Now that I have returned from Mombasa, I want to visit the doctor. I want to complain to him about my inability to conceive. Perhaps I choose him specifically because I need to hear that I’m fine, that I can conceive, that this is a superficial, passing problem. Who better to tell me this than the person who took the embryo out of my tender, living uterus and threw it away? But he’s no longer here. He was murdered.
I want to visit the places imprinted on my imagination and experience flashes of memories. I’ve left a man behind me in Mombasa and returned to Beirut. I want to re-tell my story with Georges, not to make it live anew but to feel it flash through my body. But his story is lost, just as he is. Georges didn’t follow me and I could never mourn openly. I could never mourn and so couldn’t heal. How could I mourn him when he wasn’t my husband or brother or father or at least fiancé? He was the father of a baby who was never born. He was just my lover. When a lover dies we bury our sadness with him and can never show it in public.
I have left a man in Kenya and I want to reclaim my story from him, but stories can’t be reclaimed. I have to discover the rest of my story with Georges, discover his story and why he disappeared. Which story do I begin with, when they’re all my stories? I return for all this, but I don’t know that every return is a disappearance, because the past never returns. A return is only another sign of absence.
But what do I have to do to excavate my life, like a gravedigger who isn’t yet convinced that the dead won’t return?
I also came to take possession of the keys to my house, the one that my father inherited from his father, the keys to a house that has no gates. The house in Zuqaq al-Blat has five entrances, whose gates my grandfather painted different colors: green, yellow, brown and blue. All of them open onto a courtyard that from the entrance of the house appears walled in, though it’s only a little bigger than a crescent. We inherited the house from my grandfather Hamza. My old grandfather, whom I only remember from a picture that shows him as tall, with a cane and tarboush. I was very young when he passed away. From Nahil’s stories, I’ve invented a roaring voice for him and I’ve imagined us hiding from him at the end of the hallway when he came home. I’ve imagined the sound of the keys to the house ringing in my ears.
Nahil says that no one but Hamza could carry the keys; they were attached to his wide cloth belt, which changed into a leather belt a few years before he died. Salama never dared ask his father for the keys. After Hamza died, Salama inherited the house and its five keys. The first thing he did was to open up all the gates, asking Nadia to leave them open for the three days people came to the house to offer their condolences, to shake hands and console the family with a few words, then leave.
Salama went mad after our house was bombed. A small piece of shrapnel the size of a lentil, as the doctor describes it, drove him mad. It entered his brain and remains lodged there. We were all saved but Baha’, who was on the balcony at the time, and never came back. I try to recall that night, the voices and fighting and the decisive announcement that we should leave the house and go down to the ground floor. But then my mother decided that we should stay where we are. I don’t know why all of a sudden she decided that we’d stay home that night. Oh, if only my mother had known that my father would go mad and my brother would be killed.
The people who occupied the house after we left for the mountains used only one door. The other four stayed locked. Those strong iron locks, which neither bombs nor bullets could destroy, rusted. The residents made an opening in the wall and used that as the main entrance because it protected them from the bombs that came both from East Beirut and the city center.
I wonder why houses aren’t for temporary use, like lives are. When I was a child my grandmother used to tell me how my grandfather brought many large door lintels to the house, each decorated with words like talismans. He brought men to carve sentences on the columns, which rested above the doors horizontally, sentences that I couldn’t understand back then.
He also built a big room and put a giant stone fireplace in one of its corners. Nahil says that once when I was a little girl and Hamza was sitting with some guests, proudly reading them the words that he’d had carved on the house’s columns and walls, I went up to him to ask, “Why go to all this effort, jiddo? You’ll die soon and the house will be all alone. Why didn’t you build a house that’s your same age and will die when you do?”
Nahil says that my grandfather Hamza was perplexed; he didn’t respond but called her over to tell her what I’d said. Perhaps Hamza couldn’t believe that I’d asked such a question. He constantly proclaimed that life required hard work and continual effort; to think otherwise would not to be tolerated. He inherited this work ethic from his mother, who attended an Anglican primary school in Damascus.
Salama was also raised like this, although he was a Druze, which at the end of the day isn’t so different from Protestantism in terms of its work ethic. But he didn’t replicate his father’s passion for hard work. Indeed, his whole life, Hamza refused to support his projects and criticized him constantly to Nahil, “Your son, what use is he? He doesn’t carry his own weight. He doesn’t do anything.” Nahil intervened to defend her son, saying that he did work and struggled hard in his work. Hamza would shake his head, rejecting Nahil’s claims, further alleging that nothing useful could ever come of Salama’s work and repeating angrily, “He’s a baker whose bread won’t rise— no matter what he does, his bread won’t rise.”
We build houses meant to last for centuries but we live in them for only a few years. We make things to last, perhaps only to forget our own impending death. Hamza never wanted to die. As Nahil used to say, he kept fighting right to the last moment of his life. He built and decorated the house to fight against death. Most people do the same, of course. Had Hamza been rich, perhaps he would have decorated his house in gold instead of stone, so that then his certain death would be more disturbing and resonate more loudly.
Nour takes me to the mountain house where Olga and Nahil live. I want him to spend the night, but he makes his excuses. He says that he’s traveling the next morning to Amman and then, from there, to Baghdad. In the early evening I stretch out on the sofa in the sitting room and when I get up I realize that Olga’s gone to sleep early. I’ve awoken from a strange dream. The next morning, I tell Olga about this dream. I dreamed of Nour, the man I met after I left Kenya, about Chris, my husband who waits for me in Mombasa, and about the late Georges, whom I haven’t seen in more than sixteen years. I dream about these three while asleep in the sitting room. In the dream Georges put wood on the fire and told the other two the story of his life. I could see myself lying on the big sofa, listening, yawning, with a pleasant warm feeling — that these three men of mine were all friends and that I could love them all, each in his own way. I was no longer suffering because of the different experiences of love, the meaning and content of which varied with each man. In the dream I was warm and content; my whole life lay ahead of me, without interruption, like a wide-open plain that hides no secrets.