I, The Divine

by Rabih Alameddine

  I put Bic pens in her coat pockets to bleed. I placed a live mouse in her apron. I dethreaded the hems of her skirts. But my favorite act of mischief, for which unfortunately I was caught, involved the sachets. My stepmother made sachets by cutting old mosquito nettings into small strips, stuffing them with lavender, and tying them up in a bag. These she would place between the freshly laundered sheets in the linen closets; the sheets, when taken out and placed on the beds, carried the aroma of lavender. My father loved that. One night, I went into the linen closet, took out the bags, and placed them in the cats’ litter box. The next night, I put them back between the sheets in the closet. My stepmother was furious. My father was the one who beat me for that, with the belt of course, in the bathroom.

  I was a natural tomboy, and, knowing it annoyed my stepmother, I refused to wear dresses. I was frequently filthy, and I was better at games than any of the boys in the neighborhood. I did not wear makeup at all until I was fifteen, when I met my best friend, Dina. My stepmother taught my sisters, Amal and Lamia, household duties, such as cooking and sewing. I could not stand it. When she tried teaching me to embroider, I pricked my fingers until they bled. She never tried again.

  She turned my father against me. I was his favorite daughter, his Cordelia. He always considered my uniqueness enchanting. After years of her nagging, he began to see me as a lost cause, an embarrassment to the family. The final disappointment for him was my skill at soccer. I had played the game as a child, on the streets with the boys. My father never considered this the problem my stepmother did.

  However, during the years after the 1970 World Cup Finals, my stepmother was able to convince my father I was wicked. I watched the championship game with my family and saw the Brazilians tear the Italians apart. I did not know who the players were and actually thought Instant Replay was the best player because his name kept appearing at the bottom of the screen every time something really great happened. All I really knew was the Brazilians made coffee and Italians pasta. But then I saw Pele pass the ball to Jairzhinho for one of the goals and experienced a soccer epiphany. From that moment on, I knew how the game was supposed to be played, and that knowledge marked the beginning of my spiraling descent into disgrace.

  I was a scrawny child, neither fast nor strong. But I developed impeccable control with a soccer ball and was blessed with something intangible, soccer vision. I could see plays developing long before they happened. I always knew where to be, where to send the ball. Even in the small, disorganized street games, without a pair of tennis shoes to call my own, it was apparent to any bystander that I was special. And that I was a girl.

  One day, my stepmother looked out from the balcony, saw me down on the street playing, and had a nervous breakdown. She refused to speak to anyone, took tranquilizers, and locked herself in her room. My father slept on the couch. The next day, when she allowed my father into the room, they had a long conversation. All three of us, her stepdaughters, not her daughters, ended up in a half-boarding school, Carmel St. Joseph. The school was only four streets away from our house, but we slept there five nights a week. We left for school on Monday mornings and came back on Saturday afternoons. We had to wear uniforms. The nuns had been warned about me and behaved accordingly. I was treated as a troublemaker and I did not disappoint. I was not allowed to play soccer or any other sport in school. I had to watch while the other girls played volleyball or basketball, considered acceptable sports for girls, but not for me.

  Luckily, my stepmother’s meddling in my life ceased, or more accurately decreased, with the birth of Ramzi, my father’s first son and the reason for his marriage to my stepmother. I was eleven. Both she and my father stopped caring about the girls and showered all their attention on the newborn son, the boy who was the sole reason for my father’s, and all his forefathers’, existence. Apocryphal stories abound about that “blessed” event. It is said that my mother, Janet, whom my father had divorced and sent back to New York because she could not deliver him a boy to carry on his name, wailed for one whole month beginning the instant the infant Ramzi himself wailed for the first time. It is said my father cried. All I know is that I was relieved.

  What I recall from all the craziness of that day is the sound of the opening stanza of Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” being massacred by Mazen, the boy living on the second floor. Funny what we remember. Setting my memory in time is easy. The first day of the war in Beirut, April 1975. I was fifteen. Shells and bombs fell all around us, but we must have had electricity since Mazen was playing his new electric guitar, had been for the last ten days since he had gotten it for his birthday, and no “political skirmish” was going to get him to stop. I distinctly remember wondering how he could play so badly. Every boy in Beirut played “Smoke on the Water” on his electric guitar, yet we had the misfortune to live above the one boy who was tone-deaf. He took his guitar out to the stairwell, while his parents desperately tried to shut him up. The giddy days.

