An Unnecessary Woman

by Rabih Alameddine

  She touches her hair, which is bursting out of its clips. What was a meticulous bouffant after the salon visit is now massive and unkempt.

  I should say something. I must have been staring.

  “I’m less presentable.” I gesture to the burgundy mohair overcoat. “How unattractive is this? It’s repulsive.” Sorrow seems about to envelop my world once more. “Who wears something like this? Who?”

  “I would,” she says.

  “It’s unsightly.”

  “It looks warm.”

  Marie-Thérèse gathers the early pages of Anna Karenina and sits at the red-and-yellow breakfast table. She plugs the blow dryer into the wall socket, but before she turns it on she adjusts her eyeglasses and glances at the title. Her face bursts into life.

  “Thank the Lord,” she exclaims. “I’ve read this. I was worried because I hadn’t even heard of the others. I felt so small. In all the other piles not one name I recognized. I felt inadequate.”

  “Don’t,” I say. “I’m the one who should feel so.”

  “But I’ve read Anna Karenina,” she says. “I read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky as a young girl. It’s been a long time, but I did.”

  “It’s been a long time for me as well.” Those were the books that led me down this path, the books responsible for both the peak and the abyss.

  “I remember quite a bit of it,” she says. “I loved it so much. All my friends did. It was what all of us had to read. Such different times then. I wonder what young girls read these days. I adored Count Vronsky.”

  She smiles to herself. I can imagine her memories of the novel, or, more likely, of who she was and how she felt when reading it. She blushes.

  “I fell in love with a character in a book,” she says. “When I first married, I couldn’t understand why my poor husband didn’t behave like the count. I know it’s silly. My husband loved me, cared for me, provided for me, but I still wanted all the frivolities that Vronsky offered. I wanted my husband to be as handsome as I imagined he was.”

  “I understand,” I say, and I do. I also understand that you have to lie to yourself to survive in a bad marriage, you have to delude yourself if you want to carry on in this life.

  “Oh my,” she says suddenly. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be talking about romantic husbands.”

  “That’s quite all right,” I say. “Husbands mean so little to me.”

  She laughs.

  “Did you fall in love with Vronsky as well?” she asks.

  “No. I loved Anna.”

  Hearing Joumana and Fadia enter the foyer, Marie-Thérèse announces, “We’re talking about Anna Karenina and husbands.”

  The women greet this pronouncement as if they heard that one of their children was getting married. The expression on Joumana’s face is that of a woman about to ululate. Fadia holds three hair dryers in her arms, one the size of a cannon, Joumana a tray with her sacred coffee kettle and four cups. I am touched by their thoughtfulness. I have only two cups in my apartment.

  We have to drink a first cup of coffee before turning on the hair dryers; Fadia wants a noise-free one. They missed their ritual this morning because of the commotion. Fadia doesn’t get her wish, though, because as soon as she takes a sip, the plumbers begin to bang upstairs. In my reading room, the walls of books tremble in anticipation. My hair dryer nestles in my lap like a prehistoric bird, its open beak hungry, waiting.

  The coffee cup is like a thimble in my hand, makes my fingers and thumb look gigantic. I bring it to my lips and take a sip. The coffee is ambrosia, a flavor of heaven. I am stunned. I have never tasted anything like this. Had I known that coffee could taste so good, I would have gotten drunk on it every day. I want to ask them if this is how it tastes all the time or if it’s a unique brew. Do they use a special ingredient, a pinch of salt maybe, or eye of newt? I wonder where they buy their beans. I don’t know how to ask. I consider the possibility that I find it delicious because of the condition I’m in.

  Marie-Thérèse adds to the plumbing racket by directing her dryer at the first page of Anna Karenina. Joumana begins with Hamsun’s Hunger. Their faces harden with concentration. Joumana sucks in her lips till her mouth resembles a solitary line laid down by Klee, or by Matisse, who wanted nothing more than to be like everyone else. I don’t ask the question: Are we going to blow-dry every single page of my thirty-seven manuscripts? I don’t believe any of us are young enough to finish the task. We don’t get to find out. Fadia turns on her hair dryer and the electricity shuts off.

