The Wrong End of the Telescope

by Rabih Alameddine

  I have to say you masked your rage well. No one could see the suppressed fury you habitually unleashed in your books at unwary readers. You almost slipped once. A pompous audience member, a man trying to impress, asked you a question. Beirut was such a crazy city, he said. He wouldn’t know how to describe it. No, of course he hadn’t been there, but he needed your help to understand it better. If a Martian came to Earth, he said, would you be able to explain the city to him in one sentence? I was taken aback. I heard Francine groan. But you, I saw you cock your head for a moment, your eyes flared as if you’d been shocked with a defibrillator, then a confused smile, after which the great diva returned to the podium. If a Martian landed here, you said with a chuckle, why would you want to explain anything to her, him, it, let alone Beirut, in one sentence? Any other questions?

  A portly gay man your age asked if you were ever going to write about the AIDS years again since it had been so long since your earliest book. You were thinking about it, you said. But he surprised you with a follow-up query. What did you think was your biggest loss from those years? You considered the question for a moment. I think the questioner had expected some wise sound bite, a warm idea that you could both share, but that was not where you went. You began with one name, then another, then another, a slow recitation. By the time you reached the fifth, the questioner began naming his lost friends. I heard Francine next to me begin to whisper the names of our friends long gone. Everyone in the room, gay, straight, whatever, repeated names. You had transformed an event to promote your latest book into an impromptu memorial for our collective losses. And then you were making jokes again as the audience wiped their tears. You begged their forgiveness for having a surprise séance, for opening doors and allowing the return of old ghosts.

  You seemed solid and confident, a surfer on the waves of life. Do you understand why seeing you frightened and battered by the maelstrom of people in the middle of Moria felt disorienting?

  How to Make Liberace Jealous

  Lebanon became home to the largest number of Syrian refugees and to the largest refugee population per capita in the world. In a country of four million, there were more than a million refugees, though the actual number was closer to a million and a half. So much pain, so much destitution. So many refugees. And sometimes it seemed that you wanted to interview every one of them, to provide an ear for all the tales. I remember listening to you on the radio saying there was nothing you could do to ameliorate the situation, that you felt helpless and pointless, but that you thought doing nothing would have been a crime. You could bear witness, you said; observing was the one thing you knew how to do. If you could listen to their stories, maybe their stories could make sense. Only what was narrated could be understood. You traversed the country—granted, it’s a pygmy country—talking to all manner of Syrians. You went to different corners of Beirut, down south to Sidon, up north to Tripoli, to the west, beyond the mountains to the Beka’a Valley.

  What surprised me after I read the couple of essays you wrote were the details that stuck in my head, the idiosyncrasies of being human. I recalled some of the people in your writings and not others. I didn’t remember much about the people you wrote about who were tortured, not much about the suffering of living as refugees. The woman with the sequin pantry, however, was one of those who remained ineradicable in my memory. Though she lived in a tent that had been erected in the middle of an onion field, she refused squalor. This gorgeous woman in her early twenties had an impeccably clean home that was decorated in an understated style except in one respect, the tent’s masterwork. She had studded her entire pantry with sequins, with results Liberace would have envied. You thought she must have spent untold hours gluing sparkles onto sheets of wood that would become a pantry to store nonperishables. Intricate and delicate, no spot left uncovered, so over the top that many a drag queen would kill for it.

  You desperately wanted it.

  You said she seemed embarrassed when she talked to you, admitting that it took her a long time to finish it, longer than she’d anticipated, what with caring for her four offspring, cooking, cleaning, and tending to her husband and in-laws.

  “It’s good to have something beautiful to come home to,” she said. “The children love it.”

  “I do too,” you said with real appreciation. “It’s magnificent.”

  She blushed, then beamed. A shy grin, and her eyes rose to meet yours. “We had a ton of sequins,” she said.

  In the essay, you wondered what kind of person would think it was a good idea to donate thousands of sequins to Syrian refugees who had nothing left, whose entire lives had been extirpated.

