The Angel of History

by Rabih Alameddine

  The poor landlady felt so guilty. She told me she should have known something was not quite right when your mother went into the apartment with three of your relatives and slammed the door on her, she was wearing a cerise Nike tracksuit, the landlady told me, you don’t wear that color when your son has just died.

  Your mother took the television, she took all the lamps, the craquelure glass coffee table, she took our music, the albums and compact discs, she stole your shoes, my shoes, your shirts, my scarves, I don’t know why she did that. So many little trinkets that meant nothing to anyone but us, all the things that we loved and that belonged with us, your family robbed me of them, except for the tiny porcelain fairy with lavender wings that your mother gave you before she knew you were one, she left that. She stole my notes and journals, figure that one out. She tried to steal the kitchen wall clock, but one of your relatives must have dropped it and left it broken on the floor, I still have it hanging even though it hasn’t worked since the day you died. Worst, she walked out with my books and the bookshelf, which was what hurt the most. I tried to understand why, couldn’t come up with anything other than unadulterated venom, she judged me unworthy, she wished to extirpate me from your life, to punish me.

  The mahogany bookshelf, the only thing in the house worth anything, remember that amazing bookshelf with the caryatids, fourteen delicately carved drag queens holding up the seven shelves. Who knew that wood guy had that kind of delicateness in him, what was his name, Max, wasn’t it? We made so much fun of him, Max the I’m-not-gay carpenter, and he wanted nothing to do with us, he’d screw Lou only when he was sure he wouldn’t meet any friends. Max wanted to be discreet. Lou had to dress in drag or Max wouldn’t go anywhere near him, but Lou loved him even though Max returned to his wife and his kids and his shop every single time. Who knew? Not you—you hated Max, what he stood for, you told Lou that Max didn’t love him, that Max wanted a fantasy, your deft knife sliced deep. Why did you think that everyone should hear the truth about love? You were so American. And you were so wrong. When Lou found the virus swimming in his system, he told Max the not-gay carpenter, who turned crazy, wanted to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, but Max found out he had somehow won the lottery like yours truly, no virus was found anywhere within his vicinity. Max couldn’t have sex with Lou anymore, refused to see him again, could not risk exposing his wife and kids to the virus, the truth, or something. Lou was devastated and did not recover, he was obviously never the same after that since he was now both dying and abandoned, not an uncommon pairing in our circles, sola perduta abbandonata, he never wore drag again, no wig, no lipstick, no leotard.

  For two long years, whenever Max had a spare moment, in secret, without a single person knowing, he worked on the masterpiece, hoping to finish it before Lou died. Foot-long caryatids, each unique, bulging thighs on one, chest hair on another, a Cher impersonator, a passable Asian standing on a low stool, one of the most astounding things I had ever seen, and Max had a shipping company drop it at Lou’s apartment. Remember? Lou couldn’t keep it because looking at it caused him so much pain, we’d take it, we both yelled, we’d put the mahogany masterwork in the bedroom so it wouldn’t hurt him. And your mother stole it and the books within it, I don’t know whether she unloaded the books first or just flipped the heavy shelf and all four of your relatives carried it out like pallbearers.

  She took my notes and journals, stole the kitten wall calendar with holiday dates circled in red. She wasn’t looking for a memento, she drove off with your car and sold it when she arrived in Stockton. I didn’t mind that so much, it was your car, and I didn’t like to drive, still don’t. But the books, she didn’t even bother transporting them to the horror from whence she came—I abhor Stockton more than you did—she sold them to the used bookstore down the street, knowing full well that I would come across them sooner rather than later. There’s a special place in Hell for people like your mother, she’s probably there now, circle four, quadrant B. Quadrant C, Thomas Friedman’s, is waiting for him completely empty because no human could possibly do enough evil to have to suffer Friedman’s company for eternity, but I digress.

