Other Lives

by Iman Humaydan

  My life feels like interrupted sequences of time, like scenes in a film that begin just as another scene ends. My memory of everything that has happened is not continuous, but circular. I always come back to where I began. When I tell my doctor this, he tries to reassure me, saying that circular memory is a peculiarity of women and that men remember differently. But I don’t find this answer logical. I mix up the relationship between events and places. I’ll be thinking about the day we left Beirut and then find myself suddenly jumping to the years that I’ve spent with Chris in Kenya. Perhaps this is why my story now takes on a circular and sometimes spiral form.

  I live in Adelaide for four years that pass like the taste of the wind. I stay eleven years in Mombasa, always on the verge of leaving. “On the verge”—this expression perfectly summarizes a life scattered between Australia and Kenya. I’m like someone waiting to get out but who, at the very same time, isn’t even inside. Between inside and outside, I live a suspended life, like someone waiting in a purgatory with locked doors, no bridge, no way out. I remember what Mary Douglas, the anthropologist and scholar, said in a book I read in Australia when I was trying to finish my Masters thesis. She described the state of being in-between, or “in-betweenness.” She said that people pass through this stage and move into another one, which is clearer, when their lives and relationships become more regulated. My situation in no way resembles Douglas’s description. For me, “in-betweenness” is a permanent way of life that will never change or be transformed into any other state.

  I am going to Beirut, then.

  In the Dubai airport, I pass my time in a bar on the first floor. I choose it because it has large sofas that allow me to stretch out and relax. I have to wait six hours for the plane to take me to Beirut. I have to wait what seems like a whole night. Time passes in a strange way here. I don’t feel like it’s nighttime, nor do I fall asleep. The place seems like a giant space station stuffed full of jewelry, toys, gifts and food. A world full of light that never sleeps. A place that I imagine withers and dies when people leave it, as if it’s an imaginary world that doesn’t exist. As if it’s on television. The music of the whole world plays here all at once. Filipinos and Indians and Sri Lankans and Europeans and Americans. People from every country in the world walk through this airport’s halls. The place lives off of them; they illuminate it. But emptiness consumes its heart, just as the desert sand consumes buildings and transforms them into skeletons that age at the speed of light.

  The man in his fifties who sits on the other end of this sofa is turning the pages of an English newspaper and when I’m about to sit down he adjusts how he’s sitting, closing and folding the newspaper as if offering me more space. I don’t need more space; the pages of the newspaper don’t hinder my movements. I put my suitcase on the seat across from me, my book and papers on the table. He starts gathering up his stuff as though getting himself ready for a trip he’s unprepared for. He seems puzzled and concerned with knowing the identity of this woman who’s sitting near him—that is to say, me—so he raises his head after a few minutes and, smiling, asks me in English, “Traveling to Beirut?”

  I nod in response to his trivial question, glancing at him to be sure that this voice was his. He adds, smiling, that he’s a sorcerer and in touch with the supernatural. His smile broadens as he looks at then nods toward my passport on the table in front of me, with my Middle East Airlines ticket sticking out of it. An unimpressive attempt at seduction, I say to myself wearily. I need a better, more powerful seduction to conjure up a passion I haven’t lived for a long time. Despite this, a flood of feelings, like what children feel when they rush off to play with a new toy, sweeps me away. Feelings of fear and excitement together. I can smell his cologne from this distance. Perhaps it’s the scent of his skin. When he stands up and comes closer, he seems cleaner and livelier than a traveler usually can be.

  “My name is Nour.”

  He says to me in English, extending his arm out in front of him as though to shake my hand. Nour… I smile. I didn’t expect him to have an Arabic name with his American accent. He’s wearing jeans and a blue shirt with thin white stripes. He acts as though he’s spent a long time preparing for the excursion to come over and introduce himself to me. He asks if he can share my hot chocolate and then gently places my leather suitcase beside me so that he can sit down across from me before I’ve even answered.

