Other Lives

by Iman Humaydan

  I leave the yoga class and walk from Hamra Street to Dr. Adam’s clinic, the doctor who performed my abortion in the fall of 1979. His clinic is closed. I ask about him and they tell me that he was killed during the last years of the war.

  I lost my child long ago. I was twenty-one and Georges was about the same age, or rather he was five years older but I never used to feel our age difference. I discovered my body with him and, although he had some experience, he discovered his masculinity with me. We discovered our bodies and our desires completely, once… twice … three times.

  A year into our relationship, I found out I was pregnant and that I had to get rid of the pregnancy. He took me to a doctor, who he said was a relative of his. A well-known doctor who had a big private clinic in Ras Beirut. The doctor was handsome, though to me his good looks seemed too perfect and somehow suspicious. Two days later, I returned to the clinic alone and stayed there for a day and a night. I left in the morning, alone, since Georges didn’t come to pick me up.

  I left alone, while the cells of my baby, who never became a fact, stayed in a big bin in the operating room. I didn’t ask anything: I never saw the doctor again. But from the moment I left, I decided to keep my distance from the man who had shared the discovery of my body, who shared my pleasure. He didn’t come to the clinic with me and didn’t come to pick me up when I left. At that moment, it was like I was the only one who was guilty. He was simply not there. He didn’t lie down on the cold bed, his arm wasn’t pricked by the needle, and the old spinster nurse didn’t look at him with cold, glassy eyes and ask him, contemptuously and with open hatred, if his family knew about this. This wasn’t his experience; it’s my experience alone. He didn’t share it with me at all, ever. I decided to distance myself from him, but this isn’t exactly what happened. I could only keep him out of my life for a short period. Then I went back to waiting for him and loving him.

  Now that I have returned from Mombasa, I want to visit the doctor. I want to complain to him about my inability to conceive. Perhaps I choose him specifically because I need to hear that I’m fine, that I can conceive, that this is a superficial, passing problem. Who better to tell me this than the person who took the embryo out of my tender, living uterus and threw it away? But he’s no longer here. He was murdered.

  I want to visit the places imprinted on my imagination and experience flashes of memories. I’ve left a man behind me in Mombasa and returned to Beirut. I want to re-tell my story with Georges, not to make it live anew but to feel it flash through my body. But his story is lost, just as he is. Georges didn’t follow me and I could never mourn openly. I could never mourn and so couldn’t heal. How could I mourn him when he wasn’t my husband or brother or father or at least fiancé? He was the father of a baby who was never born. He was just my lover. When a lover dies we bury our sadness with him and can never show it in public.

  I have left a man in Kenya and I want to reclaim my story from him, but stories can’t be reclaimed. I have to discover the rest of my story with Georges, discover his story and why he disappeared. Which story do I begin with, when they’re all my stories? I return for all this, but I don’t know that every return is a disappearance, because the past never returns. A return is only another sign of absence.

  But what do I have to do to excavate my life, like a gravedigger who isn’t yet convinced that the dead won’t return?

  I also came to take possession of the keys to my house, the one that my father inherited from his father, the keys to a house that has no gates. The house in Zuqaq al-Blat has five entrances, whose gates my grandfather painted different colors: green, yellow, brown and blue. All of them open onto a courtyard that from the entrance of the house appears walled in, though it’s only a little bigger than a crescent. We inherited the house from my grandfather Hamza. My old grandfather, whom I only remember from a picture that shows him as tall, with a cane and tarboush. I was very young when he passed away. From Nahil’s stories, I’ve invented a roaring voice for him and I’ve imagined us hiding from him at the end of the hallway when he came home. I’ve imagined the sound of the keys to the house ringing in my ears.

  Nahil says that no one but Hamza could carry the keys; they were attached to his wide cloth belt, which changed into a leather belt a few years before he died. Salama never dared ask his father for the keys. After Hamza died, Salama inherited the house and its five keys. The first thing he did was to open up all the gates, asking Nadia to leave them open for the three days people came to the house to offer their condolences, to shake hands and console the family with a few words, then leave.

