates. She said she knew as many men and women as the fish in the sea, and her experiences have led her to despair of the entire human race. It’s dull. Why? Because people are predictable, and their actions are predictable; nobody surprises her anymore. She said she sets traps for people to fall into. She places every one of them in a situation anticipating the result, and she watches and judges their performance.
“Seriously, can’t one of them surprise me?”
“Do you really want to be surprised?”
“Yeah.”
“Then give people a chance.”
She laughed and quickly changed the subject.
Today, she finally does what I’ve been asking her to do and emails me letting me know how she’s doing and what she’s been up to, not answering all my questions with, �
�nothing new,” as she usually does. She writes to me in French:
Bonjour Sitt Boudour,
There are two websites I insist on visiting every night aside from my email and Facebook account. The first is a Lebanese website, the National News Agency. I check it, read news of Lebanon, from the simplest to its most complex and from the most important to its most trivial. Every silly piece of news speaks of a silly person. Like an article that tells of someone who traveled to Athens to participate in conference such-and-such. I wonder why this person finds traveling important enough to send word of it to some news agency to announce to the nation and the world? The problem is he probably has connections, both known and secret, that enable this piece of news to be published over and over again. And so, on a daily basis, I discover people who make me laugh.
But, few are the amusing local news pieces and many are the disturbing ones, like the mere existence of politicians, their statements, and news of conferences that cover everything from the environment to children and drugs to religion. Most of these conferences have no purpose at all. This person attended them, that person saw something, and that other person confirmed some other thing, and words words words. The only purpose behind them is funding: an NGO has national funding with which it wants to start a project that deals with the youth for example, so, let there be a conference! I get so bored—dead bored—every time I come across a conference discussing “the reinforcement of the role of the youth.” I hate my job in NGO even though it’s in Paris.
And there is the kind of news that makes me cry. I read a news article yesterday that paralyzed me:
In a statement to the NNA, a security delegate stated that he found four dead bodies inside the home of so-and-so around 7:30 this evening, located in the such-and-such area near Baabda and Bekfaya. The four bodies found in the bedroom belonged to a mother (40 years of age) and her three daughters (13, 10, and 7), and they had food next to them. The security forces were on site waiting for the medical examiner to examine the bodies and determine the cause of death.
End of article.
How can a person deal with this kind of news, go to sleep, and find the strength to wake up?
The second website I insist on visiting, obsessively, is the Interpol website.
Oui, that’s right, Interpol.
I can read it in four languages if I want: Arabic, English, French, or Spanish. The official language is English, but it cannot (ha!) ignore other foundational languages, mine included, which my people and your people consider “dead.” But if it were really dying, Interpol wouldn’t have written in it. If it were really dead, Interpol would’ve written news on it instead. Ha!
It’s a website full of crimes and criminals. What’s funny is that it’s trying to murder the crime: I’ll kill you, you stinking crime, then you won’t kill anyone else!
And the website could easily use footage from horror movies with bloody and scary scenes to achieve visual shock, but it adopts a very professional look instead. It also includes a section for job openings. Imagine: Interpol is looking for a travel agency to manage its employees’ flight reservations. This job opening makes no sense to me. I personally go back and forth before choosing an airline and buying a ticket, worrying about my personal safety and fearing hijacking, crashing into the ground, and lost luggage. So how can Interpol make such a difficult decision? Especially when it’s aware, more than most, of all the bad things that could go wrong (in life).
They’re also considering creating “e-passport” for the Interpol’s senior employees.
E for electronic.
So they would have a virtual passport, like the new plane tickets: a picture on a screen that people can print out if they feel better about dealing in hard copies, like me and other old-fashioned people like me.
Cool.
This is the variety of news reports I read last night and which are available to anyone out there.
I read this news on purpose; I attack it head on so it can’t surprise me.
Did you like the idea of e-passports?
Yesterday, I thought about the idea of giving e-passports to the Palestinian refugees. They are citizens of a country that we know very well and taste its wine and oil every day, rest in the arms of its poems, and jump up screaming its name in defense here and abroad. And still, it’s not recognized as an actual country, and all the rights and duties that follow are not recognized either. By the way, the Palestinian director, Elia Suleiman, made a short film a while ago that he titled Cyber Palestine. Have you seen it? I have.