  Bright, shiny, gaudy, useless sequins?

  A fabulous one, of course, a lovely, most wonderful human being.

  How to Become a Westerner

  Another woman I distinctly remember from your refugee interviews was Rania Kassem, whom you met a few months before you showed up to Lesbos. On a Thursday evening in September 2015, under the Viennese lights of the Café Museum, Rania ensnared you in her tale. You spent hours with her. She looked older than her age: only in her fifties, yet the skin on her hands was thin enough that her veins showed violet. She kept brushing a strand of gray hair back from her face. You described her as a woman who didn’t seem to care about her appearance—her shirt peeked from below a dark sweater covered with cat hair, a sprinkling of powdered sugar from the apple strudel studded her lips—yet she carried herself with an innate elegance. Her wrinkles became her, you wrote. Though she painted herself as a stranger in a strange land, her steady voice revealed a confidence not usually present in other Syrian refugees you’d talked to.

  She lost her husband piecemeal, she said, the scent of coffee surrounding her. She spoke rapidly, as if her mind were racing to find something. She took momentary breaks to dip a sugar cube in her coffee and put it in her mouth for a second. Her husband was disappeared five years before the interview, but it felt as if it had happened the day before and simultaneously, in a different epoch. She told you his political standing was well known. He was your garden-variety socialist with a bit of communist leanings, never pretended otherwise. Everyone knew it, and everyone who was anyone sat at their dinner table at one point—ministers of all stripes, other journalists, his coworkers, and his competitors. Daughters of the president, brothers, sons-in-law. All of them. Even the ophthalmologist showed up for dinner once long before he was crowned their valiant leader. He ignored seating arrangements, requisitioning Rania’s chair. She was an ophthalmologist, a real one, so he probably felt the need to put her in her place, which was not to be her usual seat, it seemed. The guests would join the hosts on the living room sofas after dinner, smoking the night away. She usually had difficulty breathing for a couple of days after each dinner. No, they all knew who Rania and her husband were. He was everything to her. They had no children and were devoted to each other.

  Demonstrations erupted in various Middle Eastern countries, and everyone in the government was tense, fearful of a possible revolution in Syria. One day, months before the protests in her country began, she left for work at the hospital and she had a husband. She returned home to a husbandless apartment. She didn’t panic, not at first. She called his newspaper, and even though she was told he hadn’t come in that day, she still wasn’t afraid. She assumed he was working on something somewhere. She assured herself that he would show up a bit later, complain about the horrid day he’d had, likely beg to be fed because he hadn’t eaten since breakfast. She had the maid serve dinner. No, she wasn’t worried. She was a fool.

  She fell asleep not frightened and woke up in their giant bed alone and terrified. She began to make calls, but no one knew anything. She may have been oblivious, but she wasn’t stupid. She figured out that he’d been arrested. The mere fact that the next morning none of the people who’d been regular dinner guests returned her calls made her certain that he was suffering in some cell somewhere. No one
would corroborate anything, and she couldn’t figure out why. She had a long talk with his boss at the paper, and he knew nothing. Her husband hadn’t recently written a controversial column. He had continued to swing his critical pen, but there was nothing that he hadn’t said before, and more obstreperously at that. She wasn’t able to discover what had happened, why they’d disappeared him.

  She searched for him everywhere. She tried to see the ministers they’d known but that didn’t help. She knocked on every prison door in the country. No one would tell her whether he was there. She went to every Mukhabarat office, talked to intelligence agents who wore cheap black leather jackets that were impermeable to compassion. Her husband disappeared, and she turned invisible. The powers that be refused to return her calls and her friends no longer acknowledged her existence. If they saw her on the street, they would cross to the other side. The hospital where she worked fired her for taking time off to look for her husband.

