An Unnecessary Woman Read online

  But come, my friends, as we stand here mourning, do you see the lightning?

  See its glittering, like the flash of two moving hands, amid the thick gathering clouds.

  Its glory shines like the lamps of a monk when he has dipped their wicks thick in oil.

  I sat down with my companions and watched the lightning and the coming storm.

  The language—we hear it all the time. News anchors speak classical Arabic, as do some politicians, definitely Arabic teachers, but what sputters out of their mouths sounds odd and displaced compared to our organic Lebanese tongue, our homemade, homegrown dialect. Television and radio announcers sound foreign to my ears. Those early poems, though, they are alchemy, something miraculous. They opened my ears, opened my mind, like flowers in water.

  Yet my first translation was not a poem but twenty dull pages. In the school I attended, the sciences were taught in French. Rarely was Arabic used for physics, chemistry, or mathematics in any of the schools of Beirut, whose main curriculum has always been community conformity. It seems that Arabic is not considered a language for logic. A joke that used to make the rounds when I was a child, probably still going strong: the definition of parallel lines in geometry textbooks in Saudi Arabia is two straight lines that never meet unless God in all His glory wills it.

  The twenty pages were a curiosity; I wished to see for myself. My first translation sounded odd and displaced as well.

  The translations that followed improved, I hope.

  By improved, I mean that I no longer felt as awkward about writing my name on what I translated as I did in the beginning.

  My father named me Aaliya, the high one, the above. He loved the name and, I was constantly told, loved me even more. I do not remember. He passed away when I was still a toddler, weeks before my second birthday. He must have been ill, for he died before impregnating my mother with another, as he was supposed to, expected to, particularly since I was female and first. My country in the late 1930s was still trying to pull itself out of the fourteenth century. I’m not sure if it ever succeeded in some ways. My father was barely nineteen when he married and twenty-one when he died, my mother a widow at eighteen. They were supposed to spend aeons together. It was not to be.

  What to do with a young widow? The families convened. My mother’s family, having thought they had one fewer mouth to feed, now had two more. It is said that my maternal grandfather hinted that they were given a defective model. The families decided that the young widow would be married off to her husband’s brother and try once more, except she wouldn’t receive a second dowry, her wedding gift. Three months after my father passed away—a three-month canonical period—my mother knelt obsequiously before a sheikh and watched as her father and second husband signed the contracts.

  In time I was presented with five half siblings, none of whom I was particularly close to. Six children, one room, three narrow, lumpy mattresses on the floor; horizontal martial arts battles during the night, yawning bruised bodies in the morning.

  My uncle-father was kind, if not particularly loving or affable. He paid little attention to his children, even less to me. I’m unable to recall much about him. I have no pictures of him, so in my memory his face is always obscured. In every evocation of a childhood scene, my stepfather’s face is the least detailed, the most out of focus; when I think of him my memory’s eyes have cataracts.

  His sole remarkable trait was his unremitting passing of gas, which he had no inclination to control. Lunches and dinners, as the family sat on the floor surrounding him, were unbearable. The boys loved it, but I could barely eat after he broke wind. That’s probably why I’ve been skinny all my life. To this day, there are certain human smells that make my stomach swirl.

  At his deathbed, on a night drunk with cicadas, as the family sat in his room, he called on each of his children to offer final wisdom, but he forgot to call on his youngest daughter or me. The youngest was devastated, and all tried to comfort her. They surrounded her, cooed to her, smothered her with mollifying maxims, passed her their handkerchiefs. I wasn’t distressed and none comforted me. No one passed me a handkerchief, not even a tissue. He had no wisdom to offer me; no one in my family did.

  I am my family’s appendix, its unnecessary appendage.

  I was married off at sixteen, plucked unripe out of school, the only home I had, and gifted to the first unsuitable suitor to appear at our door, a man small in stature and spirit. Marriage is a most disagreeable institution for an adolescent. We moved into this apartment and it took fewer than four years for him to stand before me, as the law required, and declaim the most invigorating of phrases: “You are divorced.” Nothing in our marriage became him like leaving it.

