An Unnecessary Woman

by Rabih Alameddine

  As I boil water for my tea in the unlit kitchen, I try to clear my thoughts, to sift out the dark morning dregs. It’s drizzling outside my window, and the street’s one functioning lamp, my familiar, emits weak light, lonely light, a diffuse conical beam to the asphalt. I’m weary. I don’t wish to think about my mother this morning. I don’t wish to think about my life. I want to be lost in someone else’s. An easy, effortless morning is what I need.

  I walk myself back to my bedroom, back to the stack of books on my mirrorless vanity, unread books that I intend to read, a large stack. Choosing which book isn’t difficult. The choice is typically the last one I brought home. I acquire books constantly and place them in the to-read pile. When I finish with whatever book I’m reading, I begin the last book I bought, the one that caught my attention last. Of course, the pile grows and grows until I decide that I’m not going to buy a single book until I read my stack. Sometimes that works.

  The top book on the pile is Microcosms by Claudio Magris. I’ve only read one other book of his, Danube, from which, among his many impeccable sentences, one wrapped its octopus arms around my frenetically feeble mind for months. It goes like this: “Kafka and Pessoa journey not to the end of a dark night, but of a night of a colourless mediocrity that is even more disturbing, and in which one becomes aware of being only a peg to hang life on, and that at the bottom of that life, thanks to this awareness, there may be sought some last-ditch residue of truth.”

  If Kafka, if Gregor Samsa, can resign himself to being a cockroach, if he can accept being the blade of grass upon which the stormtrooper’s boot stomps, is it immoral for someone like me to want to be more?

  Ah, splendid Microcosms, the deliciousness of discovering a masterwork. The beauty of the first sentences, the “what is this?,” the “how can this be?,” the first crush all over again, the smile of the soul. My heart begins to lift. I can see myself sitting all day in my chair, immersed in lives, plots, and sentences, intoxicated by words and chimeras, paralyzed by satisfaction and contentment, reading until the deepening twilight, until I can no longer make out the words, until my mind begins to wander, until my aching muscles are no longer able to keep the book aloft. Joy is the anticipation of joy. Reading a fine book for the first time is as sumptuous as the first sip of orange juice that breaks the fast in Ramadan.

  Now, I haven’t fasted since I was forced to as a child. I just remember what it was like.

  I adjust myself in the reading chair, pull my legs up. It’s going to be a long, voluptuous ride.

  I flip delicate pages with an unhurried and measured beat, a lazy metronome timing. I lose myself in the book’s languorous territories. I’m transported to a café in Trieste, become intimately acquainted with its idiosyncratic patrons. I travel along the book’s meandering paths—breakfast with a young man in one village, lunch with a crone in another—salivate over beautiful sentences, celebrate holidays I’d never heard of. I read and read until I am abruptly bashed over the head by the full weight of Esperia’s story, a throwaway of no more than four pages in a three-hundred-page tome. Esperia, an incidental character indelibly rendered in a few phrases, a bit player in life, mirrors Hannah.

  I’m not allowed an escape.

  The story induces a state of disequilibrium: dizziness and a slight nausea. In my ear a ringing commences, a small hyperactive church bell. I’m no longer able to see what is before me, I’m no longer able to hear what is around me, I’m no longer able to recall who I am. I lay the book facedown upon my chest, steal a long breath. Shudders course through my body, electric shocks through my vertebrae. I feel cold. Steady breathing can’t warm me.

  First my mother barges back into my life, then Hannah. What is this?

  I don’t believe in coincidence.

  “Hunger is what I remember of my childhood—hunger, insatiable, voracious, devouring.” Hannah wrote that sentence in one of her middle-years journals. She began registering her thoughts in diaries at an early age; the first recorded birthday was her tenth. I inherited all of them, of course. She gave them to me—well, left them to me, my name on a little piece of paper.

