I’ve often decided that I should make more of an effort to improve my situation and my relationship to the world, as well as my relationship to Chris and our social life. After weeks of this effort, though, he’ll suddenly tell me that there’s no point in exhausting myself, he knows that I have no desire whatsoever to go out to dinner with him, his friends and their women, especially because I always have to speak a language that’s not my own. He seems to understand, but I feel that this understanding hides a bitter disappointment he’s trying to summon the patience to tame. When the results of his research in the laboratory are unsatisfactory, he tries to suggest that his work has deteriorated because he worries about me too much and can’t sleep. I’m always the reason for any setback that he or his work suffers. When we were newly married, I would believe everything he said. I felt hugely guilty and gave all of my time to him. This meant that I was at home most afternoons, spending my time reading and writing—writing things no one but Olga ever read. While Chris was out working and earning money, I would spend my morning hours teaching English in courses designed to wipe out illiteracy in Mombasa, as well as giving private Arabic lessons. After years of this, I’ve become convinced that he invests all his energy into his work. The very moment he leaves home, he forgets the place he’s just been, forgets who’s in it, forgets me. I’m convinced that the unsatisfactory results of his work are because of him alone and have no connection whatsoever to me. Yet whenever the issue of his work is raised with his friends or colleagues, he mentions my perpetual sadness.
Chris counts the number of people infected with malaria and tries to save them, while I’m infected by the malady of mute rage, compounded by fear. He won’t be able to save me. My illness requires playfulness and Chris isn’t good at playing. He doesn’t know how to play. He doesn’t even play with the puppy, which he began to fight with the moment I brought it back from South Africa. As if he knew who I got it from and desperately wants to get rid of it. Play is humankind’s most important invention, Samuel says, rubbing his face on the dog Yufu’s head, and it’s not only human, he continues, watch! See how animals love to play! Samuel tells me, raising his voice as though he’s learned that I only listen to him when he changes the tone of his voice, shaking me out of my deep thoughts and forcing me to pay attention. Chris doesn’t play… He has his habits. Here’s a day of his habits: going to the laboratory at seven thirty, coming back at one, sleeping after lunch, going back to the laboratory from three thirty until seven.
No doubt malaria is on the rise because of these habits, because it has gotten used to his habits!
As for me, I’m not sure of anything. I can accept and refuse something with equal ease. The more years I live in Mombasa, the more difficult I find it to have habits. But what does is it mean to be a woman without habits, not even drinking coffee in bed? He comes to me, sure that the hand he rests on my shoulder has the magic of the serums that he spends his whole day with in the lab. He loses his patience after a few minutes and leaves after I say for the thousandth time that I miss playing, that play is ageless and that I’m slowly dying here. He leaves me and goes out. I walk over and turn on the tape recorder so that Asmahan’s voice will rise out of it, reverberating in revenge. I go back to the book that I had in my hand before Chris entered. I read, “Nietzsche was right when he said that original sin pushed us toward a perpetual feeling of hatred, and that ‘god’ is a lethal invention—it’s difficult to believe in a god who doesn’t dance.”
I narrated my Beirut and Australia lives to Eva, my neighbor in Mombasa. Now that I’ve returned to Beirut, it’s easy to narrate my Kenya tales to Olga, whom I missed and who missed me. But why do I remember all this now, when it’s behind me? Is it because the past remains forever part of our future and never goes away? I narrate my life in Kenya to Olga, thinking of Nour and what’s happened between us. Meeting him has been something strange. As though I left Kenya and came back specifically to find him—not to reclaim the house that I’d lost. I’ve returned to Beirut in search of a dancing god, but found instead a companion for my journey of loss.
Chris sends me a second letter. I’ve only been here two months. I feel like he wrote all his letters before even I left him.
