Other Lives

by Iman Humaydan

  Nahil’s contradictory qualities perplex me, though I guard a giant love for her deep in my heart. Wasn’t it she who taught all the girls in the village how to read and write, when she was a young woman teaching in the French girls’ school? To achieve all her aims in this closed society, she came up with a clever strategy, in which it was easier for a father to say his daughter was dead than that she was learning how to read and write.

  She opened a sewing school, though she’d never held a needle and thread in her life. She said that she wanted to teach the girls in the village about housekeeping and the domestic arts. At the time, being able to sew was one of the qualities that made a girl a sought-after bride. Nahil committed herself to sewing, convinced this was her calling, and asked to teach the girls for two hours a day in her parents’ house. She devoted the big salon with its view of the main road to her sewing lessons.

  The families went crazy when one day she asked the girls to bring chalkboards to write on. They visited Nahil’s father in protest and asked him if she was teaching their daughters to read and write. Her father called her in to ask her and she entered the room and greeted the girls’ families, inquiring after their crops and their relatives. She invited them to stay a little longer and offered them sweets she had prepared herself.

  She told them that she was teaching their daughters the letters related to sewing, cutting garments, and housekeeping, only because these were necessary. As for the letters related to love and to rejecting customs and traditions, “That’s monstrous—of course not!” She told them that she was like them and that, like them, she would never sanction educating their daughters!

  She’s a strong woman. Despite this strength, her husband Hamza managed to keep his relationship with a woman from Zahleh secret from her for more than thirty years. When Hamza died, Nahil forgot everything bad about him. She mourned him, cried over his corpse, and asked for forgiveness for him. The truth disappeared at the moment of his death. It’s as if the truth had been erased; at that moment it became absent, as if it had never been. When I try to remind her of aspects of Hamza and his love stories that she did and didn’t know, she starts repeating, “Oh, Abu Ibrahim… Oh, Abu Ibrahim, what’s all this talk?” trying to get up from her chair, which each year seems bigger and bigger compared to her emaciated body.

  That she has magic powers doesn’t mean that she knew about Hamza’s movements. He would tell her that he went to Soufar to store up ice to sell in the summer to merchants and passengers on the train between Beirut and Damascus who stop in the ‘Ayn Soufar station. After refrigerators became widespread, there was no more selling ice in Soufar; soon the train stopped running and the station disappeared. But Hamza kept on saying that he worked there and Nahil kept up the appearance of believing him. After his death, she found many letters among his papers, as well as verses and love poems that perhaps he had intended to send to the woman he loved. But this all remains in his leather suitcase, preserved with care in the wooden cupboard above the door. This life of his didn’t prevent Nahil from going, after his death, to a photography studio to have color added to his photo before she hung it on the wall.

  The day we left for Australia, Hamza’s colored photograph was still hanging in the living room. By talking about him, Nahil keeps his presence in the house strong. Sometimes I think that she’s making Hamza into a fairytale hero—a man everyone fears, especially my father. Nahil makes sure he’s ever-present in the house; she always recounts stories about him and keeps his portrait hanging in the living room.

  After his death, Nahil took the original black-and-white portrait to Harut, the photographer, near our house in Zuqaq al-Blat, and asked him to color it.

  At first Harut was perplexed by Nahil’s request. He told her that men never ask to change the color of their photographs, only women do. Nahil insisted, almost losing her patience, “Hamza entrusted it to me and died, how can you know what he would have wanted?” She took Hamza’s small cloth wallet out of her bag and gave all the money in it to Harut, saying, “If you don’t know how to color it, I’ll take it to Vicken.” Vicken was the owner of a studio near AUB.

  She didn’t want Harut to choose only the colors he wanted for Hamza; she wanted all the colors. She stood in front of him with the picture in her hand and described the color of the shirt that Hamza was wearing in the portrait, the color of his trousers and his tarboush, though they all appeared to be the same color. She wanted to be sure of everything before she left the studio. Every time he made a colored photograph and took it from the black box behind the curtain, she would shake her head disapprovingly and ask him to redo it. Harut colored my grandfather’s cheeks red, and his lips too, so he looked like a clown dressed up in a fighter’s clothes. In black-and-white, the weapon Hamza bears looked frightening; in the new photo it looks like it’s made of plastic, the kind of toy children use to play war.

  The male line in our house ended with my brother’s death. Nahil’s repeated complaint was no use—she wanted more sons for my father, but my mother Nadia refused to have more than two children: my brother Baha’ and me. She was afraid that another pregnancy would end in the baby’s death and so she refused to have a big family. She has carried this fear with her from her own childhood; it’s a fear she’s been living out from the first time she gave birth and it predates even her marriage to Salama.

  Nadia is the only survivor in a family whose mother bore more than five sons, each of whom died at birth. Every time my grandmother, Nadia’s mother, gave birth, the baby died the moment he was born or a few days afterward. Not only did this mother suffer through the pains of pregnancy and childbirth, she then had to suffer the loss of her baby. This was enough to make her accept her husband’s accusations that she had rolled over onto the baby while she was sleeping and killed it.