  I don’t know how much time passes before I look him in the eyes. Without extending my hand, I say in English, slowly and neutrally, “I am Myriam.”

  Slow and neutral, I think, while sipping hot chocolate, which burns my tongue and the roof of my mouth… “Slowly and neutrally.” I keep reminding myself that since leaving Beirut my behavior has been formed by a selection of well-learned techniques that I use to connect or not to connect to people. He tells me that he’s lived in America since he was ten years old and that he left it for Lebanon this year. He was visiting Dubai for just a week for his work as a journalist and now is returning to Lebanon because he was born there and wants to get to know the country that he hasn’t visited since 1967. He’s returning to search for his roots. It’s amusing to me that when talking about his roots, repeating the same sentence many times, he curls his lips and raises his voice higher and sharper than before:

  “I’m searching for my roots!”

  Nour’s father is Palestinian, he has a Lebanese mother, but he doesn’t speak Arabic. He doesn’t know his mother tongue, I say to myself. I have to make a huge effort to listen to him and respond to his questions, just as I do with Chris. In a few moments that feel like a very long time, he tells me about his family, his life and his American wife and daughter. It seems as though this life of his fatigues him and, using rapid, exuberant words, he wants to hand it over for safekeeping to the first person who’ll listen to him. By chance, I am that person. A woman he just met in an airport. I think, I don’t have space for other people’s lives, my own life’s enough for me. It’s enough that I’m continually attempting to gather my life together, given my overwhelming suspicion that I lack the proper tools. When faced with these thoughts, my body grows restless and I suddenly feel like a combatant preparing for an attack. At that moment, I feel unable to gather myself in one place and one memory; his speech confuses me and makes me more anxious. But I hear myself saying to him, with open sarcasm, “Why bother searching for roots, I can give you as much as you want, a surplus I want to get rid of!”

  Why bother to search? I can give you all you want, I have a surplus of roots and I want to be done with them! He wasn’t expecting such an answer. And I don’t think about what I’m saying before this sentence pops out of my mouth. Perhaps it came from a confused, impotent thought that has grown and been nurtured by the travels I’ve been forced to make between Lebanon, Australia and Africa; roots are something that we ourselves re-fabricate and completely modify, just as when we prepare food, we add spices according to our tastes. During the conversation a quick, tense understanding develops naturally between us, from the sentences we exchange and the thin, friendly laughter we generate.

  He was born in 1945 in Lebanon and was a boy when he immigrated with his parents to the United States. He returned after their death to get to know his mother’s country. In Beirut he rents a small apartment paid for by the American newspaper for which he’s a correspondent. I cannot go back to Palestine, of course, Nour continues, they destroyed my paternal grandfather’s house there 30 years ago. He used to visit this house in Palestine until 1967, when he could no longer enter. He says that he’s forgotten nearly everything and only remembers the smells of the food, which he feels are always there, nearby. He came back searching for these smells. In America, he cooks for himself and his American friends, whom he invites over to hang out at his house on Saturday nights. He prepares recipes that he learned from his mother and he has many cookbooks from which he’s learned Palestinian and Lebanese recipes.

  He tells the story of his family chronological
ly, as though reading it from a book, as though his memories have no pain attached to them. My memories always spiral when I narrate them. I begin with a story and find myself returning to it. He narrates exotically, as though I myself were foreign to him and he needs to make sure the story follows a chronological progression in order for me to understand it. On the plane, Nour tells me the story of his life. He has a deep need to tell me everything about himself. Intimate conversations are easier when we’re moving from one place to another. Perhaps because he’s in such a state, his words are quickly left behind—they aren’t a heavy burden weighing us down.

  On the plane I learn to surrender to my fear to remain relaxed and calm, in total surrender to the possibility of death, to a fear that could swallow me up and not terrify me.

  I lean my head against the glass of the airplane’s small window while Nour, who manages to get seated next to me, starts reading a book that he took out of his small suitcase. Its author, Elia Kazan, put much of his life story in it, the story of his Turkish, Greek, Armenian family, the story of their immigration to the United States and a discussion of identity and assimilation. I read the title on its cover: The Arrangement.