  My whole family was out of our apartment. The stairwell seemed the safest place, surrounded as it was on every side. My father sat sideways, with his back facing the wall, one knee close to his chest, crumpling his best brown suit. He looked so handsome in those days. His hair was still dark brown, his fierce eyes still indomitable. He smoked his cigarette, blowing smoke toward the upper floors. He spoke softly to us throughout, to keep us calm. “They can’t keep going on like this,” he said. “They’ll stop soon.” I noticed skin between his socks and the hem of his pants. His sock garters must have been loose. It was the first time I saw a flaw in his attire. My father’s name is Mustapha Hammoud Nour el-Din, M.D. Everyone called him Doctor, even his children sometimes. I called him Docteur Baba.

  I smelled something peculiar in the air, what I discovered later to be cordite. The things we learn. In time, the smell of cordite, of garbage, urine, and decaying flesh, would become familiar to us, banal and clichéd.

  Three loud explosions in a row rocked the building. Too close. Pallid-faced Ramzi, the youngest, screamed and burrowed deeper into his mother’s dress. My father winced. I assumed he was wondering if Ramzi was too young to be chided. Boys should never scream.

  “They don’t seem to be letting up,” my stepmother, Saniya, said. She held her son close, caressing his hair. “Maybe we should move down and be with the neighbors.” She was rounded and soft, bearing an uncanny resemblance to Anna Magnani. She sat between her two daughters, Majida on her right, and Rana on her left, comforting them. She would look at us, her three stepdaughters, intermittently, wondering how she should comfort us. All three of us remained separate from her and the young ones.

  Amal, my eldest sister, then nineteen, was about to get married. Gunfire could not dampen her mood. She leaned against the wall, resolute, wearing Jordache jeans and a lavender angora V-neck sweater, her face serene.

  My other sister, Lamia, seemed unperturbed as well, but in a different mood. No amount of gunfire could transform the air of gloom around her. She sat, head bowed, not participating. She was almost eighteen. The dim light created shadowy havoc on her acne-scarred face. Her morose expression was only habit, through continual recurrence of an emotional display, the face reverted to it, habituated itself to it, even in repose. She did not seem to belong to our family, yet was an essential part of it.

  I stared up at the water stains on the ceiling, at the peeling paint. I wondered whether the concierge would paint the stairwell if the building was damaged enough. Another shell fell close by.

  “I’m sure it’ll be over soon,” I said. “They’ll get tired.” I smoothed my red dress. My hand curled a lock of my reddish brown hair.

  My half-sister Rana wrote furiously in her diary. She wrote incessantly, considering the world nothing but material for her writing. My favorite sister was growing up to be a stunner, a heartbreaker in training.

  “What are you writing?” I asked.

  “I’m writing about this. Everything that’s happening. All the noise. Where
it comes from, how unexpected. Why the stop, start, stop and start again. All the different sounds. Always coming from different places. I can’t tell where it’s coming from next.”

  “No one can tell, my dear,” said Saniya. “No one’s sure who’s fighting whom. We just have to wait it out.”

  “If I knew what to expect, it would be better,” Rana said. “I just don’t know what’s coming next.”

  Something exploded not too far from us, making everyone jump. Ramzi screamed again. Rana reached out and patted his head. She seemed so adult. He began whimpering. I knelt down on the stairs below him and rubbed his tiny back. “It’s okay, hayatee. Everything will be okay. I promise.”

  As if at my signal, the gunfire stopped. We heard men shouting, but we could not discern what was being said. “They seem to be on the roof of the building next door,” my father said. “That’s probably why the shells are dropping close.”

  “Do you think they’ll go away?” Saniya asked.

  “I hope so. Maybe I should go up and talk to them.”

  “No. We don’t even know who they are. You can’t talk to them.”

  “Maybe one of them is hurt,” Rana said. “Would they need our help?”

  We sat silent, wondering if they would fight again. Whenever someone tried to say something, my father shushed them. After ten minutes of silence, the electric guitar was back at it again. Lamia stood up, leaned across the railing, and screamed down, “Stop making all that noise. We’re trying to think here.” She sat back down.

