Other Lives (2 page)

We were not the only Lebanese in the neighborhood; there were many Lebanese families, especially Christians and Druze. Five Lebanese families lived on our same street. Others lived on the streets that branched off ours and it didn't take us long to meet them. Their gardens revealed that the same people had lived here for a long time. These Lebanese families cared for their gardens and grew trees that reminded them of their villages and perhaps even their homes in the Lebanese mountains.

Adelaide is a city of churches. In the neighborhood where we lived there were at least four small churches that the Christian Lebanese attended every Sunday. These people had had to immigrate again after they were first displaced from their villages in the Lebanese mountains. In the nearby neighborhoods, some of the Protestant churches where only a few people prayed had transformed into banks and coffee shops and real-estate offices and houses for people who were hippies in the sixties.

Perhaps the thing that made my father the happiest about our new house was that it was located near a Lebanese bakery that had opened just one year before we arrived in Adelaide. He would go by himself to the Awaziz Bakery on Victoria Street, which branched off our street, to buy Lebanese bread and manaqeesh covered in olive oil and zaatar. The bakery sold not just bread and manaqeesh but also various pickles, zaatar and sumac, which my mother Nadia bought to put in fattoush. After a while, we started to see other things on the bakery's shelves, like cinnamon, coffee beans and apple-scented tobacco. Sometimes, in addition to these things, the owner of the bakery stocked small Lebanese flags, made in China, to respond to his customers' longing for Lebanon.

Why'd you come back to Lebanon? Why'd you return? What can you possibly expect from this country?

Olga repeats these same questions from the moment of my return to Beirut as though she doesn't know the answer.

Is it true that her incurable illness is what made me come back to Beirut? Or was it the news from the Ministry of the Displaced about reclaiming our house? Or did I come to settle old scores with a war that broke up my family, destroyed our dreams and every kind of permanence? Did I return to search for my friend Georges, who never made it to Australia? I waited for him to join me and he disappeared. They said that he left Lebanon from the port at Jounieh, but he never arrived. Perhaps he was kidnapped. Perhaps he never left and remained in Lebanon—imprisoned, lost or murdered, his corpse buried somewhere that no one in his family can find. He never reached his destination, just like so many people who left their own places for others and never arrived. On the ship that I boarded that day for Larnaca, they said that his name was recorded in the log but that no one had seen him. They said that he bade his family farewell at home and left for the port long before the ship put to sea.

What'd you come back for? Olga repeats, and then when I don't answer, she draws me to her and hugs me, scattering kisses all over my hair, face, mouth and neck. Angry? she asks me, then repeats her question: What'd you come back for?

Olga's question takes me back to an earlier fear, one that began long before my trip from Beirut, after my brother Baha''s death, which was followed soon after by Georges' disappearance. In my first letter to Olga from Adelaide I wrote, “To kill fear, it isn't enough to move to another country and live in a new house. It's already taken root inside of us and so in order to kill it we first have to kill something inside ourselves. Perhaps we have to cut off one of our limbs. I've often thought of this as a little suicide. It's as if we are looking fearlessly right into the eyes of a wild beast, looking at it and trying to kill it. We don't know at that moment that we are killing most of what's inside ourselves. But what remains after that? What remains after we've killed the fear? Does memory remain, for example? Or does it become like a blank page? And what should we fill it with?”

Olga never wrote to me much, she preferred the telephone. She would call every Thursday. She chose the day and it became our tradition. She used to call me every Thursday and I would write to her every weekend. There was a continual conversation going on between us, each one of us participating in her own way—I through letters and she through words. Our phone conversation would stretch on too long every time; I would laugh when she'd repeat news she'd already told me, protesting that I hadn't paid enough attention the week before. She'd finish by saying, “Don't forget to answer my questions in your letter.” Sometimes a week or more would pass without a phone call from her and when she would speak to me she'd tell me that the phone lines were cut, that Lebanon had become a country where people are maimed, victimized, murdered, slaughtered. She'd tell me that things there were shitty and that for her things were shitty beyond shitty.

