I come back and find Nahil unchanged, as if she hasn’t grown older. A mild case of Parkinson’s, which comes and goes, restricts her movements. When it comes on, her whole body shakes and she can’t be still. Her head jerks awkwardly to the left and right, her tongue gets thick but she insists on talking. She hasn’t changed, though she’s started covering her head with a long, white mandil. In my memory, she’s a woman who never covered her head, her thick, wavy hair that’s a color between gray and black. She would go out without her head covered even in the winter, leaving her white mandil draped over her shoulders. She went out like that, in front of people, without a care and then came back all wet, soaking from head to toe. Her face would glow a little then return to normal, though deep in her womb a little climax had burst forth, then just as quickly dried up and disappeared. She wasn’t afraid of anyone and in fact felt she was stronger than everyone else. Perhaps these feelings were simply the result of what people used to say about her. She could be stronger than everyone else because they knew about her powerful curses. “God save us from Nahil’s curses!” is what people said. They’d say this and repeat the famous tale about the army officer her curses killed.
This was in 1958, when a soldier entered the house by force to arrest my father and interrogate him about a shooting in Hadath. The soldier pushed my father roughly to get him into the jeep. My grandmother Nahil went to talk to the officer who’d remained sitting in the jeep, urging him to release my father, begging him to let him stay with his family because he was an only son, with no brothers, and because his wife, that is to say my mother Nadia, was that very day about to give birth to her second child, my brother Baha’. But the officer wouldn’t listen to Nahil and she started assailing him with curses, a group of people gathering around her: “May curses befall you and go with you to your grave… May they go with you to your grave…” She repeated this over and over, holding her head in her hands as if she were afraid it would fall off. My father wasn’t detained long, but he did receive many blows to the head there. And my brother was born while my father was in prison. The men of the family always say that on the day my father was released, the soldier entered the officer’s room to bring him his usual cup of coffee and found him dead in his bed.
Nahil laughs when she hears these accounts of her power to affect the destinies of men. One day, before my brother Baha’ was killed, she told me, “There’s no magic, none at all, don’t believe it, it’s all lies. It’s just that there hasn’t been any goodness in this house for a long time, even before the war started.”
This is what she told me, adding that since she moved to Beirut and stopped visiting al-Sayyid Abdullah and the Prophet Job’s holy tomb in the mountains, a series of crises have befallen not only this house but also its family’s health, finances and offspring. My grandmother then criticized my mother, saying that my mother had taught us nothing about religion, that she never opened the Hikmeh even once, though it’s constantly been in her sight. Nadia never answered these accusations. It’s as though she didn’t care, as though neither Nahil nor anyone else could touch on what actually preoccupied her. Nahil never once said that it was because of how Hamza lived his life that the family left religion; she has never made such an accusation. I’ve always believed, however, that Hamza was extremely far from any kind of belief in the presence of the sacred. From the stories we’ve heard about him, it seems to me he was always ready to defile anything sacred to fulfill his own ambitions. Hamza lived his life convinced that life on earth was both paradise and hell, that people’s lives begin and end here—that the things we don’t live don’t exist. He used to say that, on the whole, people are a bunch of errors and mistakes. This view of life and the world is his legacy to his son Salama… and then it was our turn, Baha’’s and mine. Hamza didn’t realize that we no longer believe in the idea of prophets or holy men because of this inheritance, his way of thinking.
My grandmother has lived her whole life making a place for the sacred in our house, but it has vanished, its place taken by an existential anxiety that sleeps in our beds and shares our dreams. Thinking about this always takes me back to my mother Nadia’s silence. Sometimes my imagination starts working and I say that Nadia is silent not because of my brother’s death but because she can’t be a prophet like a man can. Her words will never be carved into the walls of the house so all our visitors can read them. Her silence is simply a protest against this. One evening, in our secret apartment near the Arab university, I found myself asking Georges why I couldn’t be a prophet, but a man could. He didn’t answer and instead jokingly whispered things like, “Why aren’t your questions ever like other women’s questions?” “How did my luck bring me a woman like you?” he asked theatrically, lifting his hands up as though imploring a third party there in the room with us… that third person being God! He approached me, bent over and kissed my lips, “You’re my very own prophet!” he said and sprang onto the bed. I didn’t feel his words or kisses because at that moment my head was filled with the question of prophethood!
