An Unnecessary Woman (17 page)

“I’ll bring the tray,” Hannah told her sister-in-law. “Just one minute.”

Maryam jumped up, horrified by her indiscretion and insensitivity. “Please forgive me, sister,” she said, “I wasn’t paying attention. I am shamed. Let me relieve you, please. I will take all.”

“There is no need for forgiveness,” Hannah said. “None.”

Both girls took the cups to the kitchen.

Let me take a brief detour, very brief. Ticktock.

Pundits these days keep jabbering and hooting about the Internet being the greatest advancement. Web this, web that, and let the resident spider suck the life out of you. Being connected to the world doesn’t appeal to me.

As someone living alone, as an aging woman, the technological discovery I love most is the electric clock, though with Beirut’s electricity, I should say the battery-operated clock. Do you have any idea how much anxiety those old clocks induced? Ticktock, you’re all alone in an empty apartment. Ticktock, the world outside is going to come and get you. Ticktock, you’re not getting any younger, are you? Give me a tranquilizer, please.

The ticktock tattooing of the march of time.

The ticktock of the tiny object full of gears suffocating all existence, wringing life out of life.

After that wonderful discovery, the clock’s hands still turned in the same direction—it’s called clockwise, for all you youngsters—time still marched forward, but miraculously, its heartbeat, its ominous announcement, was reduced to a meek buzz.

Hannah was being truthful when she told her sister-in-law that there was no need for forgiveness. She didn’t hold the incident against her. It was inconsequential, Hannah believed, a minor faux pas. It wasn’t as if the insult was intended. Maryam felt so guilty that she tried to appease Hannah. As a matter of fact, the two women lived harmoniously in the same household until Hannah died, and to this day Maryam is the one who brings fresh flowers to Hannah’s gravesite every week, placing them exactly two hands’ width in front of the tombstone.

The writing in the journals changed, though. For a while after the incident the sentences shrank. The entries grew terse and irritated—jerky, jittery jottings, even when she wrote about the meals she had.

Toward the second half of 1944, with her nascent and hopeful nation living through its first year of independence, Hannah decided that she would not remain at home all the time.

What could a young middle-class woman of her day do? One who was educated, fluent in two languages, Arabic and French, and “how do you do?” familiar with a third, English? One who had loved and excelled in philosophy in high school?

Not much.

To begin with, her father, as was to be expected, was opposed to his daughter working, opposed to her generating any kind of income. He was a good man. She adored him. His obstructionism was of its time.

She talked to him, pleaded and persuaded, until he relented on his first objection but not on his second. He gave her permission to work, but not to generate income. No girl of his was going to be allowed to ruin her reputation. She could help him at his grocery store. Hannah was ecstatic.

She began on a Monday morning and for three days she wrote of how much she enjoyed working. She did everything, from stacking to cleaning to helping customers to handling money. Her diary entries were longer, more florid, more detailed, and joyous. Her father was doubly ecstatic, for not only was he able to make his beloved daughter happy, but he began to notice that the women of the neighborhood were staying longer in the store and buying more. His daughter wasn’t the most talkative of people, but women certainly talked to her more than they did to him or to his two sons who shared the work. Hannah was beginning to shed her shy skin. For a brief time she was the belle of the grocery store.

Three days, the perfection lasted three days. On Wednesday evening, at dinner, listening to her husband laud Hannah’s salutary presence at the grocery store, Hannah’s mother wondered if she too could help. After all, her children were grown, her household duties had long ago shrunk. Why not? All thought it was a grand idea, even the sons, and it most certainly was.

Father, mother, and child opened the store on Thursday morning. They worked together happily, and the business did well. It was a small store, though, and there wasn’t enough work to go around. They shared, and since the income wasn’t divided any differently, they managed. Everyone seemed content, though the situation was not as perfect as it had been in the first three days since she had less to do.

But as Hannah, a devout Muslim if there ever was one, always said, “God does provide.”

One day about two weeks into her foray at the store, Hannah was standing around with nothing to do when a customer suggested that she volunteer her time where she would be most needed, the local hospital. Hannah thought it was a grand idea, her mother thought it was a grand idea, her father consented. For the next two months, until the day she met the lieutenant, Hannah was a hospital volunteer who never took any time off and worked as many hours as she was allowed.

Where would a hospital place a young middle-class woman who was educated, who was fluent in two languages and familiar with a third, who had loved and excelled in philosophy at school?

In the cafeteria, of course, serving food. Would you like a gloomy Wittgenstein with your rice, or a bitter Schopenhauer? A cup of Hegelian metaphors, perhaps?

Wearing a yellow front-buttoned uniform, a hairnet, a white bobby-pinned paper cap, beige tights, and low white patent leather heels, she waited for the doctors, nurses, and visitors to decide which of the stews they wished to eat that day before she ladled the choice onto a plate. Potato stew, plop, gone, next, cauliflower stew, plop, gone, next, lima beans, plop, gone, next, three hours a day. No one paid any attention to her.

She loved it.

Although by then her childish hunger had been somewhat sated, she also still loved to eat. She didn’t write about it in her diary, but I can guarantee you that she partook more than just a little from every course she served. There we had an eater at an eatery.

She was happy, her mother was happy, her father was happy.

In the morning she put on her uniform—a uniform radiant with a supernatural cleanliness—went to work, and returned home after lunch still in that yellow getup.

How did she get to and from work? Therein lies the story.

Beirut at the time had a modest tram system, which of course disappeared when the city decided to modernize itself in the sixties and seventies. One line used to stop only two buildings away from her hospital. Unfortunately for Hannah, the line didn’t reach her house. She would have had to walk for ten minutes to reach the tram stop, something she wouldn’t do because she was much too self-conscious of her limp.

