An Unnecessary Woman (25 page)

By the time I was presentable enough to look up, my mother stood above me, looking more perplexed than angry, but only for an instant. When the balcony woman began cursing her and her parenting techniques, my mother unleashed a litany of imprecations so impressive that the woman turned red and speechless. The mute rude woman held on to the railing with a deathly grip, as if my mother had the power to blow her off the balcony. Below this balcony where the woman once reigned, an escutcheon depicting sheaves of wheat was carved into the stone, a make-believe crest that must have once been the same ocher color but had blackened, collecting the city’s soot and grime in its grooves.

My mother prodded me back onto the street, grasped my hand once more, and continued her march back home. She ignored me the rest of the way, but she mumbled to the sky, to herself. She didn’t hit me, she didn’t backhand the top of my head, but she was furious. She was a one-handed gesticulating fury on the go.

I’m unsure which of the two added the most fuel to her fire: that I embarrassed her, the woman thinking she was an imperfect mother, or that I interrupted her speedy stride, her husband thinking she was an imperfect wife. I remember being horrified throughout the return, my eyes glued to two spots on my left shoe, two wet spots on the cream-colored cloth, not the brown rubber. How would I explain to my mother?

I am marching back to my mother’s house. I can’t say the march is fully unconscious. I’d considered the idea this morning, but I hadn’t formulated a plan or made a firm decision. I’d been thinking about seeing my mother, and some muscle memory in my legs seems to have responded. My feet have been tortuously leading me with an uncertain pace in that general direction. As in many a fairy tale, I must end up there. Jung would have been unsurprised.

I’m not sharpening my knife, nor am I fluffing welcoming pillows. I should mention that I’m not fluffing pillows to kill her with either. I’m not planning anything. There will be no resolution, no epiphany; and most probably I won’t understand more than I do now. I guess I don’t want her skirl of terror to be my last memory of her. My intention—my goal—is simple.

I feel that I missed an opportunity at our last get-together, that I flubbed a pregnant moment. That was a pregnant moment, wasn’t it? Should I have said something to her?

“It’s me, Mamma, me.”

Should I have quoted Milton, what the daughter, Sin, says to her father, Satan: “
Hast thou forgot me then, and do I seem / Now in thine eye so foul?
”

Should I have slapped her?

Everything seems sharp, slick, and shiny after the rain. Some rust collects on the dead leaves of a tree that I can’t name. If she screams again when she sees me, I’ll kill her.

Instead of seeing her, I should go home and put Sebald away in the maid’s room.

I am proud that I finished the
Austerlitz
project. I consider it one of the best Holocaust novels. I have to say that much of what is being written about the Holocaust these days seems to be directed at the petite bourgeoisie. I find that when a subject has been heavily tilled, particularly something as horrifying as the Holocaust, anything new should force me to look with fresh eyes, to experience previously unexperienced feelings, to explore the hitherto unexplored. When I first read Primo Levi, my body shivered and spasmed at the oddest of moments for a week. I couldn’t read Borowski’s
This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
without clutching the edge of my desk. But then it took years, wading through mostly melodramatic books until I came across Kertész’s
Fateless
, to feel challenged once more.

Kertész, like Levi and Borowski, escaped the gas chambers of Auschwitz, and he’s the only one of the three who hasn’t killed himself—not yet, at least. In 1951, Tadeusz Borowski, all of twenty-eight years old, opened a gas valve and put his head in the oven. The Gestapo had arrested him, a non-Jew, for surreptitiously printing his poetry.

Anyone who says the pen is mightier than the sword has never come face-to-face with a gun.

Two of my favorite books are
The Emigrants
and Ota Pavel’s
How I Came to Know Fish
. What I love about them is that they deal with the Holocaust by looking at it indirectly; I don’t recall the word being mentioned in either. Both refuse to soil grief with sentimentalism, and so they are devastating.

Grief is difficult to approach directly and must be courted obliquely. Very few of us are able to write about a tragedy without getting lost in the refractions of blinding tears. It seems to me that we must heed Bushy’s advice in
Richard II,
and Slavoj Žižek’s for that matter, and look awry.

Does grief make us lose short wavelength cones as well, make us less able to distinguish the color blue?

I wonder whether Hannah, in her last year, gazed directly at her life and was overwhelmed. Could she have saved herself had she looked awry?

From Rilke’s
The Sonnets to Orpheus
:

Even the trees you planted as children

Long since grew too heavy, you could not sustain them.

The first time I saw Hannah was in my mother’s apartment. When my ex-husband’s family arrived to ask officially for my hand in marriage, she tagged along. I noticed her that day, though I didn’t notice much; I was two months shy of my sixteenth birthday, too involved in books, schoolwork, and delusions.

I admit here that before that day I hadn’t thought much of its possible consequences. I knew, was told, that this was a marriage proposal and my future husband’s family was visiting to measure me, to judge me, that I must comport myself with some dignity, but I hadn’t thought it through. I had no older sister who had gone through the procedure, no older cousins as models.

For example, I hadn’t realized that marriage meant I’d be taken out of school. If I had, I would have asked quite a few more questions in class. I was a moth forcibly peeled from its chrysalis to face the world’s harsh lights and frightening storms.

I didn’t understand what my options were. If I had, I would have paid more attention, would have asked more questions of the nitwit.

I would have shoved his pretentious pipe down his throat while he puffed it.

My ex-husband had the first virtue of Stendhal’s time, as Count Mosca explains to the delicious Duchess in
The Charterhouse of Parma
: “The first virtue of a young man today—that is, for the next fifty years perhaps, as long as we live in fear, and religion has regained its power—is to be incapable of enthusiasm and not to have much in the way of brains.”

