Other Lives (14 page)

Nahil sent Olga in with a tray of aphrodisiac foods: little dishes of mezzeh, raw meat and sweets. All the while she sat in the living room near the balcony and prayed, muttering words without a book.

Sometimes she prayed for Salama so that he'd be healed and get his right mind back. She prayed for Baha''s soul, Baha' whom she forcefully believes was born again in another place not far from her.

Sometimes she would open the Hikmeh and ask for God's forgiveness, saying that her many sins were the cause of Salama's misfortunes.

Nahil believes that her curses influence the destinies of people around her. That's what everyone around her believes, too. She prayed for Salama to conceive again, even though she believed that the curses she unleashed on Hamza in the past have done their job.

“May God deprive you of continuing your family name!” she told Hamza after learning that he'd betrayed her. She learned of his betrayal from his changed smell.

“What's her story? She curses your grandfather to deprive him of his family name, and then when it happens like she wanted it to—then she wants to marry your father off so he can have another son?” Olga said to me in a soft voice. She objected to Nahil's behavior, but her objections remained confined to whispers and head shaking, in disbelief.

Neither Nahil's prayers nor Salama's seclusion with the woman resulted in anything. It was no use. The woman didn't get pregnant and Nahil waited for a whole year, sighing continually and repeating to everyone who could hear the proverb that she's famous for, “Blessings on the family that produces sons to secure the future of their family home.” It's as if it took Baha''s death to make her suddenly realize that he was the sole heir and that his death meant the end of the family home forever.

Nahil isn't convinced that our family home doesn't have a male heir; she won't accept the fact that in the end I alone will inherit everything. Of course she knows that I haven't been blessed with a son from my marriage to Chris, and she doesn't know anything about the baby that was pulled out from inside me in Doctor Adam's clinic and thrown away before I left the country.

“My daughter, do you want the English to take our inheritance?” she asks me after I come back, when I'm trying to help Olga to get out of bed and walk a little, over to her wardrobe. By this, she means Chris and his children from his two previous marriages.

She says this while advising me to register the house in the name of male relatives on my father's side. This is the very same predicament Nahil found herself in. The fact that the male heir she desires does not exist means that nothing prevents me from inheriting what's mine.

She opens the drawers of her wardrobe and takes out a bronze key ring with five keys on it. She also takes out documents and property deeds. She gives them to me, saying with great sadness that the Zuqaq al-Blat house has become my property now, after Salama's madness and the death of Baha', the only male heir. She's still waiting for Salama to come back, when I tell her about his situation in Australia she says that I'm complicating matters and exaggerating his mental state. No doubt he'll be cured when he returns. Doctors here are better, she says, as soon as his feet touch the ground in the airport he'll feel better.

Nahil doesn't ask me what I'll do—if I even want this inheritance or if it means anything to me. Of course it doesn't cross her mind to bring me a man, as she did with my father, to marry him to me so that I could be blessed with a son to carry on the family name and family home. But this wouldn't happen even if I produced one thousand sons. My son won't carry my name. Indeed, my name will be lost to him from the very beginning, as I lost it myself after I married. Many years separate me from Nahil, of course, but in our two different times the issue of the name and the inheritance remains the same. A young woman still leaves her family home to go to her husband's home and family all alone, denuded of everything, even her name. Thus, you must pass on an inheritance to a male heir. The child must be a boy. A girl is useless, even one hundred girls. This is not only true today, but throughout time. Why is Nahil so concerned about a male heir? Isn't she a woman? How could a woman agree to her own burial when she's still alive?

Nahil's contradictory qualities perplex me, though I guard a giant love for her deep in my heart. Wasn't it she who taught all the girls in the village how to read and write, when she was a young woman teaching in the French girls' school? To achieve all her aims in this closed society, she came up with a clever strategy, in which it was easier for a father to say his daughter was dead than that she was learning how to read and write.

