An Unnecessary Woman

by Rabih Alameddine

  When you write about the past, you lie with each letter, with every grapheme, including the goddamn comma.

  Memory, memoir, autobiography—lies, lies, all lies.

  Is it true that I didn’t think of a husband, wish for one, or has the image I have of myself, the way I like to think of myself, superimposed itself on what was happening then? Does that question make sense?

  Let me put it another way. It is quite possible that I, like every Beiruti girl, dreamed of getting married, had fantasies of what my future husband would look like, but that after growing up, after having had a sad and incomplete matrimonial experience, I reinvented myself, convincing myself that I hadn’t dreamed of such trivial matters. It is possible. I sincerely believe that I didn’t, but I also don’t see myself having had that much courage as a young girl.

  I keep the possibility open.

  There are images that remain with me. I remember reading an essay—I believe it was by Nuruddin Farah, but I can’t be sure—where the writer says that all we remember from novels are scenes or, more precisely, images. I don’t know if that’s the case, but a number of authors seem to write their novels in one image after another—Michael Ondaatje is probably the best practitioner of the form, as his novels seem to me to be not so much plot as a series of discrete divine images. I still can’t remember who wrote that essay. Maybe it was Ondaatje, but I doubt it.

  I’m not a proponent of the above idea, because if all we retain from a novel is an image, then the obvious conclusion is that photography, painting, or film would be a better medium of communication and a higher art form. Not a satisfying conclusion. Also, I loved The English Patient as a novel, but the movie, with the exception of the lovely Juliette Binoche, is much too syrupy.

  I bring this up, however, to mention an image that is seared into my memory—an image by the exquisitely disconsolate W. G. Sebald. He describes a great-uncle Alphonso in the act of painting: “When he was thus engaged he generally wore glasses with gray silk tissue instead of lenses in the frames, so that the landscape appeared through a fine veil that muted its colors, and the weight of the world dissolved before your eyes.”

  Beautiful.

  Sometimes I think I look back on my life wearing glasses with gray silk tissue in the frames.

  If I am to think of what image you’ll retain from reading these paltry pages, I assume it will be my mother’s screaming, the frail body, the position of her hands, the skirl of terror.

  Am I right?

  Most people say they feel nostalgia for their childhood, or for a first love, or maybe for Beirut as it once was, or for parents who have passed away. I don’t, not in the sense everyone means. I feel nostalgia for scenes. I don’t recall the years of my youth with affection; I don’t my family either: my dead uncle-father, or my mother still alive. However, I do recall with a certain fondness the manner in which we children slept on summer nights with their pitiless heat, windows open and the smell of jasmine floating in, the colors and patterns of the sheets in the dark. What was most irritating then—having to get out of bed when my little half sister wet the mattress—I now remember with a tinge of devotion, not for her or her predicament, but for how we always stood in the same spot around my mother as she examined the wet abstractions on the sheets, how we carried the mattress outside to air and sun-clean it. I feel a certain tenderness for the way the furniture was arranged in the main room, the way the large brass tray sitting atop the round burlap ottoman was set for dinner.

  But then I feel nostalgia for the walks by Swann’s Way, as well as by Guermantes Way, for how Charles Kinbote surprises John Shade while he’s taking a bath, for how Anna Karenina sits in a train.

  I met a secretary once, a classmate’s mother. She walked her daughter to school one morning and delivered her to the gate, at which point the grizzled Armenian guard stepped briefly out of his kiosk to greet them, which he always did when a parent appeared.

  Was Hercules the gatekeeper of Heaven? I wouldn’t describe the aged Armenian as Hercules in any case. His job was to make sure that none of the students left before school was out and that none but students and teachers entered, which meant that even though he approached the mother obsequiously, he was in essence taking her child away and forbidding her entry. So no, not Hercules. As much as I loved it and felt at home within its cages, school is more Hades than Heaven—a ritual killing of childhood is performed in school, children are put to death. The guard was the ferryman.