“Last time we spoke, you didn't tell me you were coming so soon…!” Olga comments. She's harassed me with this same comment since I arrived in Beirut. It's as though she doubts everything I say and doesn't believe I've returned simply to reclaim the house in Zuqaq al-Blat. I don't tell Olga that I've read her doctor's report and his description of a treatment that she rejected. I've also seen the test analyses and results.

 

I've collected no fewer than thirteen suitcases during my scattered migrations between Lebanon, Australia and Kenya. I put what I need in these suitcases. I still don't understand why a person would need to empty her suitcases. My suitcase has become my home. I've become a suitcase expert—special suitcases for backache, others that hold a lot though they weigh very little. I've had to find extra space in my house to put the suitcases, safe places I can get to easily when I need to.

“What a surrealistic life!”
My English husband Chris mounts a reserved protest as he counts the suitcases piled one on top of the other.

“
How many lives do you need to fill all those?
” he asks, adding yet another comment: that I should be reincarnated and live other lives in order to fill all these suitcases. According to him, I do nothing in Mombasa except “try to find a permanent location to store my travel apparatus.” This is how he describes my suitcases, trying to make a joke. When we first knew each other, his sarcastic comments would make me stop and think. I used to believe that there was poetry in his remarks and that he needed great powers of imagination to create these sentences. But with time, I'm no longer interested in these kinds of comments. I no longer laugh at his jokes; instead they make me angry. I now believe that he's so sarcastic because he can't understand that I can only calm my fears and ease my time in Mombasa by creating stable, settled places within this kind of temporary residence and deferred departure. I've started putting in ear plugs, those little wax balls wrapped in cotton, when he talks nonstop about his research and other ideas. I nod my head, agreeing with what he's saying as if I'm listening. I see him talking on and on, gesturing with his fingers, hands and arms. He looks like one of those sign-language interpreters on the six o'clock TV news broadcast. When he makes a circular motion with his fingers that means that everything's going as he wants it to, I don't really understand him. I laugh and doze off. No doubt I doze off while laughing.

My life feels like interrupted sequences of time, like scenes in a film that begin just as another scene ends. My memory of everything that has happened is not continuous, but circular. I always come back to where I began. When I tell my doctor this, he tries to reassure me, saying that circular memory is a peculiarity of women and that men remember differently. But I don't find this answer logical. I mix up the relationship between events and places. I'll be thinking about the day we left Beirut and then find myself suddenly jumping to the years that I've spent with Chris in Kenya. Perhaps this is why my story now takes on a circular and sometimes spiral form.

I live in Adelaide for four years that pass like the taste of the wind. I stay eleven years in Mombasa, always on the verge of leaving. “On the verge”—this expression perfectly summarizes a life scattered between Australia and Kenya. I'm like someone waiting to get out but who, at the very same time, isn't even inside. Between inside and outside, I live a suspended life, like someone waiting in a purgatory with locked doors, no bridge, no way out. I remember what Mary Douglas, the anthropologist and scholar, said in a book I read in Australia when I was trying to finish my Masters thesis. She described the state of being in-between, or “in-betweenness.” She said that people pass through this stage and move into another one, which is clearer, when their lives and relationships become more regulated. My situation in no way resembles Douglas's description. For me, “in-betweenness” is a permanent way of life that will never change or be transformed into any other state.

I am going to Beirut, then.

