Other Lives (5 page)

Only Samuel the Kenyan gardener offers me some sense of security. He gives me peace of mind when he tells me that moving doesn't have to mean anything, that it's possible for a person to remain at home in his heart wherever he may be. He tells me that he feels able to live multiple lives while in the very same place. When he's somewhere else, he can feel that there's another person inside him.

Samuel approaches the chair where I'm sitting in the garden and starts flipping through the books that fill the bag lying open on the grass near my feet. Some of the books are in Arabic, so look like a puzzle to him. He leaves the books, looks at me and says that every book has a life here and a life there, where it came from. He continues, “This is how I live both inside and outside.” I don't understand exactly what he means, but right away I connect what he's saying to something he once told me about his old grandfather, who left the bush half-naked and came to Mombasa to live, have a family and settle down, dressing like the foreigners who lived in the city. That time he told me that he feels I understand everything, as though I too have started to carry his memories—though I'm a stranger to this land, I live this life here and share these experiences. I have started spending more time with Samuel than with Chris, who is entranced by his little insects, painstakingly fixed on glass slides under his microscope. He says that if they multiplied enough and filled the world, they could finish off humankind.

In Kenya, as in Australia, I've started taking tranquilizers and sleeping pills, but the migraines still won't leave me. I wake up in the morning and am unable to open my eyes. I close the curtains again, banishing the morning light to the outside. Light makes my migraines worse and would keep me in bed for the whole day. The curtains of my room remain drawn and I only see the daylight in Mombasa when my pain subsides. When I feel a bit better, I go out into the garden and watch Samuel cut the grass while water gushes out of the hose, submerging his muddy feet and watering the plants and trees.

To feel better, I always need to lean my head slightly forward so that the muscles on my neck press backwards and relieve the pain a little. When I go to bed, I need to put a pillow right under my neck, to ease the pain so I can sleep. But now nothing relieves the pain. When I bend my head forward it hurts, so I lean it back and the pain only gets worse. I tilt my head to the left, then to the right; later I feel that it's so heavy I can no longer hold it up. I take two Advil. Two hours later I follow up with two Diantalvic and then before I sleep a Toradol, then a Stilnox. I go to bed still in pain, but the pain just sleeps. It gets tired, turns over and goes to sleep, while I toss and turn in the bed.

As soon as Chris comes home, he starts gathering up all my stuff that's lying around. He tidies everything back where it belongs and says again how worried he is about me and how he wants me to be more present and at home here. He walks over to the cassette player, lowering Asmahan's voice so much that he almost strangles it. I've grown used to his running commentary and the presence of two speeds and rhythms of life in the house. His rhythm and my rhythm. My rhythm is like the music of the people whom Samuel brings every day to work in the house and in the garden for a little money, who leave in the evening always carrying food that I've shared with them. As for his rhythm… it's stable and calm. Nothing about his inner life ever changes. I only feel his presence in the house when he goes into his office and stays there until after midnight, when I'm in bed, covered with a thin blanket, novels that I've started to read but haven't finished scattered around me, Asmahan's voice filling the room, keeping me company while I sleep until morning. Of course he doesn't understand why I keep the music playing while I sleep. And he doesn't understand how I can listen to the same recording one, two, three times throughout the night. These tapes of Asmahan that I brought with me from Lebanon. Other tapes that Olga sent me. Still other hard-to-find, rare ones, most of which I bought at a place near Suq al-Hamidiyyeh when I went secretly to Damascus with Georges just before Baha' was murdered in 1978. When I sleep, sometimes I dream of Asmahan. I imagine a young woman who's twenty-six years old, dying at the height of her glory. I was about her age when I lost my brother Baha' and we decided to leave Lebanon for Australia. From the time I was young I tried to invent things she and I had in common. I'd say that we both loved singing, we both came from the mountains, we both lived through wars that changed the course of our lives, our destinies. Then I'd backtrack and say that she was different from me in many ways, the most important of which is that she didn't know fear—this adventuress had no fear, the kind of fear that's inhabited me since Baha' was killed and Georges disappeared. Indeed well before this I might almost have said that it was this fear that caused Baha''s death.

