She visited me during working hours as well, although nowhere near as often, and there at the bookstore she wasn’t chatty. Whether I had customers or not, she sat on a white plastic chair in the corner, knitting soundlessly except for the rhythmic click-clack of the bamboo needles. Sometimes she would write in her journal, her pen scratching faintly in the quiet store. I would be reading at my desk, something she deemed part and parcel of my job, and considerate as she was, she kept me company but left me undisturbed. We were two solitudes benefiting from a grace that was continuously reinvigorated in each other’s presence, two solitudes who nourished each other.
I should say that at times we were three solitudes in the bookstore. She visited on occasion while Ahmad was there. Since neither spoke much while I was working, they got along rather well. I read at my desk, Hannah knitted in one corner, and Ahmad consumed books on the floor. He left me a couple of years before she killed herself.
Hannah taught me many things, but somewhere along the line, I’m not sure exactly when, probably when I was twenty-two or twenty-three, we commenced a new ritual: in the evening, as we sat together in my reading room after the meal, I began to read to her. She would sit on the love seat, quietly knitting, while I, on the navy chenille chair, became the babbling newswire. I read only books of philosophy to her—she always claimed to love the subject—and only in French since her English was weak (she used to say she got befuddled upon encountering the first subordinate clause). Both of us had trouble in the beginning, and frankly it was quite a long time before I understood much of what I was reading. I think it took two years of evenings, probably 1952 and 1953, to read, to leaf through, Le monde comme volonté et comme représentation, and I can’t seriously claim I ever grasped much of Schopenhauer on that first reading, or the second, but I kept trying. In philosophy, I was a page-turner long before I was a reader. I worried the surface till I penetrated the essence.
As I write this, I realize that I can easily tell you how difficult learning was in those first few years, but it wasn’t as easy to admit then. I wasn’t able to share my fears with Hannah in the beginning; I couldn’t tell her how foreign those philosophers sounded, how insurmountable the obstacles to my becoming a learned person felt. My only hope was to fake my way to an education. I assumed that she understood little of what I was reading either, that she listened because she enjoyed the sound of my voice. It took us one whole year to finish Spinoza’s Éthique, the first volume only.
One day in the early history of my bookstore, when I was still unsure of so much, she was knitting on the white plastic chair in the corner when a chic woman walked in trailing a reek of lily perfume and petit bourgeois affectations. Something about her made me feel inadequate. She approached my desk, lifted her sunglasses, and inquired about books by Heidegger, the first time any customer had asked about a philosopher. When I directed her toward the books, she regarded me roguishly and asked, “Which would you recommend?”
She was being mean, entertaining herself at my expense. I was a rube and I looked like one. I could have answered; I’d read Hannah an essay about him, but I hadn’t yet read any of his work. I was embarrassed and about to say the wrong thing.
Without lifting her eyes from the sweater she was working on, Hannah said, “We wouldn’t recommend anything by that proto-Nazi. He’s a third-rate philosopher with a ridiculous knit cap, and trust me, I know my knitting.” I’d shown her the picture that appeared with the critical essay. She continued, sans façons, to embellish what I’d read to her. “His only interest was in posturing, and only posturers are interested in him. A woman of your intelligence shouldn’t waste time reading Heidegger. People who like him confuse philosophy with cooking. Everything he’s written is fried, roasted, and completely baked. Try Schopenhauer—him we can recommend.”
Had we actually understood Heidegger then, we wouldn’t have dismissed him so readily. After all, anyone who says that displacement is a fundamental way of being in the world should have been considered a bit more seriously by the two of us.
We may not have comprehended much in the beginning, but we coped—she helped me cope.
The philosopher I feel the most kinship with is Spinoza; I identify with his story and his life. The Jewish elders of Amsterdam issued a cherem—a fatwa, for you non-Hebrew speakers—against my kinsman when he was a mere twenty-three. He was excommunicated for his heresies. He didn’t fight it, didn’t rebel. He didn’t even whine. He gave up his family inheritance and became a private scholar, a philosopher at home.
