An Unnecessary Woman

by Rabih Alameddine

  I returned to my desk. He sat on the floor leaning against a bookshelf, his legs splayed before him, the rubber soles of his shoes facing out, conspicuously visible. Three books faced out as well, As I Lay Dying, Goodbye, Columbus, and A Moveable Feast, the last two having recently arrived in Beirut. Separated by the spines of other books, they formed a triangle that floated atop his head. It was only then that I understood he couldn’t afford to buy a book, any book. The army pants he wore were neither a fashion nor a political statement—they were inexpensive.

  I asked if he had killed lizards when he was a boy. He asked for the meaning of the word magpie, the word austerity, and the word covet.

  I liked him.

  He loved the book, finished it in twenty-three days (the bookshop wasn’t open on Sundays). He appeared every afternoon, sat in the same spot. On the infrequent occasion that I had a customer when he arrived, he’d sheepishly wave and tiptoe to Moravia’s book, which he’d returned to its position the day before. By the second week he began to do little things around the shop, by the fourth he was signing for deliveries. I tried to have him hired, but the owner refused. I needed the help. I was the only employee. If I was sick, the bookshop didn’t open.

  “Give him part of your salary,” the owner replied. “The bookshop isn’t a moneymaking enterprise. It’s a labor of love.”

  Not exactly. I provided the labor, I provided the love, and he enjoyed the fugitive cachet of owning a bookstore. Ahmad worked in the shop without pay for four years. He didn’t seem to mind. He helped me whenever he could, sat in his spot and read during slow periods. He came and went as he pleased, may not have been punctual, but he was fervently devoted to the bookstore, to his reading, desperate to educate himself. When I apologized for working him without pay, he replied that sons always worked without recompense.

  One day he decided to paint the interior of the shop. He’d ended up with free cans of light lavender paint. It seems someone at the refugee camp had bought them for a bargain before realizing that no one would want their walls that color. Ahmad left the spaces behind the stacks unpainted because we didn’t have enough cans. I loved the color and kept it till the bookshop closed and I retired.

  I relied on him. A few young men used to trickle into the bookstore before his arrival, solitary and in groups, without any intention of buying books. With a single woman working at the store, a boy could practice flirting, try his luck. I dealt with them by ignoring them. They were harmless, but I found them irritating. My friend Hannah, who often visited me at the store, found them amusing. She didn’t interact with them, but her face lit up whenever one of the lads walked in. Ahmad, on the other hand, considered them offensive. He glared, followed them around until the offenders left the bookstore. One time after he chased two teenagers out, Hannah asked him if he was sure that they were not going to buy anything.

  “They only wish to harass respectable ladies,” he said.

  “Are you sure respectable ladies don’t wish to be harassed?” she said. “I don’t know about Aaliya here, but maybe I want to talk to a handsome young man, just a few words here and there.”

  He looked up at both of us and smiled for the first time that day, his glasses sliding a little along his nose as he did so.

  “If you talk to one,” he said, “you wouldn’t be able to get rid of him. He would never leave.”

  He left me sometime in 1971 because the traumatic events of Black September the previous fall forced him to reevaluate his priorities. The killings in Jordan probably convinced him that books would not open the door to his cell. In this world, a cause could—a cause could swing prison doors wide open. I mourned his loss.

  Even though I believe that the choice of a first book, the book that opens your eyes and quickens your soul, is as involuntary as a first crush, I still wish he’d chosen a different one. He loved The Conformist and saw himself as utterly unlike its protagonist, but in light of what he would mature to become in later years the choice now seems so pathetically predictable, almost a cliché. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, as Marxist-Leninist as it may have considered itself to be, was a mirror image of Mussolini’s Fasci Italiani di Combattimento. Political parties may argue, yell and insult, punch and kick each other, launch grenades and missiles; it is naught but Narcissus’s silly gesturing at the pool’s image.

  Ahmad was sure he was different from Marcello, the protagonist of The Conformist, who has no moral core, who is a follower, who has no independent personality. Ahmad claimed to be an individualist.

  There is none more conformist than one who flaunts his individuality.

  Let me revisit the events of Black September, not so much to paint the political or historical landscape, important though that may have been in changing Lebanon and sending it into the abyss of civil war, but to show the changes in Ahmad. I wish to paint the transformation of his face.

