An Unnecessary Woman

by Rabih Alameddine

  I wonder at times how different my life would have been had I not been hired that day.

  I love Javier Marías’s work. I’ve translated two of his novels: A Heart So White and Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me. I’ll consider a third after I read the French translation of the final volume of Your Face Tomorrow, although at more than thirteen hundred pages, I’ll probably balk at that as well.

  But I digress, as usual.

  In one of his essays, Marías suggests that his work deals as much with what didn’t happen as with what happened. In other words, most of us believe we are who we are because of the decisions we’ve made, because of events that shaped us, because of the choices of those around us. We rarely consider that we’re also formed by the decisions we didn’t make, by events that could have happened but didn’t, or by our lack of choices, for that matter.

  More than fifty years ago, on a gloomy day when hope followed my shrimp of an ex-husband out the door, or so I thought at the time, my friend Hannah led me by the hand to a bookstore owned by one of her relatives. The relative, a second cousin once removed, had opened the bookstore as a lark, a ground-floor store with an inadequate picture window in a distressed building off a main street and no foot traffic. There were more stupid stuffed toys than there were books, and everything was covered with dust. The bookstore had as much chance of making it as I did.

  Yet of all things, the flint that sparked a flame in my soul was the huge, darkly stained oak desk where the owner sat. To a practically penniless twenty-year-old divorcée, sitting behind such a desk seemed so grand, so luxurious—something to aspire to. I needed grandeur in my life.

  Hannah told her relative he should hire me, and he informed her that he wanted to hire someone with more experience and, just as important, with more class. He spoke as if I weren’t there, as if I were invisible, as if his face were hidden behind a perforated printout. Hannah, my champion, wouldn’t accept defeat. She explained that I loved books and read constantly, that I knew more about them than he ever would, and, just as important, that I could dust and clean and scrub and mop. He’d have the cleanest bookstore in the city, I piped up, the most sparkling, a diamond. I would rid it of its acrid and musty odor. He pretended to mull over the offer before deciding to hire me for the time being (still talking to Hannah and not me), until he could bring in someone else to be the face of the bookstore.

  What I didn’t know at the time was that the first face he offered the job to belonged to a pretty girl whose family was so classy that they immigrated to Brazil and one of their scions had recently become the governor of São Paulo. The girl left without ever showing her countenance in the bookstore. The second didn’t show up either; she married and no longer needed or wished to be employed.

  Had either of these women made an appearance, my life would have been altogether different. I didn’t realize how the fate of those two had influenced mine until a few years ago when the owner mentioned it in passing. He hadn’t thought for a moment that I could do the job. He credited my success to his diligent training.

  I worked for the paperback dilettante for fifty years, and mine was the only face anyone associated with my bookstore.

  That huge, darkly stained oak desk I once longed for now sits comfortably in my reading room, behind it a window letting in early evening darkness, and next to it my overfilled bookcases. When the owner, my boss, died four years ago, his family closed the bookstore, sold the books and inventory for a pittance. I ended up with my desk.

  How safe I will feel once I begin my translation, how sheltered, seated at this desk in the dark night, as Sebald as Jacques Austerlitz described, seated at this desk “watching the tip of my pencil in the lamplight following its shadow, as if of its own accord and with perfect fidelity . . . from left to right”—right to left, in my case—“line by line, over the ruled paper.”

  On this oak magnificence I place the new notepad, next to the pencils, next to the pens. I unscrew the primary pen, an old Parker, and inspect the ink. The walnut-shaped inkwell, a fake antique of porcelain and copper, is lushly full. It is always a delicious thrill when I prepare for a new project. I feel at home in my rituals.

  The real antique on the desk is a comic book, an illustrated A Tale of Two Cities in Arabic, wrapped in red cellophane. Its value is sentimental only. It was woefully damaged—four pages missing, two torn, others water stained—when I received it some sixty years ago.

