by Naomi Holoch
“Do what you want,” my mother said. “You always do.” She punctuated her words by yanking my arm and pulling me out the front door, in the direction of the church, mumbling something about not wanting me to grow up godless like my father.
But me, I’m much better at winning arguments with my father than my mother is. All I have to do is pretend I’m telling the truth and then stay silent until he has shouted, or talked, or hammered himself out of the bad mood I’ve put him in. It’s so simple that, sometimes, it’s hard for me to believe I can keep winning without him noticing my tactics. I live in dread of the day he wakes up to me.
I knew my father would be angry when I gave back Efthalia’s shoes for free, but I also knew that all I had to do was sit still and wait until he hammered the anger out of himself. Waiting for his anger to dissipate was a small price to pay for adventure. Adventure? you’re saying to yourselves. What adventure? I suppose that’s what people mean when they say “Get to the point, Aphrodite.” And I suppose that’s what I mean when I say I tell stories in a roundabout way. Roundabouts are important. For example, while I stopped to tell you about my plans to write songs, my inside-eyes blinked into a wide-open expression of recognition; they gave me the reason I’m on Efthalia’s veranda. Who better to teach me how to write songs that will make a body move than Efthalia?
Efthalia returned with our drinks. I focused on the mix of soap and jasmine that drifted from Efthalia’s body while she began a new conversation.
“Once, when my grandmother was still alive, she asked me to make her some almond cordial. My mind was thinking of other things. I hadn’t noticed that I’d put the almond concentrate in one glass and poured the water into another.” Efthalia inched closer to me on the step and wrapped my hand around the glass without taking a break from her story. “My grandmother was a quiet woman, used her gestures and her words carefully. I remember her looking into the two glasses and saying, ‘You must need a few more years at school so you learn that the concentrate is supposed to go in the same glass as the water.’ She had a way of telling me about myself that made me laugh. We really didn’t speak to each other much. We didn’t have long conversations, but we did have long periods of laughter. Do you remember laughing together at school, Aphrodite? Do you remember the time we followed the twins home—”
“And locked them in their outside toilet—,” I interrupted.
“And turned the hose on them.” She finished off the sentence and stopped to drink the cordial. The retelling of this story didn’t make us laugh, so I filled the silence by listening to a series of her gulps until I heard the sound of an empty glass.
One of the odd things I missed about having sight was watching someone’s throat bounce up and down while they drank. I decided to tell her that. After all, she had told me about her grandmother.
“Put your hand on my throat,” she said, taking my hand and putting it there for me. “I wonder why the lump on a man’s throat is called an Adam’s apple. Wasn’t it Eve’s apple?” I knew she wasn’t expecting me to answer so I listened to her silence, knowing she was thinking. “Maybe it’s because the bite Adam took got stuck in his throat. I’ve never read the Bible. Have you?”
I gave her a one-syllable No so I could quickly return to the feel of her skin next to mine. Today was a big day. Not only did I have to understand sounds and silences, but I also had to understand touch. The feel of me. And, now, the feel of her.
“I don’t think I’ve ever touched someone else’s throat before,” I said as I removed my hand from her neck. Continuing with words that backtracked over the earlier part of the day I said, “I touched my own throat, today. Actually, I was feeling the area from under my chin to my breastbone.”
“Oh,” she said with one syllable that sounded like nine. I had let my guard down. The nine were oh-did-you-and-why-were-you-doing-that? Just how was I going to respond to this oh? Was I going to be safe and ignore it? Was I going to take a risk and exaggerate? Or was I going to be Aphrodite and elaborate? I decided to be me.
“I was feeling my neck because I realized I’d never felt my body before. I wanted to explore it, to see how well I knew myself. It seemed strange to me to walk around with a body for so many years and not know it. So I decided to feel my neck, and my wrists, and my breasts.”
Have you ever noticed how some words seem to go on much longer than the time it takes to say them? Breasts is one of those words. My inside-eyes showed me Efthalia felt that way, too. But, instead of giving the word the time it needed to drift between us, Efthalia caught the sound of breasts in her mouth and repeated it in a way that told me more.
“Ba-reasts,” she said, making it into two syllables.
“Why do you do that?” I asked.
“Do what?”
“Make one-syllable words into two.”
“Do I? I hadn’t noticed.” My inside-eyes told me she knew she was lying. I decided to take a risk and tell her what I could see, but she beat me to it. “I suppose I do, don’t I? I guess I do it for the same reason you decided to feel your body. I like to explore the feel of a word in my mouth.” She stopped for a second and in my head I pictured her sucking the ends of her wavy hair as her eyes drifted into her feelings. “If you take a word that has one sound and turn it into two you can hold on to the word that much longer. Not only can you hold on to it, but you can say it in a way that makes it yours.”