  The impotent insect stepped out the door, and these floors never had to feel his feet again. Young as I was, I shed not a tear. I did what my nature demanded. I cleaned and scrubbed and mopped and disinfected until no trace of him remained, no scent, not a single hair, not a touch. I removed the nails on the wall where he used to hang his dirty hat and his pungent pipes that he thought made him distinguished. With a needle and spool of thread I repaired every hole in the doilies singed by the cinders of his pipe. I soaked the mosquito net in bleach.

  I did not wait for the smell of him to dissipate on its own. I expunged it.

  Before leaving this world, the listless mosquito with malfunctioning proboscis remarried twice and remained childless.

  “Woman, you are divorced.” Of course, he could have married over me and brought a second wife into our crumbly nest. Having more than one wife wasn’t common in Beirut even then. He’d have been the only one in the neighborhood with two wives, but he could have done it.

  My mother wanted me to be grateful. He may have rejected me as superfluous waste, he may have treated me as merely the dispensable product of his rib, but still I should be appreciative. “He divorced you. You can remarry a gentle widower or maybe a suitor of women more seemly who has been rejected a few times. Consider yourself fortunate.”

  Fortunate? For my mother, being a pathetic suitee was a cut above being a neglected second wife. She couldn’t conceive of a world in which my husband didn’t hold all the cards. In her world, husbands were omnipotent, never impotent. Mine thought of me as the cause of his humiliation and probably continued to blame his other wives. He couldn’t risk having his women talk to one another.

  I would have loved to chat with his second wife, or his third. Did he continue to wear his ridiculously large hat that cruelly emphasized his small head? I could have asked, “In all the years of marriage, did you ever see his penis? Did that shrivelly appendicle ever reach half-mast? When did he surrender? When did he end his fumbling humiliation in the dark? Was it a year, six months, a couple? I hazard it was merely a month. He pursued the charade for seven months with me.”

  In The Science of Right, Kant wrote, “Marriage is the union of two persons of different sexes for the purpose of lifelong mutual possession of each other’s sexual organs.”

  Kant obviously hadn’t met my husband.

  Of course, like Descartes, Newton, Locke, Pascal, Spinoza, Kierkegaard, Leibniz, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein, Kant never formed an intimate tie or reared a family.

  As a young woman, I was so frustrated never to have seen a man naked that I used to wait until my husband snored before lifting the covers, lighting a match within the enveloping womb of the mosquito net, and examining his body under his buttoned cottons. Ah, the disappointment of discovering a worm in place of the monster. Of this I was supposed to be afraid? This, the forge of fertility? Yet I couldn’t rein in my curiosity. Ecce homo. I looked every chance I had, by the light of a match, not a candle, because when quickly extinguished its smoke was not as incriminating. The steady snores, the deep breathing, the lost world of sleep. Never once caught, never discovered.

  Fifteen years ago, at sixty-one, my husband died, a solitary passenger on a public bus, his head leaning at an awkward angle against th
e murky window. The bus drove two full routes, passengers ascending and alighting, before the driver realized he was keeping company with a lifeless man. Sometimes death arrives quietly.

  Wanting to put him to rest once more, I attended his burial, his final interment. No keening or wailing at his funeral. In the open casket, he lay dead. Someone had combed his hair flat and awkward, as if he’d just taken off his imbecilic hat. Seated all around me, the mourning women could not help but giggle and gossip. He had died with an erection that would not relent, priapism in the final throes, an irony worthy of Svevo.

  In death Eros triumphed, while in life Thanatos had. My husband was a Freudian dyslexic.

  Death is the only vantage point from which a life can be truly measured. From my vantage point, as I watched men I didn’t recognize carry my ex-husband’s coffin away, I measured his life and found it wanting.

  I realize that I haven’t mentioned my husband’s name. It isn’t intentional. It’s just that I can call him my husband and that defines him.

  There are many reasons for not naming a character or someone you’re writing about. You might want to have the book be entirely about the main narrator, or maybe you want the character to remain ephemeral, less fully fleshed.

