An Unnecessary Woman

by Rabih Alameddine

  Had it not been for Abdallah’s untimely death by sudden cardiac arrest while in an unsober condition, the lovers would probably still be together. She mourned him more than anyone in his family; she mourned him more than she did her husband, of course. After her lover’s death, she discreetly accepted condolences. She was considerate enough not to attend his funeral. However, she was inordinately pleased to hear that at the obsequies an old lady made the egregious blunder of addressing her lover’s wife as Fadia.

  She was certainly pretty all those years ago, and as she shoos my mother, half brother, and sister-in-law out of the apartment, I can still see who she once was, how she was. Framed by the light crossing the threshold, Fadia’s old face seems to be dismantling, and the face I remember breaks through like a newborn chick out of its shell. I sometimes see her as impervious to time.

  “Out, out!” Fadia says, even though my interloping relatives have already left the apartment. Fadia wants them out of her building. “Don’t make me call the gendarmes,” she says as they slowly lead my mother down the stairs. “I never want to see you here again. I don’t like you.”

  My feet feel as if they’re swelling in their slippers, my knees unable to bear my weight. My robe hangs heavily upon my shoulders. I wonder if I can simply lock the door against Fadia, but Joumana is still in the foyer, joined now by Marie-Thérèse, both regarding me quizzically, wanting to know, looking like characters out of a bad Lebanese soap opera.

  “I must sit,” I announce as I take slow steps, tread softly across the worn kilim, and retreat to my reading room. “I must sit.” As I fall back into my trusty fauteuil, I realize it’s a mistake, a grievous error. My throat constricts. I shut my eyes. I haven’t allowed anyone in this room in decades.

  My breath shudders within my body’s unyielding limits, my heart seems to be walking about inside.

  Joumana and Marie-Thérèse, my neighbors above and below, follow me into my sanctuary. Joumana crouches before the chair. She wants to know if I’m all right. That must have been traumatic. Am I okay? Is there anything they can do? Joumana has a strong face, with features more Slavic than Semitic, more Israeli than Lebanese, slightly rough but not unattractive, broad brow above shrewd eyes that make me uncomfortable. Do I know why my mother screamed?

  No, it felt like an aberration. I can’t tell what scared my mother. I’ll never know. What was it that was unleashed from the chambers of her memory? How can I know?

  Delicately and discreetly, Joumana examines my hair, then shakes her head. Does that mean she doesn’t think the blue dye is what caused the screaming? I say nothing.

  A mistake, a lapse. They shouldn’t be in the room. I try to catch my breath, try to concentrate on the vase of hothouse flowers on the stand next to me: red dahlias, white delphiniums, glass vase, sweetish smell. Perishable flowers, they cost more money than I can afford, but once I saw them in the shop, I couldn’t return home without them.

  Like most Lebanese, Joumana speaks rapidly, one sentence dovetailing into another, producing guttural words and phrases as if gargling with mouthwash. I prefer slow conversations where words are counted like pearls, conversations with many pauses, pauses replacing words. I prefer my visitors elsewhere. She’s looking slightly above my chair. Her eyes, the color of quince jam, reinforce her easy demeanor, her loquacity.

  “I need to rest,” I say. “The air feels humid.” Pause. “I might be getting a headache.”

  Joumana’s eyes suddenly dart from one side to the other, gathering information at high speed. The crow’s feet around them tighten. I shut mine in despair. “Oh my Lord,” exclaims Joumana, “what is all this?” She twirls unhurriedly in place, looking up and down. Her face lights up and glows. “What have you been hiding in here?”

  “It’s only books,” I say. “Only books.”

