Why did I smile at her? Did she notice the wave of my hand, or did it simply pass into oblivion? Like my words and movements that had sometimes started coming too late recently, it was as if a little opening had swallowed it up before it was completed. Suddenly, involuntarily, I burst out laughing. And in the little opening I noticed my own reflection in the image of that other unknown laughing face that had returned to my wandering consciousness just moments before.
When did that long, carefree laugh stop emerging from within me? I thought while quickly turning down the narrow pathway into which the bicycle woman had disappeared. I couldn’t find any trace of her. In the shadow of her absence, a bygone memory emerged. It involved my little sister Vera, whom I have not seen for years, whom I rarely call, and who rarely calls me from Paris. I’m not even sure what time and place this was.
Fast and fading, the years retreat and vanish in time. Though my body started to become sluggish without me noticing, every moment became a nice memory—like my smile and the wave of my hand. They remained precariously suspended in emptiness. Like people wandering through the public park without a trace. Like my face, giggling in the forgotten memory, which caused more than half of my life to flash by in an instant. Like the laugh, which escaped from me involuntarily just a moment ago, but which had died years before I left Beirut for Los Angeles—more than twenty years ago now.
* * *
I exited the gate of the public park. The cool, light evening breezes revived the damp skin on my face. I walked along the sidewalk, heading toward my little but recently renovated ground-floor apartment in an old three-story building.
The glow of lampposts hung motionless over the street and sidewalk. The men and women passing by, myself included, were few and distant from one another. We were a mysterious being, strange and unknown, in a transient present which perhaps makes it forget itself and who it is. Perhaps the transient present extracts it from itself or preys on it, so it separates from its life. I enjoy this fleeting presence of humans, similar to how I enjoy the frozen, suspended memories that float through my vagrant vision when I pause in front of my living room window each morning. It’s an external scene that the windowpane keeps me separated from—faraway, distant, invisible, present only in my seclusion, no one can see me but myself. Every morning, I stand behind that pane of glass, separating myself from the things in that static, outside world that makes my vision wander. I imagine myself a person in an Edward Hopper painting that I’ve inhabited and has inhabited me, by virtue of how much I’ve stared at it. I begin to think the painting depicts and narrates moments from my life.
In my Beiruti adolescence, I isolated myself from my parents and other people. I started seeking aesthetic inspiration from Edward Hopper paintings I discovered in a catalogue of his works among the books at our house in Sanayeh. Like the women in his drawings, I would sit on the chair or the bed, frozen all alone in time and place. The chair, the bed, and other things in my room were haunted by the shadows of inanimate objects, lit in the catalog’s pictures by an unknown source. They enticed me. It was the power of the deep pain in the women’s eyes staring out into that bleak, illuminated void, emanating from the emptiness that the paintings depicted.
Throughout my entire life in Beirut, nothing ever suggested that people in the city desired their time, bodies, things, and places—even their intimate ones—to be devoid of the presence of the noisy outside world and all its reverberations. Rarely did I come across someone accustomed to living in voluntary isolation—of the self, body, things—internally, in dark solitude. Whenever I recalled the Beirut which I left, it seemed to me that people lived, and I lived like that too, under the gaze of others—whether those people were actually present or not—haunted by other people’s words, looks, and echoes. I remember myself among them merely as a black bee buzzing inside a hive, as I would write on the first page of my diary days after arriving in Los Angeles.
* * *
Here I am now, in the living room of my small house, lighting a candle for my sixtieth birthday. One candle, one glass of champagne on the side table, and me in my exercise clothes, wondering what to do, where to sit in the weak light shining from the corner. It is as if I’m reliving exactly the same birthday for the second or third time: a candle, a glass of champagne . . . nothing. No one else but me, taking a long rest on the rocking chair, absorbed in my daydreams.
