He wouldn’t even make friends with anyone who knew Arabic. People who knew him and liked him insisted that his lying wasn’t some kind of a hobby to him; rather, he felt compelled to say what his acquaintances wanted to hear. If he met someone who was trying to find a quick way to get a residency visa, for example, Eliyya simply could not stop himself from claiming he knew some higher-up in the Department of Immigration who could help him. Eliyya would then give him a full name he’d made up on the spot or borrowed from somewhere and promise the applicant he would call him as soon as possible, assuring him it was a done deal and that the immigration office employee owed him a big favour worth much more than a simple residency visa. And that would be their last conversation, since Eliyya would choose to stay out of that friend’s sight after that. Eliyya also invented two or three serious diseases for himself, kidney failure with required dialysis sessions, bouts of acute shortness of breath and even leukaemia, and he would reveal his diseases to anyone who tried to confront him, turning their indignation about being lied to into sympathy for him.
Time flew past Eliyya; quick as an arrow, life was passing him by. The daily chronicles of his life seemed like one long holiday, yet he never found a way to rest. And he wasn’t spared of feelings of boredom and repetitiveness, not just repetition of the details, but of that scenario he kept falling into without meaning to. Something had begun to slowly slip away from his routine, despite his always being prepared and ready to go, rising every morning as if he had vital duties to carry out and which he took on with optimism.
But Eliyya began to chastise himself. A person who lives alone eventually ends up talking to himself. He rebuked himself in the shower or whenever he lay down for a little while after lunch and stared at the ceiling. If he found himself all alone in the elevator, he looked at himself in the mirror, sometimes thrusting his thumb at his image and waving his fist threateningly at himself. He interrogated himself out loud at the diner, Jack’s, where he sometimes went at noon, so that the waitress thought he was trying to capture her attention, forcing him to quickly excuse himself in embarrassment. If he were to write down all the censure he constantly heaped on himself, or if he were able to say it out loud to someone, it would no doubt be harsh. ‘Stop it, Eliyya. Dammit, stop! Don’t you realise you’re overdoing it? Haven’t you gotten tired of feigning desire every time some blonde’s hair unfurls in some place, on some street, some café, some store? One blonde after another . . . the whole country is nothing but blondes, so what’s the point?’
Once, with a woman named Julie, Eliyya became indifferent towards her the moment the dye faded from her hair. Even he couldn’t believe his sudden change in feelings. She cried, demanding an explanation, but he couldn’t explain. The moment he caught a glimpse of a blonde passing by, his antennas went up and he started preparing his lines. He’d start with a pomegranate juice mixed with soda – the deep red colour in the glass made a good opening to intimate chatter that ended the same way every time. To keep up his charade one time in front of a girl, he guzzled down a whole glass of vodka and lemon into the back of his throat, the way he was told Russians do at their boisterous banquets. He nearly choked and his eyes bulged out of his head, so they lifted him up high so he could spit the vodka from his throat and slapped him in the face until he came to.
He laid it all out on the table whenever a girl sat down in front of him: other people’s expressions and proverbs, plus a repertoire of stories he had made up only moments earlier while riding the subway to his date. Stories he drew inspiration for from anything he had read, trying at any cost to create the impression of himself as a genius wandering the sidewalks of New York City, or that the Middle East had spit out into the new world once again because the East could not bear the presence of minorities. He would describe places he never visited in his life with sincere and poetic nostalgia and then get up all of a sudden once he’d made certain from the look in the girl’s eyes that the scheme had worked yet again. He had succeeded in painting a bizarre picture of himself that opened up numerous possibilities to his new friend, things she never expected to come upon in her monotonous life that kept him in an unquenchable state of desire for what he believed women possessed but which he hadn’t yet been fortunate enough to obtain. He would do his dance and then suddenly, like every other time, make up something about having to go home right away and offer the girl a ride home. He would leave, calm and collected, convinced that his phone would ring the next day or the day after that, and the seduction he’d started would reach its conclusion as the activities of daytime made their way onto night’s stage. He was good at the game, too, even though it had started to unravel from overuse. Once he succeeded at a certain restaurant, he regarded it as lucky and returned again and again. He’d take women there one after the other, calling the waiters by their first names, all part and parcel of his seduction toolkit.
