Other Lives (6 page)

 

Thus I'm returning to Beirut to sell the building and then return to Mombasa. I have spent more than eleven years traveling between Australia and Kenya, almost as long as I've been married to Chris. Chris was my father's GP. He left his clinic in Australia for Kenya two months after our wedding to direct a British research association that's working to develop a vaccine against malaria, the virus that kills so many people across this vast, poor country. I began my second immigration—from Australia to Kenya—to follow Chris.

I don't refuse Nour's invitation to share a taxi from the Beirut airport. “I left my little notebook on the plane!” I shriek while getting into the taxi. Nour steps back from the taxi door, saying that he'll go back into the airport to ask about it. “Forget about it… Just forget it!” I say hopelessly, waving in his direction, gesturing at him to get into the car. As though what I've written in this notebook is no longer important. As though I've started to accept loss as natural, something I can never change. But then I remember that this notebook of observations contains everything about Joe—the last time we met, our break-up and my return to Beirut. I've written there about my desire for children and my perpetual failure to get pregnant. I've written about the boredom that almost pains me when Chris and I go to bed together. I persevered and wrote everything in Arabic. I find Arabic letters and words exciting in a strange city like Mombasa. Particularly because then I don't worry about Chris finding my notebook some day and reading what I've written.

When I arrive in Beirut, I don't go straight to the building where we used to live before we emigrated to Australia. This is the building that I've come back to reclaim after receiving a letter from Olga saying that the Ministry of the Displaced was offering financial compensation to internally displaced families to vacate houses they occupied during the war. I pass nearby the house in Zuqaq al-Blat but I don't want to get closer. I tell Nour that I miss the intensity of my relationship to my house as it was. And it's changed. Instead of visiting our two-story house that's still occupied by displaced people, I ask the driver to take me to my grandmother Nahil's house in the mountains. On my way up the mountain, the view of rocks and rough terrain—a land rich with images and colors—is repeated over and over. People think that this area has no vegetation. But it produces many-colored rocks and their outgrowths, fertile rocks with little, tough trees growing from them whose leaves stay green all year round.

Nahil doesn't recognize me when she first sees me. She greets me coldly and with a whisper asks Olga about me, while covering her face with a cloth that she lifts over her lips while she asks Olga who I am. “It's Myriam!” says Olga, who has lived with my grandmother Nahil since childhood. She embraces me and directs seemingly pointless words at Nahil, “What's the matter with you? Did you forget your granddaughter Myriam? She's your son Salama's daughter!” Nahil's face lights up when she hears my name. She lifts her head toward me and straightens herself up so that she can reach out and touch my hair. Her thin hand brushes over my hair, down my neck, and she kisses me. “Dark-skinned with big, beautiful eyes!” she says to me in a weak, broken voice. Then she smiles and repeats as she always used to that I'm still beautiful like her, even if I am built like my mother and not slender. I know that some things about me have changed. I've dyed my hair a deep aubergine color, I weigh seven kilos more than I did, I am fifteen years older than the last time she saw me. I've crossed the threshold of forty; I've started putting on make-up before leaving the house. But despite all this, I think that I haven't changed that much and that everyone will still recognize me. I'm sure they'll recognize me by my big, black eyes… that's what I think, but perhaps I'm wrong. Does my face truly betray me? It's true, I haven't endured what others have… does my long absence betray me? Do I seem so strange because I don't share this collective memory? A memory that should show in my movements, the way I walk, and my speech. Did the intensification of violence during my absence distance me this much from the people I love? Did it deprive me of all intimacy and collective memory? Does absence not merely erase the memory of the absent person, but also the memory of the person waiting for her?