  Salama went mad after our house was bombed. A small piece of shrapnel the size of a lentil, as the doctor describes it, drove him mad. It entered his brain and remains lodged there. We were all saved but Baha’, who was on the balcony at the time, and never came back. I try to recall that night, the voices and fighting and the decisive announcement that we should leave the house and go down to the ground floor. But then my mother decided that we should stay where we are. I don’t know why all of a sudden she decided that we’d stay home that night. Oh, if only my mother had known that my father would go mad and my brother would be killed.

  The people who occupied the house after we left for the mountains used only one door. The other four stayed locked. Those strong iron locks, which neither bombs nor bullets could destroy, rusted. The residents made an opening in the wall and used that as the main entrance because it protected them from the bombs that came both from East Beirut and the city center.

  I wonder why houses aren’t for temporary use, like lives are. When I was a child my grandmother used to tell me how my grandfather brought many large door lintels to the house, each decorated with words like talismans. He brought men to carve sentences on the columns, which rested above the doors horizontally, sentences that I couldn’t understand back then.

  He also built a big room and put a giant stone fireplace in one of its corners. Nahil says that once when I was a little girl and Hamza was sitting with some guests, proudly reading them the words that he’d had carved on the house’s columns and walls, I went up to him to ask, “Why go to all this effort, jiddo? You’ll die soon and the house will be all alone. Why didn’t you build a house that’s your same age and will die when you do?”

  Nahil says that my grandfather Hamza was perplexed; he didn’t respond but called her over to tell her what I’d said. Perhaps Hamza couldn’t believe that I’d asked such a question. He constantly proclaimed that life required hard work and continual effort; to think otherwise would not to be tolerated. He inherited this work ethic from his mother, who attended an Anglican primary school in Damascus.

  Salama was also raised like this, although he was a Druze, which at the end of the day isn’t so different from Protestantism in terms of its work ethic. But he didn’t replicate his father’s passion for hard work. Indeed, his whole life, Hamza refused to support his projects and criticized him constantly to Nahil, “Your son, what use is he? He doesn’t carry his own weight. He doesn’t do anything.” Nahil intervened to defend her son, saying that he did work and struggled hard in his work. Hamza would shake his head, rejecting Nahil’s claims, further alleging that nothing useful could ever come of Salama’s work and repeating angrily, “He’s a baker whose bread won’t rise— no matter what he does, his bread won’t rise.”

  We build houses meant to last for centuries but we live in them for only a few years. We make things to last, perhaps only to forget our own impending death. Hamza never wanted to die. As Nahil used to say, he kept fighting right to the last moment of his life. He built and decorated the house to fight against death. Most people do the same, of course. Had Hamza been rich, perhaps he would have decorated his house in gold instead of stone, so that then his certain death would be more disturbing and resonate more loudly.

  Nour takes me to the mountain house where Olga and Nahil live. I want him to spend the night, but he makes his excuses. He says that he’s traveling
the next morning to Amman and then, from there, to Baghdad. In the early evening I stretch out on the sofa in the sitting room and when I get up I realize that Olga’s gone to sleep early. I’ve awoken from a strange dream. The next morning, I tell Olga about this dream. I dreamed of Nour, the man I met after I left Kenya, about Chris, my husband who waits for me in Mombasa, and about the late Georges, whom I haven’t seen in more than sixteen years. I dream about these three while asleep in the sitting room. In the dream Georges put wood on the fire and told the other two the story of his life. I could see myself lying on the big sofa, listening, yawning, with a pleasant warm feeling—that these three men of mine were all friends and that I could love them all, each in his own way. I was no longer suffering because of the different experiences of love, the meaning and content of which varied with each man. In the dream I was warm and content; my whole life lay ahead of me, without interruption, like a wide-open plain that hides no secrets.