  Il est des histoires qui ressemblent à un conte de fées. L’histoire de mon enfance, par exemple, semblait être tirée d’un conte de Grimm. Et pourtant, mon enfance racontée ne fut jamais une histoire à faire rêver.

  L’on dit souvent que les contes de fées laissent libre cours à l’imagination de l’enfant. La mienne (mon imagination), stagnait à chaque fois qu’on me parlait de sorcières. Je ne me prenais jamais à imaginer diverses figures féminines au physique hideux et aux cheveux hirsutes. Les sorcières des histoires qui m’étaient narrées avaient un visage qui m’était douloureusement familier, des cheveux longs et lisses comme de la soie, une élégance recherchée, et surtout une jeunesse hantée et menacée par la mienne. Invariablement, dans mon esprit, toutes les sorcières se retrouvaient en une seule: ma belle-mère.

  Elle débarqua un jour dans nos vies, belle, jeune et impitoyable. Elle me prit en grippe dès le début. Et je le lui rendais bien. Elle m’était détestable. A son arrivée, elle imposa un système de lois et d’interdits qui transforma notre maison en une institution hautement disciplinée. Mes deux soeurs se plièrent sagement à ses règles. Mais mon esprit rebelle se refusait de se soumettre à ce régime qui semblait doubler de sévérité à mon égard. Si elle était intransigeante avec mes soeurs, avec moi elle se transformait en un despote Nazi.

  Mon père et mes oncles prenaient un malin plaisir à nous apprendre des gros mots. Et encore, au fur et à mesure que nous nous perfectionnions dans cet art, ils enrichissaient notre vocabulaire d’insultes à caractère pornographiques. Avant l’arrivée de ma belle-mère, nous passions nos soirées à nous lancer des insultes. Bien sûr les oreilles délicates de celle-ci furent choquées par notre vocabulaire qu’elle trouvait aberrant. C’est pourquoi mon père avait trouvé un compromis. Il nous permettait de laisser libre cours à nos injures durant les absences de ma belle-mère. Mes soeurs avaient tout de suite appris à éviter les dérapages compromettants en la présence de celle-ci. Quant à moi, je ne l’appris jamais. Et je dérapais souvent. Je me délectais dans mes dérapages qui faisaient surgir des expressions effarées autour de moi. En l’absence de ma marâtre, mes injures déclenchaient des fous rires. Quand elle était dans les parages, je recevais les piments. Mais je continuais à avoir ces lapsus quand même. J’en savourais la sonorité exquise.

  I wanted my mother to see her grandson, but she refused. My son, Kamal, was born in New York. When he was a baby, I took him everyday across the park, from the Upper West Side to the Upper East Side, to visit Janet. Once he left New York, she did not want to see him again. Kamal lived in Beirut with his father, but he came every summer to visit me.

  One day, in July of 1993, I forced the issue. I walked Kamal over to her building. I told Jonathan, the doorman, to tell my mother Kamal and I were coming up. I did not have to do that since Jonathan knew me well, but I thought it would be better if she was prepared for us. Janet told him she could not receive us because she was leaving. I said I would wait for her downstairs and see her on her way out. Janet entered the lobby twenty minutes later, still beautiful as ever. Like a well-behaved boy, Kamal stood up to greet his grandmother. She shook his hand.

  “You’re a big boy now,” she said.

  “He’s twelve, Mother.”

  “Well, I can’t stay here and chat. I’m late for an appointment. We can do this some other time. Okay? Have fun you two.”

  She turned around and walked out, not allowing us to say anything more.

  “Your mother is crazy,” Kamal said.

  “She’s your grandmother.”

  “Sitto Saniya is my grandmother, not Janet.”

  “Saniya is your step-grandmother. Janet is your grandmother. She’s your blood and you can’t forget that.”

  “I’m hungry.”

  I took him to a Greek restaurant across the street. We sat outdoors because I wanted to watch. He ordered pizza, the only thing he ate those days. Within five minutes of sitting down, we saw Janet walk back into the apartment building.