  It was summer, I was ten. My mother took her children to the public garden of Beirut. I had only three half brothers by then, I think, the youngest still in the pram. I may not remember my siblings clearly, but I do the day and I do the dress I was wearing, my best one, a blue taffeta with white trim. It came with a white plastic handbag that wouldn’t unsnap and was, in any case, too small to hold anything but a lonesome stick of gum. I remember clutching it to my right hip at all times. I remember the sky as clear and breezy, the whitish sun lazy and indifferent, neither too warm nor too bright. My mother—hunched over, her knees touching, both feet on the ground—sat on a wooden bench that was painted an overworked brown and was missing a board in its backrest. My half brothers and I clustered around her, planets orbiting our tired star. Shoo, shoo. She wanted us away. We weren’t used to being around strangers.

  In tentative steps with tiny feet I did separate, slowly and hesitantly, but I did.

  A chestnut-haired boy, plump and pale, with eyes the color of newly pressed olive oil, sat forlorn, all alone on a bench, longingly watching gaggles of dizzyingly loud children rush about on bicycles, tricycles, and those topless, floorless miniature red cars. The lonely boy looked a few years younger than I. Rolled up in his hand was the comic book that lies on my desk right now.

  I envied him. I wanted that comic book more than I’d ever wanted anything.

  I asked him if he wanted to play. I used the word play, I remember that, giving him the option of choosing what game he wanted. He lit up, flushed as if he’d drunk a glass of Bordeaux. He did want to play, most certainly he did. He nodded and nodded and nodded. I asked if he was willing to share his comic book. He didn’t mind at all, he let me hold it. My dress had no pockets because it came with a purse that didn’t open. I gave it to him, my purse. A fair trade, no? He laid it on the bench and neither one of us noticed or cared when it disappeared. We played tag. My half brothers joined us, and others did as well. He had a good time. He left us grasping his mother’s hand and waving wild good-byes, a wide smile turning his double chin into a triple. I remember his jolly face, his joy, and his lovely smile to this day. There must be a reason that this survives so clearly in my imagination.

  I went home with my comic book, my mother giving me a tongue-lashing for losing the plastic handbag.

  How would I ever grow up to be a proper lady?

  There’s another relic on the desk, though not as ancient, a souvenir from the war years in Beirut: a copy of Calvino’s Invisible Cities, scorched in the lower right corner, but just the back cover and the preceding twenty-two pages. The front isn’t damaged. I was reading the book by candlelight while people killed each other outside my window. While my city burned, I had an incendiary mishap, something that seems to have happened regularly to Joseph Conrad—the incendiary mishaps, not the burning cities.

  The burning city, what a time. I have to mention here that just because I slept with an AK-47 in place of a husband during the war does not make me insane. Owning an assault rifle was not an indicator of craziness. You had to consider the situation. In the early days of the civil war, I used to descend to the garage beneath the building next door when the shelling began; our building didn’t have one, being a decade older. I hated those nights. Residents of the neighborhood, anxious and sleep deprived, sat around the rodent-resplendent garage in inappropriate dress: nightgowns, boxer shorts and undershirts, holey socks. I spent many a night there in the beginning of the war, until one day in 1977, while I was underground, a group of Palestinians broke into the apartment, rum
maged through my belongings, and one of them defecated on the floor of the maid’s bathroom. That was the first break-in.

  You might think that the Palestinian chose not to use the toilet because I had no running water. He might have felt it was beneath him to use the bucket filled with blue water—I’d hung toilet cleanser inside it—to flush. Not so; it was not uncommon for men to do such things. Israelis left their shit in houses they broke into; Palestinians left their shit; the Lebanese, the Iranians, the Syrians; Christians, Jews, Muslims. For man, this urge, which had been deposited in his cells at Creation, would forever be bestially liberated during war. It said: I was here, like it or not. I am told that toddlers in China do not wear diapers; their pants have a vertical opening along the seat making it easier for them to crouch and excrete. All soldiers should wear pants with slits.

  Someone shat in my home. I procured a Kalashnikov.