“It’s important to you to do things in a way that’s yours, isn’t it?” The words flew out of my mouth. I tried to understand where the intimacy of this question came from. The only explanation I could find was that it sprang from the awkwardness and the emptiness my hand had felt lying in my lap ever since it left her throat. It was as if I could hear my hand saying, Okay, so we’ve done necks and wrists, but what about feet, or calves, or thighs. The word thigh joined the word breasts in my head. They were dancing together. My inside-eyes were dizzied by the image of disconnected human body parts waltzing. “Yes. It is important to me,” she said. “When my grandmother died I could feel everyone feeling sorry for me. It didn’t bother me that I washed rich peoples’ clothes to feed myself. And I know people feel sorry for me because I haven’t got a husband, but the truth is I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I had one. For me, the important thing is that I have no one telling me what to do. I like to walk around barefoot. People call me gypsy when they think I’m not listening. They think I’ll be insulted. But I think it’s a compliment. I don’t want anyone in my life who’ll tell me to put my shoes on. I only leave my house to buy food, what do I need shoes for? The radio brings me music. There’s a song on the radio that says,
All I want is a room somewhere
Far away from the cold night air
With one enormous chair
Oh, wouldn’t it be love-er-ly
When I heard that song I thought, I’m so lucky, I have everything this woman wants. I have warm air, an enormous chair, and a home of my own. I even understand why she makes lovely into love-er-ly. She wants to keep the word in her mouth longer. She wants to make it hers. All I want is someone I can talk to who won’t feel sorry for me. And if I’m really going to dream I want someone who will, sometimes, choose to talk to me with words and, sometimes, without words.”
“Is that why you drew the heart in my hand?” I clicked.
“Yes,” she said and then I felt the air stir as her face moved closer.
“I wondered why you were bringing in your shoes to be repaired.”
“So who dresses you?” she whispered.
“Pardon?” I said, while my inside-eyes searched to find the part of Efthalia’s body that her question came from.
“Who dresses you?” she repeated. “You look like you’ve been wearing the same clothes for six years.”
“I have,” I admitted. I ran both hands down my thigh, over my knee, down to my ankle. The more Efthalia spoke to me the more my hands felt disconnected from my body. “I don’t trust my mother to pick out clo
thes for me,” I continued. “She thinks clothes should be loose and hair should be pulled back and tied tight.”
“You know your mother has everything backward, don’t you?” I waited for Efthalia to elaborate, but she didn’t. Continuing, she said, “Well, seeing as how you’ve spent your day touching things you’ve never touched before, why don’t you come inside? I have a silk dress for you to feel.”
“A silk dress! Where did you get that?”
“One of the women I work for gave it to me.”
“Rich women give away silk dresses?”
“This one did. She said it was a gift for my hard work. But I think it’s because she hasn’t always had money and watching me work reminds her of where she came from. She feels sorry for me, but in a different way. I don’t mind that as much.” Efthalia paused for a second. I could feel her mind flying backward.
“When I was young I collected silkworms. I made a home for them in a shoebox. I think watching a worm change into a cocoon and then into a butterfly is like watching a miracle. I love the word butterfly. You can play with it. You can rearrange the letters and it will tell you more. My word for butterfly is flutterby. It’s a much better word. Because butterflies are not always the color of butter, but they do always flutter by.” My inside-eyes watched Efthalia’s body unfold. In the music of her sentences and her silences I could hear she had accepted me as someone who didn’t feel sorry for her. “Do you have favorite words?” she asked, wanting me to move into her feeling.
“Well, there’s a song I heard on the radio…. I don’t like the song for the words, I like the song for the things it makes me think about touching. The first time I heard the song it made me want to touch raindrops resting on the petals of flowers. The second time, it made me want to touch the whiskers on my cat. And the third time I heard the song my ears rested on the line that said, ‘Snowflakes that fall on my nose and eyelashes.’ I’d love to feel snow on my eyelashes, but it doesn’t snow here.”
“It does snow. In the mountains. I’ll take you.”
“Two women going into the mountains on their own? My parents would never allow it.”
“Oh yes, your parents. I forgot.” I heard melancholy seep into her voice, but it didn’t stay there for long. “Well, let’s start with something you can feel. Come feel the silk dress and if you like we can share it. But there’s one condition. I’ll only share it if you promise me that every time you wear it you’ll come and drink something with me.”
We both laughed. I had no idea why she was laughing. My inside-eyes were failing me. But I did know why I was laughing. It was a sound to fill up the silence while I tried to work out what to think of her offer. I didn’t say anything. When the laughter stopped I knew that neither of us could fill the silence because it was already full.
“Please. Will you come?”
As she pleaded I felt a certain kind of victory because this was the first time I had witnessed Efthalia waiting without being sure she would be getting. But my victory was fleeting because I wasn’t very good at waiting, either. I wanted to feel silk. She took my hand and gave me a gentle tug to bring me up to standing. I didn’t make it difficult for her. I let out an eighteen-syllabled sigh that spelled I-suppose-this-is-going-to-be-another-one-of-her-getting-times.
“Please?” she repeated.
I had a vision of her unbraiding my hair.
“Yes,” I said.
She took my hand and led me through the meandering maze of her stone-floored house until we reached her bedroom.