I don’t like visiting Australia with Chris because I have to spend so much time traveling with him from one city to another to visit his children and family. He insists that I accompany him when I just want to stay at home with my mother and listen to what she tells me about my father, herself and her work. We speak English together, my mother and I, and it doesn’t bother me. It’s enough that she’s speaking again, it doesn’t matter in what language. The last time I visited Adelaide, Nadia greeted me with less silence, with words that I’d missed from her for so long. We hugged as if each of us had found the other after having been lost. She’s taken intensive English classes and her silence disappears completely when she speaks a foreign language. A few years ago she started working part-time in an organization that looks after immigrants who come from countries that have gone through civil wars. She gave me a small gray cat, saying that she found it that morning. She brought it in, washed it, fed it, and gave it an English name, Gray, because of its color. A cat to replace her cat, Pussycat, in Beirut. I was happy for my mother, who looked like a girl suddenly taking her first steps. My mother has gotten used to her life in Australia and when I read something to her about Lebanon, she tells me that she doesn’t want to hear anything and never wants to go back.
I take Nadia and Salama to the public park. Salama arrives a few steps ahead of us and enters the park, greeting the gatekeeper and the cleaners. He doesn’t sit with us for long, but gets up and starts walking back and forth from left to right across the park. “They respect me more here.
I feel like I am a respected human being here,” he always says to me, while engaged in what seems to be his only hobby in Adelaide—constantly, never-endingly, crossing the street. He goes out and steps into the crosswalk; drivers are surprised by him and slam on their brakes so they won’t run him over. Cars stop for him and my father completes his journey to the other sidewalk, joyful and proud. The cars then take off, their drivers cursing and swearing at him in English, which doesn’t bother my father. He doesn’t understand what’s happening around him. All he knows is that the whole world stops for him the moment he leaves home or the park for the street. Cars stop for him and then continue, then other cars come and stop and then continue. Salama keeps on crossing the street going from one sidewalk to the other. The signal changes from red to orange then to green and Salama continues his game, the cars honking. A man sticks his head out a car window and starts cursing Salama, who doesn’t understand what’s being said to him. In fact, he looks forward and just keeps walking. He stops when he gets angry, in the middle of the street, to tell the driver who hurls his words into the air, “You don’t know who you’re talking to, boy!” It doesn’t take long for these short bursts of anger to change into smiles. Salama smiles at the brightly colored cars that shine even when the sun disappears. Cars shine in the shade like the eyes of Beirut’s street cats. But he isn’t in Beirut, I think while sitting near my mother, who’s reading her book.
My mother has gotten used to my father’s madness and accepts it as her lot in life. I keep a careful eye on him, his mouth agape with a wide smile. All the while Salama keeps moving ceaselessly between the two sidewalks. I can’t keep watching him; I turn away from him as though his movements are an affliction. “Leave him, leave him be,” my mother, who’s used to his madness, tells me, “don’t worry.” It’s raining hard but my father doesn’t care. It’s July, the height of summer, he says, the rain’s just fleeting and it’ll pass quickly. My father never accepts that it’s winter in July and that rain lasts for months here. He lifts his head toward the gray sky, where there are clouds that can’t reach him and words that still trouble him, the words of my grandfather Hamza, which remain planted in his mind, body and soul. Hamza is dead but Salama has never heal
ed from the violence of these words. Even though these violent words can no longer reach him, he hasn’t healed. I leave the wooden bench on the sidewalk and walk toward him, while my mother takes shelter in a small kiosk in the center of the park, fleeing from the rain. I try to grab my father. But he keeps walking back into the crosswalk, heading from one side of the street to the other, rain completely soaking his clothes. I don’t know what to do. I look for my mother and see her running toward us, holding her book over her head to keep it from getting wet. I hold onto my father’s arm, water pouring down from his hair into his eyes and over his face. My mother reaches us and extends her arm to Salama and meekly he stops moving, muttering unintelligible words. He holds onto Nadia’s arm and the three of us pass through the neighborhood park in Paradise, crossing the street while my mother takes the house key out of her purse, saying that it’ll be night soon and we should get back.
