The shopkeeper whose store was in the building where Ankineh used to live tells me that he’s never heard of such a name, seeming amazed that there could be a woman named Ankineh. This shopkeeper is a child of the war; the list of names he knows is small and includes only names of those who belong to one sect, one religion.
Ankineh was a friend of my grandmother’s and often went to visit her in the mountains, staying for weeks, especially during oppressive Beirut heat waves. “You didn’t know how to do anything, we had to teach you,” Ankineh always said whenever she saw Olga preparing macaroons, the dessert she’s famous for. “You only knew how to make bread!” Ankineh’s memories were always vivid and present, despite her age.
Every time I sat with her, I asked her to tell me the story of how she came to Lebanon after the massacres that weighed so heavily on the lives of most Armenians in Turkey. She came to Lebanon in 1921 when the whole world was getting itself back in order after the end of the First World War. Ankineh came to Lebanon with her parents when she was five years old.
Her family had wanted to make their way to Jerusalem because they had relatives there, but they stayed in Lebanon and became Lebanese. They left everything they had in Turkey. The Turkish army took everything they had carried with them when they left their house. Ankineh would always thank God that her father didn’t take his family to Jerusalem because many of the Armenians who were in Palestine in 1948, during the first Arab–Israeli war, took refuge in Lebanon, including Ankineh’s relatives, who came to live with them in their house. Few Armenians have stayed in Jerusalem—most have emigrated to America or Canada or are preparing to emigrate now.
The house in our neighborhood was the fifth house that Ankineh had lived in since she moved to Beirut. When she and her family first arrived in Lebanon they were settled near the big theater in the middle of Beirut. Then they moved to Corniche al-Mazraa, where her father opened a jewelry shop. Her father had worked as a jeweler in Konya, Turkey. When they left Turkey, he sewed the jewels into blankets and covered the children with them.
Ankineh’s mother had adopted two Armenian children who lost their families so that she could bring them on the train and then the boat without risking arrest by the Turkish army. The adoption happened as quickly as that. She told them, “I’m your mother. If anyone asks you who you are, that’s all you tell them.” When they arrived in Marsin by train to take the boat to Lattakia and then Beirut, the Turkish army forbade them to take their blankets with them. They were forced to leave everything behind, including the jewels still hidden in the blankets. Some Armenians first took refuge in Beirut and then emigrated, “Because Beirut is very small,” as Ankineh used to say. They preferred to move on to Chicago, New York or Montreal. “Beirut is very small,” Ankineh would repeat, turning her closed hand and then opening it, on her lips and in her eyes the trace of a smile lost somewhere between pride and pity. She meant that her closed fist represented Beirut’s size. The word “small” for her meant two things. First, that everyone here knows everyone so everyone sees her as a stranger, an immigrant, or “eemeegrant” as she pronounced it. Second, that Beirut wasn’t enough of a trade and manufacturing capital for Armenian businessmen. Born and raised in Istanbul, they were used to a cosmopolitan life that Beirut couldn’t offer, so they left for Western cities.
Perhaps Ankineh was one of the few who came to Lebanon after the massacres of Armenians in Turkey and stayed until the end of the twentieth century. She married an Armenian man sixteen years older than her and never had children. When she would tell the story of her flight from Turkey, she’d say that she heard that Istanbul, or “Constantinople” as she preferred to call it, burned ten times after she left. She believed that these fires were the work of God, vengeance on behalf of her and her family. “This my darling, is God’s wrath,” she would tell me in Armenian-accented, broken Arabic, but with great confidence—as if she’d completely mastered the Arabic language and didn’t need to explain anything.
In the building across the way are people whose names and faces I don’t know. They don’t know me either. The houses have changed on the inside and the outside. Only one woman, Yvette, remains on the second floor of the building across from our house, though her brother left for Canada a year after we emigrated. “We no longer have a place here,” Yvette used to say before I emigrated. When she sees me, she doesn’t repeat what she used to say about wanting to leave Lebanon. Instead, she opens her mouth, confused, “Mimo, my darling, it’s you! People leave and you… What did you come back for?!” She carries on, her smile a false reprimand, “Like someone who leaves on a pilgrimage just when everyone else is coming back!”