  Leaning her head toward me with the warmth and collusion of a lover, Olga asks me about Nour. I tell her that he’s just a friend.

  “What? You’re going to stay strong this time? Or will you get all romantic and stupid like you always do?” Olga says, “My darling, a woman has to be a whore to live with a man.” I don’t answer, but struggle to recall some of Olga’s failed romantic adventures, which I’d witnessed as a teenager. I realize that Olga isn’t speaking to me but to herself. She’s speaking to the young woman she once was and who couldn’t choose the right man for her life. It’s as if she’s finally discovered what she should have done in the past and wants another chance. But the past is the past; we don’t get to correct our mistakes. Olga’s words come too late, like a woman who discovers birth control only after she’s already turned fifty.

  I believe that Olga is a desirable woman, and not only because I first learned love with Olga when I was just a teenager. But I see her life as an ongoing loss of faith in love. It took a long time for Olga to lose her faith that love could cause miracles.

  I haven’t seen Nour for a week. He’s still in Amman. Sometimes I contemplate his perpetual travel and his ever-present worry. He uses his time to research, collect stories and transcribe old newspapers that he’s found in the AUB library. He wants to know everything: the history of his family and their properties, which he believes are still there and still rightfully belong to his grandmother, his mother’s mother.

  Today is the twelfth of January, 1996. I’ve been here for five months. It was this exact same day sixteen years ago that we left Lebanon. Our voyage that day wasn’t easy. We had to drive to Damascus and fly from there to London and then onto Australia. It was snowing and just before we reached Dhour al-Baidar, we had to wait for a long time until we could pass through because of snowstorms. The long journey was hard for Salama and for Nadia, who decided after Baha’’s death to resign from life—to resign from all responsibility and even from speaking. She no longer cares about Salama, neither his madness nor his perpetual anxiety.

  She would look at him and then turn toward me, as though to say, “Enough… I’m done! I can’t take it any more, now it’s your turn.” Nadia hadn’t spoken since Baha’ was killed. Perhaps she no longer had anything to say. Sometimes I believe that she decided to stop speaking; she came to this point through a conscious decision-making process and not as a result of shock. Perhaps the death of my brother made it easier simply to go silent. I know that my mother didn’t love my father when they married; I know that her father forced her to marry Salama, after she’d been engaged to a man she loved. Nadia always thought that it was because she loved this man that her father forced her to leave him. I also know that Hamza had traveled to Hasbaya, my mother’s village, to ask Nadia’s father for her hand and that he had consented without Nadia’s knowledge. A distant kinship between my mother and father’s extended families meant they both took it for granted that this marriage would happen.

  My grandmother Nahil says that Nadia fainted on her wedding night. That she fell ill from fear and because Salama wasn’t patient with her. But the real reason that she passed out is that she couldn’t be with the man she loved. She had to accept that the person on top of her on her wedding night was someone else—a man she didn’t love; she didn’t even like how he smelled. She had only seen this man a few times, but his smell alone was enough for her to recognize him. She came to know him from his scent. She knew when he was coming to visit her father before he crossed the threshold of the house, as if his scent had a voice she could hear from far away.

  I only remember one sentence that the speaking Nadia used to repeat to us: she had only ever once loved one man and she lost this man on the day she married Salama.

  Nadia was destroyed by Baha’’s death. He was her son, so she died too. She died because she’s no longer really alive. For me, the tragedy of Baha’’s death is no more terrible than Nadia’s silence. She remains silent while the kitten meows at her, wanting food. She goes into the kitchen to feed Pussycat, who walks behind her silently, as though they have a lasting understanding that her silence will never change.