  I have no such reasons, I’m afraid. He was Sobhi Saleh, a leaden sound, unwieldy. Unfortunately, I still carry his last name like a cross, nailed to it, you might say. His first you can forget. We can jettison it under sea swells, bury it under the silt of the Mediterranean.

  Sobhi. Tfeh!

  When I first married, though, life had possibilities. Beirut, and this building, looked different in the early fifties. A frangipani, long since disappeared, babbled mischievously before the building, spilling fragrance and flowers as I entered. Across the street was a locust tree that has also vanished, uprooted. In the early evening, the neighborhood’s chatter of starlings hadn’t yet been silenced. Among the many definitions of progress, “enemy of trees” and “killer of birds” seem to me the most apt.

  When we moved in, the owner of the building, Hajj Wardeh, his pale face sporting sunglasses, a bristle mustache, and at least three worthy warts, turned out with his family to welcome my husband and me with rice pudding and rose water—an inappropriate double dose, I thought, since the pudding had more rose water than was necessary, and many a rose was beheaded for that dessert. I remember his perfectly tapering fingernails. I remember the first words out of his little daughter’s mouth: “But she’s much taller than he and skinnier.” Fadia, forever long-tongued, was six then. I remember her father’s embarrassment, her mother covering Fadia’s mouth.

  Hajj Wardeh said, “Welcome, family.”

  His title was recently and proudly acquired: he’d just returned from Mecca.

  My black shoes were dyed earth red; I’d lugged two suitcases and several bundles, everything I owned, across town through a parasol pine thicket. Everything I owned including my trousseau: three dresses, one pair of shoes, three pairs of socks (not hose), underwear, two scarves, one gold chain, one bracelet, a brooch of crocheted cherries, two cooking pots, a serving dish that was slightly cracked, five plates, a copper and tin tureen and its ladle, a complete set of silverware for three people, my father’s few things, and two textbooks from that year, which I knew I’d not use again.

  I felt so rich then. The apartment seemed so wide and spacious. I look back now with longing.

  From Pessoa: “Ah, it’s my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me.”

  Aaliya, above it all, separated, disentangled.

  Many Muslim and Christian hajjis are masters of pious dissimulation who covet the title but not the path. Not Hajj Wardeh; he earned his title. He lived by Javertian principles. He was generous and neighborly at first, but once my husband walked out, he wanted nothing to do with me. I might as well have worn a scarlet letter. He forbade his children to interact with me. Fadia, who used to spend all her time in my apartment, began avoiding me, turning her back when I walked by. If she had to talk to me, she employed a haughty and authoritative tone, as if I were her scullery maid. She was only ten or eleven, already an autocrat. Just a bit of that belligerent childhood despotism passed into her adulthood—well, maybe a little more than a bit.

  Even though Hajj Wardeh refused to acknowledge my existence in person, he took my side when it came to the apartment. My husband’s family wanted it, claiming I had no right to it. My own family demanded it, suggesting that any of my brothers was more deserving of it. Hajj Wardeh would brook none of this. The apartment belonged to my husband, and unless my husband himself claimed it, or possibly his future sons, he would not release it to anyone. My husband, of course, could risk no such thing. As long as I paid my rent, Hajj Wardeh considered me his tenant.

  My home, my apartment; in it I live, and move, and have my being.

  My husband’s family forgot about the apartment, but mine didn’t. My mother couldn’t look at me without trying to convince me to leave. My half brothers had large families living in small apartments. They needed it more than I did. They had more difficult lives, they deserved it. It was my familial duty. I was selfish, insensitive, and arrogant. Did I not know what people were saying about my living on my own? My mother was the young United Nations: leave your home, your brothers have suffered, you have other places you can go to, they don’t, get out.

  More than once, my half brothers cursed me. More than once, each one banged on my door in an attempt to terrorize me. Terrorized I was, particularly in the beginning when I felt most vulnerable and the fear of losing my home nibbled at me. I would be in the apartment eating or reading when banging and curses would suddenly erupt from behind the door. My heart would skip, my body would tremble. At times, during the early years of being alone, I felt as if my soul was withering, like a chestnut drying within its shell.

