An Unnecessary Woman (24 page)

It is rare, however.

The mist of drizzle has lifted. The damp pavement and a quilt of tenuous low clouds—now comforting, now threatening—are the only evidence that rain passed this way. My legs, each trying to outpace the other, lead me along a side street. Unlike the main streets that cut the city with a butcher’s cleaver, this ancient one wiggles its hips quite a bit. It negotiates with the neighborhood, it haggles, gives and takes; rarely is it straight, it is intrinsic. This street is more old-fashioned than the bigger boulevards, more settled. I walk on the asphalt, for the pavement—more discontinuous curbstones than an actual sidewalk—is covered with parked vehicles and the Vespas belonging to the many castes of delivery boys of the city. A film of drizzle residue makes the road feel like a sheaf of tar beneath my walking shoes, which squish ever so slightly. The buildings on this street are all four stories or higher, each floor with a balcony wearing long, wide outdoor drapes that were brightly colored once, a long time ago.

A small car passes, filled to the brim with smokers; it seems to be on fire with all the lit cigarettes and the smoke. In another car a bored boy presses his face into the back window. He notices me looking and extends his tongue into the smushed self-portrait. This brief exchange amuses me, as it does him, it seems. He pulls back, whether to admire my reaction or his handiwork on the window, I can’t tell. A third car honks to make sure I don’t jump in its way, then howls past me. I move to the curb, but only for one step, since a rack overflowing with bags of potato chips blocks my path. The owner of the grocery store sits outside on a stool, earphones plugging his senses, blithely unconcerned that he and his merchandise have overflowed his store and taken over the pavement. He seems happy in his world.

I pass a sign that says
SALON AALIYA
in Arabic lettering, though its Roman alphabet counterpart says
SALON BEYONCÉ
. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. There are no customers in the barber chairs.

It feels colder. The last traces of autumn are rising and disappearing. I clutch my handbag close. I’m no longer perspiring, of course, but moisture still clings to the valleys between my fingers.

A sandwich shop pumps the smell of garlic into the street. I’m hungry. I can’t tell whether it’s lunchtime yet or whether it has passed. I forgot my watch, not so unusual since my retirement.

This neighborhood is a rabbit warren, at least what I imagine a rabbit warren might be, but it doesn’t compare with the ever-changing mazes of the Palestinian camps. It feels more solid. I probably see a chasm of difference because of familiarity. I haven’t been to Sabra since I went looking for Ahmad all those years ago. I may not walk this neighborhood regularly, but I know it. It’s changed some since I was here last, but it’s recognizable, inherently so. The neighborhood I grew up in lies not far from here—not a stone’s throw, a mortar’s launch.

There were quite a few launches a couple of years ago. In 2008, the Shiites and Sunnis—
a plague o’ both your houses
—clashed briefly and violently along these streets. Traces of the shooting can be seen on the buildings, a few bullet holes on one, two blotches on the second floor of another, a single beauty mark on a third, residues on edifices that can’t afford plastic surgery. No trace of the psychological scars those battles caused can be found on any Beiruti, however. We suppress trauma so very well. We postpone the unbreathable darkness that weighs us down.

How do I talk about the betrayal we felt when Lebanese killed Lebanese once more? For years, since the end of the war in 1990, we deluded ourselves into thinking that we’d never fight each other again. We thought we’d buried our horror. Yet the Lebanese do not wish to examine that period of our history. We, like most humans, consider history a lesson on a blackboard that can be sponged off. We’d rather ostrich life’s difficulties.

I can dig out the old chestnut from George Santayana, that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” but it serves no purpose. It’s a hopelessly optimistic quote. We are condemned to repeat the past whether we remember it or not. It is inevitable; just ask Nietzsche (eternal return) or Hegel (history repeats itself) or James McCourt (history repeats itself like hiccups).

Beirutis are intricately woven into their city’s wars.

