Her boyfriend put these two options before her and told her that she had to make the decision that’s right for her so that she could arrive at the outcome she desires. But he cautioned her about the importance of thinking this over fully and carefully, weighing all the issues before making her final decision, because he, for his part, would not change his mind no matter what! Yana tried to make him reconsider but her efforts were fruitless.
“Case closed!” he told her. He then said, “Full stop!” and left the apartment.
After Yana had calmed down a little, she said that she didn’t believe a word of it—despite how rigid he was—and that she was sure he would change his mind sooner or later! She then added, with an affected gesture, lifting her finger in the air, “He’ll come crawling back to me! It’s merely a question of time, that’s all!”
“Shut up, sharmouta!” the parrot told her.
As for me, I said that I had to go back home because it had gotten late. But the moment I left her apartment I regretted it because I hadn’t told her about having seen her boyfriend before, thereby concealing an important piece of information from her! I promised myself that I’d tell her the next day, for sure, as soon as her appointment with the gynecologist was over.
But despite this I couldn’t relax, I kept thinking about it all night long and I didn’t fall asleep until it was nearly dawn and I had already heard the morning azaan.
A phone call from Yasmine woke me up after only a few hours of sleep. She told me that she would come and pick me up by car in a half hour, no more. She told me to get myself ready quickly—not to waste time like I usually do—because if I wasn’t ready when she got there, we’d be late for our doctor’s appointment.
“Our appointment?” I wanted to say, “It’s Yana’s appointment and hers alone!”
But she hung up before I could say anything, without even saying goodbye.
“A waste of time” is what Yasmine considers my long periods of standing in front of the mirror, examining myself—I do this every morning, as soon as I get out of bed. I am drawn to mirrors as metal is drawn to a magnet. The mirror is the most important thing in my room and I’ve hung it on the wall exactly opposite the window, thinking that then the mirror could reflect the world outside my window to me.
This outside world was no longer sea and sky, as it used to be, but one morning had been transformed into a gigantic billboard, rising up on the street facing our building and blocking my view. For years, this billboard had displayed nothing but Coca-Cola ads, so that every time I looked at my likeness in the mirror, a huge bottle of Coca-Cola—with its long neck, full chest, and high waistline—was reflected behind me.
Approximately every two months, a new advertisement appears on this billboard, but the last one—in which Yana herself appears—has not changed for about six months, because it has been such a huge success. I’ve seen Yana’s picture reflected in my mirror, behind my own reflection, every day for half of an entire year. Every day I see Yana standing next to a giant bottle of Coke and drinking from the smaller bottle she’s holding. She’s embracing the front of the bottle with her full, open lips, which are stained a vivid shade of red, her eyes closed, completely absorbed in what she is doing—as though drinking Coca-Cola were a divine pleasure, something completely separate from the concerns of this world.
At the bottom of the sign, giant letters spell out: Always Coca-Cola!
Today I also looked carefully at Yana’s picture reflected behind my own likeness, because the mirror beckoned to me, pulling me toward it. That beckoning was far more powerful than Yasmine’s directives about the need to hurry. Yana, as usual, was completely naked except for a red bikini, and I was facing her in my underwear.
As usual, I started inspecting my body, searching for flaws. I grabbed my breasts and pressed them close to each other and then I sucked in my belly and stood on my tiptoes to seem taller. Then I stood flat on my feet, turning around to see my rear end, which seemed really big to me, much bigger than I had hoped.
Disaster!
But the biggest disaster is the cellulite stuffed in it, which is hard for me to get rid of and gives the surface of my ass “orange-peel skin”! (This is what women’s magazines call skin that has cellulite, because cellulite causes zigzags on your skin that look like an orange peel.)