In paintings and drawings he is portrayed with big brown eyes (and a big Semitic nose like mine, of course), inquiring eyes that penetrate the darkness surrounding us, and the one within us, by looking unblinkingly—intense, shining eyes that disperse mists and miasmas.
He worked as a lens grinder until the day he died at forty-four, of a disease of the lungs, probably silicosis, exacerbated by the glass dust he inhaled while plying his trade.
He died early trying to help people see.
Like many of the writers and musicians I admire, he never married. Probably died a virgin.
I always assumed that Spinoza lived the life of a hermit after the cherem, but I recently found out that wasn’t the case at all. He had a good number of friends who visited him, and some even supported him financially. So I know that my idea of who he was isn’t accurate, but I still hang on to my myth. Now, if he hadn’t written Ethics—if he hadn’t developed the concepts of religious freedom, freedom of the press, democratic republicanism, and a secular morality detached from theology—I wouldn’t claim him. The fact that he wrote that masterwork is what makes him a genius. The fact that he was, and that I consider him, a pathological outsider is what makes him my favorite.
We so desperately need a Beiruti Baruch, a knight to slay the ecclesiastical dragons, or at least declaw them.
When I run across his name in one of my readings, as in the brilliant novel I mentioned earlier, Sepharad, by Antonio Muñoz Molina, butterflies flap their wings about my heart as if I’ve encountered a lost lover or rediscovered an intimate, an almost sensual experience.
The heel of my shoe lands on hard ground, the pavement tile, but the ball of my foot encounters no support and I lose balance. I gather myself quickly so I don’t fall forward. A hole in the pavement gapes at me—a hole big enough for a mining dwarf to slide through. I try to look in to gauge how deep the mine is, if only to guess how many leg bones I’d have broken had I stepped in it. Nausea overwhelms me, and I back away. The small hyperactive church bell rings in my ears again. A few meters away I stop, lean against a building’s wall in order to breathe and settle myself, to allow the miasma of memories to seep out of my head.
I must keep walking. Onward.
Two giant residential buildings are being erected on this tiny street. Billboards featuring ridiculously wealthy Westerners shopping, swimming in private pools, and getting facialed in spas cover the construction sites. One slogan proclaims WE’RE BEIRUTING AGAIN. Hundreds of these buildings are going up all over the city, none of them less than super ultra deluxe.
Not long after I was married off, the family of which I’d suddenly become a superfluous part moved into the apartment that my mother and my half brother the eldest’s brood live in now. The change of residence, one street over, was an upwardly mobile one, but not by much, from two bedrooms to two and a half—the half being my mother’s cell. The tiny building with the tinier apartment I grew up in was leveled and replaced by a twelve-story complex with a sushi boat restaurant on the ground floor where our home used to be. I’ve never eaten there.
I don’t ring my mother’s doorbell (my half brother the eldest’s). I pause briefly before knocking on the pinewood door. Hearing nothing, I wait. It has been such a long time since I’ve stood on this spot. Scratches, scrapes, and dents make the door look like the bottom of a litter box, but the copper knob is polished to a shine by the touch of many a hand—many a hand but not mine, not in a whil
e.
I refuse to touch it, refuse to turn it. I notice that my hand is fiercely clutching the black wrought-iron railing that surrounds the landing. I let go.
I wonder what Murakami would think about strangers slicing tuna where he once slept, where now a series of dispirited miniature boats connected stem to stern goes around and around forever.
No one seems to be answering my knock. I lean into the door, hoping to hear no sound within the apartment. I won’t be disappointed if no one’s home, for I can most certainly return another day. I can climb these seventeen shallow, steep stairs once more if I want to, if I choose to. The wood presses the scarf against my ear.
I ring the doorbell. A rustle of steps inside, then more steps. A young girl in a T-shirt, jeans, slippers, and clumsy makeup opens the painted pine door. Thirteen, I’d say, maybe even fourteen in spite of the ludicrous pigtails. An obstinate ridge of pimples occupies the lower right quadrant of her chin. Her eyes hide behind lids that droop heavily, giving her an appearance of permanent apathy that belies a shadow of astonishment, possibly even excitement, over this seemingly rare occurrence of a stranger at the door. Her T-shirt screams KENZO in sparkling gold letters.