He did get caught a few times, however, like the day he went to Calabrese Restaurant and saw the plump redhead he’d met a month earlier and then shunned. When he saw her there having dinner he begged the earth to crack open and swallow him up, because she caught him doing his same act. He read it in her eyes as she watched how he coaxed the new girl he’d just escorted to the same corner of the restaurant he’d sat her down in. She could probably even predict which menu items he was going to suggest to his new little friend. ‘I highly recommend the fillet of sea bass in bitter lemon sauce . . .’
In that way, Eliyya became versed in the art of introductions of all kinds, including the art of persuading young women to come to his apartment, which was also adorned with various allurements, such as paintings, small statues and select furnishings. The stories he told and the details he gave to his ‘prey’ opened the floodgates of her imagination and fed her desire to discover the secret of this slender Easterner . . . The way he postponed going into the bedroom at first had the effect of putting his friend at ease as she attributed his restraint to his refined manners. But this delay tactic of his quickly transformed into the fear that Eliyya was merely delaying a test he would not perform nearly as well on as the preparations for it.
He hadn’t yet reached the age of settling down, but rather continued to eye up university girls a decade or decade and a half younger than him. He wound a rope around himself and never cut the cord, wound it tighter and tighter until he nearly choked, finally forcing him to yank his neck out of the noose he’d made with his own hands and run like the wind. ‘Escaping is two thirds of valour.’ He never knew how to end a conversation. He would excuse himself and make things up and invent all kinds of fibs, because he was incapable of severing any relationship, no matter how short-lived it was. If the other person didn’t bid him goodbye, he was no good at getting out of the mess. The moment he got the feeling one of his conquests wanted to move in with him and cling to his side because this Eastern man with the eloquent tongue had provided her in her time of need with the emotional support she so desperately required, he would run like the devil as if his rear end was on fire. He went as far as moving out of his apartment and moving to another one elsewhere in New York for fear that he would be forced to take in the Filipino girl who was intent on getting to know him fully; he also changed his phone number.
Over time he exhausted all his tricks and started feeling like he wanted to retire, that is until that day at one of his favourite hunting grounds, the department of Middle East Studies and Semitic Languages. He was sweet-talking the department secretary, Miss Davis, when he caught sight of the blonde American girl. There wasn’t anything in her eyes that indicated she was lost in the big city, and that was what attracted him to her. She seemed to be a child of the city. He imagined it: a happy childhood, her parents’ only child, she lived in the city and had sex without giving it much thought. He followed her into the library and managed to sit down beside her. He waited for her to take a peek at the book he was holding, A Perverse History of the Human Heart, another item in his toolkit. He waited for her to make a move
before turning towards her and saying in one sentence that he thought she might be a student in the Arabic department, but he doubted she would accept his invitation to dinner the following Tuesday, bent as she might be on upholding her reputation as one of those young Baptist women born into a respectable and upright Baltimore family who tried to restrict herself from life’s pleasures. At this point he picked up another book he had in front of him for the girl to see the title, Dictionary of Small Pleasures, about going out into nature in the springtime to pick blackberries in season without worrying, just this one time during the year, about clothes getting dirty.
He said it all without taking a breath. Then he followed it with a nervous laugh with which he wanted to suggest that he was only pretending to play the role of the skilled ladies’ man who deployed prefabricated moves on the opposite sex, that in reality he wasn’t like that. His game came at the right time. The blonde was in an easy-going mood and didn’t correct his mistakes but rather responded to him as she was supposed to. ‘A French restaurant would be good. Come pick me up by taxi even if you have a nice car because that doesn’t impress me. You can start waiting for me out front, at 2 Arlington Avenue, as of eight o’clock. It might be a half hour before I come out, which is something I do on purpose to test your patience and desire to see me.’