  The early diaries are barely legible, childish script in pencil in spiral-bound notebooks. The wires have rusted and stiffened. The fold-around orange cover has faded, the manufacturer’s logo (Clairefontaine, I believe) is almost unrecognizable. The paper is aged and warped and frayed and discolored, or not discolored but multihued—aging births new colors, variations of yellow and burnt orange in this case, the colors of a dying fire. Reading the childhood diaries is like deciphering ancient papyrus. The post-teen journals are better preserved, in indelible ink on pristine white paper, her handwriting flawless and arabesque formal.

  Immaculately committed to the process, she wrote every night, and some days, until a couple of months before her death. Those months, those weeks, are the ones I’m most interested in. I have a general idea of what happened to her, or at least I’ve formed a plausible theory, but if I had her writings of the last few weeks, I might be able to understand fully what induced the Ovidian metamorphosis, what she was thinking, to understand her pain, or possibly humiliation, the second transformation of her life, from butterfly to self-conscious housefly. Those months were lost to me.

  Hannah wasn’t only speaking of physical hunger. The year of her birth, 1922, fifteen years before mine, was after the Lebanese famine had ended for the most part—Ottoman soldiers and a plague of locusts, the interchangeable pests, had feasted on all our food during the Great War. She arrived into a lower-middle-class family, though by no means poor, the fifth child, the only daughter.

  It was said that her mother was in labor for a whole week because Hannah was much too shy to make an appearance in our world. It was said that when she was finally forced out, she was too embarrassed to cry, or even whimper. Her face, her bottom, her entire newborn body, was as red as a dry-farmed tomato. All this was told as if it were fact, without a trace of irony. She did have fox-red hair.

  As a child, her parents loved her, her brothers adored her, doted on her. She was the family’s baby. She was fed. She did not sleep on an empty stomach.

  She was born with two deformities: a slight clubfoot and that excessive shyness. The latter was healed in her twenties, the former never completely so. Treatments for her left foot began when she was still an infant.

  Three buildings to the right of her father’s home, the house where she joined our world, stood an azadirachta tree and a faux Ottoman three-story building in which an Arabic healer lived. Out of respect, many Beirutis called him an Arabic doctor; ungullible people called him a quack. The azadirachta, also called a neem, or zanzalacht in our beautiful language, was his bread and butter, or bread and sap. The alleged medical benefits of the tree’s resin brought the ill to his doorstep from all over Lebanon. (In the 1990s, years after our pretender ungracefully expired, years after Arabic doctors ceased to practice, a resourceful Sri Lankan laborer struck the rich tree and sold ampoules of the resin to the thousands of Ceylonese maids in Beirut. The neem’s curative powers were known in their homeland as well.) The sap seeped into every medicine the Arabic healer prescribed. He even mixed it in with the plaster he used to set bones.

  Hannah wrote of the pains she endured at that charlatan’s hands, some remembered, some reimagined. Hoping that it would reset correctly, he broke her foot twice before she was four. She couldn’t possibly remember what the first time was like, she wrote, for she was barely six months old. Yet when she was informed of the incident, she began having nightmares about wailing infants that lasted into her early twenties. She wasn’t anesthetized for any of the breaks. She couldn’t recall the procedure itself, whether any implements were used—unfettered minds might imagine anvils and mallets and blacksmith’s aprons—but she recalled the resulting agony.

  I’m intrigued by the details she remembered, what she wrote in her journal—details recorded in her late teens, more than ten years after her visits to the quack. She reme
mbered a clean white waiting room; the Arabic doctor’s Jordanian wife mopping a constantly wet floor and dusting every nook but unable to reach one corner of the ceiling, from which dropped a bunch of plastic grapes and their dusty, insincere leaves. Hannah’s father, not her mother, at her side. The second room, the torture chamber, outwardly clean but suffused with a subtle purulent scent. Light air, subtle air, shallow breathing. The man himself: lanky, emaciated, with bright, clear eyes and a malevolent smile. Was it all reconstructed? He wore frayed moccasins with no socks. Her father’s courtesy that bordered on the extravagant. On a shelf, jars of powders, herbs, and viscous liquids. The pain.

