Nour returns from Amman. It’s early evening and I’m lying down reading a book. I guess I’d dozed off because I glance up at the clock above the door before I hear the doorbell ring and get up out of bed. When I open the door I see him standing there, leaning against the wall as if he’s about to lose hope of ever seeing me again. He’s brought me the bags of Dead Sea salt that I’d asked for. He tells me that he’s calling off the search for his roots. He says this on the verge of tears. He seems defeated, having lost all hope of finding any members of his family who are still alive. No doubt he’s discovered that it’s dangerous to feel hope in Beirut and that his search is futile.
I’m still half asleep and feel troubled when we go out together. I wasn’t prepared for him to come by or even to see him just like that, all of a sudden. I’m not prepared to listen to his frustration about the journey to search for his roots, which at this precise moment means nothing to me. I didn’t even look in the mirror before I opened the door to him and only later realized how I must have looked when he first saw me. I have the feeling that he’s betrayed me with this visit, as though he’s forcibly entered a place intimate to me, one I don’t want him to enter. We walk along the sea in the Manara neighborhood. He starts talking and I don’t want to talk. Suddenly, as though to anger me, he tells me that I’ve inherited my mother’s silence. My mother, whom he’s never met in his life, whom he knows only from the stories I’ve told him. Then he asks me if I want to sit down at a nearby café, across the road from the Corniche, because it’s starting to rain.
Nour wants to spend the night with me. He doesn’t want to go home and spend the night alone after his discouraging visit to Amman. I give him a t-shirt to wear. It used to be Chris’s and I often wear it to sleep because it’s comfortable and its cotton is soft to the touch. It looks almost exactly the same on him as it looks on Chris because they’re about the same size, though Nour is a little shorter. It doesn’t matter to me that he’s wearing a t-shirt that belongs to a man who even at this moment is still technically my husband. It all seems simple and self evident.
“I want to go back to my country,” he says, searching for a match to light my cigarette. He keeps repeating that he wants to go back to his country. The fool doesn’t know — he doesn’t know that I want to be his country.
Mere hours after he leaves my apartment I see him in the street and I don’t believe this is the same Nour, the Nour who was in bed with me all night. He’s walking sluggishly, with little confidence. He looks around him anxiously, a man who has lost hope. “Nour, hi!” I call out to him from the sidewalk on the other side of the street. He hears a voice but doesn’t see me at first. A few seconds pass before he notices me. Then he turns toward me, his face showing only slight surprise. From far away and with too big a smile on his face he shouts, “Oh hello! Is that you?” Then, as if he wants to make up for the inappropriate sentence he’s just uttered, one not suited to two people who just a few hours ago were in bed making love, he mouths to me silently, you are my love… He looks strange standing like that on the other side of the street.
I can’t see his shadow. Moments pass and I’m still searching for his shadow behind him.
It’s exactly midday. He is standing in front of me like the upright hands of a clock at midday. I think that everything we’ve done together in bed has brought us closer, that the sexual pleasure we shared brought us neither closer to God nor to hell. Perhaps we were somewhere between the two. The animal words we exchanged left behind an aggressive, thrilling heat. The effects of an action never end. Even now, I don’t know quite how to describe the moments between us. It’s as if what happens between us is a dream, something unreal. Moments that occur outside time can’t return to memory.
We exchange words, which the two sides of the street interrupt, as if we’re carrying something heavy between us and we don’t know where to take it. This heavy thing wants each of us to be done with it. At that moment a strange feeling surrounds me. I feel that his words may reflect what’s inside him, but they remain deep inside him. They stay inside and never come out into the open. These words are, “How heavy life is, how difficult life is to live.”
I haven’t found anything in Beirut, I think. I’ve found nothing but a companion on my journey of loss.
My brother was killed. Less than two years after his death we found a way to leave Lebanon. Many things happened between these two events. The first is that my grandmother Nahil tried to marry off her son Salama again. For the sake of the family name and inheritance and so that the house would “remain open and never be closed,” as she always used to say.
Nahil had to find a way to put this that would convince Nadia to let Salama marry again. To remarry, my father would have to first divorce my mother. In our religion — despite the fact that for marriage, theoretically, we follow the Hanafi school of law — a man cannot be married to more than one woman at a time.
Nadia offered no resistance. She didn’t leave the big house and return to her family’s house, which had been closed up since my only maternal uncle, Yusuf, left for Australia. It’s as if her husband’s remarriage was no more than a game to her.
While my grandmother was still talking, trying to convince Nadia of all the reasons that this plan of hers was necessary, Nadia indicated with her hand that none of this made any difference to her. Perhaps my mother no longer wanted anything or anyone. She had transformed into a box made of flesh, totally closed in on itself and content that way, with no needs or desires. All she did was sit all day long on my brother’s bed and stare at his many photographs.
She was satisfied by going back to the old books she had brought with her when she came to her new house after marrying my father. Salama and Nadia’s divorce never happened, since my father remarried as a Sunni Muslim. This all happened at the speed of light. Nahil was compelled to go along with this solution to the problem, despite her Druze faith, which caused a huge uproar in the extended family, especially among the men.
Nahil brought a woman in her thirties from Jordan, where most of my grandmother’s relatives have settled. She was a widow who had lost her husband in 1970 during the troubles between the Palestinian fedayeen and the Jordanian army. They were married the day the bride arrived because Nahil was afraid that the woman would change her mind when she met my father in person and saw how sick he was. She had to pay off everyone at the court that day to get it all over with quickly. That’s what she told Olga.
After the shaykh registered their marriage, she brought the bride back to the house, into the living room, holding her hand. She pointed to my father, who had entered the room before them and was standing and staring at the suitcase that his new wife had leaned against the sofa. She said, “Yellah, that’s your husband. We want a boy in nine months!”
Nadia watched all of this happen. No one from the extended family came to witness the registering of Salama’s marriage. Olga attended, as did the brother of the new wife, who accompanied her from Jordan, despite his obvious limp and leg pain, both of which made it necessary for him to remain seated.
None of the men of the family accepted what Nahil had done. They told her that she was “making decisions and doing whatever she wants” as though our family had no men in it.
They also said that Hamza never managed to discipline her, not even once, and maybe Salama went mad because of her, not because of the shrapnel in his head.
The women of the family said that this was a cursed day and that Nahil had sinned. They said that she shouldn’t defy God’s will — if our family had been destined to have a male heir who would carry on the family name, my brother wouldn’t have died.