  The antique grandfather clock in the hallway stopped striking the hours. It used to chime from one to twelve and then again every day. Her husband was the one who used to wind it, and she couldn’t do it with him gone. It remained stuck at the same time, its friendly ding-dongs not to be heard. She couldn’t pick up the Scottish plaid blanket he kept in the living room for his nap after lunch. Who knew where their belongings were now? The grief, the guilt, inseparable emotional siblings. She spent months locked in her carapace of an apartment with its unbearable smell of memories, not answering the phone or the door, mostly sitting at the kitchen table weeping bitterly, her nose running. She swallowed enough snot and tears for five lifetimes. She was a walking carcass except she wasn’t walking. She was mired in a slough of misery. She once took out all the brass in the apartment, the vases, the trays, spent a week scouring them with lemon and ash, a whole week of mindless rubbing four or five pieces over and over again. Then one day she was no longer able to ignore the ringing phone. Her brother in Aleppo was on the line, insisting that she leave Damascus that instant. She should come to him, be among family. If she stayed in her apartment, her life would be forfeit.

  She packed a couple of bags. She was sure you’d experienced similar, trying to figure out what to take with you, what to leave behind, knowing that in all likelihood you would never come back, never see your home again. The arbitrary rules we came up with. She decided she’d pack only two suitcases that she’d be able to carry herself if she had to. She didn’t take anything that belonged to her husband. She left all that, but for some reason she ended up packing the espresso machine. She suddenly couldn’t live without it. She still had it in her apartment in Vienna. If you came over, she’d fix you the best cup of coffee in town.

  She moved into her brother’s house in Aleppo, but she didn’t live there for long. Her brother immigrated with his family to Dubai. They wanted her to come with them, but she couldn’t. She still had hope that her husband was alive in jail somewhere. She couldn’t leave, but then she wasn’t able to stay in the apartment what with cluster bombs falling all around her. She moved to her home village north of Aleppo, into a ramshackle house whose cement floor was broken by weeds and wildflowers. The bombs followed her, however. Syrians, Russians, Americans, they all bombed her at one point or another. She couldn’t keep track.

  She ended up in Bab al-Salameh, the refugee camp along the Turkish border, the last place on earth she’d ever have expected to end up. She was given a new identity: an IDP, an internally displaced person. Now that was the lowest of the low and she couldn’t fall any further. She had to rely on the kindness of international governments and nongovernmental organizations for her survival. She was helpless. She lived in a small tent with five other women and the ubiquitous smell of weak paint thinner. The women took care of her. She had no idea how to turn the coal heater on. Cooking? Forget about it. She’d had a maid who’d done all her cooking for years, and without one, she’d subsisted on sandwiches and eating out of cans. There was nowhere to plug in the espresso machine. None of these gentle women could believe at first how helpless she was. She slept on a raffia mat, woke up with blue bruises on her shoulder and an unnavigable loneliness.

  One day, a thirteen-year-old girl in the tent next door stopped being able to move. Rania heard screams in the early dawn, jumped off her mat, and rushed out, only to find a whole host of women blocking the entrance. She wanted to go in, but no one would move aside for her. Whenever a man arrived, the human sea would part for him to enter the tent, but not for her. That’s when it hit her. Hold on a minute, she thought. She was still a fucking doctor. She became herself again. She ordered everybody to move aside. Inside, two men tried unsuccessfully to unfurl the girl, each pulling on a different limb. She ordered them out of the tent, everybody out. It had been a while, she said, but ordering people around was like riding a bicycle.

  The girl was in a fetal position, catatonic, breathing, eyes shut. That was beyond her expertise. She lifted her. The girl was not too light, but Rania knew she could carry her to the Doctors Without Borders camp. She didn’t have to. As soon as she exited the tent, a man from the Free Syrian Army helped her. There were only two doctors in the camp at the time, and they seemed befuddled about what to do. She asked if they had lorazepam or diazepam, and they didn’t. They had only ketamine because that was the only sedative allowed in by the Turks. She hadn’t heard of ketamine being used for catatonia, but she thought that it should work. It did. They administered it intravenously, and within two hours they were able to move the girl’s limbs, within four she was awake.