I’m fond of Mark Twain’s quote: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”

We’re traumatized every time the Israelis go on one of their macho homicidal binges, but we explain it away. They are not us. It’s the price we pay for living next to a neighbor who constantly has to prove how big his endowment is. It is big, trust me, nuclear even. The destruction our neighbors inflicted on us in 2006 was monumental—no, I shouldn’t use that adjective, which implies raising instead of razing. The southern suburbs of our city were nearly wiped out, hundreds if not thousands were killed. They bombed every bridge in the country, every electric plant. I refused to leave my house even though my neighborhood was in no danger of being bombed. Yet as horrifying as that was, like most Beirutis, I dismissed all this as the insanity of the Israeli military and the lunatic fringe of Hezbollah meeting head-to-head. O Poseidon, grant that these sackers of cities both find troubles in their households.

Two years later, in 2008, when the clashes between Shiites and Sunnis erupted, I was no longer able to dismiss.

I’m sure you’ve noticed that I dislike Israel, that ridiculous pygmy state dripping with self-overestimation, yet many of the giants I respect are Jewish. There is no contradiction. I identify with outsiders, with the alienated or dispossessed. Like many nation-states, including its sister pygmy state Lebanon, Israel is an abomination.

Israelis are Jews who have misplaced their sense of humor.

I like men and women who don’t fit well in the dominant culture, or, as Álvaro de Campos calls them, strangers in this place as in every other, accidental in life as in the soul. I like outsiders, phantoms wandering the cobwebbed halls of the doomed castle where life must be lived.

David Grossman may love Israel, but he wanders its cobwebbed halls, just as his namesake Vasily wandered Russia’s. To write is to know that you are not home.

I stopped loving Odysseus as soon as he landed back in Ithaca.

I love the idea of homeland, but not the actual return to one.

A while back Czesław Miłosz wrote in an essay that in today’s age of technology and mass mobility “the whole nostalgic rhetoric of patria fed by literature since Odysseus journeyed to Ithaca, has been weakened if not forgotten.” Weakened, possibly, but I think not forgotten. It is that longing for a mythical homeland, not necessarily a physical one, that inspires art. Without that longing, patria is nothing more than the name of a Finnish company that produces armored vehicles used by Israel in its wars on Lebanon, or the name of an Argentine submachine gun.

I appreciate longing.

I also appreciate irony.

In the summer of 1982, while Israeli armored tanks and gunships imposed a siege of another age on rampartless Beirut, cutting off the water supply and food shipments, the modern catapults, the air force, leveled residential buildings, destroyed all infrastructure, and, amazingly, bombed the synagogue of Beirut’s Jewish neighborhood.

There is no contradiction.

I notice a mother sitting on the pavement across the street, not Lebanese, as shows in her face, and not from this neighborhood, as shows in her haggard dress. A beggar by profession, she’s surrounded by the tools of her trade: a baby in her arms; a girl of about five with dirty dress and knees, hovering in the world of her mother; the eldest, a girl of no more than ten, sitting on the ground, back against the building wall as she examines me from afar. The grim out-of-a-fairy-tale mother nudges her eldest, who jumps up and charges toward me in one smooth, experienced sweep. Brown hair, grimy face, and pink cheeks, she seems determined and overly earnest. Her eyes gleam with a heavy dose of resolve, a predator sighting her prey.

Except this quarry is prepared for her.

I wait until she comes around a parked car, until she’s upon me, before I stop her by extending a demanding palm and saying, “Can you spare some change? I’m terribly hungry.”

Her body reacts before her face, a lapse of a few seconds, recoiling. She practically lands on the blue Nissan to her left. The eyebrows lift, her lower jaw drops, her lips thin out, her cheeks flush puce. She uses the car as a support, leans on it with outstretched hand. It’s then that I notice she’s younger than she first appeared, a tall eight-year-old, probably.

I wonder if I went too far, but no, her recovery is quick.

Her eyes smile first, bright girl. She breaks out giggling. Her laughter comes at me as if by catapult, and her gaze holds me transfixed. She examines me with mirth. I grin.