  Nour opens to a page and starts reading, aloud, a part of the novel in which an old man, nearing death, asks for grapes from Smyrna, or Izmir, grapes that he hasn’t been able to eat since he emigrated from Anatolia. After a long life’s journey, changes, forgetting, adaptation and making a new life—after all this, it seems the only desire left in the father’s memory is for grapes from Smyrna. Nour’s reading penetrates me, his words flow deeply inside of me while I’m somewhere between sleeping and waking on the airplane, trying desperately to remain awake so I can listen to him.

  When his words enter my head, they transform into colorful pictures coming from a memory behind forgetfulness—pictures from the day my uncle traveled abroad and from the day we left. His words transform into questions, born of stories told about my family’s emigration. What does our emigration mean, what does it mean to belong to another country and another civilization? We emigrate and build another life and believe that we’ve been saved. But at a certain moment, everything that we have built becomes ruined and we return to a past that we reckoned had disappeared or that we had intentionally forgotten, throwing it somewhere under thick layers of memory.

  Idea after idea bores into my head, entering with Nour’s voice; it’s difficult to know if I’m asleep and having these thoughts like dreams or awake and talking to myself. There’s no doubt that I’ve nodded off. I’m warm and happy like a small kitten, especially since for once I don’t have a headache. A chronic pain emigrated with me from Beirut fifteen years ago and has never left.

  I wake up in the airplane and a warm feeling of contentment floods through me when I find myself wrapped in the blue woolen blanket that Nour pulled over me while I was sleeping. I take two migraine pills. I started taking them not long before my trip from Lebanon. My medicine is my constant companion; I take it before I even feel the pain. I take it to be sure the pain will not suddenly seize me.

  When he asks why I’m returning to Lebanon I tell him that it’s not a “return,” but that I’m coming to reclaim a house that I thought I’d lost. I don’t know why I keep insisting that my return is temporary, that I’m not remaining in Beirut. Do I insist on this to this man whom I hardly know because I fear the passion with which he speaks about his own return? About the Lebanon that he began to rediscover only a year ago? About the place of his father’s birth in Palestine and his family and childhood stories from Lebanon, his mother’s country? I tell him that my stay in Beirut is temporary and that I’ll return home soon. I repeat this to him, perhaps more to convince myself that nothing could change my decision to return to Africa.

  Nour returns to search for his roots. As a journalist he may decide where he wants to travel and he’s chosen Lebanon, the country where he spent his childhood before he left for America. As for me, I’ve come to sell the building that I inherited from my parents, then return to Kenya. I’ll be able to sell it only after the displaced people living in it are evicted. I only inherited it because my brother Baha’ was killed. Of course my brother would have been first in line to inherit the house, he was the only man in the family, just like my father Salama before him when he inherited the house from my grandfather Hamza. Baha’ was killed in the beginning of 1978, almost three years after the civil war started in Lebanon. He died when a rocket explosion sent shrapnel flying onto the balcony of the second floor of our house in Zuqaq al-Blat, where he stood. We couldn’t recognize him. They brought a coffin and told our family, “Your son’s inside.” Two days after the burial, young men from the neighborhood found pieces of his limbs hanging from the branches of the few trees that were not also burned in the explosion. The smell of my brother’s burning body remains in the house for a long time. Sometimes I feel as though this smell is still close to me, that since the incident my senses can no longer perceive any other smell. My father was also injured that day, with a head wound. He recovered, but a short time later he started acting strangely. The doctor doesn’t want to remove the piece of shrapnel from his head because of the danger of injuring him further. And as for my mother, she stopped speaking all together. The shock of my brother’s death made her lose the power of speech. When she wants to say something she gestures with her fingers, drawing empty circles in the air. This is how we leave Lebanon for Adelaide, where my uncle went when he emigrated many years before the war. We leave: my incomplete, amputated family made up of an almost insane father, a mother who refuses to speak, and a daughter who is waiting for a man to follow her to Australia, a man whom she’ll never see again after she leaves.