  Nadia was the only one who lived, despite her soft, delicate constitution. When Nadia was a small child, they took her to a shaykh in the Biqaa who was meant to help her mother bring boys into the world who would survive. They took her first to visit the Prophet Job’s shrine and fed her sweets and fruit. Then she got back in the car and was taken to a place near the house of the shaykh where he sat her in a big basket. The weather was cold and the basket had a long rope tied to it so it could be lowered into a dried-up well. Nadia was small and from the opening of the well she looked like a bundle of folded clothes forgotten in the basket.

  When the basket reached the bottom of the well, the shaykh asked her to wish aloud for whatever she desired, and then, by God, all her wishes would come true. They had told her at home to ask for a brother and not to ask for toys or sweets or clothes. Everyone prepared her in advance to say the right words. “Ask for a brother, called Yusuf,” they told her, repeating it over and over again so that she’d memorize the name. The shaykh repeated his question, “What do you want?”

  She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t answer, because she had started to think: What if she asked God to bring her a brother and then he died after he was born like the other baby brothers? What if her mother got pregnant again with another baby who was born and then died? And then another baby was born and died? She could see her mother’s face, her mother’s body rolling on the floor, moaning in pain. She could hear her crying. Suddenly she heard the shaykh’s voice descending toward her from the opening of the well. When she didn’t answer, the voice began to shout. She started to shiver, her teeth chattering from cold and fear. But she didn’t ask for anything, she stayed silent. The shaykh yelled louder. At the time, it felt as if it was her father screaming down at her. They seemed to have the same voice. Suddenly she raised her voice— soft, weak and frightened—from the bottom of the well. Her words were like a wail. Hesitant and fearful, she asked for only one thing. She asked God to make her father die and free her mother from him. Then she lost herself in disjointed, strangulated sobs.

  When my mother’s only brother Yusuf was born, my maternal grandmother dressed him in little girls’ clothes for four years. She
said this was the only way to keep the evil eye far from him.

  My grandmother Nahil has died. I went into her room one morning and thought she was still sleeping.

  I go to see Nour three days after I lose my grandmother Nahil. I want to see him, to see his face and eyes, to know that everything’s well with him. When I see him I relax. We walk together from his office to his house, a short distance that seems to take a lifetime.

  When we arrive, he locks the door behind him. At that moment I understand the meaning of the expression “Your heart is shattering in your palm.” My heart plunges.

  I don’t know what to do when I enter. I pick up the jacket that I had put on the back of the sofa when I walked in and put it on. I do exactly the opposite of what is usually done. What we’d wear to go out, I put on as we enter. It’s as if I’m hiding the passion bursting from inside me, preserving it, fearing it, pushing it back inside one more time—with my clothes. But as soon as I’ve put on the jacket I discover that nothing in the world, absolutely nothing, can keep my desire from escaping. I leave my arms around him. I leave my head, its sadness and desire, on his shoulders. I bury my face in the folds of his wine-colored sweater. I need to breathe in his scent. It enters my pores like an act of love. A force pushes me toward him. I forget my house in Kenya; I forget what brought me here to Lebanon; I forget everyone in the world. I want only him at this moment, powerfully. I want to be with him alone. The two of us alone together with the door locked behind us. I shut the door firmly. I leave the world outside.

  I come close to him. He is familiar and friendly. His scent—the scent and fragrance of his skin—penetrates my every pore. He says that he’s nervous and afraid. I don’t say anything. He says that with every human death a little bit of God dies, that love and death can’t encounter each other, that he doesn’t like making love at moments like these. I don’t understand what he’s trying to say. I know only one thing: that during Nahil’s burial, a passion and desire for him swept me away. A vague force pushed me toward him as though nothing within me could resist death except a moment of love with him. My hands journey across his body, to discover him through touch.

  He seems lost and anxious… His kisses were that way too, they slid from my face to my neck and my chest to my belly then my vulva. He’s quick and absentminded, his mouth doesn’t pause. I want him to come inside me, quickly. I feel that he’s bringing a deep pain out from inside me, a pain that resides there and has become part of my body. I hear myself moaning, my sighs increasing like the echo of a wounded animal in a forest. Then I start to cry. I couldn’t cry the day Nahil died. Only now can I cry for her. I start crying with Nour, who seems like a child, in how hard he’s trying to satisfy me.

  On the night before her death, Nahil called for Olga and asked her to help her take a shower. When Olga tried to put the shower off until morning, she got agitated and screamed at her. Olga bathed her and poured water infused by bay leaves on her damp hair and rosewater all over her body. When Olga wrapped her in a big towel, Nahil took her hand and asked her to help her get to her bed.

  The old woman seemed exhausted and couldn’t walk. When she got to her bed she seemed refreshed and asked Olga to sit near her. She took Olga’s hand, drew it to her again, then put it between her thighs, saying, “Look… it’s like I’m still a young woman.” When Olga tried to move away, Nahil pressed her hand and asked, “You’ve been with a man, of course?” Olga withdrew her hand and started to lift the towel off of her to help her put on her nightgown and said, impatient and exhausted because of her illness, “No!”