  Hannah didn’t think her shyness had much to do with the inflicted pain—no causality, at least not according to her. Her barely perceptible hobble didn’t explain her shyness, but she thought that it certainly didn’t help matters. You and I might not have noticed much of a limp, but she did (she described her walk as that of a non-alpha gorilla). It was difficult for her. She was also right in suggesting that any prospective suitor, and his keen-eyed family, would notice.

  There were no suitors, except for the lieutenant, and he wasn’t exactly one either. I’ll get to him in a minute.

  Nothing could explain the hunger, however.

  Hannah ate and ate, anything and everything that was before her. She couldn’t stop, nor did it occur to her to. As a child, she had a fondness for fruit. Apparently, her mother realized there was a problem when Hannah single-handedly ate an entire cluster of bananas that her father had brought home and placed on the kitchen table. That’s about twenty-five bananas in one sitting. She was four.

  Her family was slow to catch on because she wasn’t fat, or, I should say, she wasn’t obese. I knew her as well rounded, buxom and curvaceous, but not unattractively so. It seems she looked much the same as a child and teenager, robust and flush with good health. When her mother began to pay attention, she realized that Hannah was eating constantly. As in any Beiruti kitchen, rich or poor, food was always around, and Hannah partook.

  Her mother began to put food away, offering it only at prescribed times. Hannah was confused at first, but adjusted. Since the meals were common plates that all shared, she still ate everything before her, except now that included everybody else’s meal. Food landed on the table, food disappeared from the table. She swallowed food as if it were going to vanish, and, of course, it was going to. Dinners became a family race. A brother who hesitated for a second missed his meal. Her parents tried to talk to her, but she was too young to understand. She was hungry.

  Her father tried a different tactic. He brought home a case of mandarins. He explained to Hannah that it was all for her, no one else was to touch it. She could store it in her room and eat at her leisure. The case of mandarins wasn’t going to disappear.

  It did, of course. By herself in the bedroom, she ate the whole case in one evening. At midnight she was wailing because of a major bellyache.

  There were many drawings in her journals, mostly doodles and meaningless sketches. One, though, informed by hunger, as she called it, was striking, at least to me. Later, much later, as an adult woman, she wrote of her need to be loved, to be desired, as a ravenous monster with an exigent appetite living in a black hole within. Whatever love was thrown her way, the monster devoured it and left her with nothing. The drawing of the insistent beast was delicate and finely rendered. A dragonlike creature peeks its equine head out of the hole, a perfect circle—perfect ellipse because of the viewer’s perspective—crosshatched unto death to show how dark it really was, how black the hole.

  That was my Hannah.

  Like all of us, she lived, she survived. Contrary to what you’d expect, or what I would, she wasn’t teased or tortured in the neighborhood. A plump, freckle-faced redhead (not that rare in Beirut, but still) who had a limp and blushed bright blood at the appearance of any human of an unfamily variety?

  How did she escape mockery for her awkwardness?

  Her family was liked and respected. Her brothers, who watched over her, were popular. She wrote that if it hadn’t been for her infirmities, she would have had suitors begging for her hand, and she was probably right, but that wasn’t all there was to her being somewhat accepted. She had an insatiable desire to please, “an ignoble craving,” as she described it in her journals. She had an uncanny ability to read what people wanted, even as a youngster, and was ever ready to offer what was needed. At home, she understood when her mother needed help around the house, when her father wanted a back rub. At school she always carried two of everything, pens, pencils, erasers. Just as a girl’s pen ran out, Hannah’s extra seemed to appear as if by magic. She was not disliked, was tolerated when not ignored. She was studious, of course, since that was what pleased her family and her teachers.

  She wrote of what it felt like when a neighbor or teacher asked her a question or spoke to her, how fast her heart beat, how the skin of her hands flushed, how her lungs shrank, how her throat constricted, and how her jaw ached.

  When she was seven, she moved back into her parents’ bed. Their house had only two bedrooms, four boys, one girl. It seems that when one of the boys reached a certain age, her father decided Hannah shouldn’t be in the same room with her brothers. Until her father built another two rooms when she was fourteen, she slept with her parents: father on the left, mother the middle mote, Hannah on the right. She wrote fondly of those days. She had no trouble sleeping at that age, a talent inherited from her mother. She would climb into bed behind her mother and disappear into the movie world of dreams. Her father lacked that aptitude, and since she also inherited her mother’s snoring, his nightly insomnia became a long-running joke in the household.

