An Unnecessary Woman

by Rabih Alameddine

  Joumana looks confused, her eyebrows arch into question marks. Her eyes concentrate on the lower half of my face as if she intends to lip-read. If I’d said I had bags of heroin in the cartons, she’d have been less shocked. She is a decent woman who isn’t used to deciphering the mutterings of monsters.

  “Let’s get to work,” she says in a commanding tone. “Let’s get them out of those rooms.”

  As soon as I try to move, I teeter like a giraffe that’s gorged herself on fermented fruit. Marie-Thérèse of the kind face wraps her arm around my waist and steadies me. My forearm rests on her shoulder. I feel both helpless and shiftless. I wish to escape all this and return home, except I am home.

  “Sit,” Marie-Thérèse says, leading me to my armchair. “Catch your breath for a minute. We’ll clear the boxes out.” She hesitates for a moment, as if she intends to ask a most portentous question. “Do you have a stepladder, or should I get mine?”

  I’m upset at myself, not just for blubbering in front of strangers like a little girl during kindergarten recess, but for blubbering at all. I try to control myself. In my comforting armchair, I observe the three women hustle. I try to stand up; my thigh muscles quiver, my legs give way, and I sit back down. Only for a minute, I tell myself, less than, I lie to myself. I feel like a slimy toad pressing into the mud, unblinkingly eyeing my nothingness. Spinoza has little if anything for me this morning.

  Fadia had gone up to her apartment and returned with two large bedsheets and at least eight towels. Now all three sally back and forth, carrying out soppy crates one by one. They seem synchronized, as if they’ve been clearing out flood-damaged translations all their lives, as if they grew up in one of the villages on the banks of the Euphrates where this kind of work is not unusual. One of them enters the dark, another exits carrying a box from the underworld. I notice for the first time that Joumana’s feet are as flat as a duck’s. The smell of rot wafts through the apartment, the scent of decay permeates my home. Sadness and frustration well up inside me. I should stand, but I can’t yet. As they work, I can do nothing but twiddle my thumbs.

  I must get stronger, fortify myself. O Flaubert, show me how to seal my chamber, send me your mason. Fear, sorrow, keep out these marauders and pillagers, this anger, this guilt, this hopelessness.

  I feel nostalgic for my once arid heart that knew how to cope with such loss.

  Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo.

  In silence, I help my neighbors move the crates out of Egypt. I am able to reach the high ones more easily. Ahead of me Fadia steps on the Israeli landmine, a hand’s width south of the drain. I avoid the spot, still think my slipper will be soiled if it hovers anywhere near where the stain had been. The damp cardboard feels like boiled cabbage in my hands. We line the crates up on the towels and bedsheets, in the kitchen, in the living room, in the reading room, caskets of war dead being returned home. I should stand at attention and salute—so many national anthems, so many countries in the pile. I wish to fire twenty-one guns.

  Finally, Joumana kneels before one of the coffins, a mourner of sorts. As her left knee lowers, it knocks the English version of The Encyclopedia of the Dead off the side of the box (English version on the left/west, French on the right/east); the book falls a few centimeters to the floor with a minimal thud. She hesitates, but only for a moment. An airy gasp escapes my throat.

  What unaccustomed sounds

  Are hovering on my lips.

  Joumana’s knees rest on the towel and cradle the crate. Her left hand gestures for me to calm down, her palm extended. Her right hand holds my chef’s knife. She saws through the masking tape in four places.

  The manuscript is wet, of course. The first page is legible since it contains only the title, Danilo Kiš’s name, and mine. Joumana lifts the title page and sighs. Underneath, the pages are damaged. There seems to be a dry section in the middle of each, the size of a young woman’s mittened hand. But the rest of the page, the rest—the smudging, the discoloring, the smell—death, as it always does, creeps toward the core. Mine certainly does.

  I can’t help myself. I begin to weep again, silently though, less embarrassingly. Joseph Roth ends Flight Without End with the sentence: “No one in the whole world was as superfluous as he.” I beg to differ. No one in the whole world is as superfluous as I. Not Franz Tunda, Roth’s protagonist, no. I am the one who has no occupation, no desire, no hope, no ambition, not even any self-love.

