Don’t laugh.
The way I looked at it at the time was that the composers were German (or German-speaking), so Deutsche Grammophon just seemed logical. Don’t you think?
But also, I just thought the design was classy; the yellow rectangle label added a touch of panache. I always wished for a touch of panache in my life.
It turned out to be a good decision, a great decision, though limiting at first. I didn’t know about Gould’s Goldberg Variations for ages. Someone could have saved me a lot of time by explaining things, or by pointing out that I should have listened to the bourrée from Bach’s English Suite no. 2 (Englische Suiten!) much earlier, instead of finding it by accident on a Pogorelic´ disc. What if I had missed it? The hours of pleasure I wouldn’t have known.
If only I had someone to tell me every now and then, “Aaliya, you must listen to Scarlatti’s sonatas, fils, not père.”
If only I had someone to guide me, the pillar of cloud going before me on my wanderings, to lead me and show me the way. If I had someone to offer me the benefit of her attentions.
The queen calls to her worker ants. Come back, come back, don’t go there.
I bought my Deutsche Grammaphon albums from the fat man—two a month, one with each paycheck, which was all I could reasonably afford. Beethoven came first, of course, piano works followed by the violin sonatas (Kreutzer still delivers shivers), and so on.
On the weekday my paycheck was to be deposited, I would sneak a peek out my living room window, through a tiny vertical crack between the louvered wood, and gauge whether Azari’s green shutters were up, which would mean that the bank branch in my neighborhood might be open and I had to unlock the bookshop’s doors. More likely than not, the record store would be open regardless of fighting. On my way to work, I’d stop at the bank for cash, and on the way home, I’d stop at the store for an album, one of the few rituals I looked forward to in those days. I’d plan in advance the next five or six albums I was going to purchase, the early, the middle, and then the late quartets. I would agonize over deciding whether a double album was one purchase or two.
The portly owner sat on a high toothpick of a barstool and still had to look up to me. He rarely spoke, yet as we began to know each other and feel comfortable, he’d grunt approval with every purchase. When I first bought The Sofia Recital by Richter, he of the pink plastic lobster, the shop owner’s smile floated toward me like a leaf on a river. With Martha Argerich’s Début Recital, his face wore the three-foot grin of an alligator. After such high praise, walking the three-building distance home was torture; I couldn’t wait to listen. And when I bought my first Gould, his eyebrows climbed up his forehead, his eyes shot up to the ceiling. Finally.
On new album days, while a war raged around me and chaos ruled, I felt triumphant.
Buying music was almost my sole expense but not, of course, my sole luxury. I have far more books than I have albums, far more, but I didn’t buy most of them. Do not judge too harshly. I’ve had to live on a minuscule salary. No one was making any money on my bookstore’s sales. The owner kept it open because he was proud of its reputation among Beirut’s pseudointellectuals and high priests of literature as the only place in the city where one could find obscure books, which none of them read. These literary dilettantes know books about as well as an airline passenger knows the landscape he overflies; they talk about novels in highlights as if they’re reading a fashion magazine. I ordered books, and if no one bought them, I carried them home. I’ll admit that sometimes I ordered two of each just to make sure—all right, sometimes three.
I would never have been able to buy them otherwise. Once I paid my rent, I could afford little, and because I had to put something away for retirement, the days of agonizing leisure, I had even less. I began to cook vegetarian fare early because any kind of meat was way beyond my meager means. I survived—still do—on fruits, vegetables, grains, and rice. I haven’t had lamb on Id al-Adha in years. Luckily, I never smoked, because I certainly couldn’t have managed to pay for that. During the lean years of the war, Fadia upstairs, who smokes as much as a French philosopher, and who could certainly afford more than I ever could, used to break her cigarettes in half for economy’s sake and stuff them in an elegant gold-plated holder. She halted the practice after the war ended.