  Our landlady insisted that I call the police, I didn’t wish to, I wanted to barricade my door so your mother couldn’t return, and then go to bed, but the landlady wouldn’t drop it. Both police detectives were inconsiderate, kept asking me whether I was sure what was yours and what was mine, as if that mattered. When I told them I was your inheritor, they asked me to bring out the notarized will, and what kind of son would not put his own mother in the will? I didn’t even merit a good-cop bad-cop routine, all your faggot earned was two horribles in matching polyester beige sport coats. No, they wouldn’t call her to investigate, the poor thing, her son had died that morning. All I wanted back was the bookshelf, the policemen wanted me to prove that it belonged to me, did I have a receipt, a bill of sale, I shouldn’t expect them to drive all the way to Stockton to find out if she took the bookshelf.

  Amazingly, I saw one of these policemen not too long ago in one of the It Gets Better videos, this one put out by the San Francisco Police Department, he was older now of course like me, white-haired, white face, chubby, still in a beige sport coat—I saw him tell his unseen intended audience, the suicidal gay teens, to buck up and tough it out, they might be getting tortured and beaten up but it would get better, and he should know because he was a heterosexual cop who now had gay cops for friends and they were just like him, and he ended his sappy speech with, You can’t control the wind but you can adjust the sail. I bestirred myself, stood up from my couch, my bare feet sinking into the dough of the carpet, I screamed at my laptop still in my hands, You can’t control the wind but you can break it, you father of lies, and sat back down on the couch, which I bought after your mother cleaned us out even though she didn’t take any of the couches. I replaced the old one, the black microfiber three-seater, after Deke Dickhead the blond god left, because it smelled a bit like him.

  The first night after you died I moved that black couch to block the door because the car keys your mother purloined contained a house key and changed all the locks the next day. I couldn’t sleep that night. You were out of my life and she was in it, I got the worst of that bargain, let me tell you. The first couple of weeks were not much of a struggle, I’m not sure I was able to feel anything. I returned to work because I had to, took care of Jim in the evenings, but I was separate, living in a glass-bottom satellite that orbited my world. I was walking home on a shivery cold evening under a menacing sky when I noticed the dark cover of The Collected Poems of Eugenio Montale in the used bookstore’s window, and like a mother goose who can tell her chicks from those of others, I knew it was my copy. The owner bought about forty books from your mother, sold about fifteen, and even though he knew they were my books, my name on my hand-designed bookplates was on each, he wanted me to buy them back. My handsome bookplates made the books worth more. I couldn’t buy them back, I just couldn’t. Before I’d walked a block, Odette, the owner’s young lesbian employee, caught up with me, asked for my address and phone number, and told me she’d get back to me. Four days later, she arrived at my apartment carrying twenty-one of my books—she was small like me, a short wraith of an Ecuadoran, those books probably weighed more than she did. I loved Odette, still do, my everlasting friend. She apologized for not bringing them earlier, she had to wait for her paycheck before she stole the books and quit. She hated that quisling of an owner and wanted to do what was right. She slept over that night, for we both needed company. All we had was each other in those days.

  All I wanted was the caryatids, to me they were not inanimate, they were so impeccably rendered they burgeoned with life. Next to your sickbed the bookshelf stood, and one evening more than a year before you died, before any of you left me, I sat beside your insensate form, held your feverish hand. I noticed that though each drag queen, each mahoganette, was different, they were all suffused with an ache of weariness. They’d been given
this Atlantean task of keeping a world afloat, a burdensome commission that drained life out of them bit by bit, breath by breath. When I looked closer I noted a translucent haze surrounding each drag queen, a cloud not of dust motes as I’d first assumed, but of molecules of vitality, their life force seeping out of their pores back into the universe, no joie de vivre for my babies. I began to speak to them, to encourage them and ease their burden, and slowly but most surely, the mahoganettes responded with equal measures of kindness and godly gratitude. They also began to help me, to comfort me. They even performed the more difficult tasks: changing Lou’s diapers, I hated that but not as much as singing him Liza Minnelli songs while he died. I realized then, when three of my mahoganettes sang Cabaret a cappella, that they were the Fourteen Holy Helpers.

