An Unnecessary Woman

by Rabih Alameddine

  It is much quieter now.

  It’s much easier to sleep now, if only I could.

  I had a troubling night. I must have dozed off briefly, because in the early morning my heart found itself disquieted by a short unrestful dream—not one with my mother, the protagonist of my most disturbing dreams, but one about Hannah, probably the woman my mother disrespected most in life, and in death.

  How does this memory of mine work? How it betrays me. What thunderous ministorms of neurons were fired in my mind during the dark of morning, what ghosts!

  While I dozed, Hannah materialized—healthy, younger, in her late thirties—and it seemed irrelevant at first that she was much younger than I. My almost sister-in-law appeared corporeal and sturdy, yet somehow askew, resembling a posthumous oil portrait more than herself. She wore one of her familiar unshapely dresses, fine linen and purple. There was an affectionate formality in the way the arms of a black sweater crossed around her shoulders, in the care of the woolly knot’s placement and position. Her shoes, not her face, were furrowed with wrinkles. Her gaze was kind, open, and amused.

  “Sweetheart,” I said softly, extending my hand toward her cheek. “No one wears her hair like that anymore.” She grinned and I answered with my usual smile that begged forgiveness. She made an appearance to offer me courage, and I worried about her appearance. Shame. Such a worrywart I am. I miss miracles blooming before my eyes: I concentrate on a fading star and miss the constellation. I overlook dazzling thunderstorms worrying whether I have laundry hanging.

  The archipelago of liver spots on the back of my hand kept distracting me from her face. I jerked it back, covered it with my left, and held both like a bouquet of prayers before my heart. She ignored me and walked toward the lieutenant, her husband-to-be, her husband-who-never-was. He was much younger than she in my dream. She kissed him, which couldn’t possibly have happened while she was alive, and he returned her kiss, matching passions. She undressed him with uncommon verve, her kisses deeper, her lust brazen.

  An observer would receive the wrong impression from this salacious tableau. Their ages were wrong, I thought. Incompatible. Insidious Nabokov insinuated himself into my dreams once more, not allowing me to lose myself in watching what was before me, not allowing me to engage life. Hannah was Humbert, the lieutenant the ingénue. Fire of my loins. They fucked, no other term can be used. Hannah and her lieutenant fucked and fucked.

  Why Hannah? Why now?

  There was a time when nary a minute passed without my thinking of her, without my wondering about her last days, her consummate loneliness and how well she masked it, her insatiable longing. She’d come into my thoughts unsought, uninvited. Maybe Hannah and her ghost stayed away before this morning’s dream because they felt sorry for me in my old age, for me and my weary remembrance, maybe they felt it necessary, if only to relieve me of one of my grotesque obsessions. You have to move forward, try to live.

  But life isn’t necessarily as considerate as its ghosts, or as compassionate.

  Nor is it fair.

  “She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line.” I won’t translate Lolita even though I’ve always wanted to. It’s against the rules. Nabokov’s earlier work in rowdy Russian I could. “But in my arms she was always Lolita.”

  “Lo. Lee. Ta.”

  My memory has aged into an unruly child but is still quite precocious.

  It is the loneliness, the abject isolation. Hannah reappears in my memories to remind me of how alone I am, how utterly inconsequential my life has become, how sad.

  I have reached the age where life has become a series of accepted defeats—age and defeat, blood brothers faithful to the end. I struggle to get out of bed, as I do every morning. Still night outside, no light trickles through the short slats of the bedroom’s wood shutters. I’ve been awake for over an hour, probably more. I move my feet toward the edge of the bed and lower them to the carpet, which helps me sit up with less effort. Ouch. I extend a sleepy arm and turn on the bedside lamp, a fifty-year-old relic that barely functions, one of the first possessions I bought on my own.

