Other Lives (15 page)

I come close to him. He is familiar and friendly. His scent—the scent and fragrance of his skin—penetrates my every pore. He says that he's nervous and afraid. I don't say anything. He says that with every human death a little bit of God dies, that love and death can't encounter each other, that he doesn't like making love at moments like these. I don't understand what he's trying to say. I know only one thing: that during Nahil's burial, a passion and desire for him swept me away. A vague force pushed me toward him as though nothing within me could resist death except a moment of love with him. My hands journey across his body, to discover him through touch.

He seems lost and anxious… His kisses were that way too, they slid from my face to my neck and my chest to my belly then my vulva. He's quick and absentminded, his mouth doesn't pause. I want him to come inside me, quickly. I feel that he's bringing a deep pain out from inside me, a pain that resides there and has become part of my body. I hear myself moaning, my sighs increasing like the echo of a wounded animal in a forest. Then I start to cry. I couldn't cry the day Nahil died. Only now can I cry for her. I start crying with Nour, who seems like a child, in how hard he's trying to satisfy me.

 

On the night before her death, Nahil called for Olga and asked her to help her take a shower. When Olga tried to put the shower off until morning, she got agitated and screamed at her. Olga bathed her and poured water infused by bay leaves on her damp hair and rosewater all over her body. When Olga wrapped her in a big towel, Nahil took her hand and asked her to help her get to her bed.

The old woman seemed exhausted and couldn't walk. When she got to her bed she seemed refreshed and asked Olga to sit near her. She took Olga's hand, drew it to her again, then put it between her thighs, saying, “Look… it's like I'm still a young woman.” When Olga tried to move away, Nahil pressed her hand and asked, “You've been with a man, of course?” Olga withdrew her hand and started to lift the towel off of her to help her put on her nightgown and said, impatient and exhausted because of her illness, “No!”

“You haven't experienced a man's liquid?” Nahil asked.

“No… It's better this way,” Olga answered.

“This was the first time she'd started to lose her mind.” This is what Olga told me, her face betraying an unspoken anxiety for Nahil.

The next day, Nahil didn't wake up. She was stretched out on her bed as though asleep.

 

I see Olga fading away and I can't say anything. I'm not ready for another loss. This is too much for one year.

Shortly before my return to Lebanon, Intisar sent me a report from Olga's doctor so I could show it to a British doctor who's a friend of my husband's. The doctor had told her that she should begin chemotherapy, but Olga refuses to submit to this kind of treatment. On the phone I asked Intisar to check up on Olga and see how she's doing. I've never had the courage to bring up the subject of her cancer with her, as though bad news will get better, or less harsh, if it passes through other people's mouths before it reaches me.

It's hard for her to accept her emaciation and the changes in her appearance. But the Olga that I know and love endures, as does her perpetual movement, its remnants overcoming her atrophying body and yellowing face.

In my early adolescence, we slept in the same bed. She reached out to touch my body. She taught me pleasure. She kissed me on my mouth and then asked me to kiss her as she kissed me. In my first relationship with a boy, who was only a year older than me, I relied on the sexual knowledge that Olga had passed on to me. She was the one who supplied me with my first instructions. The discovery that men had different parts than Olga and I did was a surprise. We took off our underclothes before sleeping, as she'd learned to do in her convent boarding school, run by French-speaking Swiss nuns. Then she would tell me about her mad grandmother, who was a bad cook and boiled everything in salt water. She told me she'd never had herbs or spices until she moved in with Nahil after her grandmother's death, when she hadn't yet reached seven years of age.

In bed, Olga repeated the story of her birth and the death of her mother Myriam, after whom I'd been named by my grandmother Nahil—even though my mother had chosen another name, Asmahan. Olga told the story of how her grandmother had raised her and how, when her grandmother was dying, she asked my grandmother Nahil to take her in, although the family disapproved of a Druze woman adopting a Christian girl. As was her habit, my stubborn grandmother didn't listen to anyone. She took Olga in, Olga who had no parents, and sent her to the convent boarding school to study just like the other Christian girls in the area.