Her fidgeting mother across the dividing bitumen doesn’t seem to be appreciating our peculiar scene and its urban charm. Her anxiety is palpable across this great distance. She pulls her five-year-old close, her right arm encircling the little girl’s hips.

“You have blue hair,” my girl says.

In an effusive gesture, I reach into my handbag and hand her all the paper money I have—everything I have except for what’s in my pocket, where I keep my real money in case my purse gets stolen. I end up giving her just a little more than the price of museum admission. I’m not stupid, romantic, or a busy Russian novelist.

Beaming and preening, the girl counts the notes with the nimble fingers of a Beiruti moneychanger. She turns around, still counting, and begins walking back to her mother.

“Stay in school,” I tell her.

“It’s the holiday break,” she replies without looking up or back, engrossed with her bounty.

I tuck in a strand of blue hair, adjust my scarf, and continue on my way.

In one of these side alleys, I can’t remember exactly which, I had a humiliating experience that loiters in my memory, almost seventy years later. The recalled event no longer causes me much pain. I must have been a few months past four years old; my mother was second-trimester pregnant with my half brother the eldest. We were hurrying home, she dragging me by the hand. She walked with complete concentration and no little consternation. I couldn’t understand then, nor would I for a long time, her terror of being a disappointment to her husband, to his family and hers. Like most of us, she was suckled on the milk of patriarchy (the courage of men, the fidelity of women). She sincerely believed that the world curdled if her husband held his breath, and if his every whim wasn’t met, the universe itself turned to ash.

I still remember my hasty footsteps that day, their uncertainty, my sturdy brown-and-cream shoes of rubber and cloth, recently bought but long outdated. We traveled this path regularly, but that one time was different. Whether she was going to be tardy, wouldn’t be on time to cook his dinner, finish cleaning, iron his nightshirt, or something else, I don’t know. I know that it was still light, so he couldn’t have reached home yet. I know that I could concentrate only on her calves, how they slid like tectonic plates with each step, and not on the familiar sights of my surroundings. She was running late, but not running because of her condition; passersby would have brooked none of that, would have felt obliged to protect my half brother the fetus from his irresponsible mother.

More people walked these streets then, many more.

In my mind, as I walk these streets now, I see her creamy calves as they were then, the calves of Hera or Athena in Rubens’s
The Judgment of Paris
. I conjure up the sway of her black skirt’s hem, its billowing below the saddle-shaped hollows of the backs of her knees.

As I walk these streets now, I note how much taller the buildings are today, most of them built in the fifties and sixties, how much taller I am now.

I remember I was panicking then. I needed to pee. I kept telling her that I couldn’t wait until we reached home. I must have imagined that she, sorceress that she was, could conjure a toilet for me. Unlike Lot’s wife, she wouldn’t look back, kept her steady gaze forward, toward her Mecca. She needed to urinate as well, she told me as we kept moving. She always needed to in her condition, but she was going to wait until she reached our apartment. She always did. If she could, so could I.

I must have begun to cry. I must have stumbled. I must have done something, because other people showered us with worried glances, some with disdain. She stopped our forward progress. Must I always make demands, make a scene? Why couldn’t I behave like normal children? My hand still in hers, she pulled me toward an alley between a couple of two-story ocher buildings. Severing our connection, she waved me away with a flapping hand. “There,” she told me, “do it there, and do it quickly.”

I may have been surprised or shocked at her pronouncement. I should have been one or the other, but I don’t recall. I ran into the alley as she stood guard with her back to me. Fearing I would be noticed by a passerby, I sneaked through the gate of one of the buildings. Behind a large flowering bougainvillea, half obscured under its panoply of red, I crouched.

A woman in a dark dress and a dark, hair-covering scarf screamed at me and called me names. I had assumed no one could see me. I’d looked around before beginning my desecration, but I hadn’t noticed the upper-floor balcony on which she stood. “Get out of here,” she kept yelling, but I couldn’t. I wasn’t able to stop peeing. I wasn’t able to meet her gaze either, or her fury. Her voice rose and her curses grew more vivid. My glance dawdled on the continental puddle forming in the soil below me.