I, The Divine

by Rabih Alameddine

  She told me the damn Israeliens killed all my two sons in 1967 and I feel so sad because of this and I cried for them many tears like river and she said my heart is kind because I cry for them now so long ago and I say I think of them all the time for so long now and maybe they have a better life now I hope and I pray. She told me about her family because she had three sons and a daughter and all are well and all married with there children to them and I said to her I am very young and not reddy for a great grandmother and we laughed hard as a rock and when she laughs all her whole body shakes and she have a good life and all her hopes have come true all the time you see.

  I asked her about her husband and she said he was a good man and he loves her and he from a good family and was a stoneworker and worked hard and he with the family in good and bad time and I ask her if he makes a problem when before she married and she said no problem and asked me why I ask her about a problem and I said did he know she not pure when he marries her. She looks sad and cry a lot and said he did know nothing because he is simple man and did not know anything about women. She surprised I remember all that but I was upset because she thinks I forget something like this because all the time I rememeber what happenned that day all the time never forget you see and how can she think I forget what my husband he did and I killed him because he did when I see him over her on top. what can I do? so I killed him and cut the throat and then cut my throat because after I cannot explain why I killed him because she will never have a husband if I say why and she was not pure you see. She said she know all the time and is smart because she knows and she says thank you to me and then she make me eat a big lunch with her and we talk to each other all the afternoon all the time and she cooks good like me and we change cooking recettes to cook better. Then she walks me to see her children one by one all of them and was realy wonderful but I did not see her husband because I want to go and come home before midnight but I say to her I come back soon all the time you see and I now feel I have family. This is secret between you and me don’t tell any personne about my car to Suida because I don’t know what to say to people how I went because I don want problems now. so you see you keep secret.

  Lamia

  Dear Janet,

  Very worse day today and you don’t believe what happen because Ramadan is over and everybody celebrate and have good time and celebrate and noisy and everybody fire fireworks all the time and noise all over and not sensitive for other people and no one thinks of anyone but them self. You know all the month there is one man that is a drummer and he wakes all the people for two in the morning all night and every night and he bangs his drum boom boom and shouts wake up wake up for everybody to wake up and eat before fasting in the morning but I do’n fast so why wake me? he calls all muslim to wake up but muslims have there party at cafes and dance and eat all night and not sleep until next day but he wakes me you see. The drum boy makes me crazy all the time so I throw potatos at him but I am not a bad person because I cook the pototos in microwave for one minute only so potato is not too hard on his head and I hit him with only one and I did not want to hurt him but want him stop banging the drum all the time and it was not raw potato. The shit drum boy come all the way to my home and complain to my husband about me hitting him on the head with a potato. He asked my husband why I do that and he is little man because he is very short and why are most bad people short don’t you think? Good thing Ashraf is not short at all. So my husband says a big sorry to the short drum boy and he says to him I have much stress in my life now but I don’t have much stress if he did not drum all the time every night now you see but my husband does not take my side anytime. All the time I am wrong to him and I hate him. Well Ramadan is now finis and now all the time for two days muezzins call there prayers on microphones for two mosks and one on one side of my house and one on other side of my house and they say sermons on microphones and each one is more loud than other one and its not right they do that but also the one church now microphone the bells ringing because the mosks are loud so the church has to be more loud. The two mosks hate them self and my husband says there is blood between them and we get noise in stereo now. Every one shut up now please but there is more noise all the time and firework and all wrong religion all the time and there is no quiet for me you see.

  And the shit drum boy comes to the house today and says he want money so please pay because he helps up for Ramadan and wakse people like the Koran says to do all the time. I could not believe he come and wants pay for waking me up don’t you think. But he is serious he wants pay because he thinks we are muslim and that is his job so my husband say okay he pays but I shout at my husband and then shout at him to get out my house now but he did not know anything so he stays in sofa all the time and is confuse him self and why do I shout at him like this so I go to kitchen and bring a knife and he scares and runs out the house but my husband runs second and says he is so sorry and I do not know why he does that all the time say sorry to people. Why say sorry because this drum boy is annoying and he wants money so we must pay? why you see? He is stupid not me.