She, too, capped off what she said with a studied laugh with which she made him realise that she wasn’t actually agreeing to go out with him; she was just pretending to go along with him. The game was exciting for both of them: ten minutes or more of a whispered parody in the silent library, while some of the people reading shot disapproving glances in their direction, until they finally agreed, as is expected when playing with fire, upon an actual date. Once it was concluded, he stood up from his chair in a celebratory manner with no concern for the groans of the other patrons, shook her hand and introduced himself, signalling, perhaps, that it was time to start being serious.
He told her his name was Eliyya, which made her think he was a Jew from some Middle Eastern country. She walked out of the library with him and they passed through the reception area under Miss Davis’s reproachful glare. He didn’t ever tell her he’d gained information about her identity and family background from the department secretary. He already knew her name: Heather Pollock, daughter of the Reverend Henry Pollock, Jr.
He took her to a French restaurant – and what a restaurant it was! ‘Le Relais d’Arcachon,’ he said, laughing. ‘French cuisine is one of the keys to seducing American women. Its effect on them is scientifically proven; tests verify it.’ He would run his experiment on her while she was in a state of submission. He didn’t hide his game. He admitted to everything he could be accused of. He would mess up the game and yet continue to play it. He fed her small doses of information about himself while she kept shouting at him, ‘Where are you from, for God’s sake?’
He smiled as if he’d succeeded in getting her right where he wanted. He took a long drink from his glass and a new kind of look came into his eyes – a mixture of pride and longing. He told her a lot of things, among them that the night made him anxious, especially Sunday night. Then he tied his white napkin around his neck, looked at the wine swirling in the glass he held with two fingers, closed his eyes and sniffed the wine as he stirred the glass before tasting it and spouting off expressions that sounded like they came straight out of the dining section of The New York Times. He requested that the waiter ask the chef if he still made the duck in orange sauce that he said had become a very popular dish. The kitchen manager came personally to answer his questions. It appeared to have all been set up in advance. He asked him about the prawns and whether they were freshly caught. He and his date argued back and forth. He made her laugh. She let her guard down and surrendered to having a good time. She had only one question left, which she kept repeating like a dumbfounded fool. ‘Who are you? Who are you?’
And he would keep at it, more and more. She’d burst out laughing hysterically, barely able to say, ‘Stop. Stop for God’s sake! Who are you?’
She described him in a letter to her friend as early forties, slim, eyes sparkling with intelligence. If you saw him on Sunday morning roaming in the streets before he put his contact lenses in, you might think he’s a novelist researching the subject of his next book about street people who depend on welfare and about the broken-hearted poor.
After a little while he surprised her with, ‘I want to visit Lebanon . . .’
Just like that, without any introductions as they walked across one of the city bridges.
‘I want to see the white almond blossoms in early spring . . .’
She smiled and he added, ‘I want to see my mother before she dies.’
He said it without showing much emotion and without a desire to affect her one way or another. He said it like someone saying he had to go to the train station at seven fifteen otherwise he’d miss the morning train to Pittsburgh.
This time around he wasn’t just making up an excuse to escape from his new girlfriend.
Chapter 12
Nishan never could have imagined himself pleading to save his soul and crawling on his knees that way, never could have imagined prostrating himself flat on the floor amidst a crumpled heap of women – nuns and girls from the orphanage – all dressed in black, as he prayed continuously to Saint Vasken inside a church dedicated to one of the Maronite saints. He muttered his cries for help, not knowing what he was saying because the sound of bullets being fired reverberated in his head and he couldn’t hear what was coming out of his own mouth. He squeezed his eyes shut like a child refusing to look when told, and knelt, huddled over himself, propped up by the women’s bodies, protecting himself behind them actually. No, he would not die with his eyes open. The sounds of the bullets clamoured in his head. He felt the shots in every part of his body. The sound of someone screaming, one man’s voice, called out with all his might, without stopping, ‘Hey all of you . . . for the fear of God!’