  From out of nowhere, it seems, Fadia’s hands reach up from behind and gently massage my shoulders. I resist the urge to go Merkel to her Bush. I allow her hands to touch me.

  I can’t help myself. My mind leads my thoughts to death on a leash.

  Arbus slashed her wrists, as did Rothko. Woolf walked into the river and drowned herself. Hemingway shot himself in the head, of course. Plath, Hedayat, and Borowski put their heads in the oven. Améry swallowed an overdose of sleeping pills in 1978 and didn’t wake up the next day refreshed. Neither did Pavese in 1950. Gorky (Arshile, not Maxim) hanged himself. Levi allegedly jumped to his death.

  Then there’s the strange suicide story of Potocki, who shot himself in the head with a silver bullet. Every morning for a few months, he worked at filing off the strawberry-shaped knob of a sugar bowl his mother had given him, until he freed it and used it as a bullet. Paging Dr. Freud.

  No composer of note, or at least none that I know of, committed suicide. You would think if anybody would have, it would have been Schnittke, but he didn’t. Schumann jumped, but he had bipolar disorder, and as if that weren’t enough, syphilis spirochetes were rejoicing in his brain. In any case, he didn’t die from the attempt. Tchaikovsky may or may not have intentionally drunk that bad water. I wouldn’t count those two. Music seems to be the healthiest of all the silly arts. I should point out, though, that composers tend to die at a younger age than the average human, whereas conductors die older. I don’t know why that’s so, but it intrigues me.

  Syphilis spirochetes felled both Schus, -mann and -bert.

  Fadia notices that I’m feeling calmer and more collected. Her hands drop to her sides.

  “I can read most of this,” says Joumana. She riffles through the pages of Danilo’s and my collaboration.

  “Please don’t,” I say.

  “I mean it’s legible,” she says, a little amused. “I’m able to read it, not that I’m going to.” She puckers her lips and blows on the page in her hands. She waves it back and forth, trying to fan out the dampness, but stops, probably worried that the page will disintegrate.

  “We must separate all the pages,” Marie-Thérèse says, “and dry them. It’s the only way we can salvage them.”

  She occupies the floor in the center of the room and constantly checks up on me while pretending not to. Today she doesn’t look like Pessoa’s imaginary girlfriend, Ophelia, more like the older Eudora Welty, though with dyed black hair.

  “It’ll take a long time,” I say, “much too long.”

  “We have the time,” Marie-Thérèse says. Kneeling, she blots her wet hands dry on the towel on the floor before her. “It’s the holidays, after all. I don’t have anything better to do.”

  “If we don’t dry the pages,” Fadia says, “we’ll have fungus growing all over the place. Fungus spreads like fungus. All over the place, all over the building. I can’t have that. What if it gets under your nails? It’s highly contagious. Who knows what would happen to mine? Look, look.” Fadia’s voice hoots and shrieks as she shows us her nails. “I can’t risk structural damage to these. We need an emergency intervention.”

  She does repeat her unfunny jokes, which for some strange reason sound funnier the more I hear them.

  It rains and rains. My soul is damp from hearing it. It drizzles, then showers, then drizzles, then showers. The day’s sorrow is pouring itself out. The window groans from being battered. Through it, the sky seems frozen.

  “I’m not sure they’re worth salvaging,” I say, returning to my chair. Standing exha
usts me.

  “What a silly thing to say.” Fadia shakes her head in mock disbelief. “This is a lot of paper. It can’t all be unimportant.”

  She settles next to Joumana and grabs the chef’s knife from her. She, the vivisector, slices through Javier Marías, opens him up to examine his insides. Her use of the knife is more skillful, of course: she’s both a better cook than Joumana and less sensitive, less meticulous.

  Marie-Thérèse begins to put up laundry lines. Her deceased husband, who was obsessed with hunting, fishing, and trawling, left behind a boatload of line spools. She strings crisscrossing clotheslines across my entire apartment, tacking them to the wall with pushpins. When I suggest that they might not hold, she reminds me that all we’re hanging are sheets of paper. Even before she finishes, I know there won’t be enough lines for my pages.

