Other Lives

by Iman Humaydan

  Just as we leave the office, a powerful feeling develops between us. And then, just as quickly, it disappears. The visit is urged on by ambiguous desire, a misunderstanding or perhaps wondering on his part: What do I want? Why did I call him to go out, why am I here? I let him wonder about my silence that I don’t want to waste. Perhaps my silence encourages him to move his secret contemplation into the realm of questioning. He doesn’t ask and I don’t want to explain. This time, I’ll let my life find its way, I’ll throw my desire to the wind that plays on the surface of the water and transforms it into high waves that crash against the café’s white walls. I observe him while we sit; I chose the seat where I could see the sea. I don’t want to turn my back on it.

  A desire more powerful than myself floods me. I give myself to it… it takes me. I no longer see what others see. I let myself give into a desire that I thought I’d lost. How can I know what’s inside him? He begins to speak freely. I listen to him with calm contentment. I listen, thinking about him. Just seeing his fingers holding his cigarette, about to light it, makes me shiver. He pauses, then continues what he had started to say. I watch him look at me this same way and forget that I’m holding a cigarette and an unlit match in my fingers. Then I put this all aside and drink my cold tea. It’s eight o’clock in the evening when we leave Rawda. I go back to his place with him. Outside the door, I want to tell him, let me into your heart as well as your home. Instead I say, I want to see your little garden this time. But I’m thinking, do I really want to be let into his heart? Will I be able to bear the burden of a relationship? Or do I only want to use my head to survey things a little—to see his place and his life, to see them through my own desires, my body and eyes. I look at him for a long time but then feel annoyed and turn my face to feel the wind coming from the blue line of the horizon.

  In his little flat, he goes into the kitchen to prepare dinner for us. I stand and watch him. It’s nice, how he busies himself cooking for me. He takes out a bag of frozen seafood and quickly prepares rice and a salad as well. The smells of cooking pervade the kitchen and the whole house. Suddenly I feel hungry. Nour works quickly while my stomach grumbles; I want to eat. I look for a bottle of white wine that he says is at the back of the refrigerator. With the first glass, I feel strongly that I’m living another life. A life that in no way resembles my previous lives in Beirut, Australia or Kenya. My other lives. Lives like my first meeting with Georges, my observations in the notebook that I left on the plane, as if I’d forgotten it on purpose. Lives that begin in two places or more or are from no place. Stories that don’t meet up. Lives whose origins are an abundance of love and an abundance of desire, perhaps more than a man can satisfy. Lives for which I open two permanent parentheses in my heart. I open up for him too and invite him inside.

  When we embrace, a little question flashes through my mind: Why does his face grow red when our bodies touch? Why do men fear these moments, inviting the whole world’s worries into the room to come between us? All my questions disappear in a fleeting moment that accounts for an entire lifetime. A complete passion, which I once believed that I’d lost forever, takes its place. In the moment, I tell him “I feel like I’m traveling!” I close my eyes. “What’s happening between us is better than traveling,” he whispers, burying his face in my hair, then kissing my face and neck. Is what is happening to me now like when I first knew Georges? We don’t laugh like Georges and I did. Love then was a frivolous game we enjoyed. It was easy, light and painless. Now love means regaining a desire I believed had died long ago. This act isn’t free of nostalgia. But I don’t know why.

  He starts coming to my flat on Makhoul Street every night. The calm apartment transforms into a site of life and celebration. I’ve never known sex in my life like I experience it with Nour. He cooks for me while I sit in the small living room across from the kitchen and watch him search for the ingredients he needs. He’s calm and peaceful standing there. My heart beats with love for him. I love that man when he’s cooking for me. My desire for him is mixed with scent memories of the delicious spices that emanated from Nadia’s kitchen when I was small. Remembering my mother while a man cooks for me is a wonderful, pleasurable thing. This erases the masculine and feminine roles. Nothing remains between us and with us, except love and desire that is reignited every time it starts to wane. A thread suspended between the sighs of separation and sighs of coming together. A separation delineated only by the distance between two bodies and the time between two moments.