  She returned to her tent a hero. Her roommates kept asking why she hadn’t told anyone she was a doctor. She explained that she’d forgotten, not that she’d forgotten to tell them, but that she’d forgotten she was. She was born again. For the first couple of days after her rebirth, she had not a moment of rest. She had a huge line of patients waiting to see her. Men, women, children, IDPs, FSA soldiers, locals from villages nearby. It didn’t matter that she was only an ophthalmologist. She treated them all. Her roommates had to shoo people away for mealtimes. She didn’t have to cook for herself again. Not too long after, she was invited to move to the DWB camp. She was back with her peers.

  For the eighteen months she was in the camp, she transformed into a different kind of physician. It was as if she were in an intense residency rotation. She had to treat everything, learning on the spot. One of the doctors, a Viennese in his midsixties by the name of Peter, took her under his wing. She had much more experience than him—he’d entered medical school at fifty-eight, a second or third career—but he was trained as an emergency physician, more useful in the camps than ophthalmology. She became a surgeon (bullet wounds and shrapnel), a burn specialist (she wasn’t the only one incompetent around an oil stove), an OB-GYN. She delivered more babies than she cared to count.

  The Doctors Without Borders camp was separate, but all the camps were controlled and protected by the Free Syrian Army. The joke was that the FSA ran things during the day and Daesh once the sun went to sleep. In any case, FSA men fought alongside the Islamic extremists since their own funding had been cut off and their supplies had run out, whereas Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other Gulf states competed on who would give more money to their pet religiously criminal group. Now, whatever objections she might have had to Daesh, she still treated the fighters. She would have done the same had someone from the regime needed help. She was a physician. She was able to put aside the problems she had with those bigots. They weren’t able to do the same. They had few issues with Western doctors, but she was a local. To them she was a Muslim, no matter if she believed or not. She kept telling them that she was an atheist, but that was even more troublesome. She was an apostate, an outspoken one at that, and a woman. She elicited immeasurable rage in those boys.

  Once a young boy of about seventeen called her a slut. She refused to let it go. They’d spent the last four hours in surgery saving his best friend’s life, another fighte
r. She demanded to know the boy’s name. He was taken aback but he told her. She chided him on his lack of manners, told him she was presumably older than his mother, who she was sure did not raise him to insult his elders. He turned various shades of red. By the time she was done with him, he was stuttering all kinds of apologies.

  But it didn’t end there. Peter kept warning her that she should be wary, but she couldn’t keep her mouth shut. She felt she had nothing to lose. The men of Daesh kept telling her that they didn’t like her clothes, her hairstyle, or her lack of subservience, and she replied with various forms of “mind your own business.” She would not cover her hair. She would not lower her eyes. She certainly wasn’t about to submit. But then they had another Syrian join them, a thirty-two-year-old orthopedic surgeon. The poor man didn’t last three months. He berated a Daesh fighter. He was kidnapped that night. They found his tortured body three days later. Peter insisted that she leave right away. He took her to Istanbul, sponsored her for an Austrian visa, and look at her, she was in Vienna.

  She was fluent in German now, she said. At her age, who could have guessed? This was her fifth language. She was competent enough that she could haggle at the markets, but the Viennese were not as fond of haggling as she. A month earlier, she’d bought an antique grandfather clock at the Naschmarkt for only ten euros, a bargain. It was only a case, no pendulum, no weights, gears, or wheels, but it reminded her of her home in Damascus; she had to have it. Her two cats now used the disemboweled clock for nesting.

  Of course she was working. She had a temporary job at a hospital, but not yet as a physician. She had to sit for the exams in anesthesiology and pain management the following year. There were many frustrating things she witnessed during her time in the camps but none more than seeing children in pain and not being able to do much because they didn’t have the right sedatives or tranquilizers. She was going to be better prepared when she went back. No, she was not afraid of encountering the same problems. She’d be going back as an Austrian. Couldn’t you tell how Germanic she was becoming? Didn’t she hold her nose high enough? She would be a different person. No one would recognize her. She would pass.