  Fadia and Joumana begin to hang, sheet by sheet, in meticulous order, as Marie-Thérèse finishes stringing the lines. They use plastic clothes pegs, even paper clips. My reading room begins to brim with ghostly Tibetan prayer flags.

  I want to help. I stand up again, rejoin them. I pick up a page to hang on the line. Fadia and Joumana leave a space for me, but by the time I finish they are six or seven pages ahead of me. My mind is mired in turbid swamps. I see the three witches in the room, I interact with them, but it’s as if there’s a thin layer of Saran Wrap between us—only the rare molecule passes through.

  “This won’t be enough,” says Joumana, still hanging the Danilo Kiš manuscript.

  “No,” says Fadia.

  “We’ll need something else.”

  It’s raining hard, raining harder, raining harder still, the drops like mourners goading one another into a rising frenzy of laments. It rains as if the whole world is about to collapse, as if the sky is going to plummet—Noah’s revenge upon my kind. He has finally broken through into my home.

  “Where’s your blow dryer?” Fadia stands before me, a paper line between us, our faces between the pages.

  “My blow dryer?” I ask. Why does she suddenly want to dry her hair? I explain that I don’t have one, that I’ve always dried my hair with a towel, that I haven’t had one since my husband left and took his with him, that it was one of his prized possessions, which didn’t make any sense because his coiffed hair was always covered by his sophomoric hat.

  Suddenly garrulous me.

  All three stop what they’re doing. If I’d said that I ride with the Valkyries every morning after breakfast, that I gave birth to a million jinn on the shores of the Red Sea on Sunday the twenty-second of June, that my secret lover is Zeus in the form of a shower of gold—anything but the fact that I’ve never owned a hair dryer—they would have been less surprised.

  “Your hair was nice,” says Fadia. “It had so much possibility, but you never dyed it, and when you did, you had to dye it blue. I don’t understand you.”

  She’s standing much too close to me. They all are. I can smell them—each wears a different cologne; Fadia also reeks of French cigarettes.

  “Fadia!” her companions yell simultaneously.

  “Oh, be quiet,” she tells them. Then, to me, “What was up with the blue hair? Why did you do that?”

  “It was an error in judgment,” I say.

  “It was certainly that.” Fadia waves her hand to signal her co-witches that they should not interrupt her. She knows when they’re about to meddle in her meddling. “And why in the name of all that’s holy did you shear off your hair? Couldn’t you have gone to a salon and had it fixed? A little coloring and brushing and you’d have felt like a new woman. You look like a nun without her habit, and not the pretty one, not Audrey Hepburn, more Shirley MacLaine.”

  “Fadia!” her companions cry.

  “How can you say such a thing?” Marie-Thérèse demands. She tries to pull Fadia away, but Fadia shrugs her off like someone flicking off an irritating housefly.

  “She’s not Shirley MacLaine,” Joumana says. “You are. You’re just as loud and inappropriate as she is. What happened to your manners?”

  “They aged,” Fadia says. “They grew old to keep me young.”

  “You don’t look like Shirley MacLaine,” Marie-Thérèse tells me. She reaches out to me, her right palm cupping my left elbow.

  “Well, she doesn’t look like what’s her name in Rosemary’s Baby either,” Fadia says. “That film scared me. All I have to do is think about it and I need adult diapers. Let’s not think about it. Wait, wait. Do you remember that French film with the mustached American actor who looks like a raisin left in the sun too long? The actress had short hair. Not Annie Girardot, another one.”

  “Just ignore her,” Joumana tells me. “We always do. She hasn’t made any sense since 1998. That was her last good year.”

  “I’ll get my hair dryer,” Marie-Thérèse says. “Maybe we should all get ours. We can dry the papers faster.”

  “Something in the rain,” Fadia says. “The movie had an interesting title, but I can’t remember. It’s from the sixties. You don’t really look like her, but the French actress had very short hair.”

  “Get your hair dryer,” Joumana says as she drags Fadia off by the hand.

  I want to lock the door and keep all of them, the entire world, out, but the dank smells almost suffocate me. An imperious humidity hangs thick in the apartment, an oppressive tyrant. I leave the door to my home open. I let the air in. It circulates briskly in the apartment for a moment but is soon vanquished; it grows heavy and stale.