In the first days after my return to Lebanon I have to prepare a number of legal documents to present to the Ministry of the Displaced. They tell me that it’s a matter of days. But now I’ve been in Beirut for more than three months and am still filling out forms whose purpose I can’t understand. The last forms I had to fill out were exactly the same as the ones I’d filled out the time before. When I let the government employee see my irritation and bewilderment, he answers me with open sarcasm, “Don’t worry, ma’am, you can practice your writing skills.”
Why did I come back? I ask, blaming myself and cursing the employee. Why am I here? I could’ve assigned my power of attorney to Olga or someone else. But they’d asked for my father to come in person because someone wants to buy the building and tear it down to build a big new one in its place. This building will overlook Beirut’s downtown, destroyed by the war, which a private company is now undertaking to rebuild. My father is lost in his insanity, however, and it took days to prepare him for our visit to the notary in Adelaide where he could sign over his power of attorney to me so I could take care of this.
When I first arrived in Beirut, I didn’t see anyone. There were only Nour’s visits, which have increased until they’re pretty much every day. The apartment I’ve rented is small, lost at the end of a corridor on the second floor of a neglected building near the American university. When there’s a knock on the door, I can’t imagine who would visit me today. It’s Nour. He hugs me as though he’s known me for a long time. I’m happy that I’ve met him, it’s as if he’d been waiting for me here. This man comes as a surprise to me. His visits are what I needed to connect to Beirut—meeting a man who has also come back to search for a lost connection.
We leave my apartment and walk toward the sea; the autumn chill is mild. Nour draws close to me and puts his arm around my shoulder for a quick moment, then pulls away. It’s as though he wants to say something but has changed his mind, or perhaps suddenly feels that he’s hurrying something by showing his emotions. I feel at once anxious and slightly hopeful. I want him to leave his hand on my shoulder and tell me, without thinking, what he’s feeling.
Autumn in Beirut is strange. The day begins with promising sunshine, a sky that makes your eyes tear up because it’s so clear and blue. Clouds spread out around the edges of the sky like a picture frame; it’s strange how Beirut’s autumn changes its colors so quickly. The sky’s frame widens and slowly sweeps away what was inside it. Then clouds cover the sky; without notice they change from white to translucent gray, accumulating and growing darker. The wind picks up suddenly as though it had been concealed beneath the roots of the city’s few remaining trees. It starts from the earth and rushes upward. Docile Sunday Beirut. Someone who’s seen this wouldn’t believe that sleeping Beirut could wake up each morning and produce such violence from within its walls. Every day, it spreads out its violence in the broad daylight, like women laying out an entire season’s clothes under the sun’s rays. Sunday is Beirut’s day off. It’s as if violence has a day off too, as if its buildings are taking a break from the voices that breach their yellowing walls. Sunday mornings are silent except for the distant sounds of soulless church bells, turned on with the push of a button. These sounds are met, not too far away, by the prayers of muezzins. The city is sleeping today and so is the sea. I’m reconciling with Beirut today. Beirut has changed. It’s another city. I only feel intimate with it on Sundays. That’s when my city returns to being itself.
On Monday, Nour comes to take me out to dinner. He makes me laugh when he tells me that he’s missed me since yesterday, that I’ve become his only connection to Beirut. I imagine that Beirut would be lonely for someone like him who doesn’t have old friends or family here. Our dinner changes from an ordinary event into an interview. He tells me that he’s writing about Lebanese who’ve returned after the war and wants to interview me. I can’t find anything to tell him. It’s as if I’ve lost the ability to speak, especially after he comments on my silence and I see him taking out his notebook to transcribe some of the words I’ve used to describe my return to Beirut.
Nour and I have to see each other every day so that he can finish what he was telling me. Most of the time we meet in his little rented office, near where he lives in Ras al-Nabaa. He rents it from a dentist who gave up his practice and went to the Gulf. Last time he asked me to help him interview people who don’t know English. It doesn’t frustrate me to spend these long periods of time with him. We’ve even started working late at night. As soon as I enter the office, he pulls a leather chair over next to his, and makes tea. He’s started telling me about his private life, intimate things—I’ve never heard such intimate things about a man before. I’ve never heard such things because other men haven’t meant anything to me; words can’t be separated from their owners.