  “You haven’t experienced a man’s liquid?” Nahil asked.

  “No… It’s better this way,” Olga answered.

  “This was the first time she’d started to lose her mind.” This is what Olga told me, her face betraying an unspoken anxiety for Nahil.

  The next day, Nahil didn’t wake up. She was stretched out on her bed as though asleep.

  I see Olga fading away and I can’t say anything. I’m not ready for another loss. This is too much for one year.

  Shortly before my return to Lebanon, Intisar sent me a report from Olga’s doctor so I could show it to a British doctor who’s a friend of my husband’s. The doctor had told her that she should begin chemotherapy, but Olga refuses to submit to this kind of treatment. On the phone I asked Intisar to check up on Olga and see how she’s doing. I’ve never had the courage to bring up the subject of her cancer with her, as though bad news will get better, or less harsh, if it passes through other people’s mouths before it reaches me.

  It’s hard for her to accept her emaciation and the changes in her appearance. But the Olga that I know and love endures, as does her perpetual movement, its remnants overcoming her atrophying body and yellowing face.

  In my early adolescence, we slept in the same bed. She reached out to touch my body. She taught me pleasure. She kissed me on my mouth and then asked me to kiss her as she kissed me. In my first relationship with a boy, who was only a year older than me, I relied on the sexual knowledge that Olga had passed on to me. She was the one who supplied me with my first instructions. The discovery that men had different parts than Olga and I did was a surprise. We took off our underclothes before sleeping, as she’d learned to do in her convent boarding school, run by French-speaking Swiss nuns. Then she would tell me about her mad grandmother, who was a bad cook and boiled everything in salt water. She told me she’d never had herbs or spices until she moved in with Nahil after her grandmother’s death, when she hadn’t yet reached seven years of age.

  In bed, Olga repeated the story of her birth and the death of her mother Myriam, after whom I’d been named by my grandmother Nahil—even though my mother had chosen another name, Asmahan. Olga told the story of how her grandmother had raised her and how, when her grandmother was dying, she asked my grandmother Nahil to take her in, although the family disapproved of a Druze woman adopting a Christian girl. As was her habit, my stubborn grandmother didn’t listen to anyone. She took Olga in, Olga who had no parents, and sent her to the convent boarding school to study just like the other Christian girls in the area.

  The reason my grandmother agreed to care for Olga and educate her like her own daughter, despite the difference in age and sect between them, goes back to a story dating seven years before I was born, a story exactly the same age as Olga herself. While Myriam was at home giving birth to her daughter Olga, my father’s sister, who had been born with an incomplete, deformed heart, was struggling, taking her dying breaths in the hospital. My grandmother was in the hospital room beside her daughter, facing the doctor, who advised her to take her daughter home so she could die in her own bed, in peace among her family. The young woman lost consciousness and everyone thought that she had died, but a few moments later she awoke, saying that she’d just seen her mother giving birth to her not far from her family’s house. She saw herself as an infant trying to escape a narrow, dark tunnel. She saw herself for a few moments in the darkness of the womb.

  “Hurry up, make me beautiful, dress me, my mother’s giving birth to me! My mother’s giving birth to me, the cross around her neck is dripping sweat,” my young aunt said feebly. Then she stopped moving and fell silent. It wasn’t hard for anyone there to guess the identity of the girl born at the exact moment my aunt died. My aunt died while Myriam was giving birth to a little girl at home, beside her the midwife who had come especially from Aley to help her. Myriam herself died only one day after giving birth to her beautiful baby girl. They said that her placenta, which refused to come out, poisoned her. The baby carried her name from the moment of her birth. While she was losing consciousness, her mother called her Olga. Everyone who believes in the transmigration of souls believes that when my aunt died she was newly reborn.

  Olga cries every time incense is burned. When I ask her why she cries she tells me that the smell hurts her heart. She believes the smell pains her to the point of death and that Nahil told her how she discovered Hamza’s bet
rayal from the changed smell of his skin and breath whenever he came home after being away. Nahil told her that she knew about his betrayal from the beginning, but she chose never to bring up the issue with him. Every time he came back from seeing the other woman, she would ask him about his work selling ice. She told him that the trade in ice was a losing proposition and that he needed to change his business.

  The hospital waiting room is drowning in sick people and there’s only one empty seat, right beside an enormous ashtray filled with cigarette butts. I offer the seat to Olga and stand next to her, waiting for our turn. I know what the doctor will say. I know there’s no magic cure for Olga’s illness except in fairy tales. But I wait to hear what the doctor will say. I wait for him, looking past him at the x-ray he’s busy hanging on a transparent white board that emits light.

  “I haven’t visited Dhour al-Choueir for years,” Olga says with something like hope. “There’s an old hotel, an old house whose owners turned it into a hotel. Take me there. I want us to go there together on the weekend.”