  Only Love,

  Lamia

  Dear Mother,

  I should tell you I saw a play there is a week ago and it was realy strange and supposed to be alegorie of civil war and imperialism and people say the play must be banned but the goverment did not understand the play so no ban was given tonight at all. The play attacks the goverment like knife in butter but the goverment is stupid ad doesn’t understand. It is Very hard to say what the play is because it opens with a woman chorus screaming then men chorus screaming and all women wear things like vegetables but men wear things like animals and my husband says this if from a king of lions in new york but I know nothing about that. Then a chorus of people who all die during the war sing together We die, We die, But why we die. I shout because you sing realy bad so they say I need to leave because no one shouts in a theater you see but I say I didn’t know this but I go home anyway and it was better anyway because I made better tea for myself. Do you have theater like this in America?

  And I killed another patient today and I know you dont like it when I do this but I did it because it was okay and he is old now and a bad personne and he likes very much drugs and wants more morphine and I gave him more morphine but he wants more and more and more and again and again. His wife calls me all the time every half an hour to make sure he is okay all the time and I say donot call me all the time and I say if there is changes I call her but she calls me more and more and he calls me and buzz me and says what time is it and I tell him. Then there is five minutes and he calls again and says what time is it and I say I’am not a cleaning woman so stop calling now but he calls again and he says he has much pain and wants morphine and he says more morphine because he has more pain and I say I gave you morphine and he wants more you see. He says the morphine is bad and I say not my fault and he says morphine is not good anymore and I say it is good morphine and he say he going to die and I say okay but he says he tells my boss that I am the very worse nurse he ever sees. He is a baby and I say pain don’t kill anyone and stop calling please so he calls me and says I’am ugly and he asks for a pretty nurse. I want to give him so much morphine he flies to see god but then he is happy so I gave him potassium IV and thats better because who knows what happens with morphine. So he start shaken and has heart attach and bye bye blackbeard and he died. I feel good and I relax my shoulder. I know what your thinking now because I know you and you say I need more patience but realy I’am very patient and I don’t kill every first personne and I care for people and I am a good nurse and everybody says I am a good nurse only not the other nurses and doctors but I don’t bother people but people are rude because of the war and no one behaves much. All the rude people come to me because the nurses hate me and send me rude people and its not my fault. I know you understand and one day you will sit me and we will talk and I wil say why all this happens and you will understand and I know you love me but I want you to see everything and no
t sit in new york and worry about wrong and right you see. I do the best thing for people because I’am solve problem. Okay I have to go make food for the children because if I donot make food no one eats and they will go hungry all the time.

  Love,

  The Good daughter Lamia.

  One of my earliest memories is of the day of my father’s wedding. I remember crying, wanting to ride with him in the motorcade. I must have caused some confusion. After all, Druze tradition says nothing about a bridegroom’s offspring. His three girls stayed behind, waving our brief good-byes to all the men in the cars. They were leaving and bringing back a bride. I was carried by our nanny, Violet, and cried onto her shoulder as the blaring car horns became unbearable.

  Sometimes I wonder what it must have felt like for my stepmother. A girl is supposed to be ecstatic on her wedding day. According to tradition, getting married is what we live for. Hope your wedding day is soon, they say. To young girls even, barely ten years old. May we all celebrate your wedding day. What did it feel like for her, though? She waits at her father’s house, all dressed up in white. The men in her family all proud, happy, one less mouth to feed, one less honor to defend. All parade in front of her, congratulating her, sauntering away, getting drunk. All the men happy she is marrying a man of a higher station. Good things to happen for the family. The women ululate, the groom is a doctor. She sits with her back to the window, hears the cars honking, looks back to see the caravan approaching. The ululating grows louder. The men go out to greet the arrivals. A hundred men come out of the cars, some with machine guns. Shots are fired in the air. They scream, they shout, they hail the hero. The groom will be getting some tonight. The men have come to collect their prize. More men shouting, some come into the house. She stands. The strange man, the groom she has met only twice, smiles at her. She walks out with him. Her whole family follows. She rides in the first car with her husband. Her husband’s family follow, and her own family after them.

  How did she feel? I cannot begin to imagine.

  My father divorced my mother, an American, and repented. He decided to marry a woman according to the traditions of his forefathers. He found himself a much younger girl, not too pretty, not too ugly, never even looked at a man, who would look upon him as her god. A simple girl from a poor, uneducated, mountain family. A girl who had been to Beirut only once even though she lived less than half an hour away.

  She arrived home an outsider. She desperately tried to please the family, to belong, but we were already entrenched. We three girls saw her as a usurper, taking our mother’s place. My grandparents saw her as a usurper as well, from a lower-class family pretending to be part of ours. We criticized her cooking, we made fun of her dress. We laughed at her. Even my father did. I remember walking in on her crying in the kitchen. I have to admit I did not feel sorry for her. She was making burghul and had burnt the bottom. It was too late to make anything else because my father had to have his meal at one-thirty every day on the dot. She served the burghul, and for days my father and grandfather made jokes about her new method of cooking, smoking the meals.