Throughout my childhood and adolescence, Nadia’s silence preoccupied me; I couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t stand up to Nahil and defend herself. Why does she never say anything but the words necessary to run our household affairs, words to do with food, health and school? I never know if she’s happy or joyful, sad or in pain. She never once talks about what she’s feeling. Only about things outside of her body and soul. Things she has no relationship to. To me, Nadia’s like a visitor to earth— she doesn’t want to change anything, inherit anything or leave anything behind; she doesn’t want to take or to give. When I think about her now, the only impression I have is the one she gave us: that she had no power or strength and that we could take advantage of her—in the way that all children my age and my brother’s age take advantage— we could do what we wanted and we could tell her anything we wanted. Perhaps my mother’s silence is derived from her belief that perfection is found only in religious books; it has no relationship to real life. In this way, she isn’t so different than my grandfather and his opinions of the world we live in. She is different from him, though, because she sees and knows and doesn’t do anything. I have never once seen Nadia read the Hikmeh. I’ve seen her read newspapers, novels, magazines and any kind of stories that fall into her hands. Deep inside of herself she believes that religion is love. That’s what she gives us, unconditional love, nothing else.
I return to Mombasa from South Africa. My Austrian neighbor Eva accompanies me with new environmental books about droughts and deforestation that she’s collected from the tables of the conference she attended. She also bears gifts for her husband. She’s returning with her two children, who joined her in her free time in the hotel room, the pool and in a rental car on excursions to waterfalls and shopping. I return with a small half-empty suitcase and a puppy that was a gift from Joe. When I’m with Eva, I long for the feeling of being a mother. I long to feel as I would have if I’d kept my baby and not had an abortion, out of fear of people in Beirut and the scandal. Ever since then I’ve wanted to recover and I haven’t been able to.
The migraine follows me like it’s my shadow. I hurry to my bed, which I’ve truly missed. Chris comes over to me, trying to flirt with me. He wraps his arms around me and draws me to him while trying to pull off my nightgown. My body resists, it wraps around itself like someone closing a window they’d left unlocked. I cover my body completely and tell him that my migraine hasn’t relented for even one minute. I tell him this because I know it’s the only way to keep him off of me. I have avoided him since I learned from my doctor that I can’t conceive. He asks me, flirtatiously, if I met anyone I was attracted to there; in the voice of someone who’s given up, he adds that he wouldn’t have a problem with it. I don’t answer but when hovering between sleep and waking I think that my loneliness when I’m with him has begun to tire him—my loneliness that he prefers to call fidelity, refusing to pursue short-lived affairs when I’m away. The h
eaviness of our mute relationship exhausts him, since, in his heart of hearts, he believes that life should not be so serious. But he prefers to play his role— the role of husband. In that moment, I think that I’m there beside him by accident, hanging on only because of an arbitrary equation: I don’t love him enough to forget that I was left hanging, always waiting to leave, and I don’t hate him enough to leave.
This means it is over, the relationship is over!
“This means the relationship’s over…” Eva says when I tell her how I feel, as though she’s discovered something important.
But who said anything about a lack of love or the end of the relationship? I ask her, thinking that I’m passing through something normal, like the movement of water in the ocean near my house in Mombasa, the ebb and flow of the tide. What I’m living isn’t lack of love or the relationship’s end. No… no, not at all. It’s just a perpetual, repeated, never-ending tidying up of my emotional house.
In the beginning of my marriage to Chris, I thought that our lack of understanding was born of our two different languages, and that clarity and honesty would fix this. But I’ve discovered that my style only widens the gulf between us; my clarity ends any ambiguity about whether we might build something together and ensures that the problem isn’t misunderstanding, but an estrangement that will only increase with time and take us down a path from which there is no return.