  Barely functions, like me: swollen limbs, arthritis, insomnia, both constipation and incontinence, the low and high tides of aging nether regions. In my morning veins, blood has slowed to the speed of molasses. My body is failing me, my mind as well. When my body functions, it seems to do so independently of my desires, and my mind regularly forgets what those desires are, not to mention where I’ve left my keys or my reading glasses. One could say that every day is an adventure.

  I sit up tentatively, rest my feet on the night carpet next to the bed, the first of many offerings from Hannah. It is a peculiar prayer rug, small and handwoven, Persian or Afghan, with a miniature qibla compass at the top so I can spread it to the east. The compass still points eastward, but the rug does not. It does prevent my feet from facing the cold floor every winter morning.

  I stand up carefully, lean and twist to stretch my back. The lower back pain isn’t necessarily age related—I’ve lived with mild back pain for years. What has changed is the complexity of the knots: in my younger years the back muscles felt like a simple bowline knot, whereas this morning they feel more like a couple of angler’s loops and a sheepshank. I’m able to name a few knots used by sailors, but I have never been on a boat. Joseph Conrad’s novels planted the seeds of love for sea stories. Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News led me to read The Ashley Book of Knots.

  I am a reader. Yes, I am that, a reader with nagging back pain.

  When my bones ache or my back rebels, I consider the hurt punishment for the years of alienating my body, even dismissing it with some disdain. I deplored my physicality when I was younger, and now it deplores me right back. As I age, my body demands its rightful place in the scheme of my attentions. It stakes its claims.

  The mind over body then, but no longer.

  Aaliya, above it all. Aaliya, the separated.

  Aaliya, Aaliya, über alles.

  Sad, sad, sad.

  I walk gingerly toward the door, probably looking like a waddling gnome. My bedroom is one of the safe spaces in the apartment from which I’ve banished mirrors. In one of her books, Helen Garner says that all women over sixty instinctively learn to pass by a mirror without looking. Why risk it is what I say.

  Of course, by avoiding my reflection, I end up ignoring Rilke’s exquisite admonishment:

  Though the reflection in the pool

  Often swims before our eyes:

  Know the image.

  How lovely that is!

  I’ll move more gracefully, or less awkwardly, in a few minutes, once my muscles and joints have warmed up.

  I flick on the ceiling lights in the kitchen, boil water for my tea. As the stovetop flame wavers livid and blue, the bulbs in the ceiling hiccup once, twice, and die, as does the one streetlight outside. The government electricity is down again. The building’s generator won’t be turned on until at least six A.M., until someone else wakes up, most likely Marie-Thérèse, who calls for one of her roaming cats every morning, which wakes Fadia, who’ll turn on the generator.

  I’ll wait in the dark for the lights to come on. I’m used to it.

  Without power, night is night once more, not the cheap imitation that passes for night in a modern city. Without electricity, night is the deep world of darkness once more, the mystery we dread.

  Darkness visible.

  My city seems to be regressing to an earlier age. Barely functions.

  A hospital in town recently had one of its wings remodeled to what they call “super ultra deluxe,” which means that you have to hock your jewelry just to breathe the air inside. The floors are parquet, the pillows down, and all the technology is the latest, including bathrooms with toilets that use motion detectors to flush. What no one took into account is that the detectors go berserk and have to be recalibrated every time the e
lectricity cuts off and the generators take over. Since it’s Beirut, this has to be done twice a day if not more. The hospital had to hire an in-house toilet calibrator.

  Darkness risible.

  As I sit in the dark kitchen sipping darker tea, I think in a flash of an evening long ago, when I was still a child—must have been winter as it is now; it was dark early. The meal, simple and barely enough to feed the family, waited impatiently on a big brass tray sitting atop a round burlap ottoman. The apartment wasn’t large enough for a dining table and six children. My mother refused to feed us until the return of her husband, a tailor’s assistant in a downtown shop, as he remained until he passed away. The moment my mother heard him turn the key, she stood up. The electricity went out, plunging the room into blackness and causing my mother unspeakable distress, for her husband might injure himself entering a dark room. As she ran to greet him, warn him, and guide him, her leg knocked the tray, which flipped and banged my half brother the eldest on the head; he’d used that instant cover of darkness to sneak a slice of white cheese. Food landed all about us like shrapnel.