She is so very young. I try to hazard a guess as to whom she might be, what our relationship might be. There is a resemblance, of that I’m sure. She’s family. I’m stumped.
“I would like to see my mother,” I say as a formal announcement.
She obviously has no idea who I am or whom I’m asking about. She calls her grandmother, loudly and a bit too insistently. She waits at the door, guarding it, not exactly preventing my entry, but standing slightly aside as if she expects me to offer her a tip or at least a keepsake as a souvenir of our encounter.
Her grandmother is none other than my starchy sister-in-law, all shortish height of her. The bewildered look on her mousy face may be worth whatever nasty surprises are lurking within this household. She looks tired, haggard and tattered, overworked and overwhelmed. The poor woman is inexperienced in either repose or solitude.
“I want to see her,” I say. “Please don’t allow your hopes to rise. I’m not taking her with me. Don’t even think about it. I simply wish to pay a visit.”
She recovers her sour composure quickly. “Now?” she says. “You come to visit now? After all that’s happened?”
A conversation in short bursts of question marks? Why such irritation? Such antipathy?
I am inoffensiveness incarnate. I don’t expect people to love me, like me, or feel anything at all toward me. I never wanted to be prominent enough to have enemies. I’m not suggesting that I’m congenitally shy, or that I’m a wallflower whose deepest desire is to bloom into a scandalously fragrant tiger lily, just that I try to live without interfering in the lives of others because I have no wish for them to interfere in mine.
Why does my sister-in-law dislike me? I’ve never caused her harm. I don’t even remember many interactions with her. I understand that she wishes me to take my mother off her hands, but she must know that her wish is unreasonable. She moved from her parents’ house to my parents’ house and has been living with my mother ever since. She knows my mother better than I do.
I haven’t been involved in my sister-in-law’s life for years, for decades. She shouldn’t hate me.
“I thought my visit might help.”
I take a small step back, ready to pack up my intentions and leave. She doesn’t say anything but takes a bigger step back. Both she and her granddaughter make way for me, parting the sea, so to speak.
The girl unwraps a piece of bubblegum and stuffs it in her mouth. I can’t tell whose daughter she is, which of my half brother the eldest’s children. I should ask but I don’t. Come to think of it, I can’t recall any of his children or how many he has. I walk into the apartment, past the two doorkeepers, glide through the scents of youth (gum, cheap perfume) and old age (sweat, slightly stale body odor).
The apartment hasn’t changed much since I was last here. When was that? So long ago that I can’t remember. It has always been stuffy, dark and dank. In the corridor, I walk under a strip of flypaper hanging from the ceiling; it’s probably as old as I am, brown now, covered with darker spots—carapaces, one presumes.
My half brother the eldest isn’t home, for which I’m exceedingly grateful. He’s probably playing boyish games with his buddies. I don’t ask about him, nor does his wife offer any information on his whereabouts. She leads me through folding double doors, deeper into her den. I note the miniature ladder running through her dark stockings.
The wallpaper has lost all semblance of color or texture. Last time I saw it, if I remember correctly, it was peachy pink with embossed vertical stripes. Now it’s dirty beige. Two walls in the living room are decorated by carpets, giant machine-made Turcomans, to which age has added nothing of interest or worth. Life-sized portraits litter a third wall, black-and-white photographs of plump-looking men, all mustached, none smiling, all keeping a reproachful, stern eye on me as I enter the room, all of them dead. The portraits ensure that the walls will always be more crowded than the living room, that the dead outnumber the living.
My mother looks dead in the living room, but her chest murmurs. She breathes.
“She’s not dead,” my sister-in law says.