Behind the building, the orange and fig trees have dried up. Only one decrepit pomegranate tree is still standing. It’s leaning slightly against the wall of a building that’s marked with holes of many sizes. Yvette says that the young men in militias didn’t leave one green branch in the whole neighborhood. During ceasefires they discharged their weapons into the roots of trees, splitting them open like the bodies of human beings. When there were no more trees left, they started in on the walls around them and sometimes on whatever pedestrians they could see in East Beirut.
Where are these disappeared people that Yvette is talking about? Where are they? Why don’t they come out and say something? Why don’t they tell me what happened? Where are the people who disappeared, who’ve been disappeared? How were they killed, if they were killed? Where are the people who perpetrated all of the war’s massacres?
It’s as if the earth has swallowed them up. As if the earth has swallowed the witnesses, the evidence and the perpetrators. “They are all still here,” Yvette says, tormented. “But you won’t know who they are. They’ve become something else. They have new faces and we’re not allowed to remember or even remind them of their old faces.”
It is as if there’s no place here for someone who silently witnessed the death of Beirut. No place for someone fleeing from death in Beirut. No place for someone coming back to search for a lost memory. Beirut is a devastated threshold. How can I cross over it? How can I return when I’m constantly moving from one place to another?
Nour returns from Amman. It’s early evening and I’m lying down reading a book. I guess I’d dozed off because I glance up at the clock above the door before I hear the doorbell ring and get up out of bed. When I open the door I see him standing there, leaning against the wall as if he’s about to lose hope of ever seeing me again. He’s brought me the bags of Dead Sea salt that I’d asked for. He tells me that he’s calling off the search for his roots. He says this on the verge of tears. He seems defeated, having lost all hope of finding any members of his family who are still alive. No doubt he’s discovered that it’s dangerous to feel hope in Beirut and that his search is futile.
I’m still half asleep and feel troubled when we go out together. I wasn’t prepared for him to come by or even to see him just like that, all of a sudden. I’m not prepared to listen to his frustration about the journey to search for his roots, which at this precise moment means nothing to me. I didn’t even look in the mirror before I opened the door to him and only later realized how I must have looked when he first saw me. I have the feeling that he’s betrayed me with this visit, as though he’s forcibly entered a place intimate to me, one I don’t want him to enter. We walk along the sea in the Manara neighborhood. He starts talking and I don’t want to talk. Suddenly, as though to anger me, he tells me that I’ve inherited my mother’s silence. My mother, whom he’s never met in his life, whom he knows only from the stories I’ve told him. Then he asks me if I want to sit down at a nearby café, across the road from the Corniche, because it’s starting to rain.
Nour wants to spend the night with me. He doesn’t want to go home and spend the night alone after his discouraging visit to Amman. I give him a t-shirt to wear. It used to be Chris’s and I often wear it to sleep because it’s comfortable and its cotton is soft to the touch. It looks almost exactly the
same on him as it looks on Chris because they’re about the same size, though Nour is a little shorter. It doesn’t matter to me that he’s wearing a t-shirt that belongs to a man who even at this moment is still technically my husband. It all seems simple and self evident.
“I want to go back to my country,” he says, searching for a match to light my cigarette. He keeps repeating that he wants to go back to his country. The fool doesn’t know—he doesn’t know that I want to be his country.
Mere hours after he leaves my apartment I see him in the street and I don’t believe this is the same Nour, the Nour who was in bed with me all night. He’s walking sluggishly, with little confidence. He looks around him anxiously, a man who has lost hope. “Nour, hi!” I call out to him from the sidewalk on the other side of the street. He hears a voice but doesn’t see me at first. A few seconds pass before he notices me. Then he turns toward me, his face showing only slight surprise. From far away and with too big a smile on his face he shouts, “Oh hello! Is that you?” Then, as if he wants to make up for the inappropriate sentence he’s just uttered, one not suited to two people who just a few hours ago were in bed making love, he mouths to me silently, you are my love… He looks strange standing like that on the other side of the street.