  I waited for a lull. After the incident, I was unable to sleep for three days, and no longer descended into the bowels of the neighboring building when the shelling gained heft and weight. I would choose to die with my apartment rather than live without it. In the margins of morning, I crouched behind my window and observed teenage Thanatophiles with semiautomatics running cockroachy zigzags. Moonlight on hand-me-down rifle barrels. As nebulae of flares colored indigo skies, I saw stars blinking incredulously at the hubris below. Set on low, my kerosene lamp murmured all night, acting as white noise. I waited and waited, kept company by a ticking clock whose dials glowed a phosphorescent lime green in the dark. I sat by the window, household chores not done. On my bulky couch next to the bulkier television, I watched my city, my necropolis, broil and crumble.

  On the morning of cease-fire number 53,274 (the earlier one lasted all of thirty seconds, the one before that probably even less—okay, okay, so I exaggerate, but there certainly were more than one hundred cease-fires by 1977, two years into the war), I changed out of my nightgown into a pink tracksuit and espadrilles. Across the street, the Dexedrined Thanatophiles were playing poker, with matchsticks as chips, on a green felt folding table with slender legs, in front of Mr. Azari’s grocery store, the true litmus test of whether a cease-fire would hold—the store, not the card game, for Mr. Azari was intimately connected to various militia leaders. The store was the war’s weather vane. If its poison-green shutters were shut, no one ventured out of the house. If they were open, the neighborhood wasn’t in imminent danger. By my count, there were five bullet holes scattered across the metal shutters. Mr. Azari waved at me, obviously wanting to talk, but I only nodded in his direction and rushed past. I berated myself for not being friendlier, for not trying harder to make him like me, since he hoarded food and water from his meager stock and offered it to his preferred customers. I reasoned that I would never be one. His favorites offered him home-cooked meals, and I was a mediocre cook. I was lucky, though; Fortune watched over me. Fadia was by far the best cook in the neighborhood, and fed him constantly. Since the war began, he had gained fifteen kilos. I may not have been Fadia’s favorite person, but I was her neighbor and tenant (she’d inherited the building after her parents’ deaths). A few mornings a week, I’d wake to find on my doorstep a couple of bottles of water, maybe a sack of rice, sometimes a bag of fresh tomatoes or a few oranges. After nights when the clashes were fiercer than usual, she’d leave a dish of the same meal she offered Mr. Azari. With the first bite, I would turn devout and pray for her welcome into Paradise or God’s bosom or any beauty spa she chose.

  Instead of going to open the bookstore, I took a bedraggled jitney to Sabra. No Lebanese car would drive into the Palestinian camp’s labyrinth once the civil war erupted, so I got out at the entrance. I had the need of Theseus and the knowledge of Ariadne, no ball of yarn for me, so I sought the Minotaur, not to kill him, but to ask for his help. I sought Ahmad.

  Ahmad’s mother lived in a shack, or, to be more precise, a jerry-built structure consisting of a concrete wall onto which three sidings of asbestos and corrugated iron were jammed, with a tin roof on top. Its door, also of shingles, was not hinged; you simply removed it to walk in or out and replaced it when through. No lock needed since neighbors were atop one another; if anything went missing, all knew which neighbor had borrowed what. I’d been there once before, years earlier, at which time six people lived within the structure. I only had to deliver a book, a present for Ahmad’s seventeenth birthday, and didn’t enter even though his mother, kind and gentle at the time, kept insisting that I honor her with my presence in her household.

  What was difficult before the war, navigating the maze of alleys, had become tribulation. Puddles that used to form only after rainfall had become permanent lakes of sewer-brown, the stench suffocating. My thighs were sore from being unnaturally stretched with each lake-avoiding step. I had to maneuver my way around heaps of discarded furniture, rotted beams, broken plates, and twisted silverware. A giant eucalyptus, seemingly the only living thing in sight, added to the confusing aromas (shit and Vicks); it flourished in its exotic environment, dwarfing the surrounding shacks of brick, of cement, of aluminum siding, even cardboard. A happy and content immigrant, proud of its achievement and splendor, the tree would probably have laughed off any suggestion of returning to Australia. Its sadly hued green appeared bright against the poverty of color, all faded grays and dirty whites. If only someone had planted a bougainvillea; it would have flourished in these fecund crannies.