Beirut has another system for transporting its residents, a nonpublic one that has been around as long as the automobile. Beirutis call it a
service
(pronounced as in French, not English). It is an organic jitney system. Customers stand at the side of the road, service cars slow down as they approach, the customer tells the driver where he wishes to go, and the driver decides whether to pick him up. For one cheap fare, you can go anywhere in the city as long as it’s along the driver’s route. Most cars can fit five passengers, two in front next to the driver, three in back.

In 1944 anyone with a car could pick up passengers, but sometime in the fifties you had to get a special license plate, a red one, to be able to do so.

In 1944 no respectable woman used a service. You had no idea who would share the car with you, or, worse, whether the driver would say something inappropriate. A respectable woman avoided a service. Hannah didn’t.

The choice between being seen walking or being seen taking a service was a straightforward one. She always chose the latter, but she paid a double fare so she wouldn’t have to sit next to a stranger. She wouldn’t sit in front next to the driver. She sat in back and bought two places so that only one person could share the seat with her and would sit at the other window. She considered this a chaste and appropriate solution.

Her system worked. For two months she didn’t have a single problem, not one. She girded herself against snide or salacious remarks from one of the drivers or passengers, but none was forthcoming. Beirutis, it seemed, were gentlemen, at least around her. She thought the crisp yellow hospital uniform and particularly the paper cap had a lot to do with the respect she received. Every morning she left home and waited briefly on the curb for the appropriate service. She wouldn’t take a car that had more than one passenger in back. She arrived at the hospital not twenty minutes later. It was easy.

She had her first problem on November 21, 1944, a day she would consider the happiest of her life, the most felicitous.

God does provide.

It was the day before the country was to celebrate its first year of independence. Everyone seemed to be preparing for this joyous occasion. From their various inessential assignments around the country, soldiers poured into the city to prepare for a parade of grand pretensions.

Hannah had finished serving lunch and was returning home. The jitney that slowed down for her had two passengers in front and none in the back. Before entering the car, she made sure to tell the driver, a man advanced in age, with carefully trimmed white hair and mustache, that she was buying two seats. Not twenty meters ahead, my ex-husband’s eldest brother, the lieutenant himself, joined her in the backseat, delivered to her by the iron chains of circumstance.

Providence! Destiny!

A man, just the right age, with carefully trimmed black hair and mustache; a handsome man wearing the national gray uniform—a uniform radiant with a supernatural cleanliness mirroring hers, a cap atop his head—sat next to her, less than a meter away. A man right out of her journals, out of her fantasies, a tenant of her dreams, shared the same car, shared her world.

The driver, impressed by having a Lebanese soldier in his car and by his own percolating patriotism, tried to chat up the newcomer, but received little in response. Hannah’s lieutenant was just as shy as she was.

She blushed, as if she had just dipped into a tub of hot water, her skin turning tingly and red, the color of her hair. She couldn’t help herself. She stared out her window but looked awry through the corner of her eye, trying to examine her possible future husband. She was sure he could hear the clamor of her insatiable heart. She tried to slow her breathing.

He was ever so quiet.

They’d been in the car together for only eight minutes when her panic erupted.

The car slowed for another soldier standing on the curb. She heard herself utter the word
no
, quite loudly. The service had four passengers already. This soldier would force her lieutenant next to her, into the seat she had paid for. “No,” she said, before the driver could pick up the extra passenger.

The driver was genuinely polite at first, but sitting behind him, Hannah noticed that his hair wasn’t carefully trimmed at all. A confetti of dandruff and a sprinkling of macassar oil held it together. “That won’t be a problem, madam,” he said, “I’ll return the price of one fare.”

“No,” she said. “No.” Her voice was louder and shriller than she would have wished. She wanted to insist that she had paid for two, insist once more and again. She wanted to explain that she had no wish to be squeezed next to a man, particularly this most endearing lieutenant, but her heart beat loudly, her lungs shrank like a deflated balloon, and she experienced verbal paralysis. The only word she could say was
no
.

“He’s a soldier,” the driver insisted. “We can’t leave him standing on the side of the road. He’s a Lebanese soldier.”

“No,” she said. “No.”

The passengers in front glared at her with infinite disapproval. Incensed, the driver huffed like a fish out of water, lips pursed, cheeks puffed. “We must honor our soldiers,” he said.

It was at this point that her knight came to the rescue and picked up her white handkerchief. “He can take another car,” the lieutenant said, “since this one is obviously full.”

Like most of us on many an occasion, he had vastly overestimated the power of reason. That sentence was the only one the chivalrous lieutenant was allowed to speak. The seething driver—the hottest smoke of Hell leaked out of his ears, the vilest words exploded out of his mouth—kicked both Hannah and the lieutenant out of his car, although he returned her double fare.

The princess and her knight, slightly shell-shocked, watched as their carriage sped away with the other soldier, leaving them behind in a fog of gray exhaust.

“I am sorry,” said the lieutenant. “I probably made a minor matter worse.”

“No,” replied the princess, neither loud nor shrill, thankfully.

She wished to explain how much she appreciated his standing up for her, how helpless she’d felt before he intervened, how grateful she was, how long she’d waited for a man to come into her life, how happy she could make him and, most important, what a good wife she’d be.

“We can take another car,” he said.

It was the use of that pronoun that sealed his fate. I can tell you that from the day she met him until the day he died, Hannah, in her journal entries, used the first person plural about five times as much as the singular.