What to do as the voices from the past recede further and further into the past?
Is this the very thing that allows us to go on living? Or is it the very reason we are doomed?
The sun is getting ready to set behind the high-rises and the mountains as she and the lover set off for a friend’s ski lodge to spend a few hours away from the city. The sun sets, the roads meander, the mountains rise, the sky spreads, the valleys fall, and the snow unfurls across the mountains, the roads, the valleys, its blue and white and gray and brown crawling into one another before their thirst for the land and the air separates them, before the force of cement and glass and plastic and metal and brick and gravel and asphalt separates them, before they find their way back into an embrace once again. The roads take them away, away from the mutilated air of a city lying on its deathbed, suffocating its people with the dark, heavy blanket of smog, a blanket they themselves keep threading with an avarice for apartments and malls and buildings and cars and highways and apartments and malls and buildings and cars, suffocating them as they walk and drive and rush and live and die and live and die and die and die. The roads take them away: into the naked air that shall not remain naked much longer, that shall soon be covered, because the blanket is growing larger and heavier, the boundaries between the city and the country disappearing, nature disappearing, the human’s legs spreading wider and wider, his voice rising louder and louder. The roads take them away so their bodies can spend a few hours in the arms of the solemn snow, so their cheeks can be blushed by the oxygen and the food and the company and the freshness and the coldness of the air. Only to send them back to the city a few hours later.
The stars shine, and the dogs bark, and the snow sparkles, and they move toward the darkness and heaviness of the blanket. She sits in the passenger seat clutching the unknown pain in her stomach, and he heads straight to a twenty-four-hour clinic, and she sits in the colorful chairs of the waiting room, feeling uncomfortable and restless, and he pays the admission fees, and they wait only a minute or so before the doctor calls her in, as soon as two other patients have left the room, and she tells him about the pain and that she had thought it was her period but now she doesn’t think so anymore, that she had thought it had gotten better after she took a pill late last night, that she woke up fine this morning and was fine not eating anything during the day, was fine until after taking that one bite for dinner, and now she thinks she should not have taken even that one bite, thinks it might have been something she ate at the restaurant last night, thinks she should perhaps not have smoked the hookah last night, and oh, the pain is really awful, and the tears fall down her face, and she clutches her purse and the chair and almost shouts.
The doctor examines her, says he can’t tell what’s causing the spasms and the pain, says he’ll prescribe a few things and that the nurse will inject her in the next room. He suggests she lie down for an IV because she hasn’t eaten, and her blood pressure is low, and it won’t take longer than half an hour, and meanwhile the shots will take care of the spasms and the pain, and after that they’ll see how she’s doing. She thanks the doctor. She shuts the door.
The nurse reopens the door to usher someone else in. White tiles cover the hallway’s floor. The nurse looks into a half-open cabinet of drugs and picks out some medication. The nurse shows her to the next room. Curtains separate the beds. She lies down on a bed next to the wall. She bends in pain. The nurse gives her the shots. The nurse looks for a vein in her arm. She curls in pain. She screams. The nurse fails. The nurse looks for a vein in her hand.
The nurse finds the vein and puts in the IV. She sobs. He comes in to caress her, to soothe her, to whisper to her, to hold her hand. The IV drips into her. The pain subsides a bit, but not really. He goes out.
She listens to the sounds of the men and women coming and going outside in the hallway and listens to the nurse and the doctor talking, then the nurse comes in while on the phone with someone else, who seems to be a woman, and checks up on her, and the IV drips some more, and the nurse goes to the other side of the curtain and tells the friend on the phone that she’s having guests tomorrow and that the maid cannot make it and asks if the friend can come over to help with food preparation, and the IV drips some more, and the nurse leaves the room, leaves her with the beds and the curtains and the walls, and nobody comes in for a while. Only a few more drops of the medication are left in the IV’s plastic container, and the half hour is gone, and the pain is not.
He comes in and caresses her face, her hair, her arm, her hand, her neck, her cheeks and talks of this and that, and she cries and curses, and he goes out to ask for the doctor again. The nurse comes in. The nurse takes the IV needle out, injects two more drugs. The doctor comes in. The doctor tells her to go home and rest a bit, assuring her the shots will take care of her, tells her to go to the hospital if the pain gets worse during the night. The doctor leaves. He comes in to help her get ready to leave.
She feels the urge to throw up. She feels the pain squeezing everything inside her, squeezing hard even when it subsides. He asks if she needs something to throw up in, if he should call the nurse or the doctor. She says no, no, telling herself it will go away, it will go away. He begins to gather her things. She feels the pain stabbing into her, deep into her. He waits for her at the door. She wants to reach inside herself, grab her guts, and get rid of it all, wants to throw up and empty herself of the weight of the pain. She runs to the sink at the corner of the room, and she retches, thinking who is going to clean up this mess, this mess, this vomit.
She decides she needs a massage. A full-body massage. Maybe a facial. Maybe a manicure and a pedicure. Maybe a haircut, but not a new color. It’s just one of those days.
She calls the spa and, miraculously, is able to get in for a manicure and a haircut. No appointments available for a massage and a facial for a month, the receptionist tells her. Not enough time for both a pedicure and a manicure with the woman she has asked for.