  All that—the banging, the harassing, my brothers’ demands—stopped years and years later, in 1982, during the Israeli siege of Beirut. Many inhabitants of the city had fled and squatters quickly took up residence in the empty homes. Those of us who remained, those who had nowhere else to go, were emotionally weary, fed but not nourished by fear and adrenaline. Thinking that no one was home, three men broke into my apartment in the early dawn. I hopped out of bed, still in my nightgown. There’d been no water for weeks; neither my hair nor my nightgown had been washed in ages. I picked up the AK-47 that lay next to me on the right side, where my husband used to sleep all those years earlier. It kept me company in bed for the whole civil war. Barefoot, I rushed out, brandishing the assault rifle. The men in fatigues took one look at the attacking madwoman and ran out the door—not silently, I might add. I chased after them, but only to the landing, since they’d already reached the ground floor, running in an unathletic manner—twelve independent limbs jerking and flailing haphazardly—a stampede of cartoon cows.

  A shot fired from the fourth floor frightened me out of my hysteria. Fadia had aimed at one of the sandbags at the end of the street. Like me, she only intended to scare them, but she actually fired her rifle.

  “Don’t you dare come back,” she shouted. “This is the smallest gun I have.” Then, to her kids, “Get back inside. There’s nothing to see here.”

  She too hadn’t washed her Medusa hair or her tattered nightgown for quite a while. She probably looked as much a fright as I, but as usual, her fingernails were impeccably manicured. From two floors below, I was able to note the finely shaped scarlet nail of her forefinger pressing the trigger. From inside the apartment her husband shouted that she was insane. She blinked red eyelids at the limpid blue sky. I told her not to shoot anymore or the Israelis would bomb the building. It took her a moment to recognize me.

  “That’s a big gun you have there,” she said.

  Once the story of the crazy women went out, the maenads and their semiautomatic thyrsi, my half brothers stopped demanding the apartment.

  Aaliya, the above, the crazy one.

  I turn o
n the light in the reading room. Though it is barely seven thirty, the dark outside is oppressive. Winter is calling.

  Ever since I retired, my dinnertime changes with the season. When I worked at the bookstore, I used to eat when I returned home, always at a fixed time. Since then, I’m not sure why, I feel hungry as soon as the sun sets and evening begins to fall. My stomach has its own circadian rhythm.

  I feel tired, but it’s too early for bed.

  I decide against making myself a cup of tea. Caffeine in the evening throws my system off kilter, and I can’t abide herbal infusions or the bland taste of the decaffeinated kinds. I say this as if my system were well balanced otherwise.

  Of all the delicious pleasures my body has begun to refuse me, sleep is the most precious, the sacred gift I miss the most. Restful sleep left me its soot. I sleep in fragments, if at all. When I was planning for my later years, I did not expect to spend every night in my darkened bedroom, lids half open, propped up on unfluffable pillows, holding audience with my memories.

  Sleep, the lord of all gods and of all men. Oh, to be the ebb and flow of that vast sea. When I was younger, I could sleep anywhere. I could spread out on a couch, sink into it, forcing it to enfold me, and disappear into the somnolent underworld. Into a luxurious ocean I plunged, into its depth I plummeted.

  Virgil called sleep death’s brother, and Isocrates before him. Hypnos and Thanatos, sons of Nyx. This minimizing of death is unimaginative.

  “Nothing is less worthy of a thinking man than to see death as a slumber,” wrote Pessoa. Basic to sleep is the fact that we wake up from it. Is waking then a resurrection?

  On a couch, on a bed, in a chair, I slept. Lines would melt away from my face. Each quiet tick of the clock rejuvenated me. Why is it that at the age when we need the curative powers of slumber most we least have access to it? Hypnos fades as Thanatos approaches.

  When I was planning for my later years, I hadn’t considered that I’d be spending sleepless nights reliving earlier years. I hadn’t thought I’d miss the bookstore as much as I do.