  As she handed him her daughter, the mother bathed him in a patrician smile. She wore a tailor-made dress that looked as if it belonged to someone else, as if she intended to grow into it though she carried it off. It was a gray dress of a shade quite different from the pewter gray of the menacing sky that day. Around her shoulders she had wrapped a bright blue shawl. Unlike the arriving teachers, all afflicted with a plague of inattentiveness, she seemed to be relating to the world around her, awake and participating. As I write this, I recall how wonderful I felt while watching her, how young she seemed as a mother, still retaining something organically girlish about her.

  I watched the handoff from behind the school fence, looking out through the bars—yes, actual metal bars that my head could fit through only the year before. The bars were covered with lumpy layers of cheap yellow paint, caged-canary hue; it was peeling and chipping, the rust that peeked through complementing the yellow nicely. I was staring. My hands held on to the bars, my face squeezed in between, both cheekbones pressed to painted metal.

  The daughter, my classmate, strolled to my side. She watched her mother exchanging unnecessary pleasantries with the ferryman. We, on the other hand, didn’t exchange a word. He mother noticed us and walked over. She politely inquired who I was, whether I was a friend to her daughter—a brief, kind question that only required me to nod yes or no.

  “I wish you a most pleasant day, girls,” she said.

  She extended her arm through the bars. I can still see the shawl slip from her right shoulder as she ran her fingers through my hair—the one time, as far as I remember, that anyone ever did that—after which, she left.

  “She can write shorthand,” my classmate said.

  I’ve strayed too far once more. Sorry. Let me get back to Hannah.

  What brought Hannah and me together wasn’t so much our social ineptitude, as I’ve mentioned, but her meeting my brother-in-law that fateful day, though that fateful day occurred long before I was married, when I was still a child.

  She was twenty-two when she met him, embarrassingly single by the standards of the time, but not yet a certified spinster. Her journal entries then were mostly meditations on what her future life would look like, which girl in the neighborhood had been proposed to, how her status in the family was changing. By the time she harpooned the lieutenant, all her brothers had already married. Thirteen weeks before that fateful day, one of her sisters-in-law had a baby boy, the first grandson in the family, the fourth grandchild.

  She described a telling incident. The newest sister-in-law, Maryam, recently married and relocated to Hannah’s home (only two of the brothers were still in the small house then), was deep in conversation with Hannah’s father. The discussion might have been beyond her depth, Hannah wrote, but the girl, a few years younger than she, was happy, peppy, and loud. Hannah wrote that her new sister-in-law “couldn’t understand stillness”—quite a wonderful phrase, if you ask me.

  The family was having afternoon coffee in the living room. Hannah’s father slurped his coffee as the girl went on and on. When Hannah finished her cup, she picked up her mother’s empty one and carried both toward the kitchen. As she approached, Maryam, still jabbering and hooting, eyes only on her father-in-law, held her own cup out, left arm extended straight in Hannah’s way.

  Hannah stopped, her toes curled, her shoes digging into the carpet. Of course, she was more embarrassed than furious at that point. She didn’t know what to do. The girl hadn’t even looked at her. Hannah tried to carry the extr
a cup but she wasn’t as dexterous as her mother. Ticktock, the room’s clock mocked her, but none paid attention.

  “I’ll bring the tray,” Hannah told her sister-in-law. “Just one minute.”

  Maryam jumped up, horrified by her indiscretion and insensitivity. “Please forgive me, sister,” she said, “I wasn’t paying attention. I am shamed. Let me relieve you, please. I will take all.”

  “There is no need for forgiveness,” Hannah said. “None.”

  Both girls took the cups to the kitchen.

  Let me take a brief detour, very brief. Ticktock.

  Pundits these days keep jabbering and hooting about the Internet being the greatest advancement. Web this, web that, and let the resident spider suck the life out of you. Being connected to the world doesn’t appeal to me.