The light of the lamppost, which pours out brilliantly on the asphalt outside, keeps me company. It spills through my window, dim and evanescent on the furniture whose edges are embroidered by the nighttime shadows. For a long time I haven’t been able to bear beauty and its daytime colors, so I notice the darkness of the shadows in my house which don’t leave a trace, or a memory, for anyone but me. Even that memory of the public park has repeated itself since I started taking my evening strolls there years ago: Passersby exchange greetings and kisses. I’m used to their faces and they’re used to mine, leaving no memories or traces. Sometimes one of their faces appears to me like an image suspended in spacious, silent emptiness. It’s as if time has simply been standing still or frozen since I entered the park that first time.
On the rocking chair, I close my eyes, swinging back and forth until I lose the sense of direction, time, and place. With the rhythm of the chair’s two wooden rockers on the fur of the soft carpet beneath me, I swing and fly in the nighttime space of a city with few lights. I hear the echoes of my earlier, giggling laughter, which I imagined arose from my mouth and all of my body like crystal balls of air and light, illuminating the nightlife and the faces of the people I used to sit with in Beirut’s cafés. Was my face also illuminated during these sessions and evenings at home before the long nights of the wars in Lebanon?
Suddenly I remember the first man in Los Angeles whose bed I spent the night in. I forgot his name many years ago, but the years haven’t erased the memory of the morning in his kitchen where we drank instant coffee with milk. The silence was warm and thick in the big kitchen, resembling the sensation of sleep. My body relaxed in a dark calm. I was stretched out naked on the sofa, wrapped in a white sheet pulled back to partly expose my breasts and thighs, with luxurious and artificial negligence, like women in advertisements. My legs were resting on the chair close to the table on which the man whose name I’ve forgotten was sitting, naked except for his baggy, multicolored underpants.
I don’t know if my feelings of disconnect from the world truly date back to our morning session in the kitchen, or if they were from the long gap in time separating me from that moment we lived together. But here I am now on a rocking chair soaring above the scarce city lights on my sixtieth birthday. From the outside, our silent scene recurs in my mind; I hear the echoes of the man’s voice asking me if the day before had left strange feelings in me that perhaps the passing of days made even stronger and more present in my body.
That was the first time in my life a man had asked me such a question. It revealed his sensual desire for me, converting it into an old, fleeting memory. His question allowed me a sensual answer about a blurry, abstract thought which used to recur in my inner consciousness and which I couldn’t put words to: chance encounters lead us, we meet and we part with trivial memories, so that life is and remains trivial, just like a passing memory of chance encounters.
The man smoked greedily and ecstatically in those moments. It was as if the tobacco which filled his lungs and was exhaled through his mouth granted his feelings and words a redoubled strength, making our dark morning meetings in the kitchen a lust-filled ritual emanating from our strange bodies that had lain together the night before. I kept silently soaring in the eyes of this stranger. One time he got up from the table and approached me. I hadn’t anticipated that he would pour the milky coffee ever so slowly over my naked shoulders and lick it from my breasts with his orange tongue.
Sitting and snuggling, we came together on the sofa when I asked him in a faint lust-filled voice about his female colleague, the journalist who�
��d interviewed me while he was photographing me the previous evening at the Armenian Club, where my first exhibition of paintings in Los Angeles was opening. He whispered in my ear that they were siblings of Armenian descent and my whole body started trembling, reaching an orgasm for the first time in more than a year, since I had emigrated from Beirut. My spasms began transmitting like a storm in all my senses, every part of my body, followed by waning flashes of lightning that illuminated the darkened screen of my vision.
* * *
I postponed my shower for the second time. I turned on the computer and wrote: How long has it been since I’ve heard a voice, my own or someone else’s, in this house of mine? It’s as if I haven’t talked to anyone or heard anyone talking to me except outside for a long time.
An apparition of the Virgin emerged in my imagination; it stopped me from writing and made me laugh. The crown of thorns of Golgotha on the Messiah’s head, then on my mother’s head, and a bloody tear streaming down her pale, deathly white cheek. My father slowly ripping the Virgin’s dress off her chest, while she smiled at him, thrusting her tongue out and moving it between her lips, exactly the way I’d sketched her in my room a few days before my trip to Rome on a scholarship to study drawing. While I was outlining her angelic face, I kept hearing echoes of my mother’s words—that she would lose me, that I would lose myself, that I would disappear, all alone in Rome, and never be heard from again. That I would never come back. Her words made me laugh. An impudent smile hung on the face of the Virgin and I drew her tongue licking her lips.