I like to consider my little thefts a public service. Someone had to read Eliot’s The Waste Land as the glow of Sabra burning illuminated Beirut’s skyline. No, seriously, had I not ordered some of these books, they would have never landed on Lebanese soil. For crying out loud, do you think anyone else in Lebanon has a copy of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood? And I am picking just one book off the top of my head. Lampedusa’s The Leopard? I don’t think anyone else in this country has a book by Novalis.
Why did my mother scream? I wish I knew. What I do know is that I shouldn’t have stopped seeing her. As crazy as she was becoming, I shouldn’t have abandoned her. When was the last time I’d contacted her? Not since I stopped working, probably earlier than that. Once I’d decided not to have her to my apartment all those years ago, I began to call her from work and ask her to meet me at a café or restaurant. But when she crossed into her eighties, she grew more difficult to bear, less civil, more ornery. Trouble was all I received from interacting with her, toil and trouble. I’d call her and the first thing she might ask was why I was calling. I’d invite her to lunch and she’d tell me I was being silly since she had a serviceable lunch at home. She leached out sanity and equanimity from my head. I stopped calling. I understood she was getting old and cranky, but it wasn’t as if she didn’t remember who I was. She was lucid, just difficult.
I don’t think she knew who I was today. I don’t recall her ever being so terrified, not even during the war years. The only time I’d seen her scared, though not as deeply as this morning, was when my half brother the eldest, eight years old then, was kicked in the head by a mule. He was playing an imaginary war game with other boys in the neighborhood. He was retreating, machine-gunning anything that moved, when he backed into the mule’s behind, irritating the beast. My mother rushed out of the house, and when she saw my half brother the eldest lying prone with blood seeping from his head, she wailed as if it were Judgment Day and she had been judged wanting. We, she and I alone, waited outside the hospital while the doctors fixed my brother. They wouldn’t let us in the waiting room because it was too crowded and we certainly looked like we didn’t belong. My mother, small and wilting, leaned on the hood of a doctor’s car. When I leaned on the car beside her, she said, “Don’t,” in a low voice. She added, “Don’t do what I do.”
I remember that an intern came out to talk to us after a few hours. He explained that my half brother the eldest was going to be all right. The intern interspersed French phrases into his Lebanese sentences, which only scared my mother more.
If this were a novel, you would be able to figure out why my mother screamed. Alain Robbe-Grillet once wrote that the worst thing to happen to the novel was the arrival of psychology. You can assume he meant that now we all expect to understand the motivation behind each character’s actions, as if that’s possible, as if life works that way. I’ve read so many recent novels, particularly those published in the Anglo world, that are dull and trite because I’m always supposed to infer causality. For example, the reason a protagonist can’t experience love is that she was physically abused, or the hero constantly searches for validation because his father paid little attention to him as a child. This, of course, ignores the fact that many others have experienced the same things but do not behave in the same manner, though that’s a minor point compared to the real loss in fulfilling the desire for explanation: the loss of mystery.
Causation extraction makes Jack a dull reader.
I do understand the desire, though, for I too wish to live in a rational world. I do wish to understand why my mother screamed. My life would be simpler if I could rationalize. Unfortunately, I don’t understand.
While a traffic war r
ages around me and chaos rules (lest you forget this is Beirut), I flash to a theory about why we desperately wish to live in an ordered world, in an explainable world.
No, wait. I don’t mean to imply that I thought about it just this instant, or that it’s some sort of philosophical treatise. Neither French nor German am I.
Let me rephrase: I’d like to consider a possibility concerning our incessant need for causation, whether in books or in life. I’ve trained myself not to keep inferring or expecting causality in literature—the phrase “Correlation does not imply causation” keeps ringing in my head (think Hume)—but I constantly see it, inject it, in life. I, like everyone, want explanations. In other words, I extract explanations where none exist.
Imre Kertész says it well in Kaddish for an Unborn Child. Here you go:
But, it would seem, there is no getting around explanations, we are constantly explaining and excusing ourselves; life itself, that inexplicable complex of being and feeling, demands explanations of us, those around us demand explanations, and in the end we ourselves demand explanations of ourselves, until in the end we succeed in annihilating everything around us, ourselves included, or in other words explain ourselves to death.