She wouldn't leave with us. She says that life here is no different than people's lives elsewhere. Though she's never traveled, she can imagine the cities of the whole world. She can imagine the people there—how they cross the streets and wear their clothes and what they eat. She doesn't need to go anywhere to understand all that, she sees it all from her spot in her mountain house. After the death of my grandfather Hamza, Nahil returned to this mountain house and stayed here, leaving the house in Zuqaq al-Blat to my father. She carries the whole world in her soul without ever changing her location. She never goes to see anything. She says that she can imagine everything. She invents her own pictures from the news and the images on the television that she has finally allowed into her room. I return and find Nahil exactly as I've imagined her, surrounded by religious books handwritten in a large script I can't decipher. She is sitting in her bed, the Hikmeh in her hands. It wasn't easy for her to get a hold of this book—when my grandmother requested a handwritten copy of the Hikmeh, the presence in the house of a Christian, Olga, created some difficulties for the Druze religious men. I've never turned the pages of the Hikmeh in my life. My mother had one but it disappeared when we left the house in Zuqaq al-Blat after my brother Baha''s death. The bombs started falling on the roofs of the buildings and we had to flee our home to take refuge in the house in the mountains. We left, taking nothing with us except a few clothes, our passports and the documents that we needed to travel.

I come back and find Nahil unchanged, as if she hasn't grown older. A mild case of Parkinson's, which comes and goes, restricts her movements. When it comes on, her whole body shakes and she can't be still. Her head jerks awkwardly to the left and right, her tongue gets thick but she insists on talking. She hasn't changed, though she's started covering her head with a long, white mandil. In my memory, she's a woman who never covered her head, her thick, wavy hair that's a color between gray and black. She would go out without her head covered even in the winter, leaving her white mandil draped over her shoulders. She went out like that, in front of people, without a care and then came back all wet, soaking from head to toe. Her face would glow a little then return to normal, though deep in her womb a little climax had burst forth, then just as quickly dried up and disappeared. She wasn't afraid of anyone and in fact felt she was stronger than everyone else. Perhaps these feelings were simply the result of what people used to say about her. She could be stronger than everyone else because they knew about her powerful curses. “God save us from Nahil's curses!” is what people said. They'd say this and repeat the famous tale about the army officer her curses killed.

This was in 1958, when a soldier entered the house by force to arrest my father and interrogate him about a shooting in Hadath. The soldier pushed my father roughly to get him into the jeep. My grandmother Nahil went to talk to the officer who'd remained sitting in the jeep, urging him to release my father, begging him to let him stay with his family because he was an only son, with no brothers, and because his wife, that is to say my mother Nadia, was that very day about to give birth to her second child, my brother Baha'. But the officer wouldn't listen to Nahil and she started assailing him with curses, a group of people gathering around her: “May curses befall you and go with you to your grave… May they go with you to your grave…” She repeated this over and over, holding her head in her hands as if she were afraid it would fall off. My father wasn't detained long, but he did receive many blows to the head there. And my brother was born while my father was in prison. The men of the family always say that on the day my father was released, the soldier entered the officer's room to bring him his usual cup of coffee and found him dead in his bed.

Nahil laughs when she hears these accounts of her power to affect the destinies of men. One day, before my brother Baha' was killed, she told me, “There's no magic, none at all, don't believe it, it's all lies. It's just that there hasn't been any goodness in this house for a long time, even before the war started.”

This is what she told me, adding that since she moved to Beirut and stopped visiting al-Sayyid Abdullah and the Prophet Job's holy tomb in the mountains, a series of crises have befallen not only this house but also its family's health, finances and offspring. My grandmother then criticized my mother, saying that my mother had taught us nothing about religion, that she never opened the Hikmeh even once, though it's constantly been in her sight. Nadia never answered these accusations. It's as though she didn't care, as though neither Nahil nor anyone else could touch on what actually preoccupied her. Nahil never once said that it was because of how Hamza lived his life that the family left religion; she has never made such an accusation. I've always believed, however, that Hamza was extremely far from any kind of belief in the presence of the sacred. From the stories we've heard about him, it seems to me he was always ready to defile anything sacred to fulfill his own ambitions. Hamza lived his life convinced that life on earth was both paradise and hell, that people's lives begin and end here—that the things we don't live don't exist. He used to say that, on the whole, people are a bunch of errors and mistakes. This view of life and the world is his legacy to his son Salama… and then it was our turn, Baha''s and mine. Hamza didn't realize that we no longer believe in the idea of prophets or holy men because of this inheritance, his way of thinking.