  My brother looked like my mother—his eyes, his skin color and the shape of his face were all like hers. He even inherited the big mole on his ear from her. His height and build, however, are like my father’s. As for me, I inherited Nahil’s face—her dark skin and her big, black eyes. I inherited my thin, well-proportioned build from my mother. Baha’ was distinctly Nadia’s son, as if he were a part of her body. My father, who never showed any emotion toward his son during his life, cried at his funeral and then went mad. Perhaps my father didn’t lose his mind because of the shrapnel that pierced his skull and stayed lodged there, but because his son died before ever hearing one loving word from his father.

  My silent mother. I see how silent she really is when my brother is killed. Should I have waited for my brother’s death to protest against my mother’s silence? Salama inherited the house from Hamza and if Baha’ had lived he would have inherited it from Salama. Should I inherit Nadia’s silence? Especially now when, with Baha’’s death, I’ll inherit the house? But how can a woman who didn’t learn how to speak from another woman inherit a house? Only now do I know how much I resemble Nadia. I needed to embark on my journey in order to know this. I actually resemble Nadia quite a lot. I wasn’t aware of this resemblance before, not when I was with Georges, nor with Chris, nor even with my British-Indian therapist. I see it only when I pick up pen and paper and start to write. I begin writing everything I’ve been silent about for years.

  “I won’t feel pain after today,” I wrote at the time. It’s as if the pain inside me has been mummified. It’s inescapable. It’s like needing a lot of fresh air to live and trying to gulp it down because you can’t survive with just thin gasps.

  I call Nadia in Australia; I ask about Salama. She says a few words and then falls silent. When she starts speaking again, she speaks in English, a language she started to master only after arriving in Australia. She speaks for a long time. Her voice seems as though it’s healed from a chronic illness. Here, cancer spreads through Olga’s body, while there my mother’s voice remains silent. Her original language is in exile. She now speaks only in another language.

  Her effusive words on the phone make me think that my mother’s silence was a cancer of the soul. Her silence is not silence so much as a fragmentation and failing of her original language. This is how I understand my mother’s silence in Arabic. It’s the silence of a fragmented, failing woman. I have dreamed about her a few times, and in my dreams she’s a strong woman who takes on the world, riding a bicycle furiously down the open street. I remember this dream when I call her. It’s as if my dream has become real.

  She tells me about her work in Adelaide, about the new immigrants who are Baha’’s age. She can finally speak of Baha’; she speaks of him in her new language. There’s only hope and power in these words, no sadness. We cry together for the first time, my mother and I.

  Hamza’s wor
ds are tantamount to action; he writes on stone, carves words. I don’t understand the sentences he engraves on the doors. Nadia doesn’t understand them either. He says they’re there to protect the house and family. He always repeats this to people at Thursday evening get-togethers. Writing makes Hamza even stronger than he was before. Words make my mother more silent. Perhaps this is why people believe that words are for men alone. Words and writing are for men, only men, women have no right to them.

  Did Nadia’s silence begin here—even before she was born? From the time that these sentences were carved in stone, never to be erased or disappear? Carved in Arabic, carved in stone, in the body. How can I destroy those words? How can I transform them, make them into my own writing, my mother’s writing?

  I find no one in the Zuqaq al-Blat neighborhood where our house is… I can’t find anyone I used to know. Ankineh is no longer here, the Armenian woman whose house the fighters entered, beating her and her husband and stealing their rugs and artwork right before their eyes. At the time she didn’t say anything, but simply let them plunder. Perhaps they’d satisfy themselves, as she said. “Jibreel’s gang robbed my house and stole my rugs,” she said over and over again. After Jibreel’s son was killed by a car bomb in Beirut, Ankineh would say, “Honestly, I don’t rejoice at other people’s misfortunes, but look what happened to his son.” Though the doorway was wide, they couldn’t get the huge chandeliers out of the front door, so they took them out onto the balcony and threw them down from the second floor. Little pieces of crystal radiated everywhere like fragments of a shattered sun. One of the neighbors tried to stop them, saying that there’s no use taking valuables if you’re just going to throw them from the balcony and break them, then they won’t be worth anything. In response, they picked him up and threw him off the balcony as well. The fall broke his leg.