As a child, I stood on a thick white fence, on the outer wall of the house's courtyard, in front of my mother Nadia and sang, “Ya habibi, come… Follow me and see what happened to me because you're away… I'm up all night because of my love, calling your shadow. Who's like you? I'm keeping my love a secret, but my love is destroying me.” My father, sitting far away from us, clapped as if I were actually Asmahan and my mother encouraged me by nodding her head. When I forgot or mispronounced words she'd mouth them to me. She'd start with just the first word of that part of the song to help me remember. Then her voice would emerge, clear and deep, as if it had never been used, and then just as quickly would fall silent once I'd recovered the rhythm I'd lost for a few moments and started singing again. Sometimes she accompanied me when I sang, her voice weaker than mine. My grandmother Nahil would come outside and see me fearlessly swaying on the edge of the wall, my mother below gazing up at me, her laughing eyes brimming with tears. Nahil whispered harsh words to scold her son Salama, as usual, chastising Nadia's laxity and her failures in raising me.

She'd say all this without looking at Nadia, ignoring her presence beside me. Nahil took me down from the wall herself, telling me to go in the house where my books and lessons were, adding that Asmahan died young because she never knew God and that too much distraction will ruin girls and lead to their demise.

 

In Mombasa I spend my time with Samuel. When he's finished with the gardening, he comes into the house at my request and he prepares some food that I share with him. He doesn't go straight back to his own house after dinner, but rather to night school where he's learning to draw.

In the beginning I found my house in Mombasa strange, for no reason except that to me it was like a prickly pear planted in the sand. Only the green garden that ends in a low fence separates the house from the ocean. It's strange how precisely the sandy coast borders the garden. From the moment I arrived at this house that I'm meant to call my home, I passed my days hunting for comparisons between Mombasa and Beirut. Both have endured successive attacks that make each city what it is. Both extend along the sea. Beirut's sea never changes, though. Its water isn't stingy; it doesn't recede. It isn't surprising and it doesn't frighten. The ebb and flow of the tide interests me. I've never seen this before, I tell Chris. But he laughs and says that all the seas of the world have tides. Beirut's sea is no exception. Yes, it is! I tell him angrily, as if he is extracting something from inside me, from my memory, and I don't want to share it with him. Chris tells me that the waters of the Mediterranean are exactly the opposite of how I think of them. He tells me that sailors of all civilizations from the time of Homer onward were afraid of the Mediterranean because it was so changeable, always unpredictable. Sailors on the oceans, by contrast, knew what was hiding beneath them before they entered deep waters.

I know what Chris really wants to say—he's talking about me. But I won't get into another conversation in which his patience and tolerance will surely get the better of me. And this won't change my opinion about either the sea or my life with him. I get up from my chair to walk around the house and exhale smoke from my cigarette, which I am constantly relighting. I reach the back garden, searching for Samuel, and don't find him. I hear a song in Swahili from behind the garden wall and I approach the entrance to the garden, knowing that Samuel has arrived. Chris's voice comes from the garden, strong and resolute— no doubt he's started to get angry. “You're not in Beirut anymore, you're here now,” he says. He follows up in a voice meant to leave the impression that this is his final word and he won't go back on it: “We shouldn't need so many reasons to love a place and call it a homeland.”

Mombasa's morning sea is never the same. Since I arrived, the only persistent sight is of the local merchants displaying their wares right on the sands of the beach, when the tide is out and the water has withdrawn back into the heart of the ocean. They come in the morning or at noon when the water's receded, slipping down onto the beach over the edge of the coastline. They can't come down on the roads that lead to the houses gathered on a patch of land planted with trees. These two-story houses are all alike, as though one architect built the same structure a bunch of times. There are many dogs here, dogs trained to attack strangers. Their owners bring these dogs from faraway countries to live with them in big houses they intend to live in forever. The local merchants are frightened of the dogs and the owners of the houses. The foreigners know little about the original inhabitants of this country; their curiosity is limited to expanding their businesses into more and larger markets.