The evening of my trip, I hung my picture of the Virgin on the living room wall. My mother was extremely anxious, but her sadness and trepidation were concealed behind a mask of happiness put on to greet well-wishers who flocked to our house. We sat together in the living room, with our entire family. I purposely sat under the picture of the Virgin that I’d drawn, and during certain moments that evening I tried out the expressions of the Virgin on my own face. That evening I met our Armenian neighbors and others, our relatives who I hardly knew, some of whom I’d never even met before. I stood at my mother’s side to receive and greet them, but from time to time that evening I had to rush to my room, so that I could unleash the laughter that took me by surprise and get control over it in order to answer the old ladies’ questions about what I would be doing in Italy: how would I live there all alone? They would look at my mother while directing these kinds of questions at me. But it was my grandmother who occasionally took charge of answering. One of the times when I left the living room I heard her say, “She will draw, she will study drawing, she will become a great artist,” and when I turned around I saw her pointing at the picture of the Virgin hanging on the wall.
At that point, my father rushed over to me when he noticed I was bursting into a fit of uncontrollable laughter. He took my hand and led me to my room, where I thought he would lock the door and start scolding me. But he surprised me by letting out a chortle that I’d never heard before. In turn I unleashed my own resounding laugh. He hugged me and held me to his chest, whispering in my ear in his pitiful French that I could laugh as I wished in the streets of Rome and to never let a man own me or rob me of my desire to laugh.
After many years, on one dark, dreary Beirut evening near the beginning of the wars in Lebanon, I managed to elicit one of those rare giggles from my father that I so often wondered when, where, and with whom he allowed to escape. Why did he never do this with us at home? I will never forget that moment when he was sitting alone on the balcony on one of those miserable Beirut evenings. Each one of us was alone in our own room, after we learned that the fire raging for days in the port had burned down his nearby factory and its imported goods. He’d put a glass of whiskey on the table in front of him on the balcony and started drinking, drinking and smoking without stopping, staring at the stray clouds of smoke rising up from the warehouses of the distant port.
I was worried, after he’d been sitting like that for nearly two hours during which I’d left my room a few times to check on him, and he didn’t even notice me standing barefoot in the wide-open inner door leading from the balcony to the living room. Finally, I moved quickly from the door and leaned against him on the wrought-iron railing of the balcony. After a moment of shared silence, I told him that I would never let anyone or anything own me or rob me of my laughter—not in Italy and not in Beirut. I saw him peer at me through faint darkness, before letting out that rare laugh whose darkly murderous bitterness I didn’t recognize until days later, when a heart attack overtook him on the morning of a sunny winter day on that very same balcony.
* * *
So here I am lying down in bed, in my bedroom in Los Angeles. Memories of myself in the room of a Kurdish poet I’d met in Beirut thirty years ago blur together. I can imagine him now in a room in Sweden. In another room, perhaps in a sanatorium for mentally ill people, in some country I don’t know, I imagine the Iraqi painter who left the scar on my forehead. Through my Kurdish poet’s thoughts about me, I saw my youthful face and his older gaze during our many rendezvous in Beirut. How different my face is now from how it was when I was young. If my life had led me down another path, to another destiny, would it have been possible for me to be different from how I am now?
No, I am not nostalgic for anything. I still steer clear of tender feelings, just as I used to do in Beirut whenever their echoes would reach me, like from the stories told by friends during the war. They would recount what went down with them—the life of their country and its people before the war. At that time I didn’t feel that I had a past that I was cut off or uprooted from, or that I would long for. It was as if the war didn’t besiege me, in the way they used to say that it had besieged them. I lived time and moments spirally, like now—with nothing behind me, without a trace, a lineage, or roots binding me to places and times that my friends in Beirut felt they were disconnected from, regretting the demise of those things and proclaiming their nostalgia in their stories.
