No doubt malaria is on the rise because of these habits, because it has gotten used to his habits!
As for me, I’m not sure of anything. I can accept and refuse something with equal ease. The more years I live in Mombasa, the more difficult I find it to have habits. But what does is it mean to be a woman without habits, not even drinking coffee in bed? He comes to me, sure that the hand he rests on my shoulder has the magic of the serums that he spends his whole day with in the lab. He loses his patience after a few minutes and leaves after I say for the thousandth time that I miss playing, that play is ageless and that I’m slowly dying here. He leaves me and goes out. I walk over and turn on the tape recorder so that Asmahan’s voice will rise out of it, reverberating in revenge. I go back to the book that I had in my hand before Chris entered. I read, “Nietzsche was right when he said that original sin pushed us toward a perpetual feeling of hatred, and that ‘god’ is a lethal invention — it’s difficult to believe in a god who doesn’t dance.”
I narrated my Beirut and Australia lives to Eva, my neighbor in Mombasa. Now that I’ve returned to Beirut, it’s easy to narrate my Kenya tales to Olga, whom I missed and who missed me. But why do I remember all this now, when it’s behind me? Is it because the past remains forever part of our future and never goes away? I narrate my life in Kenya to Olga, thinking of Nour and what’s happened between us. Meeting him has been something strange. As though I left Kenya and came back specifically to find him — not to reclaim the house that I’d lost. I’ve returned to Beirut in search of a dancing god, but found instead a companion for my journey of loss.
Chris sends me a second letter. I’ve only been here two months. I feel like he wrote all his letters before even I left him.
I don’t like visiting Australia with Chris because I have to spend so much time traveling with him from one city to another to visit his children and family. He insists that I accompany him when I just want to stay at home with my mother and listen to what she tells me about my father, herself and her work. We speak English together, my mother and I, and it doesn’t bother me. It’s enough that she’s speaking again, it doesn’t matter in what language. The last time I visited Adelaide, Nadia greeted me with less silence, with words that I’d missed from her for so long. We hugged as if each of us had found the other after having been lost. She’s taken intensive English classes and her silence disappears completely when she speaks a foreign language. A few years ago she started working part-time in an organization that looks after immigrants who come from countries that have gone through civil wars. She gave me a small gray cat, saying that she found it that morning. She brought it in, washed it, fed it, and gave it an English name, Gray, because of its color. A cat to replace her cat, Pussycat, in Beirut. I was happy for my mother, who looked like a girl suddenly taking her first steps. My mother has gotten used to her life in Australia and when I read something to her about Lebanon, she tells me that she doesn’t want to hear anything and never wants to go back.
I take Nadia and Salama to the public park. Salama arrives a few steps ahead of us and enters the park, greeting the gatekeeper and the cleaners. He doesn’t sit with us for long, but gets up and starts walking back and forth from left to right across the park. “They respect me more here.
I feel like I am a respected human being here,” he always says to me, while engaged in what seems to be his only hobby in Adelaide — constantly, never-endingly, crossing the street. He goes out and steps into the crosswalk; drivers are surprised by him and slam on their brakes so they won’t run him over. Cars stop for him and my father completes his journey to the other sidewalk, joyful and proud. The cars then take off, their drivers cursing and swearing at him in English, which doesn’t bother my father. He doesn’t understand what’s happening around him. All he knows is that the whole world stops for him the moment he leaves home or the park for the street. Cars stop for him and then continue, then other cars come and stop and then continue. Salama keeps on crossing the street going from one sidewalk to the other. The signal changes from red to orange then to green and Salama continues his game, the cars honking. A man sticks his head out a car window and starts cursing Salama, who doesn’t understand what’s being said to him. In fact, he looks forward and just keeps walking. He stops when he gets angry, in the middle of the street, to tell the driver who hurls his words into the air, “You don’t know who you’re talking to, boy!” It doesn’t take long for these short bursts of anger to change into smiles. Salama smiles at the brightly colored cars that shine even when the sun disappears. Cars shine in the shade like the eyes of Beirut’s street cats. But he isn’t in Beirut, I think while sitting near my mother, who’s reading her book.
My mother has gotten used to my father’s madness and accepts it as her lot in life. I keep a careful eye on him, his mouth agape with a wide smile. All the while Salama keeps moving ceaselessly between the two sidewalks. I can’t keep watching him; I turn away from him as though his movements are an affliction. “Leave him, leave him be,” my mother, who’s used to his madness, tells me, “don’t worry.” It’s raining hard but my father doesn’t care. It’s July, the height of summer, he says, the rain’s just fleeting and it’ll pass quickly. My father never accepts that it’s winter in July and that rain lasts for months here. He lifts his head toward the gray sky, where there are clouds that can’t reach him and words that still trouble him, the words of my grandfather Hamza, which remain planted in his mind, body and soul. Hamza is dead but Salama has never healed from the violence of these words. Even though these violent words can no longer reach him, he hasn’t healed. I leave the wooden bench on the sidewalk and walk toward him, while my mother takes shelter in a small kiosk in the center of the park, fleeing from the rain. I try to grab my father. But he keeps walking back into the crosswalk, heading from one side of the street to the other, rain completely soaking his clothes. I don’t know what to do. I look for my mother and see her running toward us, holding her book over her head to keep it from getting wet. I hold onto my father’s arm, water pouring down from his hair into his eyes and over his face. My mother reaches us and extends her arm to Salama and meekly he stops moving, muttering unintelligible words. He holds onto Nadia’s arm and the three of us pass through the neighborhood park in Paradise, crossing the street while my mother takes the house key out of her purse, saying that it’ll be night soon and we should get back.
In the first days after my return to Lebanon I have to prepare a number of legal documents to present to the Ministry of the Displaced. They tell me that it’s a matter of days. But now I’ve been in Beirut for more than three months and am still filling out forms whose purpose I can’t understand. The last forms I had to fill out were exactly the same as the ones I’d filled out the time before. When I let the government employee see my irritation and bewilderment, he answers me with open sarcasm, “Don’t worry, ma’am, you can practice your writing skills.”