  “Don’t move,” warned my mother, “don’t you dare move.”

  She tottered blindly into the kitchen, returned with a fluttering kerosene lamp. We remained stock-still, but entering the apartment, her husband stepped in the spilled olive oil. When he moved his shoe away, we could see a footprint stain in the carpet. All of us knelt and began to pick up food—cheese, black olives, radishes, sliced tomatoes, white onions—only the olive oil was unsalvageable. We sat around the tray and ate our dinner silently. All evening, my mother’s cheeks blushed a deep red that could be noticed even in the low light of the lamp.

  My books show me what it’s like to live in a reliable country where you flick on a switch and a bulb is guaranteed to shine and remain on, where you know that cars will stop at red lights and those traffic lights will not cease working a couple of times a day. How does it feel when a plumber shows up at the designated time, when he shows up at all? How does it feel to assume that when someone says she’ll do something by a certain date, she in fact does it?

  Compared to the Middle East, William Burroughs’s world or Gabriel García Márquez’s Macondo is more predictable. Dickens’s Londoners are more trustworthy than the Lebanese. Beirut and its denizens are famously and infamously unpredictable. Every day is an adventure. This unsteadiness makes us feel a shudder of excitement, of danger, as well as a deadweight of frustration. The spine tingles momentarily and the heart sinks.

  When trains run on time (when trains run, period), when a dial tone sounds as soon as you pick up a receiver, does life become too predictable? With this essential reliability, are Germans bored? Does that explain The Magic Mountain?

  Is life less thrilling if your neighbors are rational, if they don’t bomb your power stations whenever they feel you need to be admonished? Is it less rousing if they don’t rattle your windows and nerves with indiscriminate sonic booms just because they can?

  When things turn out as you expect more often than not, do you feel more in control of your destiny? Do you take more responsibility for your life? If that’s the case, why do Americans always behave as if they’re victims?

  Hear me on this for a moment. I wake up every morning not knowing whether I’ll be able to switch on the lights. When my toilet broke down last year, I had to set up three appointments with three plumbers because the first two didn’t show and the third appeared four hours late. Rarely can I walk the same path from point A to point B, say from apartment to supermarket, for more than a month. I constantly have to adjust my walking maps; any of a multitude of minor politicians will block off entire neighborhoods because one day they decide they’re important enough to feel threatened. Life in Beirut is much too random. I can’t force myself to believe I’m in charge of much of my life.

  Does reliability reinforce your illusion of control? If so, I wonder if in developed countries (I won’t use the hateful term civilized), the treacherous, illusion-crushing process of aging is more difficult to bear.

  Am I having an easier time than women my age in London?

  Marie-Thérèse calls for her cat to come home, the daily aubade. The uncaring, intricate world begins to rouse. In time the curtain edges will grow light.

  “Maysoura!” Marie-Thérèse’s voice has risen in volume since her husband passed away. “Maysoura!”

  I don’t understand why she allows her two cats to roam the streets of our neighborhood. Beirut isn’t a pet-friendly city. Like my mother, Marie-Thérèse loves cats. However, my mother never owned a cat; she showered her love on the city’s ferals.

  The generator comes on with its soft hum. Fadia must have awakened. I don’t turn the light on, remain in the not-quite-as-dark.

  I think of Brodsky:

  I sit by the window. The dishes are done.

  I was happy here. But I won’t be again.

