Other Lives (12 page)

I wonder why houses aren't for temporary use, like lives are. When I was a child my grandmother used to tell me how my grandfather brought many large door lintels to the house, each decorated with words like talismans. He brought men to carve sentences on the columns, which rested above the doors horizontally, sentences that I couldn't understand back then.

He also built a big room and put a giant stone fireplace in one of its corners. Nahil says that once when I was a little girl and Hamza was sitting with some guests, proudly reading them the words that he'd had carved on the house's columns and walls, I went up to him to ask, “Why go to all this effort, jiddo? You'll die soon and the house will be all alone. Why didn't you build a house that's your same age and will die when you do?”

Nahil says that my grandfather Hamza was perplexed; he didn't respond but called her over to tell her what I'd said. Perhaps Hamza couldn't believe that I'd asked such a question. He constantly proclaimed that life required hard work and continual effort; to think otherwise would not to be tolerated. He inherited this work ethic from his mother, who attended an Anglican primary school in Damascus.

Salama was also raised like this, although he was a Druze, which at the end of the day isn't so different from Protestantism in terms of its work ethic. But he didn't replicate his father's passion for hard work. Indeed, his whole life, Hamza refused to support his projects and criticized him constantly to Nahil, “Your son, what use is he? He doesn't carry his own weight. He doesn't do anything.” Nahil intervened to defend her son, saying that he did work and struggled hard in his work. Hamza would shake his head, rejecting Nahil's claims, further alleging that nothing useful could ever come of Salama's work and repeating angrily, “He's a baker whose bread won't rise— no matter what he does, his bread won't rise.”

We build houses meant to last for centuries but we live in them for only a few years. We make things to last, perhaps only to forget our own impending death. Hamza never wanted to die. As Nahil used to say, he kept fighting right to the last moment of his life. He built and decorated the house to fight against death. Most people do the same, of course. Had Hamza been rich, perhaps he would have decorated his house in gold instead of stone, so that then his certain death would be more disturbing and resonate more loudly.

 

Nour takes me to the mountain house where Olga and Nahil live. I want him to spend the night, but he makes his excuses. He says that he's traveling the next morning to Amman and then, from there, to Baghdad. In the early evening I stretch out on the sofa in the sitting room and when I get up I realize that Olga's gone to sleep early. I've awoken from a strange dream. The next morning, I tell Olga about this dream. I dreamed of Nour, the man I met after I left Kenya, about Chris, my husband who waits for me in Mombasa, and about the late Georges, whom I haven't seen in more than sixteen years. I dream about these three while asleep in the sitting room. In the dream Georges put wood on the fire and told the other two the story of his life. I could see myself lying on the big sofa, listening, yawning, with a pleasant warm feeling—that these three men of mine were all friends and that I could love them all, each in his own way. I was no longer suffering because of the different experiences of love, the meaning and content of which varied with each man. In the dream I was warm and content; my whole life lay ahead of me, without interruption, like a wide-open plain that hides no secrets.

Leaning her head toward me with the warmth and collusion of a lover, Olga asks me about Nour. I tell her that he's just a friend.

“What? You're going to stay strong this time? Or will you get all romantic and stupid like you always do?” Olga says, “My darling, a woman has to be a whore to live with a man.” I don't answer, but struggle to recall some of Olga's failed romantic adventures, which I'd witnessed as a teenager. I realize that Olga isn't speaking to me but to herself. She's speaking to the young woman she once was and who couldn't choose the right man for her life. It's as if she's finally discovered what she should have done in the past and wants another chance. But the past is the past; we don't get to correct our mistakes. Olga's words come too late, like a woman who discovers birth control only after she's already turned fifty.

I believe that Olga is a desirable woman, and not only because I first learned love with Olga when I was just a teenager. But I see her life as an ongoing loss of faith in love. It took a long time for Olga to lose her faith that love could cause miracles.

I haven't seen Nour for a week. He's still in Amman. Sometimes I contemplate his perpetual travel and his ever-present worry. He uses his time to research, collect stories and transcribe old newspapers that he's found in the AUB library. He wants to know everything: the history of his family and their properties, which he believes are still there and still rightfully belong to his grandmother, his mother's mother.

 

Today is the twelfth of January, 1996. I've been here for five months. It was this exact same day sixteen years ago that we left Lebanon. Our voyage that day wasn't easy. We had to drive to Damascus and fly from there to London and then onto Australia. It was snowing and just before we reached Dhour al-Baidar, we had to wait for a long time until we could pass through because of snowstorms. The long journey was hard for Salama and for Nadia, who decided after Baha''s death to resign from life—to resign from all responsibility and even from speaking. She no longer cares about Salama, neither his madness nor his perpetual anxiety.

She would look at him and then turn toward me, as though to say, “Enough… I'm done! I can't take it any more, now it's your turn.” Nadia hadn't spoken since Baha' was killed. Perhaps she no longer had anything to say. Sometimes I believe that she decided to stop speaking; she came to this point through a conscious decision-making process and not as a result of shock. Perhaps the death of my brother made it easier simply to go silent. I know that my mother didn't love my father when they married; I know that her father forced her to marry Salama, after she'd been engaged to a man she loved. Nadia always thought that it was because she loved this man that her father forced her to leave him. I also know that Hamza had traveled to Hasbaya, my mother's village, to ask Nadia's father for her hand and that he had consented without Nadia's knowledge. A distant kinship between my mother and father's extended families meant they both took it for granted that this marriage would happen.