“Just a second,” Efthalia said, making subtle changes in the air as she moved away from me. The sound of her voice rang around the room while my mind searched for the next sentence.
“Do you have the dress hanging or folded?” I asked.
“The dress is hanging now,” she said, letting her words trail off until the now was almost inaudible.
I dropped my voice to a whisper. “Can I feel it?”
She moved her body closer and said, “Yes.”
Etel Adnan
No one asked you to be an angel of fear
or even death
We only wanted your skin to be
as smooth
as the sea
an October afternoon
in Beirut, Lebanon
Between two civil wars.
You came
With a handful of pain
and a smile
which broke the ground under my feet
as the earthquake does
when two people
meet.
—From Love Poems (1978)
Etel Adnan, born in 1925, came to the United States from Beirut thirty years ago, but as this excerpt from her prose poem “In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country” (1977) shows, Adnan lives with both the horrors of her war-torn country and the wondrous persistence of the will to love. In writing about her work and its place in the Arab literary tradition, Adnan noted, “I could say that I was for a while the first and only woman in Arab literature, past and present, to publish love poems addressed to a woman.” A writer, poet, painter, and tapestry designer, Adnan has always kept a poet’s notebook in her pocket. The piece we have chosen reflects that concern with details, details overwhelmed by a city’s suffering and a writer’s exile.
from IN THE HEART OF THE HEART OF ANOTHER COUNTRY
Place
So I have sailed the seas and come…
to B…
a town by the sea, in Lebanon. It is seventeen years later. My absence has been an exile from an exile. I’m of those people who are always doing what somebody else is doing … but a few weeks earlier. A fish in a warm sea. No house for shelter, but a bed, from house to house, and clothes crumpled on a single shelf. I am searching for love.
Weather
In Beirut there is one season and a half. Often, the air is still. I get up in the morning and breathe heavily. The winter is damp. My bones ache. I have a neighbor who spits blood when at last it rains.
My House
My father built a house when I was a child near the German school so I could go to it. The school moved out as he finished the roof. Ever since, my property has been rented for the cheapest rent in town. The laws are such that I can’t push out the tenants. Anyway, I am afraid of houses as of tombs.
A Person
My other neighbor (from neighbor to neighbor I shall cover the world) sells birds. And cats. A Siamese cat was born to him and was really Siamese: it had two heads, four ears, two bodies, two pairs of four legs, two tails. And boy, were they glued! He has on sale a little monkey that has been growing for the last seventeen and half years. The store is in front of a newspaper that went broke. All the windows are since blind.
Wires
They are few, and, as there are no trees in Beirut, the wire poles are dead, geometric semblances for trees. Dead archetypes. As for the birds, Lebanese hunters have killed them all. Now they are killing the Syrian birds, too.
The Church
We have churches, mosques, and synagogues. All equally empty at night. On weekends, many flies desert their gardens. People come in.
My House
I should say my side of the bed. Half a bed makes a big house at night. My dreams have the power to extend space and make me live in the greatest mansions. During the day it doesn’t matter. There are many streets, a few remaining sidewalks, and, yes, the café “Express,” in which I move, hunted by memories.
Politics
Oh, it’s too much, too much. Once I dreamed of becoming the new Ibn Khaldoun of America or the de Tocqueville of the Arabs. Now I work for a newspaper and cover the most menial things. So I don’t understand how it is that there are kings without kingdoms and Palestinians without a Palestine. As for the different scandals, they do not matter to me. Why should I care that some thieves steal from other thieves.
Should I?
People
The Lebanese go on two feet, like the Chinese, for example; sometimes on four, t
o pick up a dime under the table. Their country is small, the desires too, and their love affairs. Only their cars are big. Detroit-made Chevys and Buicks. All the unsold Buicks of America are on our roads. So, in this country, you only see the heads of the people. Their bodies are carefully washed and stored away. As for the women, there aren’t any. They all consider themselves as being the other half of their men. With one exception.
Vital Data
The most interesting things in Beirut are the absent ones. The absence of an opera house, of a football field, of a bridge, of a subway, and, I was going to say, of the people and of the government. And, of course, the absence of absence of garbage.
Education
Everybody speaks Arabic, French, English, Armenian, Greek, and Kurdish. Sometimes one language at a time, sometimes all of them together. And even the children are financiers.
Business
Merchants sell to other merchants and buy from them. Men sell women to other men and buy women from them. Women sell women to women. And everybody sells a child: for vanity, for money, for pleasure. In the tall buildings of Hamra children get assaulted under the eyes of their parents. Parents thank God when they get the money.
My House, This Place and Body
There was a house in a eucalyptus grove. My father and I sneaked in, and in the middle of the night a guard came to awaken us. I advised my father to offer him money and he did: he gave him nine hundred pounds. “I didn’t ask for that much,” said the guard. My father, then, disappeared.
Don’t talk to me about my body. It has been battered, cut open; discs, nerves, and tissues have been removed. My belly, a zoological garden. My eyes, poor lighthouses, and my mind a rocky and barren garden, exactly like this place and the unexisting house.