  We leave Lebanon for Adelaide two years after my brother Baha’’s death and my grandmother Nahil’s failed attempts to get my father to have another son by a younger wife. My uncle Yusuf comes up with the idea of immigration in a letter. He tells us that staying in Lebanon is a slow suicide and that my mother’s silence and my father’s madness are both signs of this. The day we leave, my sick father still thinks that his mother Nahil will be traveling with us to Australia. Even though she’s told him, “Here and there are just the same, why would I travel?” following up with, “Every country on earth is just the same, everywhere you go, all people are the same too.” When we leave, she doesn’t wait at the door like someone who has come to see people off; she doesn’t cry in front of us. Rather, she turns her back after saying goodbye to my father and goes into her room, locking the door behind her. To someone from the outside looking at her, she might appear angry at her son Salama. Angry that he’s failed to take care of us, angry that his second marriage, which she arranged for him, has failed, that he’s failed to have another son who could take Baha’’s place. Angry that the family is splitting apart despite her belief in her efforts to plan its future. But I know that there are sure to be tears in her eyes at the moment of farewell. I know that after she locks the door behind her she takes out the Hikmeh, which she keeps with meticulous care in her closet, and opens it, letting the pages fall open at random and reading whatever passage it opens to. She reads, peering into the words transcribed in front of her in a wide, black, zigzagging handwriting, and seeks a full future for the family. Only at that moment would Nahil’s faith return to her and her anger pass. She’d stop doubting that the future the book shows her would be realized. It’s as though for her the future were a film playing over and over, its scenes seeming more natural each time.

  My grandmother Nahil won’t agree to leave with us, just as in the past she wouldn’t agree to leave her house in the mountains and come with my grandfather Hamza to live in Beirut after he bought the Turkish Damad family’s building in Zuqaq al-Blat. This is likely because she believed that my grandfather Hamza would no longer put effort into his work or business after buying this two-story building. “The threshold to this house is ill-fated,” she used to always repeat, adding, “Nothing pure nor good can come from
nourishment you’ve taken from your friend’s mouth by deceit.” Nahil’s convictions and fears, however, didn’t stop Hamza from renovating the old building, adding new rooms on the second floor, which had consisted of just two small rooms and an empty roof. He decorated the high walls and new door frames with calligraphy carved by masons who came from the mountains especially for this work. He added carvings of gilded letters, in green and yellow, blue and red, placing them on top of the five gates of the house. Nahil’s resistance didn’t last long. She left the house in the mountains when Hamza finished renovating the house in Zuqaq al-Blat. She wouldn’t return to the mountains at all until after he died.

  My grandfather tries in every way he can to suggest that the house is his, that he’d inherited it from relatives about whom we know nothing. Perhaps all the changes he makes to the house are an effort to erase the story of its family and his own story too. How he came as a child from Syria with his impoverished parents and worked in construction on the train station in Sofar. He then worked as a driver for the Turkish Damad family, who showered him with money and assistance so that afterward he became a businessman, selling bread and drinks and ice to passengers on the Beirut–Damascus train line, which passed through the Sofar station. How he bought the house cheap from the Damad widow after her husband’s accidental death in the Gallata fire in Istanbul that destroyed everything the man owned. She needed money to emigrate to America, following her family who was already there, so she sold her house cheap—for the price of dirt, my grandmother Nahil used to say. My grandfather Hamza, though, told a completely different story. He would always say that he bought the house as a favor to the Turkish man’s widow. He’d say that he would’ve rather bought land in his village that was covered with profitable olive trees, but instead bought a modest, ramshackle old house with hardly any land around it, except a small lot filled with prickly pear cactus. People in the village made fun of him and said that he’d lost his mind. He’d claim that he chose to buy the house as a favor to a man who helped him and died leaving behind a wife with no money who wanted to emigrate and join her family in America.