My grandmother Nahil says that Nadia fainted on her wedding night. That she fell ill from fear and because Salama wasn't patient with her. But the real reason that she passed out is that she couldn't be with the man she loved. She had to accept that the person on top of her on her wedding night was someone else—a man she didn't love; she didn't even like how he smelled. She had only seen this man a few times, but his smell alone was enough for her to recognize him. She came to know him from his scent. She knew when he was coming to visit her father before he crossed the threshold of the house, as if his scent had a voice she could hear from far away.

I only remember one sentence that the speaking Nadia used to repeat to us: she had only ever once loved one man and she lost this man on the day she married Salama.

Nadia was destroyed by Baha''s death. He was her son, so she died too. She died because she's no longer really alive. For me, the tragedy of Baha''s death is no more terrible than Nadia's silence. She remains silent while the kitten meows at her, wanting food. She goes into the kitchen to feed Pussycat, who walks behind her silently, as though they have a lasting understanding that her silence will never change.

My brother looked like my mother—his eyes, his skin color and the shape of his face were all like hers. He even inherited the big mole on his ear from her. His height and build, however, are like my father's. As for me, I inherited Nahil's face—her dark skin and her big, black eyes. I inherited my thin, well-proportioned build from my mother. Baha' was distinctly Nadia's son, as if he were a part of her body. My father, who never showed any emotion toward his son during his life, cried at his funeral and then went mad. Perhaps my father didn't lose his mind because of the shrapnel that pierced his skull and stayed lodged there, but because his son died before ever hearing one loving word from his father.

My silent mother. I see how silent she really is when my brother is killed. Should I have waited for my brother's death to protest against my mother's silence? Salama inherited the house from Hamza and if Baha' had lived he would have inherited it from Salama. Should I inherit Nadia's silence? Especially now when, with Baha''s death, I'll inherit the house? But how can a woman who didn't learn how to speak from another woman inherit a house? Only now do I know how much I resemble Nadia. I needed to embark on my journey in order to know this. I actually resemble Nadia quite a lot. I wasn't aware of this resemblance before, not when I was with Georges, nor with Chris, nor even with my British-Indian therapist. I see it only when I pick up pen and paper and start to write. I begin writing everything I've been silent about for years.

“I won't feel pain after today,” I wrote at the time. It's as if the pain inside me has been mummified. It's inescapable. It's like needing a lot of fresh air to live and trying to gulp it down because you can't survive with just thin gasps.

I call Nadia in Australia; I ask about Salama. She says a few words and then falls silent. When she starts speaking again, she speaks in English, a language she started to master only after arriving in Australia. She speaks for a long time. Her voice seems as though it's healed from a chronic illness. Here, cancer spreads through Olga's body, while there my mother's voice remains silent. Her original language is in exile. She now speaks only in another language.

Her effusive words on the phone make me think that my mother's silence was a cancer of the soul. Her silence is not silence so much as a fragmentation and failing of her original language. This is how I understand my mother's silence in Arabic. It's the silence of a fragmented, failing woman. I have dreamed about her a few times, and in my dreams she's a strong woman who takes on the world, riding a bicycle furiously down the open street. I remember this dream when I call her. It's as if my dream has become real.

She tells me about her work in Adelaide, about the new immigrants who are Baha''s age. She can finally speak of Baha'; she speaks of him in her new language. There's only hope and power in these words, no sadness. We cry together for the first time, my mother and I.

Hamza's words are tantamount to action; he writes on stone, carves words. I don't understand the sentences he engraves on the doors. Nadia doesn't understand them either. He says they're there to protect the house and family. He always repeats this to people at Thursday evening get-togethers. Writing makes Hamza even stronger than he was before. Words make my mother more silent. Perhaps this is why people believe that words are for men alone. Words and writing are for men, only men, women have no right to them.

Did Nadia's silence begin here—even before she was born? From the time that these sentences were carved in stone, never to be erased or disappear? Carved in Arabic, carved in stone, in the body. How can I destroy those words? How can I transform them, make them into my own writing, my mother's writing?

 

I find no one in the Zuqaq al-Blat neighborhood where our house is… I can't find anyone I used to know. Ankineh is no longer here, the Armenian woman whose house the fighters entered, beating her and her husband and stealing their rugs and artwork right before their eyes. At the time she didn't say anything, but simply let them plunder. Perhaps they'd satisfy themselves, as she said. “Jibreel's gang robbed my house and stole my rugs,” she said over and over again. After Jibreel's son was killed by a car bomb in Beirut, Ankineh would say, “Honestly, I don't rejoice at other people's misfortunes, but look what happened to his son.” Though the doorway was wide, they couldn't get the huge chandeliers out of the front door, so they took them out onto the balcony and threw them down from the second floor. Little pieces of crystal radiated everywhere like fragments of a shattered sun. One of the neighbors tried to stop them, saying that there's no use taking valuables if you're just going to throw them from the balcony and break them, then they won't be worth anything. In response, they picked him up and threw him off the balcony as well. The fall broke his leg.

The shopkeeper whose store was in the building where Ankineh used to live tells me that he's never heard of such a name, seeming amazed that there could be a woman named Ankineh. This shopkeeper is a child of the war; the list of names he knows is small and includes only names of those who belong to one sect, one religion.

Ankineh was a friend of my grandmother's and often went to visit her in the mountains, staying for weeks, especially during oppressive Beirut heat waves. “You didn't know how to do anything, we had to teach you,” Ankineh always said whenever she saw Olga preparing macaroons, the dessert she's famous for. “You only knew how to make bread!” Ankineh's memories were always vivid and present, despite her age.

Every time I sat with her, I asked her to tell me the story of how she came to Lebanon after the massacres that weighed so heavily on the lives of most Armenians in Turkey. She came to Lebanon in 1921 when the whole world was getting itself back in order after the end of the First World War. Ankineh came to Lebanon with her parents when she was five years old.