In the Dubai airport, I pass my time in a bar on the first floor. I choose it because it has large sofas that allow me to stretch out and relax. I have to wait six hours for the plane to take me to Beirut. I have to wait what seems like a whole night. Time passes in a strange way here. I don't feel like it's nighttime, nor do I fall asleep. The place seems like a giant space station stuffed full of jewelry, toys, gifts and food. A world full of light that never sleeps. A place that I imagine withers and dies when people leave it, as if it's an imaginary world that doesn't exist. As if it's on television. The music of the whole world plays here all at once. Filipinos and Indians and Sri Lankans and Europeans and Americans. People from every country in the world walk through this airport's halls. The place lives off of them; they illuminate it. But emptiness consumes its heart, just as the desert sand consumes buildings and transforms them into skeletons that age at the speed of light.

The man in his fifties who sits on the other end of this sofa is turning the pages of an English newspaper and when I'm about to sit down he adjusts how he's sitting, closing and folding the newspaper as if offering me more space. I don't need more space; the pages of the newspaper don't hinder my movements. I put my suitcase on the seat across from me, my book and papers on the table. He starts gathering up his stuff as though getting himself ready for a trip he's unprepared for. He seems puzzled and concerned with knowing the identity of this woman who's sitting near him—that is to say, me—so he raises his head after a few minutes and, smiling, asks me in English, “
Traveling to Beirut?”

I nod in response to his trivial question, glancing at him to be sure that this voice was his. He adds, smiling, that he's a sorcerer and in touch with the supernatural. His smile broadens as he looks at then nods toward my passport on the table in front of me, with my Middle East Airlines ticket sticking out of it. An unimpressive attempt at seduction, I say to myself wearily. I need a better, more powerful seduction to conjure up a passion I haven't lived for a long time. Despite this, a flood of feelings, like what children feel when they rush off to play with a new toy, sweeps me away. Feelings of fear and excitement together. I can smell his cologne from this distance. Perhaps it's the scent of his skin. When he stands up and comes closer, he seems cleaner and livelier than a traveler usually can be.

“My name is Nour.”

He says to me in English, extending his arm out in front of him as though to shake my hand. Nour… I smile. I didn't expect him to have an Arabic name with his American accent. He's wearing jeans and a blue shirt with thin white stripes. He acts as though he's spent a long time preparing for the excursion to come over and introduce himself to me. He asks if he can share my hot chocolate and then gently places my leather suitcase beside me so that he can sit down across from me before I've even answered.

I don't know how much time passes before I look him in the eyes. Without extending my hand, I say in English, slowly and neutrally, “
I am Myriam.
”

Slow and neutral, I think, while sipping hot chocolate, which burns my tongue and the roof of my mouth… “Slowly and neutrally.” I keep reminding myself that since leaving Beirut my behavior has been formed by a selection of well-learned techniques that I use to connect or not to connect to people. He tells me that he's lived in America since he was ten years old and that he left it for Lebanon this year. He was visiting Dubai for just a week for his work as a journalist and now is returning to Lebanon because he was born there and wants to get to know the country that he hasn't visited since 1967. He's returning to search for his roots. It's amusing to me that when talking about his roots, repeating the same sentence many times, he curls his lips and raises his voice higher and sharper than before:

“
I'm searching for my roots!
”

Nour's father is Palestinian, he has a Lebanese mother, but he doesn't speak Arabic. He doesn't know his mother tongue, I say to myself. I have to make a huge effort to listen to him and respond to his questions, just as I do with Chris. In a few moments that feel like a very long time, he tells me about his family, his life and his American wife and daughter. It seems as though this life of his fatigues him and, using rapid, exuberant words, he wants to hand it over for safekeeping to the first person who'll listen to him. By chance, I am that person. A woman he just met in an airport. I think, I don't have space for other people's lives, my own life's enough for me. It's enough that I'm continually attempting to gather my life together, given my overwhelming suspicion that I lack the proper tools. When faced with these thoughts, my body grows restless and I suddenly feel like a combatant preparing for an attack. At that moment, I feel unable to gather myself in one place and one memory; his speech confuses me and makes me more anxious. But I hear myself saying to him, with open sarcasm, “
Why bother searching for roots, I can give you as much as you want, a surplus I want to get rid of!
”