  I return to search for a place that I thought I’d lost. Is Nour also searching for a place for himself here? He tells me: I don’t belong to any place, not here and not there in that other country where I was raised. I wonder, where we do belong, then? Does belonging have prior conditions? Does moving from place to place, these lives of immigration, diffuse these conditions? Or does immigration not matter? Does belonging to a place give us stability, is instability the reason for our ever-present anxiety? Or is war the reason? Is…? Does…? That anxiety—not just now and not just since I left Beirut, or in Australia, or in Mombasa—follows me like a shadow. Before I left Lebanon I moved from here to there and from there to here. From the mountains to the city I left and then traced my steps back. I found Nahil reading the Hikmeh, or in front of the house throwing food to the birds. I found empty cages whose doors were always wide open. Whenever Abdo, who tended to my grandfather’s fields, found a colorful bird he put it in a cage to give it to Nahil, who would immediately take the bird out of the cage, put it on her open hand, hold it in front of her and let it fly away into the sky.

  I light a cigarette while still in bed. Nour tells me that he has allergies and can’t tolerate smoking in the bedroom, but he will just this one time. I don’t answer. I put out the cigarette and ask him if he would drive me the next day to visit Georges’ family. He makes some excuses but I repeat my request insistently. He finally agrees!

  Olga accompanies us on the visit to Georges’ mother. The war prevented us from building a life together in Australia, Georges and I. Georges’ mother is there waiting for me, his sister with her. She’s holds a cigarette as if it were the same one she was holding when I bade her farewell fifteen years ago. When she sees me, she cries. She tells me that she’s still waiting for him, that she feels close to death and has bequeathed the task of continuing to search for Georges to her daughter. “After the mother, only the sister can pursue this cause.” She chokes up as she says this. I cry, too. This moment helps me understand why I came to see her. She’s the only person who can allow me, just by seeing her, to finish my ongoing mourning.

  On the way back, Olga can’t stop talking. It’s like she wants to erase all trace of this visit. “The war is over… It’s over!” Olga sings, theatrically stretching her arms out of the window of Nour’s car, waving her hands outside. “Look at the streets, look at the traffic… All the hotel rooms are booked up!” I don’t know at that moment where Olga really is. Is she joking? Or is she making fun of the television channels that rejoice all day long that the war’s ended, even though still today men are missing and no one dares ask questions about them. I know that Olga is lying to herself and to us—that she doesn’t believe what she’s saying at all.

  “We’re not going to be afraid anymore, the war’s over,” she continues, pointing out that they took away all the sandbags used at checkpoints—there’s only one pile of sandbags left on the Jounieh Highway, near the Nahr al-Kalb Tunnel, and they say that they’ll “cleanse” the area soon. Yesterday, they “cleansed” the “Lebanese Forces” areas and arrested a number of them, I say to myself silently. Before this, a Phalange Party figure disappeared, and they said that the Syrian secret service apparatus had disappeared him. After that another man and another and all of this is happening in a time of peace. “The war is over,” I repeat what Olga said soundlessly. I look at her reproachfully, because she doesn’t want to see the truth, above all she wants to believe the lies she’s repeating. I motion to her to
be quiet. Olga quiets down but her words bring me back to a past I want to forget. So why do I blame Olga? I too want to remember the past without pain.

  Beirut is heavy with pain. But perhaps Olga is right, what use is memory? A wave from inside the sea should rise up and cleanse everything, wash away tales from the past… its stories, hatreds and resentment. For a moment I live the war as it was then, all that I lived through more than fifteen years before. As though it has been asleep in my body and needs only a little push to reawaken and float up to the surface of my memory. But I want to start over, to open my eyes one morning and see a sun that doesn’t remind me of any yesterday or any war.

  I return empty-handed to Beirut, where my loss began. That loss is all I have now.