She opened a sewing school, though she'd never held a needle and thread in her life. She said that she wanted to teach the girls in the village about housekeeping and the domestic arts. At the time, being able to sew was one of the qualities that made a girl a sought-after bride. Nahil committed herself to sewing, convinced this was her calling, and asked to teach the girls for two hours a day in her parents' house. She devoted the big salon with its view of the main road to her sewing lessons.

The families went crazy when one day she asked the girls to bring chalkboards to write on. They visited Nahil's father in protest and asked him if she was teaching their daughters to read and write. Her father called her in to ask her and she entered the room and greeted the girls' families, inquiring after their crops and their relatives. She invited them to stay a little longer and offered them sweets she had prepared herself.

She told them that she was teaching their daughters the letters related to sewing, cutting garments, and housekeeping, only because these were necessary. As for the letters related to love and to rejecting customs and traditions, “That's monstrous—of course not!” She told them that she was like them and that, like them, she would never sanction educating their daughters!

She's a strong woman. Despite this strength, her husband Hamza managed to keep his relationship with a woman from Zahleh secret from her for more than thirty years. When Hamza died, Nahil forgot everything bad about him. She mourned him, cried over his corpse, and asked for forgiveness for him. The truth disappeared at the moment of his death. It's as if the truth had been erased; at that moment it became absent, as if it had never been. When I try to remind her of aspects of Hamza and his love stories that she did and didn't know, she starts repeating, “Oh, Abu Ibrahim… Oh, Abu Ibrahim, what's all this talk?” trying to get up from her chair, which each year seems bigger and bigger compared to her emaciated body.

That she has magic powers doesn't mean that she knew about Hamza's movements. He would tell her that he went to Soufar to store up ice to sell in the summer to merchants and passengers on the train between Beirut and Damascus who stop in the ‘Ayn Soufar station. After refrigerators became widespread, there was no more selling ice in Soufar; soon the train stopped running and the station disappeared. But Hamza kept on saying that he worked there and Nahil kept up the appearance of believing him. After his death, she found many letters among his papers, as well as verses and love poems that perhaps he had intended to send to the woman he loved. But this all remains in his leather suitcase, preserved with care in the wooden cupboard above the door. This life of his didn't prevent Nahil from going, after his death, to a photography studio to have color added to his photo before she hung it on the wall.

The day we left for Australia, Hamza's colored photograph was still hanging in the living room. By talking about him, Nahil keeps his presence in the house strong. Sometimes I think that she's making Hamza into a fairytale hero—a man everyone fears, especially my father. Nahil makes sure he's ever-present in the house; she always recounts stories about him and keeps his portrait hanging in the living room.

After his death, Nahil took the original black-and-white portrait to Harut, the photographer, near our house in Zuqaq al-Blat, and asked him to color it.

At first Harut was perplexed by Nahil's request. He told her that men never ask to change the color of their photographs, only women do. Nahil insisted, almost losing her patience, “Hamza entrusted it to me and died, how can you know what he would have wanted?” She took Hamza's small cloth wallet out of her bag and gave all the money in it to Harut, saying, “If you don't know how to color it, I'll take it to Vicken.” Vicken was the owner of a studio near AUB.

She didn't want Harut to choose only the colors he wanted for Hamza; she wanted all the colors. She stood in front of him with the picture in her hand and described the color of the shirt that Hamza was wearing in the portrait, the color of his trousers and his tarboush, though they all appeared to be the same color. She wanted to be sure of everything before she left the studio. Every time he made a colored photograph and took it from the black box behind the curtain, she would shake her head disapprovingly and ask him to redo it. Harut colored my grandfather's cheeks red, and his lips too, so he looked like a clown dressed up in a fighter's clothes. In black-and-white, the weapon Hamza bears looked frightening; in the new photo it looks like it's made of plastic, the kind of toy children use to play war.