  I look for Anna Karenina. Where is she? She’s all I need. I step from one coffin to another, but I don’t see her among those in the reading room. I retrace my steps just in case. I move into the kitchen. On a damp blue-striped bedsheet covering the floor, Anna’s box looks like a small, broken dwelling about to implode, like abandoned trash on the sidewalk. She’s all I need. I must inspect her.

  This was one of my earliest translations, probably the third or fourth. I love Anna, but that’s not the only reason she’s important. Karenina was the first project where I began to feel I knew what I was doing. I shouldn’t say that. I’ll say it was the first translation where I didn’t feel as inadequate, where the struggle was no longer as arduous or titanic, where the translating itself became enjoyable—just as pleasurable, if not more so, than the anticipation of finishing the project. Anna Karenina was the first time I allowed a book and its world into my house.

  Dampness has crimpled the first page and all underneath, softened and thinned them. If I’m not careful, I might easily tear a sheet in half when I pick it up. When the pages dry, they’ll turn brittle and crinkly. Ink was less permanent when I translated these pages. Arabic words swim on the sheets; some drown, some float. Some pages look like a Rorschach, a faint blue Rorschach. I see a big dragon eating a pig. I see my mother eating a pig. I see a squashed butterfly. I see my life circling the drain. I see water damage everywhere. I see words, not all disconnected. I can rewrite these pages with an Egyptian pyramid’s worth of effort. I’ll have to be painstakingly conscientious and cautious, but it can be done. I’ll probably die before I finish transcribing. The newer translations are probably less damaged than Anna, the ink being less fugitive. I can also throw the whole pile in one of the dustbins of history. Why would I want to resuscitate this rotting cadaver? It’s nothing if not unnecessary.

  I am nothing.

  I’ll always be nothing.

  I can’t even wish to be anything.

  Aside from that, within me I have all the dreams of the world.

  Álvaro de Campos, Pessoa’s bisexual dandy poet, wrote that. He is welcome in my home anytime.

  I am nothing. I should aspire to become a speck. I assign importance to literature and poetry, plate the arts in dazzlingly bright gold to bewilder my vision so as not to see what is plain to all humanity: I am nothing, I’ll always be nothing.

  In order to live, I have to blind myself to my infinitesimal dimensions in this infinite universe.

  Kneelin
g on Fadia’s ancient linen on my kitchen floor, I separate Anna page by page, placing each in order around me. As I extend my arms, I realize I’m genuflecting, as if I’m praying. This is my religion.

  My handwriting hasn’t changed much in all these years, but the water damage makes the pages look like a stranger wrote them. Everything is written in a foreign language that I must translate—retranslate. Letters are thickened randomly, some word endings are extended. In a few instances, the tip of the Arabic letter r runs like a river tributary until it either dries up or pours itself into the lake of the letter that follows.

  A short scream escapes my throat when I see slippered feet almost touching Anna’s farthest sheet of paper. Marie-Thérèse has entered without my noticing. She apologizes for startling me, though she doesn’t need to since it’s my fault. She informs me that the plumbers have arrived. They’re going to be breaking into the wall in the maid’s bathroom upstairs. It will be noisy but it shouldn’t take long.

  “We’ll have our water back in about an hour,” she says. Sheep-colored wool tufts crawl from inside her low-heeled slippers. “Joumana is making coffee while Fadia argues with the plumbers. They’ll be down with their dryers shortly.” She extends her arm, and her hair dryer’s electric cord sways like a drunken pendulum. “I can start while we wait for them to join us.”

  Suddenly the ceiling and the kitchen walls behind me convulse. The plumbers must have dropped a heavy load. I feel as if something is shattering in my brain, but I pay it no mind.

  Not for the first time, I notice that Marie-Thérèse has an alarmingly fragile appearance, more substantial than my mother’s, but also more brittle, as if she wouldn’t survive a minor fall without a major break. A baby blue nightgown calls attention to itself from under the collar of her housedress.

  “It hasn’t been our usual morning,” she says. “I haven’t had time to make myself presentable.”