  At a certain moment, near the museum, suddenly I ask Nour to stop the car. Many workers, rebuilding, renovations. I recall that this is where I was stopped at the checkpoint. Here! Yes, here! This is where I was stopped at a checkpoint before I left Lebanon. “Get out, you!” he yelled, pointing his machine gun at me. He was the one who stormed the supermarket and took the cartons of children’s milk right off the shelves and even out of pregnant women’s shopping carts. “Isn’t that him, Olga?” I ask her, pointing out the car window. “Look at him, wearing a shirt and tie and putting something on his belt, what is it? A gun?” “No, it’s not a gun, it’s a mobile phone,” Olga replies. “Isn’t he the same one who stopped a woman crossing the checkpoint between the museum and Barbir and took three bottles of water she was carrying with her to the West side during the Israeli siege and bombardment of West Beirut, when its water was cut off?

  “You sent me stories in the papers, news and pictures… everything. What’s happening? Have you forgotten?” I ask her, trying to blink back the tears in my eyes, “Yes, I’ve forgotten…” Olga replies, seeming bewildered.

  “I didn’t forget, I didn’t forget,” I repeat, while Nour just seems afraid of something he can’t express. He looks at me and strokes my thigh with the palm of his hand as though he understands what I’m saying.

  Olga jumps up from the backseat and holds onto my shoulders impatiently to quiet me down as though I were crazy and raving, “Enough, shut up! You weren’t here, I was. I lived the war and I have the right to forget. Three-quarters of the people who keep talking about memory weren’t here and didn’t see anything… Enough already! We want to forget. Let the people who want to forget, forget. It isn’t a crime to forget!” She says this while holding my shoulders tight as if she were afraid for me because of my words. Perhaps she’s afraid for herself. She lifts one of her hands from my shoulder and touches my face as though asking me to turn toward her because what she’s saying is very important and I need to hear it.

  She calms down a little, aware that what she said was hard for me to hear, “There’s no point to all this talk. Come on, let’s sing Asmahan, you still like her, I know you do!” I tell her that I haven’t listened to Asmahan since arriving in Beirut, I left her back in my house in Mombasa. Right then, it’s hard for me to remember any of her songs, as if I’ve completely erased her from my mind. Olga brings her face right up near my hair, puts an arm around my shoulders and whispers, “Of course you aren’t hearing her voice!” She regains her loud voice and rebukes me, “Is there anything else in your head to think about besides the war?” I look at her and think that it’s her right to scold me. I’m the one who enjoys good health, and she knows deep down that her health won’t allow her to live through another war or the peace to come after that war. But she fights desperately to defend a meek, sham peace.

  Saying that the war is over is like saying that her health is stable—they are two lies that help her to survive.

  Although the war has ended, we still hold on to so much hatred in order to live together. To live in peace. So much hatred for families to continue, for children to grow, for cities to rise and for countries to be built. We need so much hatred just to go on, and when we die no one will know us.

  They say the war is over!

  I’ll never find a place in the world where thoughts and words are as deceptive as they are in Beirut. But despite all this, I find myself implicated here.

  I remember what a journalist friend of Nour’s said to me when I met him a few days ago, “In Beirut, everything begins as a drama and transforms into a caricature.” Easy for a journalist to say, I think, and ask him, “Is everything happening now a caricature, then?”

  I start repeating what Olga is saying aloud, as though they’re my own words. The war’s over, we won’t be afraid anymore, they took away all the checkpoints, there’s only one sandbag left on the Nahr al-Kalb Highway. They say that they’ll “cleanse” the area soon. I think about what Olga says and what the journalist says. I tell myself that in any case, I won’t use this road much while I’m in Beirut. Perhaps I’ll take it on one more visit to Georges’ family before I head back to Kenya. But will I return to Kenya, to my house back in Mombasa?