She pays the old man who has made it his job to help the women park on the street and watch their cars while they’re inside having their bodies attended to, and as she buzzes and enters the building, beyond the brownish-gray curtain separating the women-only inside from the outside, she is welcomed by the sound of water flowing down a wall into a small pool and the scent of incense in the air. Today, for a few hours, she will spoil herself the way many of the women here do several times a week, stealing away from the company or the hospital or the school or the office or the home to attend to their bodies on the occasion of a dinner party, a birthday party for one of their kids’ playmates, a wedding, an engagement party, a vacation to one foreign beach or another, a gallery opening, a rendezvous with a lover, or simply because they feel down or are bored with one hair color or nail polish or have too many free hours on hand.
The haircut doesn’t take that long. The stylist knows her hair, her style, her likes and dislikes. A few snips here and there. A touch of the razor here and there. The same cut invigorated. As she hugs her and thanks her for her magic touch, the stylist tells her that in two months, she’ll be heading back to L.A. for good, or at least for the time being, in case she wants to make another appointment before then. She says of course she will and asks her if she’s on Facebook so that they can befriend one another later but they still exchange email addresses just in case.
Downstairs, in the nail salon, she lets the fingers of one hand linger in the water bowl while those of the other rest in the hand of her favorite manicurist in town, who knows exactly how she likes her nails filed, not too square, not too round. The young woman tells her that she and her husband have decided to live a bit longer at her in-laws’ to save up for their apartment, tells her about his new business, tells her she loves her new haircut, asking which of the stylists upstairs did it for her, asking why she never lets it grow long, asking why she never tries highlights or lowlights, the difference between which the manicurist has to explain to her, tells her about a new oi
l she’s tried for stronger nails, suggests she try it too, asks what she has been up to since they last met, tells her she might be able to change her toenail polish, too, if her next customer shows up late.
Women’s feet idle and age in the hot water in custom-designed sinks, and their hands and fingers are massaged, and their nails are painted black or French or beige or dark blue or purple or different shades of red, cherry or toxic red or blood orange or divine passion or simply red, or each finger is painted a different color of the rainbow. A pack of digestive biscuits is offered by another manicurist who has lost many kilos since she was last here and is passed around the room from one free hand to another, and she explains to the curious eyes who her doctor is, how hard the diet is, how long the hours at the gym are, how she has had to go shopping for new clothes, smaller sizes, different styles.
The receptionist calls her manicurist to let her know the next customer has canceled, and the manicurist fills the sink with fresh hot water for her feet, adding a few drops of Betadine, and she takes off her shoes and socks and happily dips her feet into the hot water. She can now continue to eavesdrop on the not-so-quiet conversations the other women are having. One speaks of the latest ISIS attacks, taking her analysis back to 9/11, then all the way to the UN’S and Russia’s latest moves with regard to Syria, moving from Afghanistan to Turkey to Saudi Arabia to Britain to the U.S., talking as if she’s a political analyst expert in the region’s dilemmas and aims to solve them once and for all before her nail polish dries. The timid elderly server walks in with her tray and circles the room asking if anyone would like tea or coffee, and the receptionist calls to let one of the girls know her lunch order has been delivered, and the girl excuses herself for a second and comes back with a plastic bag, the contents smelling of burgers and fries, and she hands it to the server and asks her to put it, please, in the kitchen for now, and her manicurist takes a moment to check the text messages on her phone, the smile on her face suggesting she’s sending a heart or a smiley or their text equivalents to her husband, then cuffs her pant legs and pushes them up and begins massaging her feet with lavender and almond oil, and as she closes her eyes, letting her muscles relax under the manicurist’s strong fingers, she hears the two women sitting in front of her speak, like several others in the room, about their kids.
One woman wonders if she should order cupcakes and balloons for her youngest child’s birthday party or go with the caterer they used for their eldest child’s party, who handles everything from decorations to finger foods to dinner to the cake to party favors for kids and parents, and the two go on and on discussing which choices would make the party the talk of the town, and right when she’s on the verge of asking her manicurist to hurry up so she can get out of there before they drive her insane with their pretentious luxuries, one of them, not the one throwing the party, says something about how amazing it would be if she could arrange a tour of the doll museum she took her daughter and a few of her friends to a month ago, which they loved and talked about the entire week after with their friends at school, and the woman who wants to throw a party gets excited and says, oh, that’s an amazing idea, I can have the kids’ nanny and tutor take them there and then have the party later at home, but the other rushes to add, yes, it would be amazing, but unfortunately she doesn’t think it is possible anymore, since the other day while she was waiting at the bank, she heard on national news that the museum was broken into the night before, and along with the office equipment and cameras, more than a hundred dolls were stolen, so she doesn’t think it’s worth the visit anymore even if the museum is open, and the other woman gets disappointed and wonders once again what to do for the party, how to make sure it is à la mode enough for the pictures she wants the photographer she’s hiring to take of her beautiful family and of the event, and the two begin once again to evaluate the work of one event planner against another, to compare the party one mother threw to that of another and another, while the one who delivered the news of the dolls being stolen doesn’t cease to remind the other how memorable the visit she arranged to the museum was for the daughter and her friends, oh well, I guess nobody else can experience that now, I’m glad I did that for them, oh, they still get so excited when they tell their friends about it at school, oh, I wish you could do it, too, but I guess you can’t anymore.