  As someone living alone, as an aging woman, the technological discovery I love most is the electric clock, though with Beirut’s electricity, I should say the battery-operated clock. Do you have any idea how much anxiety those old clocks induced? Ticktock, you’re all alone in an empty apartment. Ticktock, the world outside is going to come and get you. Ticktock, you’re not getting any younger, are you? Give me a tranquilizer, please.

  The ticktock tattooing of the march of time.

  The ticktock of the tiny object full of gears suffocating all existence, wringing life out of life.

  After that wonderful discovery, the clock’s hands still turned in the same direction—it’s called clockwise, for all you youngsters—time still marched forward, but miraculously, its heartbeat, its ominous announcement, was reduced to a meek buzz.

  Hannah was being truthful when she told her sister-in-law that there was no need for forgiveness. She didn’t hold the incident against her. It was inconsequential, Hannah believed, a minor faux pas. It wasn’t as if the insult was intended. Maryam felt so guilty that she tried to appease Hannah. As a matter of fact, the two women lived harmoniously in the same household until Hannah died, and to this day Maryam is the one who brings fresh flowers to Hannah’s gravesite every week, placing them exactly two hands’ width in front of the tombstone.

  The writing in the journals changed, though. For a while after the incident the sentences shrank. The entries grew terse and irritated—jerky, jittery jottings, even when she wrote about the meals she had.

  Toward the second half of 1944, with her nascent and hopeful nation living through its first year of independence, Hannah decided that she would not remain at home all the time.

  What could a young middle-class woman of her day do? One who was educated, fluent in two languages, Arabic and French, and “how do you do?” familiar with a third, English? One who had loved and excelled in philosophy in high school?

  Not much.

  To begin with, her father, as was to be expected, was opposed to his daughter working, opposed to her generating any kind of income. He was a good man. She adored him. His obstructionism was of its time.

  She talked to him, pleaded and persuaded, until he relented on his first objection but not on his second. He gave her permission to work, but not to generate income. No girl of his was going to be allowed to ruin her reputation. She could help him at his grocery store. Hannah was ecstatic.

  She began on a Monday morning and for three days she wrote of how much she enjoyed working. She did everything, from stacking to cleaning to helping customers to handling money. Her diary entries were longer, more florid, more detailed, and joyous. Her father was doubly ecstatic, for not only was he able to make his beloved daughter happy, but he began to notice that the women of the neighborhood were staying longer in the store and buying more. His daughter wasn’t the most talkative of people, but women certainly talked to her more than they did to him or to his two sons who shared the work. Hannah was beginning to shed her shy skin. For a brief time she was the belle of the grocery store.

  Three days, the perfection lasted three days. On Wednesday evening, at dinner, listening to her husband laud Hannah’s salutary presence at the grocery store, Hannah’s mother wondered if she too could help. After all, her children were grown, her household duties had long ago shrunk. Why not? All thought it was a grand idea, even the sons, and it most certainly was.

  Father, mother, and child opened the store on Thursday morning. They worked together happily, and the business did well. It was a small store, though, and there wasn’t enough work to go around. They shared, and since the income wasn’t divided any differently, they managed. Everyone seemed content, though the situation was not as perfect as it had been in the first three days since she had less to do.

  But as Hannah, a devout Muslim if there ever was one, always said, “God does provide.”

  One day about two weeks into her foray at the store, Hannah was standing around with nothing to do when a customer suggested that she volunteer her time where she would be most needed, the local hospital. Hannah thought it was a grand idea, her mother thought it was a grand idea, her father consented. For the next two months, until the day she met the lieutenant, Hannah was a hospital volunteer who never took any time off and worked as many hours as she was allowed.

  Where would a hospital place a young middle-class woman who was educated, who was fluent in two languages and familiar with a third, who had loved and excelled in philosophy at school?