  Remember when we first met, I brought up the Fourteen Holy Helpers, told you one of the nuns taught me how to pray to them, and you said why not just open the box, why would you want to pray to fourteen Hamburger Helpers? I know you don’t believe, Doc, but trust me, I know my saints, I knew the Helpers, people prayed to them during a plague and they came to comfort, they corporealed.

  First you have the maidens, the virgins, Saint Catherine with the wheel, Saint Barbara with the tower, and Saint Eustace with the stag and the cross and the Jäegermeister—no, wait, Eustace wasn’t a maiden, let me start again, alphabetically—Saint Agathius if you had a headache, Saint Barbara if you had a fever, Saint Blaise if you had a sore throat, Saint Catherine if you died suddenly, Saint Christopher if you suffered from plague or fear of flying, Saint Cyriac if you had an eye infection or temptation while dying, Saint Denis if you wished to visit a prostitute in Paris, Saint Erasmus for stomach flu, Saint Eustace for family discord although he certainly didn’t help me with your mother, Saint George the vet, Saint Giles if you were a cripple, Saint Margaret if you were pregnant, Saint Pantaleon who was always on call, Saint Vitus if you had epilepsy, and basically all of them if you had bubonic plague or AIDS.

  As the mahoganettes sprang out of the bookshelf to help, I began to differentiate one from the other. The short passable Asian was obviously Saint Catherine, who always studied hard, she was easy and first to be figured out. I thought the Cher impersonator was Saint Barbara, but no, Cher could never be a virgin, no, she was Saint Cyriac, Saint Barbara was the one with the crazy hair, which was due to static from the lightning bolt that struck her father. Saint Margaret held you in her gentle arms during your last days, she stroked your face, which looked as if it belonged on one of her painted Romanesque icons, your eyes had grown larger and yellow translucent, she kissed your forehead every so often, kind and so loving, generous with her time always. I loved her. I could see her face as she comforted you even though it was covered with seventy diaphanous veils of the most exquisite black silk, each as thin as mist, as insubstantial as a flimsy flame, seventy veils because she had His face, and she lifted her veils every time she kissed you, and her lipstick left a cerise stigma upon your forehead. She told you that in Heaven God wipes the tears off His children’s faces. Did you by any chance hear her? With each of her kisses I felt blessed, even though they obviously had no effect on your health, but I know I wouldn’t have been able to carry on without their help. Blaise used to brew a wonderful tea for me when I felt blue, a dark oolong with a slight cherry infusion, whenever I lowered myself slowly onto the couch after a rough patch, there was Saint Blaise with a cup billowing heavenly steam. Pantaleon was the joker among them, some might have thought his jokes were staid or puerile but I found them funny. Does anyone tell worse jokes than physicians, Doc? When I cried, when the high tide of the gulf of sorrow hit my shores, all fourteen dropped whatever they were doing and tried to comfort me, Saint Agathius most of all; one would hold my left hand, another my right, one would hug from behind, usually Erasmus, who is very loving but a bit shy, like a fawn who wants you to stroke him but will not approach until you turn your gaze away, and Agathius would get me to breathe in and out, like a coxswain he set a rhythm for me to inhale hope of a new light and exhale bad worries, in out, in out.

  A nun at school, Sœur Salwa, taught us how to pray to the Fourteen Holy Helpers and to remember their feast days, which we, the Arab orphans, must do to keep our traditions alive. She taught us knowing full well she would get into trouble for such lessons, for spreading dangerous dogma and heretical liturgy, according to the French mother superior. Like her saints, Sœur Salwa believed while knowing what became of true believers. Catherine of the Wheel taught the Word of Christ, Barbara did the same, Sœur Salwa would not let those Western Catholic nuns keep the true Word of Christ at bay, she was true knowing the punishment that truth begot. The pope, blinded by the heretics surrounding him and possibly by Satan himself that day in 1969, had removed the feast days of our Eastern saints from the General Roman Calendar, but just because the Western Catholics stopped believing in our saints didn’t mean that we had to.