In the Nazi camps, the tortured bodies could not be named as such. “Under no circumstances were they to be called ‘corpses’ or ‘cadavers,’ but rather simply Figuren, figures, dolls” (Agamben 2002).
She thinks about asking the woman if she knows anything else about the dolls, but then she decides she has better chances of finding information on the internet, since the woman wouldn’t have heard any news of it if she hadn’t happened to be waiting at the bank, if the TV hadn’t been set on the national news channel, if it wasn’t time for the local news.
Her manicurist finishes up her foot massage and cleans the oil from her nails with alcohol and asks what color she wants today, and thinking about the gray dress and the colorful, flowery heels she wants to wear to the party tonight, she asks for the reddest red they have, for both her hands and her feet.
It’s all subjective, relative. Whom we judge and why and how.
She judges the women throwing parties for their kids, their self-absorbed grandiosity. I judge her half-serious search, her caring but not caring enough. Someone else judges me, and I judge myself, and the chain continues.
Who am I to be translating, rebuilding, representing, recounting, relating these people, these events, these narratives, these truths, these worlds?
Do I have permission to speak these stories?
Are they my stories? Are they my stories too?
“I do not know how to talk about my country without talking about all the bodies it has destroyed. I do not know how to talk about my city without talking about all the bodies it keeps underground. I do not know how to talk about ghosts without talking about myself” (Borzutzky 2015).
What purpose can these narratives fulfill when at some point they’ll become another object of intellectual inquiry on a library shelf, another object that’s lost its emotional bearings? What good is yet another remnant? Of a time, of a people, of a hope for change, or a struggle against hopelessness?
How do disparate attempts at storytelling become our collective narratives, our collective memories?
How can a narrative be collective when each of us reads and remembers it through our individual bodies and minds and emotions?
Through our individual (hi)stories? How can a narrative be collective when we are constantly shedding cells and new ones are appearing in their place?
What to do to move beyond judgment, beyond criticism? To move beyond separations and toward shared spaces?
How do collective narratives become collective actions? How much time does it take?
Is a compilation of stories that leads to noise better or worse than silence?
Doesn’t noise create the illusion of knowledge, sympathy, empathy?
Of narratives heard, existences registered, lessons learned?
Why this need for words?
Why not silence?
Is silence ignorance? Is silence rejection? Is silence stagnation?
Doesn’t silence hint at the void? At the sacred? At the unspeakable? Can’t silence be sacred?
corpse (44)
men in armor
She is excited for the friend’s party tonight. The lover is late to pick her up. He is supposed to buy dessert. She has already gotten the friend two tiny bowls, azure inside and white outside, filled with the tiny traditional flowers she knows she loves. This is her housewarming and a celebration of her thesis defense. This is her own place after a hard divorce. This is the result of her years-long research on the subject of marriage satisfaction and psychology. This is her friend getting back on her feet, and she’s happy to be sharing in the celebration.
She knows the neighborhood. Only a short drive away. On
ce upon a time, a village adjacent to a past city. Now just another neighborhood interweaving with others to form a transient map of the present city. Of its deeply rooted trees, only some remain. Of its large gardens, many are gone. The fabric store, the hardware store, the hookah store, the copy shop, the car stereo store, the handwoven rug store, the confectionery, the sandwich shop are all still there, exactly as they were once upon a time, or as ghosts of their older selves, reinvented for new customers and their demands. The little old groceries are now little supermarkets. The flower shop has new tiles and paint, and its window is filled with orchids and houseplants. The bakery still bakes its barbari bread but in an electric stove instead of a coal one. The bread doesn’t taste the same. The butcher shop is still there, though the carcasses of the cows and calves and sheep and lambs and chickens don’t dangle from hooks in front of the store anymore, but are skinned and deboned and cleaned and sliced and portioned and marinated in the basement, which has been renovated according to the health authorities’ rules and regulations, and only then is the meat brought up to be arranged in constantly sanitized containers and fridges and showcases. The mosque is still there, too, trying to hold on to its past splendor. And so are the mountains and the mountain paths and the mountaineers and the river flowing through the mountains and their valleys, the cafés and the sunny-side-ups and the lentil soups served with hot bread and freshly brewed tea.
Though perhaps even the mountains and their paths and the river and the mountaineers and the cafés are not the same anymore.
They pass a few body shops and the neighborhood’s taftoon bakery, whose bread she loves and buys whenever she passes, if there’s not a long line, and then they reach the friend’s building, right in front of the sports complex, and find a parking spot near some construction waste piled up in a corner, and as she notices the shadows of the prison gate further up the road she wraps her long, black satin veil around her bare legs and arms and shoulders and tightens her silk scarf before picking up the gift and her purse, getting out of the car, and walking down the street to the door of the friend’s apartment building.
trans(re)lating house one Page 9