I can’t see his shadow. Moments pass and I’m still searching for his shadow behind him.
It’s exactly midday. He is standing in front of me like the upright hands of a clock at midday. I think that everything we’ve done together in bed has brought us closer, that the sexual pleasure we shared brought us neither closer to God nor to hell. Perhaps we were somewhere between the two. The animal words we exchanged left behind an aggressive, thrilling heat. The effects of an action never end. Even now, I don’t know quite how to describe the moments between us. It’s as if what happens between us is a dream, something unreal. Moments that occur outside time can’t return to memory.
We exchange words, which the two sides of the street interrupt, as if we’re carrying something heavy between us and we don’t know where to take it. This heavy thing wants each of us to be done with it. At that moment a strange feeling surrounds me. I feel that his words may reflect what’s inside him, but they remain deep inside him. They stay inside and never come out into the open. These words are, “How heavy life is, how difficult life is to live.”
I haven’t found anything in Beirut, I think. I’ve found nothing but a companion on my journey of loss.
My brother was killed. Less than two years after his death we found a way to leave Lebanon. Many things happened between these two events. The first is that my grandmother Nahil tried to marry off her son Salama again. For the sake of the family name and inheritance and so that the house would “remain open and never be closed,” as she always used to say.
Nahil had to find a way to put this that would convince Nadia to let Salama marry again. To remarry, my father would have to first divorce my mother. In our religion—despite the fact that for marriage, theoretically, we follow the Hanafi school of law—a man cannot be married to more than one woman at a time.
Nadia offered no resistance. She didn’t leave the big house and return to her family’s house, which had been closed up since my only maternal uncle, Yusuf, left for Australia. It’s as if her husband’s remarriage was no more than a game to her.
While my grandmother was still talking, trying to convince Nadia of all the reasons that this plan of hers was necessary, Nadia indicated with her hand that none of this made any difference to her. Perhaps my mother no longer wanted anything or anyone. She had transformed into a box made of flesh, totally closed in on itself and content that way, with no needs or desires. All she did was sit all day long on my brother’s bed and stare at his many photographs.
She was satisfied by going back to the old books she had brought with her when she came to her new house after marrying my father. Salama and Nadia’s divorce never happened, since my father remarried as a Sunni Muslim. This all happened at the speed of light. Nahil was compelled to go along with this solution to the problem, despite her Druze faith, which caused a huge uproar in the extended family, especially among the men.
Nahil brought a woman in her thirties from Jordan, where most of my grandmother’s relatives have settled. She was a widow who had lost her husband in 1970 during the troubles between the Palestinian fedayeen and the Jordanian army. They were married the day the bride arrived because Nahil was afraid that the woman would change her mind when she met my father in person and saw how sick he was. She had to pay off everyone at the court that day to get it all over with quickly. That’s what she told Olga.
After the shaykh registered their marriage, she brought the bride back to the house, into the living room, holding her hand. She pointed to my father, who had entered the room before them and was standing and staring at the suitcase that his new wife had leaned against the sofa. She said, “Yellah, that’s your husband. We want a boy in nine months!”
Nadia watched all of this happen. No one from the extended family came to witness the registering of Salama’s marriage. Olga attended, as did the brother of the new wife, who accompanied her from Jordan, despite his obvious limp and leg pain, both of which made it necessary for him to remain seated.
None of the men of the family accepted what Nahil had done. They told her that she was “making decisions and doing whatever she wants” as though our family had no men in it.
They also said that Hamza never managed to discipline her, not even once, and maybe Salama went mad because of her, not because of the shrapnel in his head.
The women of the family said that this was a cursed day and that Nahil had sinned. They said that she shouldn’t defy God’s will—if our family had been destined to have a male heir who would carry on the family name, my brother wouldn’t have died.
But Nahil didn’t listen to any one of their opinions, that is to say she didn’t listen at all. Instead, she put the couple in the bedroom and locked the door. Not one of the men of the family dared hold Nahil accountable for what she’d done, fearing that she’d use her curses—which always come true—against them.