  “We breathed his air,” she wrote.

  She was socially inept, an affliction I am quite intimate with. In some ways, that’s probably what brought us together, but I’m getting ahead of myself as usual. There was something else that classified us as quite different, at least in my book, and in her journal. Throughout her teenage years, she wrote her fantasies. They were detailed and intricate descriptions of romance, of marriage, never of sex, always of rescue. It was as if she was anticipating the sanitized romance novels that would hit the Beirut market a few years later. When she was older, she was addicted to Italian photo-romans (translated into French), mawkish love stories told in photographs and see-through talk balloons. However, those didn’t appear in Beirut until the early fifties, so they couldn’t possibly have inspired her elaborate adolescent fantasies. She was ahead of her time.

  The fantasies were well drafted and delightfully drawn up. One impressive journal entry when she was fourteen described in minutest detail the future drawing room where she and her husband would entertain. The descriptions of her future beau tended to be more fugitive, changing from entry to entry: tall, medium height, hairy, smooth, mustached, clean-shaven. How they would meet—strolling on the corniche where eyes glance in passing, looking up from a schoolbook to encounter blue eyes filled with amorous and admiring desire—had more variations than the Goldberg.

  One of the surprising things—it astounded me really—was that who she was varied as well. In over a hundred journal entries of romantic fantasies, not a single one included her. She wrote of a different Hannah. In some she was a blonde, in others a brunette. She was an Egyptian actress, an abandoned European princess, an exiled Russian countess. She kept her name but not herself. She was rich, she was penniless, she had long eyelashes, a small nose. She walked with the grace of a gazelle, of a poplar, of a girl without a limp. She wrote herself out of her fantasies.

  What about my fantasies? I wouldn’t consider them that—more like mild dreams or tame aspirations. I rarely dreamed of romance or adventure, never of love and husbands. I would be married, I knew that, but I treated that fact as a fact, an impeding fait accompli, not as something to look forward to. I didn’t spend time considering whom I would marry or how. I wanted to be allowed to work. I hoped for a career as a secreta
ry. In those days, I couldn’t envision any other job. The only workingwomen I came across at the time were in the service business: maids, cooks, store clerks, secretaries, schoolteachers. By temperament, I couldn’t be around a lot of people. Secretary seemed like an idyllic job—an assistant to an intelligent, honest, and decent man, of course. I spent more time dreaming of my ideal boss than of a husband.

  How does the old cliché go? When every Arab girl stood in line waiting for God to hand out the desperate-to-get-married gene, I must have been somewhere else, probably lost in a book.

  I do understand that it isn’t just Arab girls who have that gene, but it is dominant in our part of the world. A force of nature and nurture, an epigenetic hurricane, herds us into marrying and breeding. Social cues, community rites, religious rituals, family events—all are meant to impress upon children the importance and inevitability of what Bruno Schulz calls the “excursion into matrimony.” No girl of my generation could imagine rebelling, nor would she want to. A kernel of imagination begins to sprout in the minds of women younger than I. Fadia rebelled, yet her idea of rebellion was the same as that of every other girl of succeeding generations. She wanted the right to choose whom to marry. In time, the shackles of arranged marriage were dumped in the Mediterranean; families grew inured to exogamous marriages, be they interfaith, interclass, or interclan. Dating, premarital cohabitation, adultery, and promiscuity became ordinary painted scenes of the current Beiruti landscape.

  Feminism in Lebanon hasn’t reached espadrilles or running shoes yet; sensible heels are where it’s at. The choice not to marry hasn’t entered the picture. It may be entering now, but I wouldn’t know. I don’t associate much with the young.

  As I write this I wonder if what I said about not dreaming of a husband is accurate. I’m not suggesting that I’m consciously dissembling. But to paraphrase the ever-paraphraseable Freud, who said something to the effect that when you speak about the past you lie with every breath you take, I will say this: