An Unnecessary Woman (31 page)

There is a Sunni mosque a mere half block away. Lebanese flags facing every possible direction drape across an electricity pole, making the green cedars, symbol of our pygmy state, look like they’re tumbling in a slow avalanche. Each sect wants to prove it is more Lebanese than the next, which explains the recent rise of puerile patriotism in our neighborhoods. This one also bears a large poster depicting the ugly mug of the “leader of the Arabs,” Gamal Abdel Nasser, against a Mao-red background. I haven’t seen one of these in decades.

I may be able to explain the difference between baroque and rococo, between South American magical realism and its counterparts in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, between Camus’s nihilism and Sartre’s existentialism, between modernism and its post, but don’t ask me to tell you the difference between the Nasserites and the Baathists. I do understand that this neighborhood can’t be Baathist; Sunnis are anti-Syria these days, and the need to belong to a party, any party, is greater than the fear of appearing stupid once again, hence Nasser is the hero du jour. However, I can’t figure out what the terms mean.

Samir Kassir, in his wonderful book about Beirut, differentiates them thus: Arab nationalists who converted to socialism and socialists newly alert to the mobilizing virtues of nationalism.

Decipher that.

Need I tell you that Baathists and Nasserites have killed each other by the busload?

One’s first response is that these Beirutis must be savagely insane to murder each other for such trivial divergences. Don’t judge us too harshly. At the heart of most antagonisms are irreconcilable similarities. Hundred-year wars were fought over whether Jesus was human in divine form or divine in human form. Belief is murderous.

After Hannah died, life became incomprehensible—well, more incomprehensible than usual. I confess that I went through some hard times, hard years. I grieved—whether I grieved enough is difficult to gauge. Life was crazy. Hajj Wardeh passed away that year as well, and I wasn’t sure if Fadia would try to evict me. My mother harped about my apartment. My half brothers tried to break my door and my spirit. It was not pleasant, and then war, the ultimate distraction, broke out. I plunged into my books. I was a voracious reader, but after Hannah’s death I grew insatiable. Books became my milk and honey. I made myself feel better by reciting jejune statements like “Books are the air I breathe,” or, worse, “Life is meaningless without literature,” all in a weak attempt to avoid the fact that I found the world inexplicable and impenetrable. Compared to the complexity of understanding grief, reading Foucault or Blanchot is like perusing a children’s picture book.

I flag a taxi. I’ll splurge. I must reach home. It is much too cold; the frost-laden wind is picking up speed, and there’s a slight downward slant to the road that makes it slippery. I can’t seem to feel the ground beneath these old feet. I must reach home.

The driver looks like he wants to talk. Whatever he has to say, I’ve heard it a million times before. Taxi drivers, the talkers, the storytellers of this chatty city, can never shut up once they get going. I take out Rilke from my purse and pretend to read. Community is not what I need right now.

The taxi makes slow progress in the coagulating pre-holiday traffic. All of Beirut is out shopping for the holidays. It has been so long since I’ve bought a gift for anyone. The sun falls, as does the rain; winter nights arrive without warning. Headlight beams refract on the windshield, creating mini rainbows. It takes the car half an hour to travel a distance I could have walked in the same amount of time. A far-flung flash of lightning, out of earshot, reminds me that the taxi was a good decision, even though I’m discomfited by the backseat’s worn-out springs.

The taxi slogs and stalls a couple of neighborhoods before mine. My back begins to ache. A brand-new hotel, muscular and gray, has sprung up on the street. I hear that one can sit in a hot tub on the top floor and observe all of Beirut through large circular windows, a sort of reverse submarine effect. On the ground floor, there’s an American diner and a gigantic fitness center. I can’t tell you how many people use the latter, but I envy their health. This has been a long day.

No matter where I’ve been or how long I’ve been away, my soul begins to tingle whenever I approach my apartment. The sharp turn that leads to my street, the brown-and-gray building that I call “the new one” even though it was built in the early seventies and is certainly no longer new, are signs that announce I am close. The pleasurable sensation of almost arriving and the impatience of not yet being there begin at those markers. My first act upon entering the apartment, after shutting the door behind me, is simply to drop on my sofa and rest. My home.

ô rage ! ô désespoir ! ô vieillesse ennemie !

The troubling sight of the recalcitrant wrinkles on my face holds me still. I stand transfixed before the mirror in my bathroom. I reach for my glasses to see more clearly. What happened to me? What happened to my face, so gaunt and inexpressive? The person looking back at me is a stranger. I’ve never had a flattering notion of my unprepossessing physical appearance, but now I seem more insignificant than ever, lifeless and without a spark or sparkle of intensity. I’m a wholly nondescript human.

I should ask my mother if she has a picture of my biological father—must do so before she dies. I want to know whether I look like him. I must. I have my mother’s nose, which these days looks like a scimitar buried in slain flesh. I try to reconstruct my father’s face, but nothing seems to work, of course. I was much too young. I may have seen a picture of him at some point, but I have absolutely no recollection. I do recall my mother then, how she looked when he died, but since it was so long ago, I assume that’s a reconstruction. I remember that my mother wouldn’t raise her head, kept her eyes down, her gaze on the ground, lower even, toward the center of the earth where Satan dwelled. She must have felt guilty about her husband’s death. If she had been a better wife, more competent, he wouldn’t have been snatched away from her. Had we practiced suttee, she would have willingly dived into the pyre headfirst, a forward two-and-a-half somersault.

Can I possibly remember this, or is it a jigsaw that I’ve forced together from bits and pieces of how I think it went? I continue to drop the wooden pail into the brackish well of my memories. There was a meal. My mother concentrated on the food, on the plate. I don’t think she ate. The memory seems both real and unreal, reliable and tenuous, solid and insubstantial. I wasn’t even two when he died. I must have configured these images much later. Childhood is played out in a foreign language and our memory of it is a Constance Garnett translation.

My features have blunted with the passage of time, my reflection only faintly resembles how I see myself. Gravity demands payback for the years my body has resisted it. Not just my breasts and posterior, but somewhere along the line the slightly swollen curves of my lips have straightened. I’ve also lost quite a few eyebrow hairs. They’re all white now. I’ve noticed the change in color before but not the sparseness. I used to have a pair of heavy lines for eyebrows. On the other hand, my melanin-deprived skin has accumulated a number of different colors. Two asymmetrical landlocked seas of purple and mouse gray spread under my eyes. A brindled barnacle clings next to my right ear. Temple veins and their tributaries are decidedly green.

I’m willing to swear that the bone structure of my face has shifted.

How can my breath hold out

Against the wreckful siege of battering days

When rocks impregnable are not so stout,

Nor gates of steel so strong, but Time decays?

I hear Joumana puttering in her bathroom above. If she’s following her usual schedule, she’s washing up before making dinner.

I must do something. I walk out of the bathroom to my reading room, to the compact disc player. I search for Chopin, find one of Richter’s recordings. My head slowly clears. Richter’s Chopin is inspiring.

Sviatoslav Richter refused to give a concert if his pink plastic lobster was not with him. I used to think it was red—I read it somewhere, a red plastic lobster—but then I saw a picture of it. It certainly looked like a crustacean, oversized pincers, but not like a lobster, or at least not like any lobster I’d recognize. And it was pink, a rose pink, not red.

“I find things confusing,” he said on film.

In this film,
Richter: The Enigma
, he looked baffled and bewildered, befuddled by life. Bald, bony, ragged, and old, a face that couldn’t face the camera, a face that fully understood what had been lost, what had been given up. He looked real to me. I don’t know if he was a virgin, but he was a homosexual.

Richter spoke to this plastic lobster and felt lost without his companion. If you talked to him without his lobster, he sounded autistic. When he played, though—when he played he could liquefy your soul. He walked on water—well, his fingers did—liquid supple and fluid smooth, running, dripping, flowing.

“I do not like myself,” he said on film.