The male line in our house ended with my brother's death. Nahil's repeated complaint was no use—she wanted more sons for my father, but my mother Nadia refused to have more than two children: my brother Baha' and me. She was afraid that another pregnancy would end in the baby's death and so she refused to have a big family. She has carried this fear with her from her own childhood; it's a fear she's been living out from the first time she gave birth and it predates even her marriage to Salama.

Nadia is the only survivor in a family whose mother bore more than five sons, each of whom died at birth. Every time my grandmother, Nadia's mother, gave birth, the baby died the moment he was born or a few days afterward. Not only did this mother suffer through the pains of pregnancy and childbirth, she then had to suffer the loss of her baby. This was enough to make her accept her husband's accusations that she had rolled over onto the baby while she was sleeping and killed it.

Nadia was the only one who lived, despite her soft, delicate constitution. When Nadia was a small child, they took her to a shaykh in the Biqaa who was meant to help her mother bring boys into the world who would survive. They took her first to visit the Prophet Job's shrine and fed her sweets and fruit. Then she got back in the car and was taken to a place near the house of the shaykh where he sat her in a big basket. The weather was cold and the basket had a long rope tied to it so it could be lowered into a dried-up well. Nadia was small and from the opening of the well she looked like a bundle of folded clothes forgotten in the basket.

When the basket reached the bottom of the well, the shaykh asked her to wish aloud for whatever she desired, and then, by God, all her wishes would come true. They had told her at home to ask for a brother and not to ask for toys or sweets or clothes. Everyone prepared her in advance to say the right words. “Ask for a brother, called Yusuf,” they told her, repeating it over and over again so that she'd memorize the name. The shaykh repeated his question, “What do you want?”

She couldn't speak. She couldn't answer, because she had started to think: What if she asked God to bring her a brother and then he died after he was born like the other baby brothers? What if her mother got pregnant again with another baby who was born and then died? And then another baby was born and died? She could see her mother's face, her mother's body rolling on the floor, moaning in pain. She could hear her crying. Suddenly she heard the shaykh's voice descending toward her from the opening of the well. When she didn't answer, the voice began to shout. She started to shiver, her teeth chattering from cold and fear. But she didn't ask for anything, she stayed silent. The shaykh yelled louder. At the time, it felt as if it was her father screaming down at her. They seemed to have the same voice. Suddenly she raised her voice— soft, weak and frightened—from the bottom of the well. Her words were like a wail. Hesitant and fearful, she asked for only one thing. She asked God to make her father die and free her mother from him. Then she lost herself in disjointed, strangulated sobs.

When my mother's only brother Yusuf was born, my maternal grandmother dressed him in little girls' clothes for four years. She said this was the only way to keep the evil eye far from him.

 

My grandmother Nahil has died. I went into her room one morning and thought she was still sleeping.

I go to see Nour three days after I lose my grandmother Nahil. I want to see him, to see his face and eyes, to know that everything's well with him. When I see him I relax. We walk together from his office to his house, a short distance that seems to take a lifetime.

When we arrive, he locks the door behind him. At that moment I understand the meaning of the expression “Your heart is shattering in your palm.” My heart plunges.

I don't know what to do when I enter. I pick up the jacket that I had put on the back of the sofa when I walked in and put it on. I do exactly the opposite of what is usually done. What we'd wear to go out, I put on as we enter. It's as if I'm hiding the passion bursting from inside me, preserving it, fearing it, pushing it back inside one more time—with my clothes. But as soon as I've put on the jacket I discover that nothing in the world, absolutely nothing, can keep my desire from escaping. I leave my arms around him. I leave my head, its sadness and desire, on his shoulders. I bury my face in the folds of his wine-colored sweater. I need to breathe in his scent. It enters my pores like an act of love. A force pushes me toward him. I forget my house in Kenya; I forget what brought me here to Lebanon; I forget everyone in the world. I want only him at this moment, powerfully. I want to be with him alone. The two of us alone together with the door locked behind us. I shut the door firmly. I leave the world outside.