He sits next to me, only a small space between us. I think about Ines, the young woman who sometimes comes to his office to transcribe his voice recordings. She says that she’s bored, that the atmosphere in her workplace, a press office, doesn’t suit her temperament. She complains, gets up and opens the window to the left of his desk. Then she shuts it, concocting an excuse to come into his room while he brings her a chair like the one he brought me. I see her coming in as I’m going out. Like a teenage girl I wonder… how will he greet her? Will he greet her like he greets me? Will he be confused about where to look, his eyes the color of sea and sky, or let himself gaze at my face? I turn away as though I have all these questions for only a moment. A hidden power will lift me from my chair, pushing me towards him. It propels me to narrow the vast divide between us, the divide that’s not even one meter wide.
I call him at the time of our usual morning rendezvous to say we should meet somewhere near the sea instead of working in the office, because the winter sun is brilliant and beautiful today. At the café on the seaside, he takes a sip of caffe latte then suddenly spits it out. He says that he can’t drink it, it’s made from powdered milk and he wants fresh milk. The waiter doesn’t understand what Nour means. “But really, madame, it is fresh, I just mixed it with the water right now!” the waiter says over and over again, directing his words at me and shaking his head like someone unjustly accused, with no hope that I can rescue him.
We then go back to the office and stay there until evening, translating and printing the interviews. He offers to take me home; first we have to walk in the direction of his apartment so that he can get his car. It’s raining a little and we go down the long, dark staircase together under his umbrella. I’m struck by a desire to touch him, to smell his scent, but I savor this feeling from a distance. We pass by his ground-floor flat and he wants to show me his garden. A dim light shines through one of the windows facing the garden. I wonder if this light is coming from his bedroom and what his bed is like. I want to go in and look around but I just wait in front of his flat while he brings the car around.
He starts the car and I get in beside him. It begins to rain heavily. I can’t hear what he’s saying because I’m observing the way his hands move on the steering wheel and am thinking abou
t how little space there is between our bodies. He takes the Corniche road around to Ayn Mreisseh before dropping me off at my place on Makhoul Street. The rain hits the windshield even harder and waves from the sea beat against the asphalt of the Corniche. A moment passes before he turns off the car, opens the door and gets out. He walks around the car and opens the door on my side. I thought that I said I wanted to stay here in the car and meditate on the waves, but I didn’t say anything and he couldn’t hear what I didn’t say. So I get out and look at him. He waves at me and gets back into the car. I walk around to the entrance of my building, my eyes damp with the power of an anxious desire.
Today I should present new documents to the Ministry of the Displaced. I have no desire to go so I call Nour and go out to meet him at his office. I walk a long way on foot before finding a taxi, so I arrive late. It isn’t easy to find a servees taxi to take me from Bliss Street to Ras al-Nabaa. I have to get out at Bishara al-Khoury Street and walk. He’s buried in work at his computer. I ask him if we can go out because I’ve started to feel suffocated. He leaves everything and goes with me, leaving his computer on. Before locking the door, he asks me if it’s cold outside. I tell him that he’s wearing more than enough clothes. He replies, I wonder if I should bring a scarf. I tell him that I once heard him say that he doesn’t like the cold, and so he should bring it. He smiles and brings it with him. I like his simplicity. I like his spontaneity. We walk to his car. He once again talks about his work, his interviews, his family, his feeling of exile and uprootedness, his house that he carries on his back like a turtle. The weather is cold and the wind pushes us forward. I enjoy the cold. He gets out of the car near the lighthouse and I suggest that we walk a little here then go and drink tea or coffee at Rawda café. I’ve always liked that café. Before I left Beirut, I spent a whole winter there in the glassed-in room writing something about the life of others, which is my life. I write and only Olga reads my writing.
Other Lives Page 6