  I am familiar with only the broad strokes of his background. His family hailed from a small village east of Haifa, expelled by the Yishuv during the Nakba of 1948 (his terms, not mine). The village was leveled and erased from all but the villagers’ memories. He was born in Sabra. His family, uncles and aunts, were dispersed across refugee camps in southern Lebanon, Jordan, and the West Bank.

  In September 1970, Jordan was in turmoil. Palestinian fedayeen were launching operations from that country, and Israel was retaliating—excessively, as has always been her wont—by bombing Jordan. The Palestinians were practically running the country, a state within a state. Feeling threatened, King Hussein of Jordan declared war upon them. Scores and scores perished. The conflict, the death and dying, lasted until July 1971 with the expulsion of the PLO and thousands of Palestinian fighters to Lebanon.

  Lucky us.

  During those months, Ahmad changed. He considered the king an Israeli agent, an American lackey. If brother could kill brother, then anyone was suspect, anyone and everyone. He was devastated. Already taciturn, he turned practically mute. He wasn’t sullen as a teenager, but became so. He withdrew unto himself. His skies clouded with black.

  But his face.

  His face.

  Joseph Roth once wrote: “It takes a long time for men to acquire their particular countenances. It is as if they were born without their faces, their foreheads, their noses or their eyes. They acquire all these with the passage of time, and one must be patient; it takes time before everything is properly assembled.”

  Ahmad acquired his countenance during Black September. His eyebrows wove together, almost becoming one, giving him an expression of permanent starkness. There was no need for patience before everything was assembled. Once the transformation began, it was quick and hurried. I could almost see each eyebrow hair stitch across the bridge of his nose. Disappointment hid in the tiny furrows of his forehead, fury in the corners of his mouth. The eyes darkened, the skin tightened; he lost what little baby fat he had, and the bones beneath his face grew more defined. The peach fuzz became a beard.

  For a while, he still showed up at the bookstore, but he was no longer accessible. It was as if I became part of the problem, someone to mistrust, the other. We shared the same space, but no longer the attentiveness, the empathy, or the companionship. We were like a married couple. I didn’t understand why he kept returning for those few months after Black September, but I wanted him to. I felt he needed me to be there in some inexplicable way.

  One day he entered the bookstore in high sulk, and I noted that the transformation was complete. He reeked of testosterone. I also noted that the army pants were no longer the cheap kind. I felt crushed.

  I looked him up and down, from the boots to the kaffiyeh. He smirked, turned around, showing me his back, and exited the bookstore.

  He left me.

  A few years later I went looking for him.

  Yes, Ahmad had moved up in the world, out of Sabra, out of Siberia. By 1977, when I knocked on his door, he was living in a lively neighborhood of Beirut, far from the camp. He
was still a vivacious picture of youth, but there was nothing peach-fuzzy about him. I had to remind myself that the peach fuzz was already gone the last time I saw him. At twenty-six or twenty-seven, he was in his prime, and amid a frenzied civil war, he was in his milieu: the slacks pressed and tailored, the white shirt fitted and expensive, the face smiling and clean-shaven. A zebra skin on the floor of the entryway greeted me, and it felt as though Ahmad had flayed the prey before breaking his fast that morning. The anteroom was bigger than his mother’s shack.

  I was slow to understand, it took me a few minutes, that he was relishing what he considered a role reversal. Of course he’d help me. Whatever I wanted. I had always been kind to him. Sit, sit in the majestic living room, plush seats. I sat ensconced within a room of Balzacian embellishments—a cloverleaf of small Lalique ashtrays, Lladró and Hummel figurines approximating a modernist Nativity scene, a grandfather clock, a rug that might have been twice my age at the time.

  He inquired whether I’d had breakfast. “Yes,” I replied, “I ate two days ago.”

  “Wonderful,” he cheered, “wonderful.”

  Did I care for coffee?

  A maid from the Philippines brought out the coffee. I couldn’t disguise my surprise.

  “It must be worse where she comes from,” he explained. “They have their own wars.”