The reason my grandmother agreed to care for Olga and educate her like her own daughter, despite the difference in age and sect between them, goes back to a story dating seven years before I was born, a story exactly the same age as Olga herself. While Myriam was at home giving birth to her daughter Olga, my father's sister, who had been born with an incomplete, deformed heart, was struggling, taking her dying breaths in the hospital. My grandmother was in the hospital room beside her daughter, facing the doctor, who advised her to take her daughter home so she could die in her own bed, in peace among her family. The young woman lost consciousness and everyone thought that she had died, but a few moments later she awoke, saying that she'd just seen her mother giving birth to her not far from her family's house. She saw herself as an infant trying to escape a narrow, dark tunnel. She saw herself for a few moments in the darkness of the womb.

“Hurry up, make me beautiful, dress me, my mother's giving birth to me! My mother's giving birth to me, the cross around her neck is dripping sweat,” my young aunt said feebly. Then she stopped moving and fell silent. It wasn't hard for anyone there to guess the identity of the girl born at the exact moment my aunt died. My aunt died while Myriam was giving birth to a little girl at home, beside her the midwife who had come especially from Aley to help her. Myriam herself died only one day after giving birth to her beautiful baby girl. They said that her placenta, which refused to come out, poisoned her. The baby carried her name from the moment of her birth. While she was losing consciousness, her mother called her Olga. Everyone who believes in the transmigration of souls believes that when my aunt died she was newly reborn.

Olga cries every time incense is burned. When I ask her why she cries she tells me that the smell hurts her heart. She believes the smell pains her to the point of death and that Nahil told her how she discovered Hamza's betrayal from the changed smell of his skin and breath whenever he came home after being away. Nahil told her that she knew about his betrayal from the beginning, but she chose never to bring up the issue with him. Every time he came back from seeing the other woman, she would ask him about his work selling ice. She told him that the trade in ice was a losing proposition and that he needed to change his business.

 

The hospital waiting room is drowning in sick people and there's only one empty seat, right beside an enormous ashtray filled with cigarette butts. I offer the seat to Olga and stand next to her, waiting for our turn. I know what the doctor will say. I know there's no magic cure for Olga's illness except in fairy tales. But I wait to hear what the doctor will say. I wait for him, looking past him at the x-ray he's busy hanging on a transparent white board that emits light.

“I haven't visited Dhour al-Choueir for years,” Olga says with something like hope. “There's an old hotel, an old house whose owners turned it into a hotel. Take me there. I want us to go there together on the weekend.”

Olga and I never ever speak about our relationship— things happen between us spontaneously, without words. I've learned how a woman takes off her clothes in front of another person. I have always felt, in the depths of my heart, that my relationship with her was a temporary way station, as I waited for another experience that would be more real. When I told her this, she laughed and hugged me. I waited for her to tell me that what I was living with her would be the most real thing in my life. But she didn't say anything. Her smile betrayed a certain compassion for a younger girl that always left me uncertain. Many years have passed and I can still taste Olga's skin on my lips.

That's magic, right? Magic, by God! She tells me flamboyantly, describing the aromas of the dishes she loves that fill the house. With her left hand she lifts the cover of the pot on the fire and with her right hand she stirs what's boiling in the pot. She sprinkles in the spices she likes, then lifts the spoon to her lips and tastes the food. “Oh mama, how delicious,” she says. She'll cover the pot and start to sing. She'll look at me and say, “Your eyes are still just like they were when you were small. Your eyes were always full of questions. It's as if they devour the answers, every word, every motion, whether coming from a human or an animal. They're never satisfied, like open lips thirsty for a sip of water.”