“Lost in translation!”
He always throws this cliché in my face, naively trying to lay the blame on our different languages. He’ll say it over and over, trying to find common points between us, but this expression feels like an insult to me. Whenever he says it I feel like he’s swearing at me. The problem isn’t the difference in language but a lack of language. This misunderstanding used to exhaust me but in time I surrendered to it. “Surrender” isn’t the right word. Indeed, I could almost say that misunderstanding has become a source of amusement for me, so much so that I have begun to use intentionally few words. It took a long time for me to discover the pleasure of vagueness. This discovery was accompanied by another discovery: that I need and miss the pleasure of a man who makes me laugh. When I realized this, I started laughing spontaneously, leaving Chris to guess at the reason for my laughter. I knew this would irritate him and eventually he’d give up. In the end he has gotten used to it.
He has begun attributing my behavior to our different experiences of married life. His first marriage to a British woman and second to an Iranian woman seem to make him believe that our misunderstandings result from my lack of experience, my failure to understand marriage and relationships between couples. It’s hard to know what his marriage to a third woman who is a different age and has different experiences and a different culture than his previous two wives means to him. But I know that he doesn’t miss me when I’m traveling. And I miss so many things and live with so much loss that this fact just becomes a part of my life. I know, though, that he’ll always write me many letters. Letters that will tell me about his day and then always linger over memories we share… Like how we met for the first time in the airport, when the Australian police called him to search my father—the shrapnel lodged in my father’s head made the electronic security checkpoint beep every time my father passed through it. Chris will write to me about the second time we met, in his clinic, and how he used to visit us to follow up on my father’s health after we moved out of my uncle’s house to our own place in Adelaide.
The first time we met, he entered the room next to the police office in the Australian airport and immediately walked up to my father and me, saying hello and apologizing for being late because of an emergency at the hospital. I no longer remember what he first said to my father when he learned that we’d arrived recently from Lebanon, but he told us that he too was born there and he knew the village of Shemlan, but that he hadn’t visited since he left Lebanon in 1958. He remembered people from Shemlan whom my father also knew.
My father was always relaxed and less worried when Chris visited. Chris would go over to my father and pat his shoulder like an affectionate father. A relationship sprang up between them, and quickly it seemed as though they’d been friends for a long time. My father never seemed as sick when Chris was there telling him stories that happened in Lebanon a long time ago, before I was born. Chris would visit frequently to check on his health and play backgammon with him, a game which Salama had practically abandoned after my brother Baha’’s death. I imagined that having Chris with us might heal the wounds of our family, stricken with death and loss. This was how a relationship developed between us, between Chris and me. I didn’t want it to be anything more than a friendship; with time it transformed into a comforting habit, with no passion or desire. I remember the first meeting of our bodies—he asked me if he could take off his clothes. I found this strange and amusing. We got married four years after I arrived in Adelaide, after I’d lost any hope of seeing Georges ever again. My marriage to Chris is like a compensation for the care and concern that he gives my father, whose madness it’s become difficult for me to bear on my own. And I want to have a child to fill the place of the baby I’d lost in Beirut—the fetus I had to abort to avoid the scandal.
My marriage emerged less out of love than conviction. Eva says it’s the kind of marriage that “clears up unresolved life issues,” like companies managing the clearance of imported cargo shipments. Eva also considers my marriage to be linked to the past more than the future. I tell her that perhaps she’s right. What I feel for Chris isn’t love, being with him instead gives me more of a fabricated feeling of serenity. I’ve discovered that this serenity does not come from Chris himself—his personality or characteristics—but from the terrible circumstances all around me. These circumstances have changed the course of my life and transformed me from a woman who dreamed about the future to a woman who simply tries to repair a present that’s distorted by the past.