In coffeehouse sessions on Hamra Street and evening gatherings at home, they used to talk about different villages, towns, regions, and neighborhoods. But it was strange to me: I didn’t understand their distinctions except for the names. At the many party meetings I attended of what was called the Artists’ and Intellectuals’ Cell of the Lebanese Communist Party, I didn’t understand anything at all. Nothing they said about the reasons for the war—its parties, battles, and regions—spoke to me. None of this altered my view of the war and its fighters. The announcements by the person in charge of the Party cell, while playing with the hairs of his long beard, would incite my sarcastic commentary. If I understood some of its ideas and hollow rhetoric, I would conceal my sardonic laughter, which I used to let out raucously whenever I heard a speaker unleashing his tirades at massive partisan rallies in Beirut. If rallies like this were paying tribute to the Party’s martyrs, I would conceal my giggles amidst the screams of party members crowded around with their slogans and applause for the speakers, before turning to my journalist girlfriend without whom I never attended a rally, and saying to her, “Look, look at him on the podium—he’s about to blow someone up or kill someone. Is he carrying a gun? Look, come on, let’s get out of here.” My friend would manage a shy, scared smile and her reluctance to applaud like everyone else made me envious.
My cynicism of the idea of the martyrs grew after the armed groups started showing off their dead—counting them, glorifying them, and competing for greater numbers. When the expression “the Party’s martyrs” became popular and spread throughout the Communists’ daily speeches, I told my comrade friend that this had become a registered trademark, which we’ve all shared in creating and promoting. I, for example, designed recruitment posters in the communal studio allocated by the party leadership to amateur artists who were party members, and their friends. The studio was in a working-class Beirut neighborhood mostly filled with Druze and Christians. The other Communist artists and I were the ones who set up the studio, and we w
orked for months there drawing and designing posters of martyrs and training the beginners. But it quickly turned into a headquarters for the fighters, a refuge to hold meetings, and somewhere to sleep after the intensification of battles after the war spread throughout the whole city.
When I entered the studio for the last time on the morning of an intensely hot summer day, all of my senses were invaded by a smell that froze my body in its place. I felt that it had crashed into a gelatinous, organic material, with my eyes as wide open as they could be, so I closed them and stopped breathing. In vain I took steps to repel this odor that I could smell emanating from inside my skin, so I ran outside. I couldn’t forget that smell from the main room of the studio that morning. Along with the weapons, rounds of ammunition, and piles of military clothes and shoes strewn around, bodies of fighters—naked except for underpants—covered in regretful sleep, were piled up on filthy mattresses made of naked sponge foam.
Whenever I remember a scene, incident, or person from those Beiruti days, my ears are provoked by echoes of a song about the mothers of martyrs, whose words I’ve forgotten. I’ve totally erased them from my memory. It’s a song inhabited by time, place, and language, like space or a floating rhythm that the whole world swims in. The closed, claustrophobic world of everyone I knew and who knew me in Beirut those days at the beginning of the war. But how can forgotten words remain a stronger and deeper presence in my memory than things and faces and scenes? It’s as if words, if they are forgotten and erased, leave a void behind them inhabited by a mysterious physical force that can’t stop memories and their moments. A poet who was a member of the Party’s intellectual cell wrote the words to that song. He used to be in love with me. Perhaps that’s because I was the only woman in the cell. All of them, one after the other, tried to get together with me. The singer of the song offered his deep love to the martyrs, with all the passion of his spoiled, childlike voice. Once he offered to take me home in his car after we’d left a meeting at the cell leader’s house. On the way he started flirting with me and invited me to dinner at a restaurant on Hamra Street. I asked him, giggling, “You are dedicated full-time to loving the martyrs, why do you love me? How can you?!” I had an aversion to his sharp, high-pitched voice, as if he were a teenage schoolgirl softening her tone when addressing a teacher who confused her in class.
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