Other Lives (7 page)

This means it is over, the relationship is over!

“This means the relationship's over…” Eva says when I tell her how I feel, as though she's discovered something important.

But who said anything about a lack of love or the end of the relationship? I ask her, thinking that I'm passing through something normal, like the movement of water in the ocean near my house in Mombasa, the ebb and flow of the tide. What I'm living isn't lack of love or the relationship's end. No… no, not at all. It's just a perpetual, repeated, never-ending tidying up of my emotional house.

In the beginning of my marriage to Chris, I thought that our lack of understanding was born of our two different languages, and that clarity and honesty would fix this. But I've discovered that my style only widens the gulf between us; my clarity ends any ambiguity about whether we might build something together and ensures that the problem isn't misunderstanding, but an estrangement that will only increase with time and take us down a path from which there is no return.

“Lost in translation!”

He always throws this cliché in my face, naively trying to lay the blame on our different languages. He'll say it over and over, trying to find common points between us, but this expression feels like an insult to me. Whenever he says it I feel like he's swearing at me. The problem isn't the difference in language but a lack of language. This misunderstanding used to exhaust me but in time I surrendered to it. “Surrender” isn't the right word. Indeed, I could almost say that misunderstanding has become a source of amusement for me, so much so that I have begun to use intentionally few words. It took a long time for me to discover the pleasure of vagueness. This discovery was accompanied by another discovery: that I need and miss the pleasure of a man who makes me laugh. When I realized this, I started laughing spontaneously, leaving Chris to guess at the reason for my laughter. I knew this would irritate him and eventually he'd give up. In the end he has gotten used to it.

He has begun attributing my behavior to our different experiences of married life. His first marriage to a British woman and second to an Iranian woman seem to make him believe that our misunderstandings result from my lack of experience, my failure to understand marriage and relationships between couples. It's hard to know what his marriage to a third woman who is a different age and has different experiences and a different culture than his previous two wives means to him. But I know that he doesn't miss me when I'm traveling. And I miss so many things and live with so much loss that this fact just becomes a part of my life. I know, though, that he'll always write me many letters. Letters that will tell me about his day and then always linger over memories we share… Like how we met for the first time in the airport, when the Australian police called him to search my father—the shrapnel lodged in my father's head made the electronic security checkpoint beep every time my father passed through it. Chris will write to me about the second time we met, in his clinic, and how he used to visit us to follow up on my father's health after we moved out of my uncle's house to our own place in Adelaide.

The first time we met, he entered the room next to the police office in the Australian airport and immediately walked up to my father and me, saying hello and apologizing for being late because of an emergency at the hospital. I no longer remember what he first said to my father when he learned that we'd arrived recently from Lebanon, but he told us that he too was born there and he knew the village of Shemlan, but that he hadn't visited since he left Lebanon in 1958. He remembered people from Shemlan whom my father also knew.

My father was always relaxed and less worried when Chris visited. Chris would go over to my father and pat his shoulder like an affectionate father. A relationship sprang up between them, and quickly it seemed as though they'd been friends for a long time. My father never seemed as sick when Chris was there telling him stories that happened in Lebanon a long time ago, before I was born. Chris would visit frequently to check on his health and play backgammon with him, a game which Salama had practically abandoned after my brother Baha''s death. I imagined that having Chris with us might heal the wounds of our family, stricken with death and loss. This was how a relationship developed between us, between Chris and me. I didn't want it to be anything more than a friendship; with time it transformed into a comforting habit, with no passion or desire. I remember the first meeting of our bodies—he asked me if he could take off his clothes. I found this strange and amusing. We got married four years after I arrived in Adelaide, after I'd lost any hope of seeing Georges ever again. My marriage to Chris is like a compensation for the care and concern that he gives my father, whose madness it's become difficult for me to bear on my own. And I want to have a child to fill the place of the baby I'd lost in Beirut—the fetus I had to abort to avoid the scandal.

My marriage emerged less out of love than conviction. Eva says it's the kind of marriage that “clears up unresolved life issues,” like companies managing the clearance of imported cargo shipments. Eva also considers my marriage to be linked to the past more than the future. I tell her that perhaps she's right. What I feel for Chris isn't love, being with him instead gives me more of a fabricated feeling of serenity. I've discovered that this serenity does not come from Chris himself—his personality or characteristics—but from the terrible circumstances all around me. These circumstances have changed the course of my life and transformed me from a woman who dreamed about the future to a woman who simply tries to repair a present that's distorted by the past.

The two of us, Chris and I, exist in different worlds. When I tell Eva this, I add that I'd reckoned that after our marriage I'd sleep better and my fears would leave me. But instead I'm still anxious—when I'm near him, when he isn't around, when he's away. Our lack of understanding, my loneliness, how far I am from my friends in Beirut— all of this makes me anxious. Eva is making bread with candied fruit in it and stops, turning off the noisy electric mixer so she can tell me that I'm too philosophical. With the back of her damp, dough-covered hand, she pushes strands of blonde hair from her forehead. She adds that I'm surely mad. This is her response to what I've said about how I can't understand why Chris loves me and how strange it is that I can never understand his way of loving me. I tell her whenever I think about Chris I feel as if I'm an exotic fruit; he desires it when he finds it within his reach, but can forget it just as quickly when it isn't there. I always have to be this exotic fruit, despite myself. I have to be that Oriental woman, coming from the other side of the sea, who is nothing like the women in his family. I discovered this game quickly, though, and I withdrew. I withdrew and said nothing to him. Perhaps what surprises him is that I'm not at all like the women of
1,001 Nights
. I don't tell him tales so that he can sleep and I can save myself. I rely on silence to rescue me. Perhaps this is what spoils the tacit agreement we've had in place since we married. I think that when I travel to Beirut he'll write me many letters, but I won't write back. If I have to choose between exchanging letters and talking to Chris on the phone—if conversation is unavoidable—I'll choose the phone, if only because that can be finished quickly and no traces of it remain. It's as if my life with him is nothing but a hole in the sand. Eva collects all the kitchenware that she's used to make the cake, puts it into the dishwasher, and says, “You're mad! Everything you're saying is just rhetoric… completely disconnected from real life.”