  This, I learned from my father: “I don’t think any man ever loved a woman as much as I loved your mother. But it faded, eroded slowly. One day I woke up and I was not in love. There was nothing I could do. We did not have enough in common to have a comfortable life together, not like Saniya and I. Once the love was gone, your mother got on my nerves. With Saniya, I don’t love her as much as I loved your mother, but she makes me happy. Your mother made me crazy.” There you go. My father divorced my mother and sent her packing, not because she could not give him a son, not because she was a terrible mother to his girls, but because he fell out of love.

  In my family, love, like religion and politics, was to be avoided, a passion that vanquished reason and caused endless pain and heartache. I grew up angry with my father because he destroyed the fairy tale. My parents, Mustapha and Janet, their glorious love had not ended up happily ever after; it withered and faded. Unlike Amal and Lamia, my older sisters, I never heard them tell their story lovingly, since I was two when my parents split up, never as the grand affair. I was told the story, but only as a didactic fable of the folly of youth, the craziness of passionate love.

  Janet arrived in Beirut in 1955, an independent woman of twenty, wanting to explore the world, picking the American University of Beirut to finish her bachelor’s, which she never did. Fate intervened in the form of a medical student at the university, my father. My mother was a beauty and, according to her, had had a number of beaus after her in New York, but my father had an irresistible charm.

  The story goes like this: On arriving in Beirut, Janet went to a Lebanese fortune-teller who read her coffee cup. The fortune-teller saw the man who was to be the love of Janet’s life. She told her the man was Lebanese, a healer who would save her from certain death, falling in love with her after curing her illness and then marrying her. They would live happily ever after.

  Janet met Mustapha at the beach of the American University of Beirut (technically not a beach since there is no sand, only large rocks and cement walkways, making it a poor beach by Beirut standards). At the time, my father had a habit of walking around with a stethoscope, which identified him as a medical student and helped him talk to girls. Years later, he would apply the same principle when he put the stethoscope on his car’s sun visor, thereby avoiding serious trouble or minor inconveniences when stopped at the checkpoints during the war. Whether Syrian soldiers, Christian soldiers of the Lebanese Forces, or the Druze militiamen, when th
ey saw the stethoscope they did not ask for his ID, opting instead for a diagnosis of their ailments.

  My mother was swimming that day. She was trying to climb on one of the rocks to rest when a sea urchin’s spine inadvertently pricked her ankle. She screamed, but apparently had enough composure to swim back to the cement platform. People called to the man with the stethoscope to come look at the ankle. The stories differ here. My grandmother says the bleeding was so profuse, it took a heroic effort on my father’s part to halt it. My father says there was no blood at all, and the prick was barely noticeable. My father examined the ankle and told my mother the only way to save her foot was for him to suck the poison out of the most beautiful ankle in the world. He then lifted her ankle and kissed it.

  Their love affair was torrid and scandalous. They embarrassed the university by kissing publicly. The Druze community felt it was losing one of its brightest men and my grandparents were horrified. They objected to everything about Janet. They did everything they could to break up the couple, threatening and cajoling, to no avail. From the beginning, Janet tried to appease her future in-laws. She dressed more conservatively, held her tongue, and made Mustapha the most important thing in her life. When she appeared at Mustapha’s uncle’s funeral, following the precise rituals of the Druze, wearing the traditional black, everyone understood it was a lost cause. Mustapha and Janet were to marry.

  Janet became more Druze than any Druze woman, even though she could not actually become one. One could not convert to the religion, but had to be born into it. Since there were no civil marriages in Lebanon, Mustapha and Janet had to travel to Limassol, Cyprus—technically, that meant that all their children were bastards. They came back to an apartment in Beirut bought for them by my grandparents. While Mustapha completed his studies, Janet became a Druze housewife. She learned to cook; her dishes became the talk of the town. To this day, it is said that her kibbeh, a dish of raw meat and cracked wheat, is unequaled in all of Lebanon. She became an impeccable hostess, generous to a fault, her house the cleanest it could possibly be. She never missed a funeral or a wedding, was the first on congratulatory visits when a birth was announced and the first at hospitals when an acquaintance was ill. She began to speak Arabic, with a mountain Druze accent even, which made her Druze contemporaries giggle but pleased the elders. She tried hard to be perfect and most likely would have succeeded had it not been for the daughters.