I want to know why my mother screamed. I do. I will probably not be rewarded with an explanation, but I need one.
Let me elaborate.
So many people died during the war. The woman who lived above me was one of the first. A different family lived in that apartment before Joumana and her husband (I don’t remember his name, but no matter). In the early months, fall of 1975 or thereabouts, the wife, the mother from upstairs, was shot in the head while driving home from work. Within two weeks the family cleared out and immigrated to Dubai, where every day is the same bright.
The rumors and false stories that circulated in those two weeks were astoundingly vivid, all attempts at explanations. She was a spy, she worked for a bank and was carrying large amounts of cash, she was sporting a flashy diamond necklace, she didn’t see a checkpoint until it was too late. All untrue, all drawn with soft pencil, easily erasable, all attempts to explain the unexplainable.
It turned out she was simply unlucky. A stray bullet killed her.
We needed an explanation because we couldn’t deal with the fact that it could have been any one of us. Assuming causation—she was killed because she couldn’t hear anything since the radio was too loud—lets us believe that it can’t happen to us because we wouldn’t do such a thing. We are different. They are the other.
None of us knows how to deal with the aleatory nature of pain.
I was lucky. I knew that what happened to the woman upstairs couldn’t happen to me because I never had a car. I walked or used public transportation.
I wasn’t like her.
That’s my theory anyway. I’m sure more erudite minds have dealt with this. Sartre I’m not, but then neither am I ponderous and portentous. One reason we desire explanations is that they separate us and make us feel safe.
In a silly essay on Crime and Punishment, a critic suggests that Raskolnikov is the epitome of the Russian soul, that to understand him is to understand Russia. Tfeh! Not that the proposition isn’t true; it may or may not be. I’ve yet to meet Russia’s soul. What the reviewer is doing is distancing himself from the idea that he too is capable of killing a pawnbroker. We’re supposed to infer that only someone with a Russian soul could.
If you think that Marcello of The Conformist becomes a porcine fascist because he killed lizards when he was a boy, then you assure yourself that you can never be so. If you think Madame Bovary commits adultery because she’s trying to escape the banality of Pleistocene morals, then her betrayals are not yours. If you read about hunger in Ethiopia or violence in Kazakhstan, it isn’t about you.
We all try to explain away the Holocaust, Abu Ghraib, or the Sabra Massacre by denying that we could ever do anything so horrible. The committers of those crimes are evil, other, bad apples; something in the German or American psyche makes their people susceptible to following orders, drinking the grape Kool-Aid, killing indiscriminately. You believe that you’re the one person who wouldn’t have delivered the electric shocks in the Milgram experiment because those who did must have been emotionally abused by their parents, or had domineering fathers, or were dumped by their spouses. Anything that makes them different from you.
When I read a book, I try my best, not always successfully, to let the wall crumble just a bit, the barricade that separates me from the book. I try to be involved.
I am Raskolnikov. I am K. I am Humbert and Lolita.
I am you.
If you read these pages and think I’m the way I am because I lived through a civil war, you can’t feel my pain. If you believe you’re not like me because one woman, and only one, Hannah, chose to be my friend, then you’re unable to empathize.
Like the bullet, I too stray.
Forgive me.
I stray but not too far. I circle the streets around the building, avoiding home, but go no farther than a prescribed distance that I instinctively cling to, like a pigeon flying above its coop.
Next to the street that parallels mine is a small plot of land that is still undeveloped and used as a car park. Toward the northwest corner, where cars can’t reach, tiny red carnations miraculously flourish in a small patch of earth. When I saw them a week ago I assumed they were confused red poppies—Lebanon’s flower, and Proust’s, the wondrous wildflower with its color-saturated tissue-paper petals. I’d never seen carnations blossom naturally in the city before, and certainly hadn’t expected them to last until winter.