  All four of us look at one another. Fadia stands up in a huff as if the tripping of the circuit breaker is a personal affront, as if Beirut’s foibles and idiosyncrasies exist only to irritate her.

  “I’ll switch it back on,” I say, moving forward in my chair to stand up.

  “Don’t worry,” she says. “I know where the fuse box is.”

  The apartment’s circuit breaker is only able to handle two hair dryers. Whenever Fadia tries to turn hers on, the breaker trips.

  Joumana suggests that one of us can iron the pages dry, or to be more precise, run a hot iron over a towel covering the damp sheet of paper. I do have an iron and a board.

  “I’m not ironing,” Fadia announces. “Blow-dry, yes; iron, no.”

  Marie-Thérèse sits on the love seat, in the same position and in the same spot where Hannah used to sit all those years ago. That was where she sat. That was where she knitted a red-and-pink scarf for her nephew, a scarf she never saw him wear, which caused her no little irritation. That was where she listened to me read Beauvoir aloud. From that love seat, she shared her stories with me. Always prim, always proper, but her dresses never fit quite right, and the cardigans she loved rarely matched them. That was where she wrote in her journals. How many years did she sit there? I should be able to count the years. How many evenings? All I have now is her writing and my memory. Who will keep her journals when I am gone?

  “I like this,” Marie-Thérèse says. She holds a page in front of her glasses. “You write well.”

  “I didn’t write it,” I say. “It’s a translation.”

  “Your handwriting is small,” Fadia says. “I can’t read a thing.”

  “Eyeglasses,” Marie-Thérèse says.

  Fadia is the only one of us who isn’t wearing glasses. I can’t recall her ever wearing a pair.

  “Has anybody read these translations?” Joumana asks.

  I don’t know what to tell her. No one has, of course. I see her hesitate; as tactful as she’s trying to be, her curiosity isn’t easy to mask. Fadia is as jumpy as a horse a few seconds before a race begins.

  Joumana tries a different angle. “Have you considered publishing all this?”

  “No,” I say.

  The look on her face confuses me. I wait for her to say something or ask another question, but she doesn’t. She keeps looking at me, discomfiting me. Then she nods her head slightly, a small downward and forward jerk, and I understand. She wants me to continue.

  “I’m not that good,” I say, “and I’m not sure anyone would be interested in reading my translations.”

  “You’re not sure anyone is interested in reading Anna Karenina?” Joumana asks.

  This look, disbelief, I can decipher.

  “Anna is one of my earliest. It has been translated into Arabic. I’m not sure mine would add anything, not sure if it’s of any significance at all. I created a system to pass the time. This is all a whim.”

  “A whim?” Joumana shakes her head.

  “A whim?” Marie-Thérèse asks.

  “A whim.” Fadia smiles.

  “A whim,” I insist.

  Joumana looks at each crate on the floor; her eyes settle on one for a second or two before moving to the next. “Don’t you want people to read your writing?”

  “My writing?” I have to say I’ve never thought of my projects as writing. “I’m translating. The writer is Tolstoy. It’s Sebald, not me.”

  “Your work, then? Don�
��t you want your work to be read?” Joumana talks to me as I imagine she does to her students, patient and mentoring.

  “I don’t know,” I say, which is as honest an answer as I can muster. I want her to understand, I want to understand.

  “Don’t you wish to keep a record of everything you’ve translated?” Joumana asks, pointing to all the boxes. “These writers, I’ve never heard of them. Pessoa? Hamsun? Cortázar? Hedayat? Karasu? Nooteboom? Kertész?”

  “Wonderful writers,” I say, “even a couple of Nobel Prize winners.”

  “More to the point,” she says, “I’d like to read them. Others would as well.”

  “You can read the English translations,” I say. “Wouldn’t that be better? The original translation can at times convey the subtleties of the writer’s language, its diction, its rhythm and rhyme. My version is a translation of a translation. All is doubly lost. My version is nothing.”

  “I can have a few graduate students from the university transcribe all this.”