I think of Palestine as a virtual reality until proven otherwise. And the virtual might become a reality one day. And the virtual might become the only reality there is in the future. On Facebook, one can experience Palestine as a whole. A country whose people come from New York, Cairo, Paris, Sweden, Turkey, Venezuela, Canada, Syria, Iran, Berlin, London, and from everywhere. People of all colors and nationalities and inclinations, and they all say Palestine and they constitute Palestine. Those who wear a keffiyeh and those who wear a miniskirt, those who are homosexuals, and those who beat their wives, etc. A country like any other, with its sweetness and bitterness. Like a complete story. And a country without geographical borders, at the moment. But it’s defined, and everyone knows it. E-Palestine. It’s a reality, and it stands. It seems like all the dividing cannot reduce its land, and the killing cannot erase its people, and the wall cannot separate. It is spreading across the world instead.
It has spread across the map now.
E-Palestine.
An e-passport for Interpol could be the beginning of that. An e-passport specifically tailored for Palestinians across the world. For all the Palestinians who belong to Palestine and who hold the land in their hearts. All refugees should have one.
Have I told you what they figured out had happened to the mother and her daughters who were found dead? My night was filled with death yesterday:
“The medical examination and investigations revealed that the wife and three daughters had four dishes of processed fruit and poison. The food was prepared in the kitchen and eaten in the bedroom where they died from poisoning. The husband had come from a six-day business trip from one of the Gulf countries where he works as a trainer for horses and horsemen. He was surprised to find no one there to open the door for him, so he broke it down and found the bodies. The case is still being investigated.”
End of article.
Want to know more? It’s none of your business or mine.
I’d rather stay here, keeping an eye out for death, ready to face it whenever it comes. That way I don’t die in Lebanon or forget about death when I’m outside it.
Email over.
Ufff.
I wish she hadn’t written to me and left me guessing how she’s doing.
My friend, my neighbor growing up, is the same age as me.
Her name: Hayat. Arabic for “life.”
I’m serious; her name means life. She was named after her aunt who was born sick and died a child.
Her fiancé, Qrunful, died a martyr.
A martyr?
No.
Hayat says he’s not a martyr. She insists that he was a victim and refuses to call him anything else. “He didn’t choose to die,” she says. And politics meant nothing to him. “He loved me, and that’s it. He’s not a martyr, he was my fiancé, and he is a victim.” That’s what she yelled on the third day of grieving when a visiting official arrived and proclaimed Qrunful a martyr in front of her and her family. That day everyone treated her like she had a breakdown. Only Qrunful’s mother stood up for Hayat and asked everyone to leave her alone and to stop telling her to go rest in the bedroom. Only Qrunful’s mother stood by her side and asked the visiting official, forcefully but politely, to kindly and quietly get out.
So, Qrunful left this world a victim of a car bomb that targeted a Lebanese minister of Parliament.
And Hayat left for Paris.
That was three years ago.
This story makes my heart ache. And her email hurts more. I had hoped she would send me an email telling me that she has gotten her life back together or started a new one.
Before the engagement and the death, Hayat was a little gloomy, and in that we were a lot alike. But she was determined to devour to the fullest the life she was named for. She insisted on trying everything, especially the sexual and political. She changed mood and political views as much as she changed her hair color, that is, with every season. She loved Qrunful because they met during one of her experiments. He loved her because she didn’t judge his actions but shared them—the drinking and sexing and fighting strangers, even the speeding, and never politics. When she got pregnant with his child, they decided to get married. Not as a result of social pressure, not at all. She had decided not to have an abortion, declared her desire to get married, and proposed to him. He told her then that he had wanted to propose to her first but was worried that she’d yell at him for being “so old-fashioned!”
She laughed her heart out when he told her that, and asked him, “Do you always base your decisions on how you think I’m going to react?” Qrunful got upset with her insinuation that he was weak-willed, so she hugged him in front of me and said, “I never imagined myself married. But you, because you’re so mindful of my feelings and thoughts, will be my one and only husband. After I divorce you, I’ll stick to casual sex.” We laughed.
He died a month later.
And she got an abortion.
32 Page 7