  When Ahmad’s mother, who’d metamorphosed into a small bundle of jerky gestures and imprecations, answered the shingles door, she said that her ungrateful son hadn’t lived there for years. I should tell the coldhearted mother-hater that the woman who conceived him, the woman who carried him for nine painful months and cared for his every need as he grew up, needed bread.

  Ahmad had moved up in the world, out of Sabra.

  Forgive me a brief digression here. It’s only to offer you a fuller idea of Sabra.

  Years later, after the war, in the midnineties, a local artist asked me to help him sell prints of a map of Beirut and its suburbs that he had lovingly painted by hand. He was obviously smitten with our city. He’d painted Beirut as if it were the whole world, complete within itself, each neighborhood a different country with its own color, streets as borders, the tiniest road documented, every alley, every corner. He’d even drawn in little hydrographic symbols (fleurs-de-lis) where all the water wells are supposed to be—Beirut, whose name is derived from the word well in most Semitic languages because of the abundance of its belowground water.

  A complete sphere, Beirut as the total globe, the entire world. The painter even created a Greenland effect, stretching the longitude lines at the top and bottom, with increasing distortion of size as one moved north or south of the city. In the map, Beirut existed outside of Lebanon, apart, not part of the Middle East. It was whole.

  As a Beiruti through and through who in a long life has spent only ten nights away from the suckling breasts of her city (Grünbein: “Travel is a foretaste of Hell”), I considered the map a chef d’oeuvre, a stunning, glorious work of inspiration. The more I lauded, the wider his smile. We stood side by side in my bookstore, staring at the print I had hung on the wall. He tried to light a cigarette, but his hand shook too much. I told him he couldn’t smoke inside. He confessed nervousness. I led him outside, carrying the map. “Let’s see it in Beiruti daylight.” In front of the store window, he shrugged off his uneasiness and regained confidence. I noted that the streets of Sabra were not named and were less delineated than the other streets.

  “I tried,” he said, “but everything worked against me. The streets were impermanent, transmogrifying at night into something else as if to trick me.” The books behind the glass window were witnesses to what he said next: “The streets and alleys of Sabra multiply at night like rats—like rats, I tell you.”

  He had painted the Sabra camp a very light blue, like the Siberian tundra in some maps. The cartographer must have been loath to include the camp
in his map. I considered giving him Bruno Schulz’s book, which negotiates a similar situation. Schulz wrote: “On that map . . . the area of the Street of Crocodiles shone with the empty whiteness that usually marks polar regions or unexplored countries of which almost nothing is known.”

  Ah, Cinnamon Shops is still one of my favorite books. That map of Beirut still hangs on my bedroom wall.

  Sabra? I haven’t been back there.

  Back to Ahmad. I first met him when he was a timid teenager in 1967, lanky and wispy, a character out of a Chekhov story, with peach fuzz and kaffiyeh, trying to emulate his hero Yasser (George Habash and the Popular Front, which was beginning to form that same year, wouldn’t come into his life for a while yet). He wore bone-framed glasses that were too big for his face. I didn’t notice him standing before my desk until he ahemmed. I was confronted by the smell of licorice and anise, his tooth-crushing candy drops. He was sent to me by another bookstore in the city, told that no one else could help him. He was looking for a book by an Italian, but couldn’t remember the title or the name of the author. He had to give me a little bit more to go on, I told him. Italians had been writing books for hundreds of years.

  He said, “The hero of the book was not a hero, he killed many lizards.”

  I didn’t laugh, but my eyes must have betrayed me. He blushed and backed up a step. I walked him over to a stack and handed him The Conformist.

  “The lizards are in the early pages of the book,” I said.

  He held it in his hands as if it were the Quran. Did I have it in Arabic? I didn’t think it had been translated (I wouldn’t translate it because I found it didactically dull, not that I would have showed him the translation had I done one). His English wasn’t very good.

  “I’m not a teacher,” I said. “Reading a book would definitely help your English.”

  Was it all right with me if he examined it to see if he could read it?