  “Why would they want to do that?”

  No one is working anymore. The blow dryers remain quiet, perhaps wanting to overhear the conversation.

  “Because serfs do what I tell them to,” Joumana says. “I’m joking,” she adds when she notices that I don’t get the joke. “They’ll do it because it’s research. Library science students, or maybe from the Arabic department. It doesn’t matter. I’ll get them.”

  “I’m not sure I’m ready,” I say.

  “How long have you been doing this?” Fadia asks.

  “Fifty years.”

  “And you haven’t thought of changing your system in fifty years?”

  I’m not sure I understand and I tell her so.

  “You’ve been doing the same thing for fifty years, the same exact thing. Did you not once consider adjusting something?”

  “I haven’t been doing the same thing. I translate a different book every year, different writers, from different parts of this world of ours. I make a point of taking on dissimilar kinds of novels. I like distinctive novels with an atypical voice. Every project has been unique. I think—”

  “But have you not considered trying a new methodology?” she persists. “Changing tactics?”

  “She’s explaining,” Marie-Thérèse tells Fadia. “Every project is different. Let her speak without interrupting.”

  “It seems the same to me,” Fadia says.

  “Let me translate what she’s saying,” Marie-Thérèse replies. “You change the color of your nails regularly, but you don’t vary how you put it on. You have a system, but you don’t use the same color.”

  “I don’t have a system,” Fadia says. “I have a manicurist.”

  “Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about,” says Marie-Thérèse.

  “Look,” says Fadia. “I don’t have the same manicure every time. It’s not just the color I change. I change the brand, I change the kind. Sometimes I have a morning manicure, sometimes an evening one. Sometimes the manicurist comes to me, sometimes I go to her. Why, every now and then, I even change manicurists.”

  “I should have a manicure, right?” I say.

  “Oh Lord, yes,” Fadia says. “I’ll try to be gentle here. Yes, you need a manicure. I can’t think of anyone who needs one more, maybe Russian wrestlers or East German swimmers. Now, please don’t tell me you don’t care about how you look and that there’s more to you than your appearance. There are two kinds of people in this world: people who want to be desired, and people who want to be desired so much that they pretend they don’t.”

  “I’m not sure that a manicure is going to make me desirable.”

  We work all morning. I run the iron in one corner of my reading room. Fadia and Marie-Thérèse blow-dry. The three of us form a triangle, or three points on a circle, within which Joumana moves. She performs triage: she organizes the piles, decides what needs resuscitation first, which page for ironing and which for hot air.

  I develop a system: press forward and backward twice, then lift the blue towel to check if the page is dry. Most times I have to go over it once more. Naturally, I don’t need to use the iron’s steam functions.

  We settle into a silent routine. Fadia talks to herself, but no one can hear her above the din of the blow dryers. Marie-Thérèse concentrates on the task before her, but Fadia treats it as some kind of game. Joumana asks her to give each page more of her attention, and she does for a minute or so. Still, the weird sisters are coordinated. Yes, it’s as if they’ve been resuscitating manuscripts all their lives. Without realizing it, I begin to fall in with their cycle. I look up after finishing each page, making sure I can move on to the next.

  I consider asking them to stop, to give up, but I can’t bring myself to. I feel guilty that they’re working so hard for my benefit; I’m imposing. I also feel uncomfortable in their presence; they’re imposing. This situation is simply not right.

  I must ask them to stop. My back hurts; at least two knots throb next to the left shoulder blade. The ironing board isn’t high enough, of course, forcing me to stoop a bit, and I’ve never stood over it for so long. I open my mouth to speak, but Fadia beats me to it. Both she and Marie-Thérèse have turned off their dryers at the same time.

  “We have to consider lunch,” she says. “Shall I make it?” Her tone implies both infinite choice and no other at the same time. She stands up and stretches.

  I stop moving the iron back and forth, lay it on its side. I’m exhausted and drained.

  “Let me check your kitchen to see what you have,” Fadia says.

  The look of panic on my face must be out of proportion, because all three women laugh.

  “She’s teasing you, my dear,” says Marie-Thérèse.

