I return to Mombasa from South Africa. My Austrian neighbor Eva accompanies me with new environmental books about droughts and deforestation that she’s collected from the tables of the conference she attended. She also bears gifts for her husband. She’s returning with her two children, who joined her in her free time in the hotel room, the pool and in a rental car on excursions to waterfalls and shopping. I return with a small half-empty suitcase and a puppy that was a gift from Joe. When I’m with Eva, I long for the feeling of being a mother. I long to feel as I would have if I’d kept my baby and not had an abortion, out of fear of people in Beirut and the scandal. Ever since then I’ve wanted to recover and I haven’t been able to.
The migraine follows me like it’s my shadow. I hurry to my bed, which I’ve truly missed. Chris comes over to me, trying to flirt with me. He wraps his arms around me and draws me to him while trying to pull off my nightgown. My body resists, it wraps around itself like someone closing a window they’d left unlocked. I cover my body completely and tell him that my migraine hasn’t relented for even one minute. I tell him this because I know it’s the only way to keep him off of me. I have avoided him since I learned from my doctor that I can’t conceive. He asks me, flirtatiously, if I met anyone I was attracted to there; in the voice of someone who’s given up, he adds that he wouldn’t have a problem with it. I don’t answer but when hovering between sleep and waking I think that my loneliness when I’m with him has begun to tire him — my loneliness that he prefers to call fidelity, refusing to pursue short-lived affairs when I’m away. The heaviness of our mute relationship exhausts him, since, in his heart of hearts, he believes that life should not be so serious. But he prefers to play his role— the role of husband. In that moment, I think that I’m there beside him by accident, hanging on only because of an arbitrary equation: I don’t love him enough to forget that I was left hanging, always waiting to leave, and I don’t hate him enough to leave.
This means it is over, the relationship is over!
“This means the relationship’s over…” Eva says when I tell her how I feel, as though she’s discovered something important.
But who said anything about a lack of love or the end of the relationship? I ask her, thinking that I’m passing through something normal, like the movement of water in the ocean near my house in Mombasa, the ebb and flow of the tide. What I’m living isn’t lack of love or the relationship’s end. No… no, not at all. It’s just a perpetual, repeated, never-ending tidying up of my emotional house.
In the beginning of my marriage to Chris, I thought that our lack of understanding was born of our two different languages, and that clarity and honesty would fix this. But I’ve discovered that my style only widens the gulf between us; my clarity ends any ambiguity about whether we might build something together and ensures that the problem isn’t misunderstanding, but an estrangement that will only increase with time and take us down a path from which there is no return.
“Lost in translation!”
He always throws this cliché in my face, naively trying to lay the blame on our different languages. He’ll say it over and over, trying to find common points between us, but this expression feels like an insult to me. Whenever he says it I feel like he’s swearing at me. The problem isn’t the difference in language but a lack of language. This misunderstanding used to exhaust me but in time I surrendered to it. “Surrender” isn’t the right word. Indeed, I could almost say that misunderstanding has become a source of amusement for me, so much so that I have begun to use intentionally few words. It took a long time for me to discover the pleasure of vagueness. This discovery was accompanied by another discovery: that I need and miss the pleasure of a man who makes me laugh. When I realized this, I started laughing spontaneously, leaving Chris to guess at the reason for my laughter. I knew this would irritate him and eventually he’d give up. In the end he has gotten used to it.
He has begun attributing my behavior to our different experiences of married life. His first marriage to a British woman and second to an Iranian woman seem to make him believe that our misunderstandings result from my lack of experience, my failure to understand marriage and relationships between couples. It’s hard to know what his marriage to a third woman who is a different age and has different experiences and a different culture than his previous two wives means to him. But I know that he doesn’t miss me when I’m traveling. And I miss so many things and live with so much loss that this fact just becomes a part of my life. I know, though, that he’ll always write me many letters. Letters that will tell me about his day and then always linger over memories we share… Like how we met for the first time in the airport, when the Australian police called him to search my father — the shrapnel lodged in my father’s head made the electronic security checkpoint beep every time my father passed through it. Chris will write to me about the second time we met, in his clinic, and how he used to visit us to follow up on my father’s health after we moved out of my uncle’s house to our own place in Adelaide.
The first time we met, he entered the room next to the police office in the Australian airport and immediately walked up to my father and me, saying hello and apologizing for being late because of an emergency at the hospital. I no longer remember what he first said to my father when he learned that we’d arrived recently from Lebanon, but he told us that he too was born there and he knew the village of Shemlan, but that he hadn’t visited since he left Lebanon in 1958. He remembered people from Shemlan whom my father also knew.
My father was always relaxed and less worried when Chris visited. Chris would go over to my father and pat his shoulder like an affectionate father. A relationship sprang up between them, and quickly it seemed as though they’d been friends for a long time. My father never seemed as sick when Chris was there telling him stories that happened in Lebanon a long time ago, before I was born. Chris would visit frequently to check on his health and play backgammon with him, a game which Salama had practically abandoned after my brother Baha’’s death. I imagined that having Chris with us might heal the wounds of our family, stricken with death and loss. This was how a relationship developed between us, between Chris and me. I didn’t want it to be anything more than a friendship; with time it transformed into a comforting habit, with no passion or desire. I remember the first meeting of our bodies — he asked me if he could take off his clothes. I found this strange and amusing. We got married four years after I arrived in Adelaide, after I’d lost any hope of seeing Georges ever again. My marriage to Chris is like a compensation for the care and concern that he gives my father, whose madness it’s become difficult for me to bear on my own. And I want to have a child to fill the place of the baby I’d lost in Beirut — the fetus I had to abort to avoid the scandal.