He couldn’t hear the wailing rising up around him – the moaning of a young woman shot in the shoulder who was bleeding profusely, and a nun struck with a bout of hysteria who was trembling and whose teeth chattered incessantly as she kissed the cross hanging at her neck. The nun’s fright was pushing him to the brink. He listened exclusively to the man’s voice, clinging with all his strength to the loud, angry voice as if it were a lifeline. If the man continued to scream, then Nishan Hovsep Davidian, the twenty-five-year-old photographer, would go on living.
He also held fast to the new Zeiss Ikon camera hanging from his neck and kept mumbling prayers to Saint Vasken, mumbling in the manner of his mother. He stowed the camera safely in his lap and curled over it. He could smell the women and the nuns – permed hair, the pungent odour of ammonia, and cheap perfume mixed with sweat from the heat and the fear and the church crammed full of God’s creatures. He didn’t want to die and he didn’t want the Zeiss Ikon to get broken because it was extremely expensive. He had been lucky enough to buy it for half price from a man who had barely used it one month and had been forced to sell it because he was leaving the country. Nishan would not be able to get another one. He’d only shot two rolls of film with it – a wedding and a graduation. He was bent on saving the Zeiss Ikon at any cost.
He braced himself, ready to take the fatal blow. The next one would strike him for sure. The important thing was to avoid getting hit in the head. A bullet in the head would be unbearable, he thought, fearing pain more than death. He thought of his father. He thought of his mother. They were sitting quietly, side by side most likely – his father reading the Armenian newspaper and his mother doing needlework and possibly mumbling quick prayers to Saint Vasken. And here he was under the bullets raining down like stones. As long as that man kept screaming and Nishan kept listening, he would be spared.
Suddenly everything cleared up and life returned. He opened his eyes and caught sight of the sun’s rays coming through the skylights. He felt his blood start to move again
. The shooting died down as did the sound of the man who had been screaming in the church. Nishan Davidian was still alive. He let the tension leave his body a little at a time, starting with lifting his head. No one in the church dared stand up. The moans of the wounded rose up, interrupted by a piercing cry. Nishan started looking around at the dead. He wouldn’t find out who the screaming man in the church had been. He didn’t even ask about him. People recalled all kinds of details to him, but no one mentioned the voice or its owner. The only person he asked was Nazaret. He asked him later on, two or three days later, when he went to visit him at his house. He asked Nazaret whether he heard a voice booming over the sound of bullets in the church. Nazaret said he hadn’t heard anything. He had been crammed against the door to the sacristy, sandwiched between the priests who were fleeing the altar. Nishan didn’t repeat his question. He was afraid his countryman would make fun of him. Maybe there had not been a man screaming. Maybe Nishan had been the only one hearing that voice that echoed in his head.
Nishan had opened his eyes and saw the blood on his trousers. It was coming from his right leg. A black splotch on his blue pants. He didn’t feel any pain; he didn’t feel anything. He saw his wound before he felt it. He was still fully conscious and fully frightened, too. But he didn’t die. He had heard once that a person who gets shot doesn’t feel the pain right away. It comes later, once the bullet cools down. Death was still present, then, still possible, lurking below, threatening to ascend from his leg to his heart. He heard some pushing and shoving near the door to the church. He silently concluded that Nazaret had been killed; he prepared himself for that possibility. When the gunfire first started he had seen him standing taking pictures of the worshippers in the front row – dignitaries and the family of the deceased and the clergy. He, on the other hand, had stayed in the back with the women so he could take pictures panning the altar and the priests. When they developed their pictures of the incident they both smiled when they discovered that Nazaret appeared in Nishan’s picture and Nishan appeared in Nazaret’s. Two photographers holding their large round flashes. Nazaret was more exposed to the gunfire than Nishan had been.
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