Despite my love of oranges, I have always hoped that my rear end would be as smooth as two firm apples, but I know very well that I won’t just wake up one morning to find it taut and tiny—voilà, it’s that simple, a free gift, gratis. Only effort and exertion, and then more effort and exertion, will make this happen! Fashion models’ asses have become mature fruit, only as a result of the enormous efforts that they put into them. If I want mine to look like theirs, I must work and work and work! I had adapted the exercises advised by the magazines to help smooth the skin of my two big oranges and I do them from time to time, when I feel that my bottom has started to exceed a reasonable girth.
So I squeezed my butt muscles until the two cheeks came together, as though I were holding a coin in between them and couldn’t let it fall. I took a deep breath and held it in my chest, keeping it in until I almost suffocated, then I relaxed the muscles of my bottom and the imaginary coin fell out from between its cheeks.
I repeated that same exercise until my rear end started cramping from so much squeezing and began to hurt; I considered this pain a good sign of the progress that I was making to realize my goal, because Yana always says to me in French: “Il faut souffrir pour être belle!”
Yana doesn’t have cellulite.
Yes, Yana has no cellulite. Her body is one hundred percent cellulite-free!
But her immunity to it won’t last long if she really is pregnant, because her body will swell up like a ripe watermelon and cellulite will strike her with the speed of a rocket. Even worse than this, though, is that it won’t be a temporary affliction, but the cellulite will cling to her rear end, hips, and thighs for a long time after she gives birth. Her beauty will be sucked out of her, as weeds suck up the rose’s share of water and nourishment, so that it wilts and its fragrance dissipates. Yana’s fragrance will dissipate and even vanish; it will become merely a fantasy from the past, which this surprise pregnancy will have put an end to! (Shame!)
Suddenly, I noticed that I’d wasted a lot of time looking in the mirror and that at any moment Yasmine would arrive and find me still in my underwear. This would make her crazy, because she hates to be late as much as she hates waiting; she won’t wait while I choose the right clothes and get dressed, she’ll drag me behind her to the clinic by my hair, as naked as I was the day God created me!
Actually, Yasmine did get really angry when she arrived, accompanied by Yana. After bursting into my room, she pointed at my underwear and said, “Is this what you’ve decided to go out in?” I didn’t answer and so she added even more angrily, “We have to get going right now!”
This anger propelled me to put my clothes on with a speed I had never previously experienced. After I finished, we left the house, got into Yasmine’s car and set off.
But our speedy exit was impeded soon after because we got stuck in a suffocating traffic jam on the Mazraa Corniche, where there was a huge amount of construction. This construction had divided the road into two sections: one part was transformed into a long ditch, which the construction workers were assiduously digging, the second part had remained intact and was reserved for the flow of traffic, but it was only wide enough for one car at a time. So one long queue of cars was lined up all the way down the road and advancing forward extremely slowly.
We entered this traffic jam because it was impossible to escape—all of the exits branching off of the main road were blocked by the construction, which had transformed the area into something of a desert, despite it being one of Beirut’s busiest streets. This is because the dreadfully dense clouds of dust kept increasing, almost completely obscuring our view, so that I felt as if we were all alone in the middle of a hu
ge dust storm.
In order to insulate ourselves from the dust, we were forced to close the windows, but this only made matters worse because the heat of the sun turned the car into an oven in which we were basically roasting like chickens. There was nothing to deliver us from this destiny because the car had no air conditioning. Despite this, we kept the windows closed because we preferred death by heat to death by choking on construction dust. This heat only increased with time so that I felt that I was no longer sitting in a seat but rather on a volcano about to erupt. In order to prevent this eruption, I tried to cool off my overheated body and reduce the inferno around me by undoing a button on my shirt, exposing a tiny bit of my chest.
At that very same moment, a group of young men mounted atop motorbikes passed close by us, moving through the tight spaces between the stopped cars like knights on horseback. One of them spotted us, broke off from his companions and stopped next to us, right on the side where I was sitting, pressing his face up against the window to stare at my unbuttoned shirt. Then he shook his head, saying to me loudly,
“Horse!”