  One sip and I cut to the point. I told him I wanted to protect myself. I’d had intruders in my home. He lit up, happy to help. He suggested the AK-47: cheap, reliable, never jams, easy to use, lightweight. They were flooding the market; he had three of them in his apartment. I wanted to pay for one. He couldn’t take my money, but I could give him what he’d always wanted.

  What did he want?

  “You know what I want,” he kept repeating, “you know what I want.”

  It seemed suddenly as if the two Ahmads, the young shy one and the older rough one, were struggling, a soul battle. He’d grown both more confident and more bashful. He’d only briefly look at me before his gaze dropped to his loafers. When nervousness used to smite him years earlier, his gaze would drop to my shoes, not his.

  “You know what I want.”

  I didn’t. I racked my brain. What was he talking about? He always used to want books, but not in a while. He couldn’t blurt out what he wanted from me, could not enunciate desire. I stared, thought, actually scratched my head. Finally, as if inspiration had descended from above, I asked the most inconceivable of questions: “You want sex?”

  It was what my Ahmad wanted.

  “With me?” It was my turn to keep repeating—“With me? With me?”—like a silly Swiss cuckoo clock.

  Why? I was a mess. I stank of sewage. I looked like the witch from Hansel and Gretel. I was forty. I was wearing a pink tracksuit, with swirling sequins no less. I didn’t even have lipstick on.

  He had a shower.

  “A shower?”

  He nodded.

  “Hot water?”

  Ahmad must have killed many a lizard. During the war in Beirut, the powerful had power, but only those with true power had water.

  I laughed, a bit nervously, dislodging air and apprehension from the nooks of my lungs—laughter of agreement. He met my eyes, more confident, delighted, having read the signs of my capitulation. They say laughter is the ultimate conjoiner.

  I knew what Ahmad was. I’d heard rumors, mysterious stories, most too strange to be believed. One of the war’s preeminent torturers, he was called Mutanabbi (he could make a mute speak, a variation on the poet’s most famous stanza), an apropos literary nom de guerre, while other torturers chose generic names like Kojak, John Wayne, Belmondo, Jaws, or Cowboy. I knew the rumors to be true the instant I saw the apartment, and if not the apartment, every rumor would have been confirmed by the bathroom—marble, stainless steel, hard lines (to use Nabokovian and not Balzacian descriptions).

  I knew, and I agreed to what he wanted. It was probably I, not Marcello or Ahmad, who had no moral code.

  I wanted a gun. I wanted a shower. I made a choice. This could be a problem, being intimate with an almost intimate, but I decided to let him worry about things, let him contemplate if he chose to do so. I would not. I refused to be embarrassed. The water called my name.

  The shower felt like a monsoon: hot, succulent, and baptismal. As filth dissolved off my skin, as grime emigrated, I felt rejuvenated, I was reborn. The near-scalding water changed my body from rigid to supple, turned my skin the color of a pink peony. My senses were sharpened. I used Ahmad’s razor to shave.

  Drying myself with the luxurious towel was as close to a religious experience as I was ever likely to have. He waited for me in the bedroom; he fully dressed, I wrapped only in luxury. Excessive light. The Lladrós on the nightstand were bathed in molten sunlight gold. I nodded my head toward the translucent curtains. Ahmad rushed to draw them, plunging the room into demidarkness. The Ahmad I knew had momentarily returned, astonishingly sensitive, servile and compliant, content and optimistic. Toward the bed I tiptoed barefoot like a thief wishing not to be discovered, wishing not to arouse noise or echoes.

  Before I unwrapped, I turned the Lladrós around. He must have thought it was excessive shyness. It wasn’t. I preferred not to have ugliness stare.

  He said I was beautiful. I told him the figurines weren’t. He moved around the bed and scooped them all into the wastebasket. Once more, he lied and said I was beautiful. I told him I was alive.

  From Donne:

  Love’s mysteries in souls do grow,

  But yet the body is his book.

  Ahmad was not the first, nor would he be the last. He was surprised I didn’t lie down like a corpse. I wished to tell him that though I was by no means an experienced lover, I had been intimate with a few. I had studied Georges Bataille and Henry Miller, submitted to the Marquis, devoured the racist Fear of Flying, and cavorted with lewd Arab writers of the golden age who constantly thanked God for the blessing of fucking, al-Tifashi, al-Tijani, and al-Tusi, ibn Nasr, ibn Yahya, and ibn Sulayman; so many had taught me. I wanted to tell Ahmad that he shouldn’t have interrupted his studying. I wanted to tell him that it was Moravia, his deflowerer, who had written about the natural promiscuity of women. I did not, none of it.