Once more, I stand transfixed before the mirror in my bathroom. I take out a pair of scissors, shut my eyes for a moment, and cut off a handful of blue hair. As Richter works his mellifluous magic, I snip and weep, snip and weep. He tears my heart. I am a sentimental fool. I cut and cry. Blue hair falls around me, collecting in a wispy cloud on the floor, the halo of a saint encircling my feet.

“For if a woman does not cover her head,” says Corinthians, “she might as well have her hair cut off.” Since no one reads anymore, Bible or otherwise, everyone assumes that Muslims invented the hijab. “Every man who prays or prophesies with his head covered dishonors his head. But every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head—it is the same as having her head shaved.”

Without my hair, I am no longer uncovered. I begin to sweep up the blue clippings on the floor. Slowly, methodically, each movement measured, each distracted, my mind in a fog, I clean and sweep.

In Germany, cut hair used to be wrapped in a cloth that was then deposited in an elder tree days before the new moon. A similar ritual can be found among the Yukon Indians of Alaska. In Morocco, women hang their hair clippings on a tree growing on or near the grave of a wonder-working saint to protect themselves against headaches. In Saudi Arabia and Egypt, they stow the fallen hair away, in a kerchief in a drawer. I sweep it all into the dustpan and dump it in the garbage.

My hair is sheared, lopped off to be exact. It is now white, the frost of old age. I don’t know whether I look like a cancer patient, a Red Brigade terrorist from the seventies, or an avant-garde artist, but I do look new. Since I only used scissors my hair is uneven and choppy. No, I don’t look like any of the above. I look like a Catholic postulant or a novitiate of some obscure monastic order.

I feel lighter, though I know it’s unreasonable to feel so. It’s only hair.

The albatross fell off, and sank

Like lead into the sea.

This evening I will contemplate the world from my bathtub. I’ll soak today away. I’m going to wash my mother right out of my hair. Wash her out, dry her out, push her our, fly her out, cancel her and let her go. I will fill the tub to the brim with cleansing water, rattle the pipes, conduct the Schoenberg symphony of glockenspiels once more. I’ll light a couple of candles for mood. I can’t retrieve those in the maid’s room, so I’ll make do with a couple of stubby ones lying around the bathroom, ugly and functional. Fire and water, I’ll end up with baptism, cleansing, and rejoicing all around.

I will shorten the hours of this evening, for I am tired. I will read, though. I am still more or less sane because of my evening reading
.

I will continue with
Microcosms
this evening.

I sit by the window in my living room. The sky puts on its darkening blue coat. My socked feet join me on the couch, my hands interlock around my knees. Even though I rubbed it dry with my good towel after the bath, my hair still feels wet. Phantom hair syndrome: I touch my scalp and my hair feels dry, but a minute after my hand grasps its partner around my knees, the sensation of wetness returns.

Out my window, all I see is a small section of my street, a cropped rectangle of the building across the way, and my lonesome lamppost. When I was a little girl I wished for a window that would overlook all of Beirut and its universe. Once I was married and in this apartment, my dreams shrank to more reasonable dimensions; I wished for a window on a higher floor, maybe the fourth—Fadia’s apartment instead of mine on the second—wished for a marginally more elevated, slightly more expansive view. These days I wish only that a Finnish or maybe Chinese company would invent some inexpensive utensil to clean the city grime off the outside of my window without my having to strain my back.

I should reread Johnson’s
The Vanity of Human Wishes
and be admonished once again.

It is fitting that I’m allowed only a glimpse of Beirut’s vista through my window, a thread of a sliver of a slice of a pie. Nostalgists insist on their revisionist vision of a hospitable, accepting city—a peaceable kingdom where all faiths and ethnicities were welcome, a Noah’s ark where beasts of every stripe felt at ease and unthreatened. Noah, however, was a son of a bitch of a captain who ran a very tight ship. Only pairs of the best and the brightest were allowed to climb the plank—perpetuate the species, repopulate the planet, and all that Nazi nonsense.