In the bedroom, Salama didn’t know what to do when this woman took off her clothes, pushed him onto the bed and rode him, saying, “Your mother wants a son and that’s what I’m here for. Let’s go!” The woman stayed with my father in the bedroom and no one saw them for three days, except in the minutes when they each used the bathroom.
Nahil sent Olga in with a tray of aphrodisiac foods: little dishes of mezzeh, raw meat and sweets. All the while she sat in the living room near the balcony and prayed, muttering words without a book.
Sometimes she prayed for Salama so that he’d be healed and get his right mind back. She prayed for Baha’’s soul, Baha’ whom she forcefully believes was born again in another place not far from her.
Sometimes she would open the Hikmeh and ask for God’s forgiveness, saying that her many sins were the cause of Salama’s misfortunes.
Nahil believes that her curses influence the destinies of people around her. That’s what everyone around her believes, too. She prayed for Salama to conceive again, even though she believed that the curses she unleashed on Hamza in the past have done their job.
“May God deprive you of continuing your family name!” she told Hamza after learning that he’d betrayed her. She learned of his betrayal from his changed smell.
“What’s her story? She curses your grandfather to deprive him of his family name, and then when it happens like she wanted it to—then she wants to marry your father off so he can have another son?” Olga said to me in a soft voice. She objected to Nahil’s behavior, but her objections remained confined to whispers and head shaking, in disbelief.
Neither Nahil’s prayers nor Salama’s seclusion with the woman resulted in anything. It was no use. The woman didn’t get pregnant and Nahil waited for a whole year, sighing continually and repeating to everyone who could hear the proverb that she’s famous for, “Blessings o
n the family that produces sons to secure the future of their family home.” It’s as if it took Baha’’s death to make her suddenly realize that he was the sole heir and that his death meant the end of the family home forever.
Nahil isn’t convinced that our family home doesn’t have a male heir; she won’t accept the fact that in the end I alone will inherit everything. Of course she knows that I haven’t been blessed with a son from my marriage to Chris, and she doesn’t know anything about the baby that was pulled out from inside me in Doctor Adam’s clinic and thrown away before I left the country.
“My daughter, do you want the English to take our inheritance?” she asks me after I come back, when I’m trying to help Olga to get out of bed and walk a little, over to her wardrobe. By this, she means Chris and his children from his two previous marriages.
She says this while advising me to register the house in the name of male relatives on my father’s side. This is the very same predicament Nahil found herself in. The fact that the male heir she desires does not exist means that nothing prevents me from inheriting what’s mine.
She opens the drawers of her wardrobe and takes out a bronze key ring with five keys on it. She also takes out documents and property deeds. She gives them to me, saying with great sadness that the Zuqaq al-Blat house has become my property now, after Salama’s madness and the death of Baha’, the only male heir. She’s still waiting for Salama to come back, when I tell her about his situation in Australia she says that I’m complicating matters and exaggerating his mental state. No doubt he’ll be cured when he returns. Doctors here are better, she says, as soon as his feet touch the ground in the airport he’ll feel better.
Nahil doesn’t ask me what I’ll do—if I even want this inheritance or if it means anything to me. Of course it doesn’t cross her mind to bring me a man, as she did with my father, to marry him to me so that I could be blessed with a son to carry on the family name and family home. But this wouldn’t happen even if I produced one thousand sons. My son won’t carry my name. Indeed, my name will be lost to him from the very beginning, as I lost it myself after I married. Many years separate me from Nahil, of course, but in our two different times the issue of the name and the inheritance remains the same. A young woman still leaves her family home to go to her husband’s home and family all alone, denuded of everything, even her name. Thus, you must pass on an inheritance to a male heir. The child must be a boy. A girl is useless, even one hundred girls. This is not only true today, but throughout time. Why is Nahil so concerned about a male heir? Isn’t she a woman? How could a woman agree to her own burial when she’s still alive?
Other Lives Page 10