  How can one describe the ephemeral qualities of sex beyond the probing, poking, and panting? How can one use inadequate words to describe the ineffable, the beyond words? Those salacious Arabs and their Western counterparts were able to explain the technical aspects, which is helpful, of course, and delightful. Some touched on the spiritual, on the psychological, and metaphor was loved by all. However, to believe that words can in any way mirror or, alas, explain the infinite mystery of sex is akin to believing that reading dark notes on paper can illuminate a Bach partita, or that by studying composition or color one can understand a late Rembrandt self-portrait. Sex, like art, can unsettle a soul, can grind a heart in a mortar. Sex, like literature, can sneak the other within one’s walls, even if for only a moment, a moment before one immures oneself again.

  I was intrigued enough by the strangeness of the situation that my memory retained a few palimpsests of the lovemaking, early images, when everything was technical or mechanical. Memory chooses to preserve what desire cannot hope to sustain. The images I retain, though, couldn’t have happened. In my memory, I can see myself with Ahmad, as if a part of me participated in the encounter and another floated high in the air, near the ceiling, and witnessed with disinterest.

  Aaliya, the high one—Aaliya with the bird’s-eye view, above the mud and muck and life’s swamps.

  What seeped through the mortar of my walls was not his technique (adequate) or his ardor (more than). I was on my knees facing away, he behind me still smelling of licorice and anise, engaged in an age-old rhythm. He slowed, and his fingers explored the topography of my lower back. I could feel his face descending, examining a tiny city on a map. His fingers squeezed gently before he removed them. At first, I tried to dismiss this interruption, considered
it a possible sexual quirk, but his fingers resumed the exploration of the region, lower back and upper derrière. His fingers squeezed once more, and this time I realized what he was doing, I recognized the feel of a blackhead being extruded. When he removed a third, I looked back, and it was more likely that I’d have turned to butter than to salt. He apologized, begged my forgiveness. It had been unconscious. He couldn’t see a blackhead on his own skin without removing it and didn’t realize he was doing the same with me.

  I asked him not to stop. I loved it.

  His fingers happily reconnoitered my entire back, delicately, gently, and ever so slowly turned my skin into a smorgasbord of delicious feelings. I was touched. I buried my face in the pillow to hide my ecstasy and my tears.

  My heart had momentarily found its pestle.

  Ecstasy and intimacy are ineffable as well, ephemeral and fleeting. Ahmad and I didn’t repeat our interlude, never resumed the exploration. He won what he wanted, as did I.

  Yeats once said, “The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul.”

  We lie down with hope and wake up with lies.

  When the warlords ended their interlude a few days after, I felt protected within the walls of my apartment, sat vigil with the Kalashnikov close to my bosom.

  Aaliya, the high one, the separate.

  I, Aaliya, the aged one, should get to bed—lie in my bed, call upon the gods of rest, instead of sitting at my desk remembering.

  The receding perspective of my past smothers my present.

  Remembering is the malignancy that feasts on my now.

  I feel tired and weary, my mind leaden, my hair still blue.

  And so the days pass.

  My bedroom is quiet except for the flapping of laundry in the breeze, sails of minor ships in soft gusts; the building behind me has verandahs on every floor (ours has none), and each has multiple laundry lines. I don’t mind these night sounds; I call them organic white noise. My bedroom has quieted over the years as Joumana’s family upstairs and Marie-Thérèse’s downstairs grew up and the rambunctious children departed. For as long as they lived below, Mr. Hayek had unidirectional screaming sessions with Marie-Thérèse at least once a week, throughout their marriage, until he died last year. I heard Fadia once say that you can tell how well a marriage is working by counting the bite marks on each partner’s tongue. Mr. Hayek had none. He held nothing back. You can’t do anything right. You always say the wrong thing. Why can’t you do what I tell you? You’re so frustrating. It was like listening to a less witty Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with a mousy, mute actress playing Martha.