  I imagine looking at the room through a stranger’s eyes. Books everywhere, stacks and stacks, shelves and bookcases, stacks atop each shelf, I in the creaky chair that hasn’t been reupholstered since I bought it in the early sixties. I have been its only occupant; years ago its foam molded into the shape of my posterior. The accompanying ottoman holds two stacks of books that haven’t been disturbed in years, except for semiweekly dusting. How many hours have I moved around this room, from nook to nook, making sure that everything is in its proper place, every book in its proper pile, every dust mote annihilated? An unframed circular mirror—when did I put that up and why had I kept it?—hangs by a nail on the door. I’d completely forgotten about it. Every surface in the room shines with dedicated cleanliness except for the mirror, of course. I’ve trained my eyes to avoid my reflection so admirably that I forgot it was there. Helen Garner is right. The vegetable-dyed Kazakh rug with noticeable rips was once a boisterous pomegranate, but the vacuum cleaner, after hundreds of passes, has sucked the fresh life out of it. I found the tortoiseshell floor lamp during the war, lonely and abandoned, outside a building that had just been looted—the pilferers had no use for a reading lamp. I spent an entire week restoring its luster. From one of its elegant metal loops, I hang a pair of reading glasses for easy access. The vase sits on seven books, liver-spotted paperbacks of the Muallaqat; each contains one of the poems with its annotations and essays. My favorite poems, four versions of them scattered, though not haphazardly, around the room.

  The Suspended Odes, the Hanging Poems, seven poems from seven poets before Islam. The myth tells us that these poems were once written in gold on Coptic linen and hung on the drapes of the Kaaba in the sixth century. Erroneous, of course, since poems were memorized, rarely written, but a beautiful story nonetheless. I love the idea of a place of worship with hanging poetry, gilded no less.

  In Joumana’s apartment upstairs, my reading room, this room, was her daughter’s bedroom. I know that because I heard her music through the years, her dancing with her boyfriend, her walking, her stomping, and, every so often, her yelling and door slamming. She’s now studying for a graduate degree in art or art history in France—quietly, one would hope. In Marie-Thérèse’s downstairs apartment, this was her son’s room, the no-longer-there boy. He was much quieter. I have no idea what Fadia uses hers for. I have never been in their rooms. Why do they feel it’s their right to be in mine?

  A draft originating from the still-open front door, an unseemly breeze, brazenly ruffles the hairs at the back of my neck and peeps into a stack of papers on the desk.

  “I knew you worked in a bookstore,” Joumana says, “but I had no idea you had so many . . . so many . . . this is a stockroom of books.” She moves cautiously and reverently, tiptoes almost, occasionally craning her neck to read titles.

  I want to tell her to stop, to let me be; no, I want her to stop, she must stop. I open my mouth but the sound gets stuck. Her fingers, her profane fingers, drum—the index, middle, and ring finger of her right hand drum a commotion, they drum on my chairback, on a shelf, on the spines of my books, the torturous tap-tap-tock clattering over everything.

  A greater commotion makes a grand entrance.

  “They’re gone,” Fadia announces. “I waited till I saw the car leave. They’d better not come back if they know what’s best for them.” Her forehead is damp and pearly, the hair above it flat against her skull. The flush of her cheeks is exaggerated, and naughtiness twinkles in her eyes. She too is surprised at the sight of so many books.

  “So this is what you do indoors,” Fadia exclaims. A lit cigarette sizzles close to her fingertips. The sunlight filtering through the windowpanes wreathes her right hand in blue smoke. “I always wondered how you spent so much time all by yourself during the war. Oh, wait. While the Lebanese were experiencing bloodlust, yours was booklust.” She emits a bubbling brook of laughter. When she realizes I’m not laughing, she adds, “You have to admit that was clever.”

  “Yes.” I nod patiently.

  “And funny, right?”

  “Thank you for your help,” I say. “That was very kind of you. I’m not sure how I’d have han
dled the situation had you not arrived when you did.”

  “Think nothing of it,” Fadia replies. “Someday you should come up and see my library.”

  “Your library?” Marie-Thérèse asks.

  Joumana shakes her head as if to say, “I can’t believe you didn’t see that one coming.”

  “My library has two books,” Fadia says, “and I have yet to finish coloring the second one.” She brightens, and her laughter grows louder when she realizes I’ve cracked a smile. “Fadia can be funny sometimes.”

  I rake my hair of blue and wait for them to leave.