That’s the fool I married, bless his rancid soul. In this case, you can also add, to lack implicitly a sense of either humor or honor; oh, and to be unable to earn an income, and to be content with his functional illiteracy, and to be a congenital coward. He was filled with virtues—overfilled, you might say.

When he and I were left alone to have a chat and get to know each other in the tiny living room, it took the impotent insect more than twenty minutes to have the courage to say anything (“You look nice”). Doused in uncomfortable silence, we sat there, our shifting eyes covering much ground but not meeting. I exaggerate little when I say that every conversation we ever had thereafter began with a silence that lasted a good twenty minutes.

Throughout our marriage, we would go for weeks without exchanging more than perfunctory communications, sharing little but the bewildered quiet.

And you think that I am lonely now? Heavens.

I wish I’d listened to Chekhov, or had read him then: “If you are afraid of loneliness, don’t marry.”

I’m not so self-centered as to believe that my marriage was the most horrific or that my ex-husband was the worst. He never laid a hand on me (he would have had to stand on a stepladder to do so) or caused me physical pain. I have come across worse men. I also know that my marriage was by no means unique, nor uniquely Beiruti. In the concise words of Madame du Deffand, who, like me, was married and almost immediately separated, “Feeling no love at all for one’s husband is a fairly widespread misfortune.”

But enough about him.

I noticed Hannah that day because of two things: she ate and she was happy. She devoured everything she was offered. My mother or I would bring out a tray of homemade sweets, chocolates, or candy-covered almonds, and she didn’t hesitate, blink, or demur. The other guests would pretend to consider whether they should take more, hem and haw before helping themselves, but not Hannah. She thanked us profusely for every offering before gobbling it down. When I said, “Please, take two,” she did.

My dear, dear Hannah.

Yes, and she was happy. She didn’t talk much, but she seemed elated to be included, almost as if she were the groom. If not for conventions, mores, and manners, she would probably have jumped across the room and given me a hug, welcoming the new bride into her world. She lavished my ex-husband’s family and mine with joy.

She was there for both the engagement and the evening that passed for my wedding. What endeared her to me was that two days after I moved into my apartment she was the first to pay me a visit. I say me, and not we, because my ex-husband hated her. She was oblivious to his loathing, and to tell the truth, she was mostly oblivious to him. Until her slip into the chasm at the end of her life, Hannah had an uncanny ability to simply ignore unpleasantness, and my ex-husband was nothing if not simply unpleasant. I don’t know when she concluded that he was irrelevant, but it was early on, long before I did. She mentioned him only twice in her journals: the first time, she likened him to a porter at the airport, which in my opinion was an extraordinarily apt description; the last was when he left me and she called him a dog, a “scruffy, mangy mongrel” to be exact.

When she first came to the apartment that day, I went into the kitchen to make her a cup of coffee and she followed. As I ground the beans, she bent her head and I felt her brow ripple my hair in a caress. “He’s such a cranky fellow, your little husband,” she whispered, “but don’t worry, I’ve known him since he was a child, and he’s harmless.” Her eyebrows, as was their wont whenever she thought she was being mischievous, flicked up and down a few times, begging for approval.

Of course she ended up teaching me how to brew a kettle of coffee, how many spoons of grounds, how much sugar, how much cardamom. We stumbled into friendship. She was the first person who wished to have me in her life, the first to choose me.

Hannah taught me many things. When I was married off, I was unprepared for life. Sometimes I think I’m still unprepared, but that’s a different proposition now. She taught me how to cook, though she wasn’t much better than I. How to knit, though I never cared to follow through on that. How to sew and how to mend buttons, which I grew quite adept at since losing buttons was a specialty of the impotent one. She slipped me books and magazines.

She also taught me how to pray, another discipline I didn’t keep up with. In the beginning I was too busy, what with housework, cooking, and educating myself. I had little time for a god who had little time for me. As I matured, I had no use for one. Emmanuel Lévinas suggested that God left in 1941. Mine left in 1975. And in 1978, and in 1982, and in 1990.

Hannah, on the other hand, was dumbfounded that neither I nor the impotent insect had a prayer rug (he was not so much religious as superstitious), and further so when she realized that my mother hadn’t sent one with me to my new matrimonial home (my mother didn’t have one either). She bought me the prayer rug that became the first thing my feet touch when I get out of bed.

Hannah wasn’t meticulous about her prayers. She did her best, but if she missed one or two a day, she took it in stride. She hardly ever performed the afternoon prayer since she arrived at the bookstore most days to help close, and then we’d walk home to my apartment together. Summer light or winter dark, she was there through the years, under umbrellas or beaming skies.

We’d chat as we muddled through the preparation and devouring of the evening meal. One of the images that I can’t forget is of Hannah licking her forefinger and picking crumbs off the tablecloth. She’d sit with me in my reading room, which wasn’t yet as packed with books as it is now, and like a newswire, she’d update me on the adventures of the families, hers and her fiancé’s, my ex-husband’s. Always knitting, she talked and talked while churning out sweaters for all the nieces and nephews of her two families—sweaters that helped her to be loved and to belong.

She visited me during working hours as well, although nowhere near as often, and there at the bookstore she wasn’t chatty. Whether I had customers or not, she sat on a white plastic chair in the corner, knitting soundlessly except for the rhythmic
click-clack
of the bamboo needles. Sometimes she would write in her journal, her pen scratching faintly in the quiet store. I would be reading at my desk, something she deemed part and parcel of my job, and considerate as she was, she kept me company but left me undisturbed. We were two solitudes benefiting from a grace that was continuously reinvigorated in each other’s presence, two solitudes who nourished each other.