  Slowly, methodically, she took control of the household, and of the family. She began instilling a discipline unheard of in our home. I rebelled.

  Before my stepmother arrived, my father used to teach us girls all kinds of curses, mostly pornographic swear words that would make grown men blush. Whenever his card-playing friends visited, he would trot us out and we would recite our teachings. All would laugh hysterically. In Lebanese, cursing is an art form; I was its Rembrandt. My stepmother was horrified when she heard us. She instilled a no-cursing rule. She took away my main attention-grabbing activity, my star-making vehicle. I saved my best curses for her and was severely punished. In later years, she would adopt a stray African gray parrot who would make my cursing sound amateurish in comparison, a feathered demon who would become in some ways her best friend.

  And Polo said: “The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

  —ITALO CALVINO, Invisible Cities

  Mustapha usually woke Saniya up early every morning by repeatedly poking her side with his fingers. He no longer slept much, getting up much earlier, their age difference causing irreconcilable sleep patterns. His daily finger poking annoyed her, which was why he continued to do it. Annoying her, a pleasant diversion when they first married, had become his only entertainment in old age, teasing and ribbing his only merriment. In the beginning, the jokes at her expense were constant, but as the marriage matured, there emerged a zone of respect he rarely breached. However, in his old age, the marriage turned full circle. Her husband believed they had reached a time in their marriage where they were one, no respect needed when one is with oneself.

  Mustapha did not poke her awake that morning because it was their anniversary. He lay close to her, face to face.

  “Good morning, darling,” he said in his most romantic voice.

  Saniya opened her eyes gently, noticing a strand of his white hair approaching her face. He surprised her by kissing her, a simple peck. She tried not to show her revulsion. She still loved him, yet she could not overcome her distaste of his smells. She realized he could do nothing about it. He bathed three times a day, which did nothing for his early morning aroma, musty, subtly tinged with putrefaction. A month earlier, she had opened the suitcase in which she had stored her wedding dress. Mustapha was on the bed. “That stinks,” he had said. The suitcase smelled exactly like he did in the morning, Saniya thought. She never mentioned anything, not then, not now, knowing fully well how preoccupied he was with age and the ensuing decay. They lay next to each other. His face was slightly asymmetrical, still handsome, not to him though. When he thought no one was looking, he would pull at his slack cheek muscles, staring in the mirror, trying to recapture a time when muscles behaved. His face close to her on the pillow, gravity skewing his cheek in an unnatural, slanting angle she found charming.

  “Who would’ve believed?” he asked. The timbre of his voice still deep, attractive, unchanged from the day she met him.

  “Happy anniversary, darling.”

  He smiled. She smiled. He got close to her and burped, taking her by surprise. She crinkled her nose. He laughed.

  She looked away, wishing the newly installed mosquito net was two singles as opposed to a double. He wanted a mosquito net even though there were no mosquitoes. He kept scratching imaginary bites until she relented. He had secretly hoped a mosquito net (such nets have all but disappeared long ago, even from mountain houses) would allow him to sleep like a little boy again.

  He rolled over, his pajama bottoms drooping, exposing unnecessary flesh, and got out of bed, energized, headed toward the bathroom. She stayed in bed, staring at the daisy-patterned wallpaper, hazy at first, the net acting as a scrim, clearing as her eyes adjusted. Three inches from the bottom, a peel in the wallpaper was exacerbated by Kooky, who had turned an unnoticeable tear into something that required attention. I must call to have it fixed today, she thought, just as she had every morning for the past three years. I have the extra rolls of wallpaper. I’ll tell Tariq to take care of it this afternoon. She closed her eyes for a minute. I should tell Tariq to get someone to wash the windows as well. They need to be cleaned.

  “I had another strange dream,” he said over the sound of the filling bathtub. He always shared his dreams in interminable detail. The sound of running water caused the inevitable pecking on the bedroom door. The pets had been banished from the bedroom when the mosquito net was installed. Alfie, the dog, and Trumpet, the cat, waited patiently for the d
oor to open, but Kooky began pecking as soon as he heard her husband running the bath. She pressed the maid’s buzzer.

  “You were in the dream,” he said, “only younger.”