  Such a messy morning. I need to get out of the house, clear the ant farm out of my brain. I intend to breathe some city fumes. My nightgown, crinkly and wrinkled from dried perspiration, I discard on the impeccably made bed. Fresh talcum powder under my arms, clean underwear. I put on my gray dress, which has gone in and out of style a number of times while I wasn’t paying attention, and a blue cardigan. My time of bracelets, perfumes, and frivolous adornments has long since passed. I clasp my locks into a makeshift bun and cover my head with a scarf, making sure I show enough neck skin. I don’t want anyone to think I’m covering up for asinine religious reasons.

  I lock the door and try to hurry down the steps, afraid the witches might return. Past Marie-Thérèse’s apartment, I forget about the stone that has worked itself loose on the third step from the top. I land on it. The hollow thud it emits beneath my low heels reminds me to slow. I can relax for a bit.

  The stairwell is no longer exposed and friendly. Fifteen years ago, in 1995, half-walls were constructed to protect the building from flying bullets that were no longer around. They look unattractive and unnatural. Part of the post–civil war renovation, they were supposed to serve their defensive purpose while maintaining the building’s older Beiruti character and keeping the common stairwell relatively open-aired. Like most things Lebanese, they arrived after the time when they were most needed had passed.

  As soon as I leave the last step and try to cross the street, battered taxis begin to blow their high-pitched beeps, clumsily inquiring about my willingness to use them. The bleating cars comfort me. My pace is quicker than it should be.

  No car will slow down for me to cross—none ever has, none ever will. I zip in between vehicles, dancing the Beiruti Hustle to the other side. What will happen when I’m too slow to do this? Will I someday lose the ability to get all the way across the street before the light changes?

  Will I live long enough to see a fully functional traffic light in Beirut?

  I pass what used to be Mr. Azari’s grocery, now a strange store selling unnecessary electrical widgets: old-fashioned irons, neon tubes, light fixtures that are supposed to look like candles, the stems dripping permanent plastic wax, vibrating filaments within tapered flame-shaped bulbs. The store stands next to a Starbucks filled with youngsters, future married couples, preening and chatting and flirting, all of them lounging in seemingly uncomfortable and unsustainable positions, all drinking lactescent swill. A street cleaner in a green jumpsuit picks up cigarette butts off the pavement. Across the street is another one. These street cleaners of Beirut, the Sisyphuses of our age. The one before me is an East African, a young man with an old demeanor.

  The city belongs to the young and their apathy. That is no country for old men. Or old women for that matter. Byzantium seems so distant.

  Beirut is the Elizabeth Taylor of cities: insane, beautiful, tacky, falling apart, aging, and forever drama laden. She’ll also marry any infatuated suitor who promises to make her life more comfortable, no matter how inappropriate he is.

  In the early pages of his gorgeous novel Sepharad, Antonio Muñoz Molina writes: “Only those of us who have left know what the city used to be like and are aware of how much it has changed; it’s the people who stayed who can’t remember, who seeing it day after day have been losing that memory, allowing it to be distorted, although they think they’re the ones who remained faithful, and that we, in a sense, are deserters.”

  Certainly a beautiful sentence, and a lovely sentiment, but I respectfully yet strenuously disagree. There may be much I can’t remember, and my memory may have become distorted along the way, but Beirut and how she was, how she has changed through the years—her, I never forgot. I never forget, and I have never left her.

  Why did my mother scream? Why did she do that?

  I can’t allow myself to dwell on it. Unfettered perambulation isn’t permitted on the ant farm today.

  I feel a little dizzy. I press my hand against the Starbucks window to steady myself. White dots and grayish striations flitter and quiver across my eyes, so I rest my forehead against the glass, as I used to do when I was a child, rest my skull against the wall whenever my boisterous half brothers grew too irksome, whenever my mother reminded me over and over to stop at the bakery on my way back from school. “Don’t forget the bread,” she used to harp. “Remember bread, bread,” and my head would need a rest.

  A taxi driver leans forward and yells out his window, “Taxi?”