  Sœur Salwa was not a Roman Catholic, not like the French nuns, she was a Melchite, she followed the pope’s edicts but not when he was wrong. Had the French nuns known that her lessons included more than the Arabic language, its grammar and literature, they would have replaced her in an instant, decapitated her probably. The wan nuns were there to civilize us, and our only purpose in life was to become civilized. That was what I wanted more than anything else in the world. We were allowed to speak our language only in Sœur Salwa’s class, and the nuns spoke none of it. They were unable to fathom what went on in our little world. Heresy, apostasy, place the lentils on wet cotton in a saucer for the feast day of Saint Barbara and watch them grow, light two candles on the third day of February and plead to Saint Blaise the Armenian to free us from all throat afflictions for the year. She showed us icons, out of her front pockets climbed contemporary ones carved and painted in nearby villages, and out of picture books jumped glorious relics haloed in gold leaf. In her windowless classroom, encapsulated in darkness, we sat rapt, infatuated, engrossed in stories of our ancestral heroes, George fighting the dragon, Erasmus surviving one execution after another because of the intercession of angels, hiding in Lebanon, not too far from our school, surviving on what black crows brought him to eat, I offer you a walnut here, I a slice of peach, I give you two Siamese twins of the blackest cherry, and Christ himself interceding on behalf of Dr. Pantaleon to thwart the near-fatal executions, those were stories as good as any by Dumas.

  Don’t you believe the other nuns, Sœur Salwa used to say, we were Christian long before they even had a country. She taught us our history and our language, we were better than them, she told us, but I did not believe her, and when the French mother superior, with her pale face and refined, masculine features, poured limpid tea into a cup and offered me a Petit Écolier biscuit while I was in her offices, whose windows opened unto a sumptuous garden with a large oak, an olive tree, a bitter orange, and a plethora of butterflies, and asked me what kind of foolishness that Arab sister taught in our classes, I told her, just as any other civilized boy would have, which unfortunately meant that I never saw Sœur Salwa again. I lost her and her Fourteen Helpers, lost Saint Margaret, Saint Catherine, Saint Christopher, and Saint Agathius. Diocletian had nothing on me.

  Satan’s Interviews

  Death

  “No,” Satan said. “I had nothing to do with his mother-in-law.”

  “I didn’t think so,” Death said. “That level of evil is way beyond you, she belonged to Jesus all the way.”

  “Yes,” Satan said. “Even I was surprised at such maleficence.”

  “No snake is as venomous as wounded privilege,” Death said. “That little foreign Muslim darkie stole her fair-haired boy.”

  Death shifted in his seat, sighed; he considered removing his cape but the apartment still felt a little nippy. “What are you hoping to get out of this?” he asked. “Do you think there’s a specific thing he needs to remember, some pearl from within a dank oyster which will lead him to an epiphany? Tell me. If it will bring
this interview to a quicker end, I will help.”

  “Nothing like that, I’m afraid,” Satan said. “That happens only in Hollywood movies and bestsellers. It isn’t how remembering works. He remembers, he doesn’t forget much, but he doesn’t think about his memories, he chooses not to contemplate what he left behind.”

  “Well,” Death said, “what did you expect? Wasn’t short attention span invented in these united states of amnesia? Multitasking? You want contemplation? In San Francisco, that wharf on Lethe itself? You poor sod. You know that when they remember, they come to me to forget. Come with me, a riparian journey, have a sip from the mighty river, a tiny sip, you’ll feel better.”

  “Tell me about Catherine,” Satan said.

  “Fuck Catherine,” Death said.

  Catherine

  “Are you sure he said that?” she asked, a bit nonplussed.

  Catherine, in a raincloud-gray gown, sat straight-backed in the same chair Death had used, looking glorious. No full halo today, just a barely perceptible ring of gold light floating about her lush black hair, unbound in keeping with the fashion of unwed women of her time. Next to her, leaning against the chair, was the broken wheel, and on her lap lay the executioner’s sword, its edge dulled after all these years.