Yasmine immediately opened her window and said, “Donkey!” Then she laughed, which made him mad. He went over to her, reaching as if to open her car door. But she was way ahead of him and opened the door herself, pushing it against him with all her strength, making him fall off of his motorbike, the door still open. He stood up, got back on his motorbike and rode away, disappearing into the dust. Basking in our admiration, Yasmine shut the car door saying, “He thinks that he can do whatever he pleases!”
She changed the subject and said, “If only we were riding on motorbikes like him, we wouldn’t have been late for our appointment!”
Next, she started enumerating the virtues of motorbikes as though she were promoting them in a commercial.
She said that they guarantee their drivers complete freedom of movement, especially on the streets of Beirut, which are always full of traffic jams. They also can get through anywhere, even narrow side streets and one-way streets, and they don’t consume much gas. In addition to this, on a motorbike you can also park anywhere on the side of the road, you don’t have to search for a parking spot as you do in a car. Then she said, “Enough! I’ve decided to replace my car with a motorbike!”
But Yasmine’s desire to leave the traffic behind made her forget one extremely important thing—that she is a young woman and young women do not ride motorbikes. I reminded her of this, adding, “Wake up and snap out of it, you’ve got to be dreaming!”
Yasmine didn’t snap out of it, though, and instead insisted that she wanted to buy a motorbike. As for me, I secretly wished that I had the courage to do something like that, because we were trapped within the sealed-up windows of this car like sardines. After a bit, when the traffic had completely stopped moving, Yasmine honked the horn violently and kept leaning on it until one of the other drivers shouted at her to stop, which she did.
With this, Yana turned on the radio—perhaps to make the time pass more quickly—and it exploded with a recently re-released song by Sabah, performed with a young singer on the cusp of fame. Yana liked this song a lot because it started, “Yana, yana, yana, yana.... I’d die for habibi.”
The first time she heard this opening line, she’d thought that it was a repetition of her name and was so happy! She said, “This song is the best evidence that my name is authentically Arabic!”
Yasmine responded that the expression “yana” that Sabah was singing was not a name but rather a word that the composer used to complete the song’s meter, but this didn’t make much of an impression on Yana, who kept on listening to the song with pretty much the same pleasure and joy.
The person who was really saddened that Sabah’s song had been re-released was my father, who told me that he had listened to the original song back in his heyday! He shook his head, adding with sorrow, “Oh, they’re lost in a haze, the olden days!”
He was remembering those halcyon times, the years of his youth and glory, which coincided, at least in part, with the years of Sabah’s youth and artistic glory. He sighed again and said, “Back then who would have expected that so much magnificence would simply fall apart, as if it were nothing, just to become some debris tossed back and forth in the winds of time? Who could have imagined that the Songbird would declare bankruptcy and find no other way to pay her debts than to re-record her old songs, sung together with a ‘new’ artist whose voice is nothing like Sabah’s—no more than kenafeh tastes like a hamburger!”
He then added that this young singer’s voice doesn’t emanate from her mouth, but her belly button! This last comment was a clear allusion to the phenomenon of singers willing to undress for success, which always really bothers my father, and many others as well.
His comment reminded me of a joke that I once heard about Sabah—that she’s had so many facelifts to make her skin wrinkle free that now her belly button also almost touches her mouth! When I told my father this joke, he didn’t laugh or even smile. Scowling at me, he said, “This generation, they don’t even marvel at marvels!”
Sabah’s wrinkles, or more precisely, her lack of wrinkles for someone her age, is one of the reasons Yana marvels at her. She considers Sabah, who of course she calls “Sabakh,” her ideal in this respect. She hopes that she will be able to preserve her own beauty as this singer has preserved hers and to look in as good condition when she reaches the same age. Today Yana repeated this to us again, saying, “I hope that I can preserve myself like she has!”
I replied, “Preserve yourself? Do you think that you’re some kind of canned good?” Yana didn’t respond and actually went silent for a bit. Then she changed the radio station to one that was playing a really popular song in English, which starts like this:
This is not Paris...
This is not London...
This is not New York...