  In the cafeteria, of course, serving food. Would you like a gloomy Wittgenstein with your rice, or a bitter Schopenhauer? A cup of Hegelian metaphors, perhaps?

  Wearing a yellow front-buttoned uniform, a hairnet, a white bobby-pinned paper cap, beige tights, and low white patent leather heels, she waited for the doctors, nurses, and visitors to decide which of the stews they wished to eat that day before she ladled the choice onto a plate. Potato stew, plop, gone, next, cauliflower stew, plop, gone, next, lima beans, plop, gone, next, three hours a day. No one paid any attention to her.

  She loved it.

  Although by then her childish hunger had been somewhat sated, she also still loved to eat. She didn’t write about it in her diary, but I can guarantee you that she partook more than just a little from every course she served. There we had an eater at an eatery.

  She was happy, her mother was happy, her father was happy.

  In the morning she put on her uniform—a uniform radiant with a supernatural cleanliness—went to work, and returned home after lunch still in that yellow getup.

  How did she get to and from work? Therein lies the story.

  Beirut at the time had a modest tram system, which of course disappeared when the city decided to modernize itself in the sixties and seventies. One line used to stop only two buildings away from her hospital. Unfortunately for Hannah, the line didn’t reach her house. She would have had to walk for ten minutes to reach the tram stop, something she wouldn’t do because she was much too self-conscious of her limp.

  Beirut has another system for transporting its residents, a nonpublic one that has been around as long as the automobile. Beirutis call it a service (pronounced as in French, not English). It is an organic jitney system. Customers stand at the side of the road, service cars slow down as they approach, the customer tells the driver where he wishes to go, and the driver decides whether to pick him up. For one cheap fare, you can go anywhere in the city as long as it’s along the driver’s route. Most cars can fit five passengers, two in front next to the driver, three in back.

  In 1944 anyone with a car could pick up passengers, but sometime in the fifties you had to get a special license plate, a red one, to be able to do so.

  In 1944 no respectable woman used a service. You had no idea who would share the car with you, or, worse, whether the driver would say something inappropriate. A respectable woman avoided a service. Hannah didn’t.

  The choice between being seen walking or being seen taking a service was a straightforward one. She always chose the latter, but she paid a double fare so she wouldn’t have to sit next to a stranger. She wouldn’t sit in front next to the driver. She sat in back and boug
ht two places so that only one person could share the seat with her and would sit at the other window. She considered this a chaste and appropriate solution.

  Her system worked. For two months she didn’t have a single problem, not one. She girded herself against snide or salacious remarks from one of the drivers or passengers, but none was forthcoming. Beirutis, it seemed, were gentlemen, at least around her. She thought the crisp yellow hospital uniform and particularly the paper cap had a lot to do with the respect she received. Every morning she left home and waited briefly on the curb for the appropriate service. She wouldn’t take a car that had more than one passenger in back. She arrived at the hospital not twenty minutes later. It was easy.

  She had her first problem on November 21, 1944, a day she would consider the happiest of her life, the most felicitous.

  God does provide.

  It was the day before the country was to celebrate its first year of independence. Everyone seemed to be preparing for this joyous occasion. From their various inessential assignments around the country, soldiers poured into the city to prepare for a parade of grand pretensions.

  Hannah had finished serving lunch and was returning home. The jitney that slowed down for her had two passengers in front and none in the back. Before entering the car, she made sure to tell the driver, a man advanced in age, with carefully trimmed white hair and mustache, that she was buying two seats. Not twenty meters ahead, my ex-husband’s eldest brother, the lieutenant himself, joined her in the backseat, delivered to her by the iron chains of circumstance.

  Providence! Destiny!

  A man, just the right age, with carefully trimmed black hair and mustache; a handsome man wearing the national gray uniform—a uniform radiant with a supernatural cleanliness mirroring hers, a cap atop his head—sat next to her, less than a meter away. A man right out of her journals, out of her fantasies, a tenant of her dreams, shared the same car, shared her world.