The truth is that people from this country also don't know much about these foreigners, who come here from a number of different countries. The few things that they do know keep them far away from the gates of the big houses. They do know, however, a lot about nature—its changes and fluctuations. They fear nature less than they fear us, the foreigners in their country. They know the ocean's movements, the speed of the wind and the changing weather. They know the times of the high and low tides. They choose six hours when the water is low, far from the coast, and then send their goods down on quickly made ropes that are tied to short poles haphazardly planted in the white sand. There they hang their brightly dyed cloth and small wooden crafts, which are both simple and harsh, like their lives. Some of them stand, holding the colored cloth and soft handmade straw and leather shoes they're selling. They set out displays of suitcases and hats. Rarely do they ask for money in exchange for these things. Instead they prefer gym shoes and T-shirts with advertising slogans for soft drinks printed on them. They trade their handcrafts for things made in China with pictures of Coca-Cola and Pepsi cans, or of people smiling while devouring Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald's. Sometimes they ask for alcohol and tobacco.

In Kenya, I spend my time filling my head with things I've received from Lebanon: recently published novels and poetry collections and magazines and short stories and newspapers and studies about the war and the post-war and the Ta'if Agreement and the devastation of 1982 and the Sabra and Shatila trials and the Oslo Accords and the Iran–Iraq War and the siege of Iraq. I don't leave Mombasa much—from time to time I fly to Nairobi just to pick up parcels and packages from Lebanon. In the beginning, I waited in Mombasa for them, for my things to be flown from Nairobi to Mombasa. But things would go missing, especially things like araq and rose water and some of the cassette tapes with Arabic songs and music, or other things Olga sent me.

In Kenya I live every day as if there were no tomorrow, or as if the future right in front of me is still waiting on something from the past. I remember all this now, Olga's question stuck in my mind, the one she repeats on the phone, “What's new? Have you found happiness or are you remembering it, or are you waiting for it… or are you living it?” She asks this knowing full well that happiness is something we only remember and never live: it's pointless to ask someone whether she's happy.

Trees die in Kenya. No, they don't die. People die long before them. The average lifespan here is 40. As soon as I arrived I should have tried to get used to this place, to free myself of the clinging feeling of being a tourist. I carry a transistor radio around with me and go out into the garden in the early hours of morning. At this time of day, I can listen to news from Lebanon on the medium-wave broadcasts. I walk on the damp sand, carrying my radio with me. The news of the war in Lebanon reaches me as if it were a daily destiny. I listen to the news from Beirut as if it could put happiness on pause, like a stop sign. One news report after another with happiness hanging between them… the news of misery that I know too well and from which I have yet to emerge. Misery clings to my skin and my soul, inescapable and viscous. The water recedes far out into the depths of the ocean. The sudden distance of the water frightens me as much as it excites me. An ocean without water is frightening; it's like a desert, stars in the sky lighting up its sands. I see myself, a barefoot woman, hands empty except for a small battery-powered box that brings me news from Lebanon. I walk on the white sand while the water is still out deep in the ocean. My naked feet sink into the moist sand. A warm dampness spreads from my feet to my lower back and I shudder. I'm afraid of myself and my deep desire to enter the labyrinth of the desert and the sea. But I carry on walking. I walk far from the depths of the ocean that appears as white as a face that's deathly ill, or a guest preparing to leave. But all of a sudden the water returns, surprising me. Without warning, I discover that I'm far from the shore and I find myself right in the water, my wet nightgown clinging to my shivering body, my small radio emitting unintelligible signals.