The two of us, Chris and I, exist in different worlds. When I tell Eva this, I add that I’d reckoned that after our marriage I’d sleep better and my fears would leave me. But instead I’m still anxious—when I’m near him, when he isn’t around, when he’s away. Our lack of understanding, my loneliness, how far I am from my friends in Beirut— all of this makes me anxious. Eva is making bread with candied fruit in it and stops, turning off the noisy electric mixer so she can tell me that I’m too philosophical. With the back of her damp, dough-covered hand, she pushes strands of blonde hair from her forehead. She adds that I’m surely mad. This is her response to what I’ve said about how I can’t understand why Chris loves me and how strange it is that I can never understand his way of loving me. I tell her whenever I think about Chris I feel as if I’m an exotic fruit; he desires it when he finds it within his reach, but can forget it just as quickly when it isn’t there. I always have to be this exotic fruit, despite myself. I have to be that Oriental woman, coming from the other side of the sea, who is nothing like the women in his family. I discovered this game quickly, though, and I withdrew. I withdrew and said nothing to him. Perhaps what surprises him is that I’m not at all like the women of 1,001 Nights. I don’t tell him tales so that he can sleep and I can save myself. I rely on silence to rescue me. Perhaps this is what spoils the tacit agreement we’ve had in place since we married. I think that when I travel to Beirut he’ll write me many letters, but I won’t write back. If I have to choose between exchanging letters and talking to Chris on the phone—if conversation is unavoidable—I’ll choose the phone, if only because that can be finished quickly and no traces of it remain. It’s as if my life with him is nothing but a hole in the sand. Eva collects all the kitchenware that she’s used to make the cake, puts it into the dishwasher, and says, “You’re mad! Everything you’re saying is just rhetoric… completely disconnected from real life.”
Throughout all our years together in Kenya, Chris persists in repeating that he loves me and could never live with another woman. Despite this, he keeps protesting against ever
ything I do or say, using my changeable moods as justification. Perhaps he’s right. I often feel that I can’t decide my position on things; I’m not sure how to see the world. How do you describe twilight, for example? Is it when darkness begins or is it what remains of the light of day? Or is it both at once? At times I’ve understood the differences between us as between two contrasting personalities—the first builds a sense of stability by believing that what he was told and taught is absolutely, indisputably true. He believes that what he’s learned is enough. The second person, on the other hand, has lost all hope of stability, to the point that existence itself is a source of doubt and questioning. I’m this second person.
My inability to plan summer vacations enrages him. He’ll ask me to decide how and when we’ll travel to Australia to see his children in Sydney and to see my parents in Adelaide. Or he’ll ask me to plan a trip to another country. And I’ll always answer, “We’ll figure it out tomorrow.” He thinks my answers mean I don’t care, but I’m never entirely certain if tomorrow will come. I tell him that life in Lebanon never allowed me to plan more than a month in advance, how does he expect me to decide how we’ll spend the summer holidays when it’s still February? I tell him that planning is a whole culture that I’m not used to and he has to understand this. I tell him that my brother Baha’ was getting ready for a relaxing trip to Istanbul, his ticket in his pocket, when he was killed. In my excuses he’ll find another reason to prolong the conversation. My pleas just provoke him and he doesn’t understand them—like all people who’ve never lived through war. He’ll tell me that I’m far away from Lebanon now… now it’s time to forget, to get used to my life with him in Australia or Africa. Sometimes he’ll explain away my bad moods by saying that they come from the dark clothes I wore after Baha’’s death. But this too is a way of life that’s hard to change—I no longer know how to buy brightly colored clothes. Why do you wear this dark dress? You look miserable in it. Why don’t you eat cold meat and sausage with me for breakfast? Is there something troubling you? Did Olga say something on the phone that upset you? Did you visit your doctor today? Which one— the psychologist or the gynecologist? How’s your Arabic teaching? Your English teaching? He’ll repeat these questions over and over. When my answers are improvised and short and don’t add or change anything, he leaves.
Other Lives Page 5