My grandmother has lived her whole life making a place for the sacred in our house, but it has vanished, its place taken by an existential anxiety that sleeps in our beds and shares our dreams. Thinking about this always takes me back to my mother Nadia's silence. Sometimes my imagination starts working and I say that Nadia is silent not because of my brother's death but because she can't be a prophet like a man can. Her words will never be carved into the walls of the house so all our visitors can read them. Her silence is simply a protest against this. One evening, in our secret apartment near the Arab university, I found myself asking Georges why I couldn't be a prophet, but a man could. He didn't answer and instead jokingly whispered things like, “Why aren't your questions ever like other women's questions?” “How did my luck bring me a woman like you?” he asked theatrically, lifting his hands up as though imploring a third party there in the room with us… that third person being God! He approached me, bent over and kissed my lips, “You're my very own prophet!” he said and sprang onto the bed. I didn't feel his words or kisses because at that moment my head was filled with the question of prophethood!

Throughout my childhood and adolescence, Nadia's silence preoccupied me; I couldn't understand why she wouldn't stand up to Nahil and defend herself. Why does she never say anything but the words necessary to run our household affairs, words to do with food, health and school? I never know if she's happy or joyful, sad or in pain. She never once talks about what she's feeling. Only about things outside of her body and soul. Things she has no relationship to. To me, Nadia's like a visitor to earth— she doesn't want to change anything, inherit anything or leave anything behind; she doesn't want to take or to give. When I think about her now, the only impression I have is the one she gave us: that she had no power or strength and that we could take advantage of her—in the way that all children my age and my brother's age take advantage— we could do what we wanted and we could tell her anything we wanted. Perhaps my mother's silence is derived from her belief that perfection is found only in religious books; it has no relationship to real life. In this way, she isn't so different than my grandfather and his opinions of the world we live in. She is different from him, though, because she sees and knows and doesn't do anything. I have never once seen Nadia read the Hikmeh. I've seen her read newspapers, novels, magazines and any kind of stories that fall into her hands. Deep inside of herself she believes that religion is love. That's what she gives us, unconditional love, nothing else.

 

I return to Mombasa from South Africa. My Austrian neighbor Eva accompanies me with new environmental books about droughts and deforestation that she's collected from the tables of the conference she attended. She also bears gifts for her husband. She's returning with her two children, who joined her in her free time in the hotel room, the pool and in a rental car on excursions to waterfalls and shopping. I return with a small half-empty suitcase and a puppy that was a gift from Joe. When I'm with Eva, I long for the feeling of being a mother. I long to feel as I would have if I'd kept my baby and not had an abortion, out of fear of people in Beirut and the scandal. Ever since then I've wanted to recover and I haven't been able to.

The migraine follows me like it's my shadow. I hurry to my bed, which I've truly missed. Chris comes over to me, trying to flirt with me. He wraps his arms around me and draws me to him while trying to pull off my nightgown. My body resists, it wraps around itself like someone closing a window they'd left unlocked. I cover my body completely and tell him that my migraine hasn't relented for even one minute. I tell him this because I know it's the only way to keep him off of me. I have avoided him since I learned from my doctor that I can't conceive. He asks me, flirtatiously, if I met anyone I was attracted to there; in the voice of someone who's given up, he adds that he wouldn't have a problem with it. I don't answer but when hovering between sleep and waking I think that my loneliness when I'm with him has begun to tire him—my loneliness that he prefers to call fidelity, refusing to pursue short-lived affairs when I'm away. The heaviness of our mute relationship exhausts him, since, in his heart of hearts, he believes that life should not be so serious. But he prefers to play his role— the role of husband. In that moment, I think that I'm there beside him by accident, hanging on only because of an arbitrary equation: I don't love him enough to forget that I was left hanging, always waiting to leave, and I don't hate him enough to leave.