  The sun rises, and the kitchen takes shape, revealing its details. The awakening of my city is more beautiful to my eyes, and to my ears, than the breaking of dawn in some bucolic valley or sparsely populated island paradise, not that I’ve actually been to a bucolic valley or an island paradise. In my city, the sun multiplies its effects on the myriad of windows and glass in colorful reflections that make each morning distinct. The faint light creeps through the window, curious to see what is happening in my kitchen. It falls across my face and falters. I make myself stand up. I sway a little, lean on the wine-red and urine-yellow abomination of a breakfast table that my husband brought with him when we were married and left when he left. I shake the loose folds of my robe de chambre. Dust motes hang thick in the air. The kitchen has two windows on adjacent walls. A spider with shockingly long front legs busies herself with prey caught in her web. All that remains is a wisp of gossamer with striated veins. The spider chose the wrong window; her home will be washed away with the first rains. I stretch on my toes, draw back the short drapes of the second window, and unveil more morning light. I allow brightness to flood the kitchen from both sides. I slide open the pane for the first time in a couple of days. This window looks onto the outdoor stairwell, and my neighbors are able to quench their curiosity as they click-clack up and down. A slight breath of air makes the stagnant motes waver; a handful of sunlight kindles them golden and luminous.

  Apollo, ever the alchemist, still sails his chariot in the skies of Beirut, wielding a philosopher’s stone. Into gold I transmute the very air.

  You must change your life.

  The surprising sound of Marie-Thérèse’s strapless sandals floats through the window—surprising since my downstairs neighbor hasn’t made the trek upstairs in a long while. After she passes the window, I lean over to observe. She doesn’t seem to be dragging her shadow and isn’t wearing a mourning dress. It takes me a moment to remember that this is the day after the one-year anniversary of her husband’s death. As my heels return to the floor, I realize my neck has stiffened.

  Fadia’s voice descends from above. “Well done, my love, well done. I’m proud of you.” The voice sounds invigorated, as if its owner has been dunked in an Italian fountain of joy.

  The coffee klatsch is reuniting this morning. Good for them.

  The three witches have been having syrupy coffee together every morning for almost thirty years. On the third-floor landing, in front of Joumana’s apartment, my neighbors gather around the round brass tray, smoking, gossiping, and getting ready for the day. Marie-Thérèse hasn’t sat on her stool at all in the last year—a bit too much mourning, if you ask me, but understandable. That she’s making the trek upstairs is a grand occasion.

  “You light up the day,” Joumana calls down. Her voice rings out along the stairwell and drops right into my kitchen.

  It’s a glorious, gilded Levantine morning.

  The acoustics in the building are such that in my kitchen I hear every word spoken on the landing. Every morning, I hover intimately among my neighbors. I hear the clink of cups on thei
r saucers, the clank of saucers on the brass tray, the pouring of the coffee, their sacred ritual—“irrigating the Garden,” Joumana calls it. I hear them chatter and gossip: Have you heard this? Can you believe that? They curse enemies and laud friends. I hear every sigh and giggle. I listen to them make plans, compare notes, exchange recipes, and exhibit every newly purchased inessential.

  Years of conversation.

  So many mornings: Fadia unleashing her frightening trademark laugh, a crackling falsetto exhalation that makes her elongated throat swell and undulate like a baker’s bellows, a wild and epidemically infectious laugh, and she’s prodigal with it. Joumana’s husband putting his head out the door; he good-mornings the women, jokes with them, and shouts down to Mr. Hayek, Marie-Thérèse’s husband and tormentor, in the apartment below mine to make sure he’s ready for their walk to the American University, where they both teach. Joumana teaches at the university as well, but she drives her car and never rushes her coffee. She pokes fun at the men because most days they walk in a dawdling mosey and she picks them up along the way. “They want exercise,” she says, “but not perspiration.”

  Poor Mr. Hayek no longer makes that walk.

  I pick a fragrant mandarin out of the bowl, poke a hole in its bottom with my finger, and begin to peel. I pour myself a second cup of tea.

  “I’m so happy you’re out of mourning,” Fadia says. “A year is too much.”

  I concur, of course. A year is too much if you loved your husband. It is much too much for Mr. Hayek.