This is... Beirut!
I said, “This song could become the new Lebanese national anthem!”
But Yana didn’t get the joke and as for Yasmine, she was pissed off and immediately turned off the radio, with an excess of nervous anger. Yana thanked her, saying she could feel a powerful headache coming on. Her pain persisted for the whole journey and lingered even after we had arrived in Achrafiyé and gone into the doctor’s office. We were an hour late for the appointment. But the secretary who greeted us didn’t comment on our lateness and just asked us to have a seat in the waiting room until the doctor was free to see us. “Go ahead, sit down and relax,” she said.
But relaxing was not my concern when I entered the waiting room. I was afraid that one of the women in there would know me. I didn’t relax even after I had verified that I didn’t recognize even one face, in fact I was intent on making it perfectly clear to all concerned—and unconcerned—parties that I had no personal connection to this clinic whatsoever, and that I was here because I was accompanying my girlfriend to her appointment. That’s it. Nothing else. In order to exculpate myself completely from any possible suspicions, I asked Yana in a voice loud enough for everyone in the room to hear, “Do you feel any better?”
But no one showed the least interest in either her or me; they were all absorbed in conversations with each other or engrossed in the magazines they were reading. Yana herself also picked up one of the magazines lying on the table in front of us, but just as quickly stopped reading it because all it contained was information about how to treat sterility and increase a woman’s fertility and chances of getting pregnant. She put it back, whispering to me with open annoyance, “It’s like these articles are mocking me, the woman who got pregnant by accident!”
Following up on this, I asked her if she’d changed her mind about keeping the baby, but she didn’t answer. Yasmine reminded her that her pregnancy was still only a possibility, of which she still wasn’t even sure. But that possibility turned into a reality when Yana went into the examination room, and after her exam the doctor announced, “Congratulations, Madame, you a
re in the second month of your pregnancy!”
He then added that she would give birth in seven months and about three or four weeks. Hesitantly, she asked him, “And if I decided not to give birth?” But the doctor explained to her that this would be dangerous and could lead to complications that might prevent her from getting pregnant again later.
So we left the clinic with two pieces of information: Yana’s pregnancy was definite and an abortion was impossible. Yasmine proposed that we could go to another doctor who might have a different opinion. But Yana replied, “I don’t want to go anywhere. Take me home.”
Yasmine deferred to her wishes and when we arrived at the Starbucks building, Yana got out of the car, refusing our offer to come up to her apartment with her, saying that she could manage this on her own. She added that she really needed to soul search and think deeply about a lot of things, so we left her to do as she wished. After Yana departed, I asked Yasmine to drop me off at my grandmother’s house in the Tallet al-Khayyat area, where the whole extended family was getting together for lunch as we always do after the prayers end on Friday.
The Friday prayers had already begun when we arrived at the entrance to the building where my grandmother lived and the nearby mosque’s loudspeakers were broadcasting the khutba for everyone to hear. I guessed that “American hegemony” was the topic of this sermon because the person delivering it repeated that expression over and over as I climbed the stairs to the fifth floor. It took me a long time to climb up the never-ending stairs—I felt as if I was climbing all the way up to the heavens and not just to my grandmother’s house. I silently cursed the electricity company that had decided to cut the current to this neighborhood the moment I arrived so that I couldn’t take the elevator.
When I finally reached the landing in front of the apartment I was panting from exhaustion and my shirt was damp under the arms with perspiration, producing an odor like a fishmonger’s shop at noon. I planned to wash as soon as I entered the house, but the women sitting on the living room floor detained me. I had to shake their hands, each woman one by one, and kiss each one three times on her cheeks, then ask each one about her health—even though I knew that the health of every single one of them was good and nothing was wrong with any of them! This process of delivering greetings lasted a long time because, as usual, there were a large number of women present. They successfully exploited their numbers to increase the productivity and speed of lunch preparation and had divided the discrete tasks involved amongst themselves.
Always Coca-Cola Page 4