The winter air smells metallic, of bronze. In fading tawny light, the city glimmers, except for one large box of a building, concrete hued, that absorbs and swallows surrounding color. It has a name; in human-sized letters it calls itself THE GARDEN CENTER, yet not a sprig of green can be found anywhere in its vicinity.
I am a blob in a photorealistic painter’s cityscape canvas. I stay out until evening, until my bladder begins to scream.
Before the final turn to my home, I see one of the neighborhood’s teenage boys holding court, leaning against a wall that already needs a coat of paint even though it received one in spring. Two beer cans—one squashed, the other only dimpled—loiter at his feet. I often notice this fifteen-year-old around this grand realm of his when school is out. He disappeared for a few weeks this summer after his mother chased him about the neighborhood with a rattan, but he seems to have returned to his full form and splendor. His mother must have woken him from an afternoon nap and kicked him out of the house before he had a chance to comb his haystack hair. His court, three younger boys, probably eleven or twelve, throw respectful—no, worshipful—eyes at him while desperately pretending nonchalance. Slim, wired, and cocky, he must have practiced his how-to-smoke pose before many a mirror. He appears the celebrated philosopher enduring the intellectual infirmities of his inferiors, an appearance that belies preening and nervous self-consciousness—in other words, he looks like a typical Beiruti teenager.
“First you wet the filter with your spit,” I hear him say as I approach. He sticks out his long, overly moist tongue and impresses the end of the cigarette onto it. “Then you inhale deeply, which you can’t do until you’re old enough to know how to smoke without coughing, and the filter will darken to show an alphabet. See?”
The court of boys oohs and aahs as he continues. “That will be the first letter of the name of the next girl who’ll sleep with you. It always works that way.”
“It’s a T,” says one of the boys.
“I see an M,” says another.
I don’t slow down, but I hear myself say, “It’s a C for Cancer.”
What words are these have fallen from me?
Have I just channeled Fadia or, worse, my demented mother before she went completely insane? I feel my face flush and my pulse quicken.
But the court doesn’t seem to have heard me, doesn’t catch my small, disembo
died retort. The boys and their world persist without me.
“It’s an S, of course,” the kinglet now says. “Can’t you tell that it’s an S?”
On the way home, a scarf veiling my blue-tinted hair, I remain invisible.
Allow me to stray once more—briefly, I assure you.
Raskolnikov was the catalyst for my obsessive translating. Crime and Punishment, the vehicle, was one of the first books I picked up at the bookstore—well, Crime et Châtiment, because at the time my French was more seasoned than my English. I loved the novel. (I’m not sure I still do, but that’s another subject. I promised you I wouldn’t stray too far.) I remember it as the first adult novel I read, or the first with a fully developed theme. Dostoyevsky’s St. Petersburg burst into such splendor around me that it became more real than my life, which I found more incomprehensible with every passing day. I belonged in his book, not mine.
So thoroughly impressed by the novel, I read the English translation, and was less so. It was the Constance Garnett translation, and it would be years before I came across the controversies surrounding her work. At the time I hadn’t even heard of Nabokov, let alone his vitriolic rants against her. It was so long ago that I’m not certain he’d even published Lolita yet.
The Garnett version was by no means awful. Had I not encountered the French one first, I would have considered it a spectacular book. Only in comparison did I find it lacking. I thought the Garnett version was less charming, more matter-of-fact. I didn’t know which version was the more accurate one, more Dostoyevskian. I thought that if I translated the book into Arabic, I could combine both. I did.
Constance Garnett taught herself to translate. She began with small steps, with Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is Within You. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky began with the most difficult Russian bear of all, The Brothers Karamazov. I began with Crime, the right novel for me. Call me Goldilocks.
I still admire Garnett, once aptly described as a woman of Victorian energies and Edwardian prose. I do appreciate all the criticisms leveled against her and her poor translations. As Joseph Brodsky said, “The reason English-speaking readers can barely tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is that they aren’t reading the prose of either one. They’re reading Constance Garnett.”
An Unnecessary Woman Page 9