Throughout all our years together in Kenya, Chris persists in repeating that he loves me and could never live with another woman. Despite this, he keeps protesting against everything I do or say, using my changeable moods as justification. Perhaps he's right. I often feel that I can't decide my position on things; I'm not sure how to see the world. How do you describe twilight, for example? Is it when darkness begins or is it what remains of the light of day? Or is it both at once? At times I've understood the differences between us as between two contrasting personalities—the first builds a sense of stability by believing that what he was told and taught is absolutely, indisputably true. He believes that what he's learned is enough. The second person, on the other hand, has lost all hope of stability, to the point that existence itself is a source of doubt and questioning. I'm this second person.

My inability to plan summer vacations enrages him. He'll ask me to decide how and when we'll travel to Australia to see his children in Sydney and to see my parents in Adelaide. Or he'll ask me to plan a trip to another country. And I'll always answer, “We'll figure it out tomorrow.” He thinks my answers mean I don't care, but I'm never entirely certain if tomorrow will come. I tell him that life in Lebanon never allowed me to plan more than a month in advance, how does he expect me to decide how we'll spend the summer holidays when it's still February? I tell him that planning is a whole culture that I'm not used to and he has to understand this. I tell him that my brother Baha' was getting ready for a relaxing trip to Istanbul, his ticket in his pocket, when he was killed. In my excuses he'll find another reason to prolong the conversation. My pleas just provoke him and he doesn't understand them—like all people who've never lived through war. He'll tell me that I'm far away from Lebanon now… now it's time to forget, to get used to my life with him in Australia or Africa. Sometimes he'll explain away my bad moods by saying that they come from the dark clothes I wore after Baha''s death. But this too is a way of life that's hard to change—I no longer know how to buy brightly colored clothes. Why do you wear this dark dress? You look miserable in it. Why don't you eat cold meat and sausage with me for breakfast? Is there something troubling you? Did Olga say something on the phone that upset you? Did you visit your doctor today? Which one— the psychologist or the gynecologist? How's your Arabic teaching? Your English teaching? He'll repeat these questions over and over. When my answers are improvised and short and don't add or change anything, he leaves.

I've often decided that I should make more of an effort to improve my situation and my relationship to the world, as well as my relationship to Chris and our social life. After weeks of this effort, though, he'll suddenly tell me that there's no point in exhausting myself, he knows that I have no desire whatsoever to go out to dinner with him, his friends and their women, especially because I always have to speak a language that's not my own. He seems to understand, but I feel that this understanding hides a bitter disappointment he's trying to summon the patience to tame. When the results of his research in the laboratory are unsatisfactory, he tries to suggest that his work has deteriorated because he worries about me too much and can't sleep. I'm always the reason for any setback that he or his work suffers. When we were newly married, I would believe everything he said. I felt hugely guilty and gave all of my time to him. This meant that I was at home most afternoons, spending my time reading and writing—writing things no one but Olga ever read. While Chris was out working and earning money, I would spend my morning hours teaching English in courses designed to wipe out illiteracy in Mombasa, as well as giving private Arabic lessons. After years of this, I've become convinced that he invests all his energy into his work. The very moment he leaves home, he forgets the place he's just been, forgets who's in it, forgets me. I'm convinced that the unsatisfactory results of his work are because of him alone and have no connection whatsoever to me. Yet whenever the issue of his work is raised with his friends or colleagues, he mentions my perpetual sadness.

Chris counts the number of people infected with malaria and tries to save them, while I'm infected by the malady of mute rage, compounded by fear. He won't be able to save me. My illness requires playfulness and Chris isn't good at playing. He doesn't know how to play. He doesn't even play with the puppy, which he began to fight with the moment I brought it back from South Africa. As if he knew who I got it from and desperately wants to get rid of it. Play is humankind's most important invention, Samuel says, rubbing his face on the dog Yufu's head, and it's not only human, he continues, watch! See how animals love to play! Samuel tells me, raising his voice as though he's learned that I only listen to him when he changes the tone of his voice, shaking me out of my deep thoughts and forcing me to pay attention. Chris doesn't play… He has his habits. Here's a day of his habits: going to the laboratory at seven thirty, coming back at one, sleeping after lunch, going back to the laboratory from three thirty until seven.

No doubt malaria is on the rise because of these habits, because it has gotten used to his habits!

As for me, I'm not sure of anything. I can accept and refuse something with equal ease. The more years I live in Mombasa, the more difficult I find it to have habits. But what does is it mean to be a woman without habits, not even drinking coffee in bed? He comes to me, sure that the hand he rests on my shoulder has the magic of the serums that he spends his whole day with in the lab. He loses his patience after a few minutes and leaves after I say for the thousandth time that I miss playing, that play is ageless and that I'm slowly dying here. He leaves me and goes out. I walk over and turn on the tape recorder so that Asmahan's voice will rise out of it, reverberating in revenge. I go back to the book that I had in my hand before Chris entered. I read, “Nietzsche was right when he said that original sin pushed us toward a perpetual feeling of hatred, and that ‘god' is a lethal invention—it's difficult to believe in a god who doesn't dance.”