  “She can’t cook anywhere but her own kitchen,” says Joumana.

  “Definitely not your kitchen,” says Fadia. “In the fifty years you’ve lived here, I’ve never smelled anything enticing coming out of your kitchen. Not one thing. Surely a record of some sort. I figured you must eat only boiled rice. Or maybe you learned to cook from an Englishwoman or something.”

  “I’m sorry,” says Marie-Thérèse. “We probably shouldn’t be making jokes at a time like this.”

  “At a time like what?” asks Fadia. “What happened?”

  “Are you smiling?” Joumana asks me. “What’s amusing you?”

  “Nothing much,” I reply. “What Fadia said reminded me of my dead ex-husband. He used to accuse me of smelling like onions when he returned home. Almost every evening, onions, onions. He blamed that for not being able to be around me.”

  “You didn’t cook with onions, did you?” Fadia says.

  “I’ve never chopped one in my life.”

  I am alone again. My home is quiet, as I like it. My neighbors have left, taken a break for lunch. We’ll all return, Joumana insisted. After lunch, Marie-Thérèse thought. Probably after a siesta, added Fadia. I tried to excuse myself from lunch, but they would have none of it. Marie-Thérèse is going to make sure I accompany her up to Fadia’s when lunch is ready.

  We haven’t made much of a dent in the drying process. In three and a half hours, we barely finished two manuscripts, Anna Karenina and A Book of Memories—two fairly long manuscripts, true. Only some of the pages are legible all the way through. When we start again, we’ll do The Book of Disquiet. I need to save it next if it’s salvageable. It will take forever. Maybe I should take Joumana up on her offer, have a passel of students air out the pages, create a serf assembly line to move the enterprise along more quickly. Tolstoy would be upset with me for using the term serf. Or I could just throw everything out, discard the weight of years, shrug off the albatross. Choices.

  My apartment is a hellish mess, damp boxes and loose sheets of paper in the kitchen, in the living room, in the reading room. Only Joumana knows where everything is now. This is her system. How will I ever clean my home once we’re done? How will I be able to clean the wet disaster that is the maid
’s room and the maid’s bathroom? I’ll need someone to change the lightbulb. A serf?

  I’m losing my manners. I must ask Joumana whether she’s heard any more news from her daughter. Joumana has been kind, as has Marie-Thérèse; even Fadia, crazy Fadia.

  The crazy witch is right in a way. This destruction is an opportunity to break free from the rules I’ve set for translating, or from some of them, at least. Like a teenager, I too can rebel. Maybe I can translate a book written in English for a change. Miss Spark—I’ll translate Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, or, better yet, the crème de la crème of short story writers, Alice Munro. I can live in Alice’s skin for a while.

  Forget the industrialized countries; I can work with writers from the third world, Ireland! Edna O’Brien, Colm Tóibín, or Anne Enright.

  The subcontinent and its diasporas: A House for Mr. Biswas or Midnight’s Children.

  A farrago of possibilities.

  Coetzee! I would love to do Coetzee; yes, I would.

  I can translate Mrs. Dalloway. I can if I want to. I’ll spend that famous day inside Clarissa’s head as she prepares to host the party. Or work on A Room of One’s Own in a soggy apartment of my own. Maybe I should translate Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. The pain might induce a religious ecstasy.

  No, I can translate a French book. I can spend a year with my darling Emma Bovary.

  If English and French are the limits of my language, the limits of my world, then still my world is infinite. I no longer need to translate a translation. Not all has to be doubly lost. I’ve been studying the water while snugly nestled within the safety of a boat, but now I will swim in the murky waters of Flaubert’s French. I don’t have to work from a language once removed; I don’t have to translate from a distance. Aaliya, the above, the separate, can step in the mud.

  Am I experiencing an epiphany?

  Forget Emma. I’m going to translate my Marguerite. Memoirs of Hadrian, my favorite novel. Marie-Thérèse may have wanted Vronsky for a husband, but I wanted Hadrian. I wanted someone to erect monuments in my memory, build statues. I wanted someone to dedicate cities in my name.