  If only Georges had listened to me the day I left. If only he’d paid attention. If he’d agreed to travel with me… perhaps he’d still be here now, perhaps he’d have saved himself from being disappeared or murdered or tortured. Perhaps he’d have saved me from a long journey of waiting and a marriage I didn’t want from the very beginning. From years of doubt and waiting between Australia and Kenya. I wonder why I insisted that Nour accompany me on my trip today. Why did I ask him to come with me to visit Georges’ family? Is it because I want to bury the past with this visit or because I want Nour to share the past with me?

  I met Georges at university but our friendship was only born when we were working alongside Palestinians in the Fatah Party. He used to drive every day from his house in Sinn al-Fil to my house in Zuqaq al-Blat, and give me a ride to Shatila where we worked as hospital volunteers. This was when the crossings between the two Beiruts were still open. Later we met as lovers. We met then at Intisar and Malek’s house and after that in an apartment that Georges rented for us in the Arab University area near the hospital.

  I remember the day when we decided to move to a safer place. We were in Intisar’s room and neither of them—that is to say, Intisar and Malek—were home. I was naked and Georges was kneeling, kissing every part of my body, his hand gently stroking my breasts. Suddenly we heard the door open. It was Intisar’s sister, who lived with her, coming home from school. We used to remember that first time we met her and laugh about it together.

  We ate dinner at the house of a Danish woman who also worked as a hospital volunteer in the Shatila camp. After dinner there once I took off my shoes and left them in the middle of the room near the leg of the dining table. At the end of the night, Georges had to drive me home because the wine had made my head heavy. I asked him to help me get to the car and don’t remember what happened on the way. No doubt I fell asleep, since I do remember how he gently stroked my face and shoulders to wake me up, saying, “Myriam, Myriam, come on, we’re there.” When I didn’t answer, he asked jokingly, “Will you sleep at my place?” When I still didn’t answer, he said, openly and naughtily, “Will you sleep with me?”

  I woke up with all my faculties at that moment as though a bell had suddenly rung inside my head. When I got out of the car he slipped a piece of paper with his phone number on it into my hand, saying, “We’ve known each other for a while and we don’t call each other. I won’t call you first, even though I really want to see you again. I’ll leave it to you to take the initiative.” I was sleepy but awake enough to hear him and like what he said. I liked how simply he said what he wanted.

  The next time we met, he told me how my shoes had excited his imagination and a thousand poems that night! He said this laughingly, then stopped and added as though he were reading from a book, “Just seeing one of your shoes upside down turned my whole life upside down, from top to toe!” Rarely did we meet without recalling the memory of that evening. While kissing my body, he’d repeat, “I only had to see one of your shoes, left carelessly on the
bare tiles near the table, to imagine you in bed, naked. This was enough to make me desire you, to be aroused and imagine your naked legs clenched around my waist while I’m on top of you.”

  I started to believe that Georges couldn’t have sex without recalling that story. He brought fruit into bed before making love, fed me grapes, kissed me and put his tongue in my mouth to share the fruit. Sometimes, when in bed, I felt we were playing, like children, and that our bodies were finding their way to a pleasure without sin.

  Before I left for Australia, we made love early in the morning. This was the most pleasurable time for him.

  Relaxed and contented, I whispered to him after we’d finished making love: “I forgive you all your past sins and those which you have not yet committed, from now until five hundred years into the future.”

  He answered with a laugh, “Yes, yes, my Goddess, my Lord-ess.” I used my damp hand to wipe the juices of our lovemaking from between my legs, and told him, “This is the holy water, take it as a baptism.” I rubbed my hand on his face and forehead. I told him that rituals, no matter what religion you were raised in, are pure sex. For me, the best moments to make love are during prayer times, since there’s so much Sufi ritual in lovemaking.

  Georges found my comparison between making love and Sufism strange, and answered with a devilishness that I love, “There are too many holy prayers and rituals… one man alone cannot carry out all your wishes.” I said sarcastically, “Yes, there are more than you think, especially if you gather up all the sects in the world and add up all of their required prayers and rituals. For us here in Lebanon, my dear, this won’t be easy—it’s almost too many to calculate!”