I put Olga's latest test results on the bottom of the suitcase. I put all the doctor's papers at the bottom of the suitcase and zip it closed as though I don't want to remember and don't see any other solution. Olga sleeps on the way to Dhour al-Choueir. Her body seems small, like the body of a teenage girl. Her hair has thinned. She's weak and debilitated.

In the hotel room, she takes off her clothes, one article at a time, and appears to be shaking. I go to her to help her get in bed. The air is warm and the windows are all the way open. There's absolutely no air circulation; the curtains are motionless. I draw back the bedcovers and clear a place for her to sleep. She keeps holding my hand for a few moments and pulls me gently toward her. With a kindly gesture, she motions to me to sit with her in bed. She closes her eyes. I take off some of my clothes and throw them on my bed by the window. I stand for a moment, then turn and see Olga looking at me. I take off my remaining clothes and walk naked toward her bed. I lift the covers on the other side and slip in beside her, with the intimacy of two people whose relationship has not dissipated because of distance.

She turns to me, I notice a weak half-smile on her face, and I encircle her with my arms. Her naked body is very cold, despite the hot weather. Her skin is smooth but dry. As I draw nearer to her I feel heat creeping through her body. She buries her delicate face in my naked breasts. Time passes like this before our breathing together takes on an even, harmonious rhythm. I pass my hand over her back as though I'm getting to know her all over again. At that moment, I can't recall the smoothness of her body or the moments of warmth that have never left my mind during my time away from her, those moments I'd make use of whenever Chris approached me in bed. I hold her in my arms once more and feel at that moment as if I've forgotten every memory that linked the two of us.

I listen to the rhythm of her calm, regular breathing and I know that she's surrendered to a short sleep, but before long it will be interrupted by nighttime pain. When we awake in the morning, I'm still embracing her, her body like an unborn child's.

Tomorrow we start chemotherapy, I tell her, and kiss her a morning kiss.

 

I wait for Nour but he doesn't come. I know that he's not in his office; I know that he's out somewhere. I've been waiting here for hours and his bedroom, which I've never liked, is lonely and cold. But I'll wait and I'll wait even longer because I know that if I walk out this door before seeing him I won't be able to return.

So I'll wait and this is how I'll pay back the debt of waiting that I owe him, because he waited for me so many times. It's as if the air in the room has decreased. Perhaps this explains my feeling of suffocation: if waiting for him in his flat where we first came together causes such feelings of suffocation, then love is useless. Should I just leave? Go back to Mombasa to see the man I don't want? Or wait for this other man who doesn't come? I postpone the moment of leaving. And so I delay every decision and every movement. I delay my whole life. In this way, I extend the period of my waiting ever more. I write and dilute my desire for him through writing. I make it dissipate and I forget. I look at the clock on my phone, which is lying next to me on the bed. It would have been better if I hadn't taken off my clothes. My nakedness is lonely; I can't bear it. Naked in a room that seems naked, with the whole world outside. I'm alone, waiting for him. I don't know why just then I remember what Georges said to me in his warm, seemingly hopeless voice when we spoke on the phone the night I left for Australia: “The most beautiful thing about you is that you have a strong presence, you're not controlled and you're soft, you're present and tender, very present and very gentle, you're strong and resilient. You give without weakness. This is what's unique to you: you don't allow a man to decode you too easily.” Did he say everything that he thought about me all at once because he sensed that we'd never see each other again? Only now do I write down what Georges said. But I'm thinking only of Nour, who seems more and more mysterious as I grow closer to him. Every time I know his body more profoundly, I grow lonelier. I miss the smell of his skin…

Nour can't bear to stay in one place for long. Maybe the idea of searching for his roots was born out of this constant movement, so that he could travel. But his continual searching worries me, as does his being away. He's searching for his roots and believes that he's holding onto something, but in reality he's only holding onto shadows of the past, his illusions. “I don't belong here,” he tells me, “I want to go back to my country.” But does anyone have a “home” country? Don't we invent our own homelands? Perhaps Chris is right when he says that we don't need that many reasons to love a place and call it our homeland.