  I take a deep breath, pull my head back. Sisyphus pretends not to notice me as he collects butts with a pair of extra-long tongs. Two youngsters behind the clean glass, a boy and a girl with Bakelite thighs, interrupt their duel of saliva to regard me quizzically, suspiciously. Their hands and bodies touch along many points, a languorous contact that speaks of desperation.

  Touching, so alive, so bright, these teenagers. Before them, on the glass, my pale, silvery reflection superimposes itself. I recoil. Immortal age beside immortal youth.

  But thy strong Hours indignant work’d their wills,

  And beat me down and marr’d and wasted me.

  A Diored woman sporting noteworthy high hair and wasp-stung lips slows her steps, hesitates near me, lifts up her sunglasses, concern showing on her face. I smile, grimace really, my ever-nervous gesture. I shake my head, indicating that I’m all right. Mild geriatric disorder is what this is, nothing more. No one needs to stop. She acknowledges my silent communication and moves on. I follow suit in the opposite direction. Air breathes up the back of my scarf. In front of a building grows—no, not grows, stands—a hewn rusty-hued bush of indecipherable leaves, of which only a few remain greenish. But of course, I—I would notice such a thing.

  The woods decay, the woods decay and fall.

  Have I grown too old for Beirut?

  Beirut, my Beirut.

  Around the corner from the building I live in is a Pizza Hut outlet that proudly identifies itself as DELIVERY ONLY. If you happen to walk in, maybe to ask for directions, or possibly to inquire whether anyone knows what happened to the owner of the store they’ve just replaced, the young men regard you condescendingly before announcing that they only take phone orders.

  The store these smug, ill-mannered boys replaced was an idiosyncratic record shop that opened its doors two days before the civil war broke out, and surprisingly kept open throughout the fighting. The owner—a portly, mustached Beiruti of indeterminate age and sect—rarely bothered to hoist his ample behind out of his chair. He always seemed oblivious to anything occurring outside the expansive world of his store. Come to think of it, he barely noticed anything outside his own mind, so content was he, so self-sufficient and complete. Nongarrulous Beirutis are as rare as vivid primary colors in the snowy Arctic, yet here we were, two of us, patient sufferers of verbal sclerosis, not more than a hundred meters apart.

  Ever the autodidact, I used his store to teach myself. When he opened for business, I knew little about music. I kept track of mentions in the novels I read. For example, I first heard of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante in Styron’s book Sophie’s Choice—a beautiful if somewhat soppy novel, and an unbearable film. I heard of Kathleen Ferrier when Thomas Bernhard mentioned her uplifting rendition of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde in Old Masters.

  In my thirties all I understood was Chopin, glorious Frédéric. To thank me for finding a rare book, a college student offered me
an invaluable gift, a double album of Artur Rubinstein playing Chopin. I didn’t have a record player at the time and had to save up before I was able to listen to it. Once I did, Artur’s spirit wafted through my home. I played my record over and over and over and over. I bought a cleaning and care kit for albums. Once a week I delicately wiped the damp cloth across the disc to ensure it remained playable for eternity. It was the only album I had for years, and the only music I listened to. To this day, I can probably whistle the melody of Ballade no. 1 in G Minor without having to think about it. I became a Chopinophile.

  Even now, I think that if I’d never listened to anything else, I’d still consider myself a lucky human being. This was Rubinstein. This was Chopin. Pole playing Pole. But I had a yearning. Sometime in the early eighties, while my city was self-immolating, while everyone around me was either killing or making sure he wasn’t going to be killed, I decided it was time I taught myself how to listen to music.

  I visited the fat man’s store and looked through his stacks of records. I didn’t buy anything until the fifth visit. By that time, my fingers, imitating Olympic short-distance racers, could sift through a stack of albums in seconds. I couldn’t tell where to begin, which pianist was better than the other. I knew to begin with the famous composers (Bach, Beethoven, Mozart) but couldn’t settle on which versions. I made a somewhat arbitrary choice. I decided I would select albums from the Deutsche Grammophon label.

  You might ask why, which is a good question.