My mother’s head and arms fold into her body like commas; because of her diminutive size and the droop of her head, the floral-patterned armchair (roses and dahlias, thorns and leaves) looks as if it belongs in Alice in Wonderland. Her shoes, low black heels, do not reach the floor—she’s always hated slippers. The strip of white in her hair seems to have expanded. Light from a small window hits her face, but it doesn’t bother her. We are all children when we sleep.
I sit by the window. And while I sit
my youth comes back. Sometimes I’d smile. Or spit.
“I can wake her,” my great-niece says. “It’s not difficult to make her stop sleeping.”
I tell them, my sister-in-law and great-niece, that I don’t want to disturb her, or them either. I can wait for a while. I’ll be out of their way. I drag over a nearby high-backed chair and sit facing my mother, the window behind me. The few leaves on the ficus tree next to me are wilted and scorched, whether from lack of light, or of blessed watering, or of loving attention, I can’t tell. There doesn’t seem to be another potted plant in the apartment.
The armchair’s back faces the rest of the living room. You can watch television without having to be disturbed by the sight of my mother. She can stare out the window toward the world, but not toward her family. Maybe she’s the one who made the choice. Maybe she’s the one who wanted to keep looking out, not in.
There must be a word in some language that describes the anguish you experience upon suddenly coming face-to-face with your terrifying future. I can’t think of one in any of the languages I know.
Maybe it exists in Swahili or Sanskrit.
Maybe I can make one up, like Hamsun’s Kuboaa.
Maybe the word is just mother.
There is a word I know: litost. In Czech, according to Milan Kundera, litost is a state of agony and torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery.
The more I observe my mother, the more I think she looks like a Chekhovian character resting before a long journey, possibly a train trip, though God knows we no longer have passenger trains in Lebanon. Like a constipated creek in dry summer months, the drool of sleep flows leisurely and intermittently from the left corner of her slack mouth as her head falls southeasterly forward. Her breathing comes at me in jagged intervals, a whispery snore.
I don’t wish to be here. She’s contagious. My breathing becomes as serrated as hers.
There’s a milky gash in the dark chestnut coffee table next to her, a table that hasn’t felt the smooth pampering of a coat of varnish in at least a decade. On it, alongside an inopportune desk lamp, sits an old, round, ticktocking alarm clock with a spherical skullcap for a bell. But what captures my atte
ntion is another object on the table: a mother-of-pearl-encrusted music box, hand-sized, that I remember well from my childhood. I recall the day she bought it as a gift to herself.
I control my breathing because I feel a flood of emotions rising. I haven’t seen that music box since I was married off.
“I begged of you, O Memory, / to be my best assistant,” wrote Cavafy.
I assess my surroundings. My sister-in-law isn’t in the room. She’s making blustery, demented chopping noises in the kitchen, but her granddaughter spuds on the couch in front of the flickering television while banging the keys of an older-model laptop, studying me out of the corner of her eye. I must restrain myself.
My mother bought the music box because of its oddness; it had two twirling ballerinas, not just one, a pseudo-Sapphic pas de deux. It was Russian, or appeared so, and we all assumed the music it played was Russian too. It isn’t. I may not recall what I had for breakfast this morning or whether I had breakfast at all, but I can whistle that tune note for note, even though I probably haven’t opened the box in sixty years.
The twisted red coils of the heater in the far corner emit a steady electric hum that feels ominous in this situation. I begin to perspire again.
The tinny piano-imitating tune interred within the box is Chopin’s Waltz no. 2 in C-sharp Minor. I had forgotten all about this box, forgotten it even existed. I’d dismembered it in my memories. I’d disremembered it.
No wonder I was so easily infected. The Chopin virus was already latent in my system.
I desperately wish to sneak the Russian box into my handbag, but I resist my shameful urge. There are things I just won’t do, as much as I want to, if I intend to live decently with myself afterward.
I’ll listen to Rubinstein the Pole play the waltzes when I get home.
I distract myself by gazing at the barely perceptible steam rising off a damp pink sweater that’s draped over the top of the heater. The girl must have come in not long before I did, wet from the rain. She chews her gum loudly.
An Unnecessary Woman Page 19