On the night before her death, Nahil called for Olga and asked her to help her take a shower. When Olga tried to put the shower off until morning, she got agitated and screamed at her. Olga bathed her and poured water infused by bay leaves on her damp hair and rosewater all over her body. When Olga wrapped her in a big towel, Nahil took her hand and asked her to help her get to her bed.
The old woman seemed exhausted and couldn’t walk. When she got to her bed she seemed refreshed and asked Olga to sit near her. She took Olga’s hand, drew it to her again, then put it between her thighs, saying, “Look… it’s like I’m still a young woman.” When Olga tried to move away, Nahil pressed her hand and asked, “You’ve been with a man, of course?” Olga withdrew her hand and started to lift the towel off of her to help her put on her nightgown and said, impatient and exhausted because of her illness, “No!”
“You haven’t experienced a man’s liquid?” Nahil asked.
“No… It’s better this way,” Olga answered.
“This was the first time she’d started to lose her mind.” This is what Olga told me, her face betraying an unspoken anxiety for Nahil.
The next day, Nahil didn’t wake up. She was stretched out on her bed as though asleep.
I see Olga fading away and I can’t say anything. I’m not ready for another loss. This is too much for one year.
Shortly before my return to Lebanon, Intisar sent me a report from Olga’s doctor so I could show it to a British doctor who’s a friend of my husband’s. The doctor had told her that she should begin chemotherapy, but Olga refuses to submit to this kind of treatment. On the phone I asked Intisar to check up on Olga and see how she’s doing. I’ve never had the courage to bring up the subject of her cancer with her, as though bad news will get better, or less harsh, if it passes through other people’s mouths before it reaches me.
It’s hard for her to accept her emaciation and the changes in her appearance. But the Olga that I know and love endures, as does her perpetual movement, its remnants overcoming her atrophying body and yellowing face.
In my early adolescence, we slept in the same bed. She reached out to touch my body. She taught me pleasure. She kissed me on my mouth and then asked me to kiss her as she kissed me. In my first relationship with a boy, who was only a year older than me, I relied on the sexual knowledge that Olga had passed on to me. She was the one who supplied me with my first instructions. The discovery that men had different parts than Olga and I did was a surprise. We took off our underclothes before sleeping, as she’d learned to do in her convent boarding school, run by French-speaking Swiss nuns. Then she would tell me about her mad grandmother, who was a bad cook and boiled everything in salt water. She told me she’d never had herbs or spices until she moved in with Nahil after her grandmother’s death, when she hadn’t yet reached seven years of age.
In bed, Olga repeated the story of her birth and the death of her mother Myriam, after whom I’d been named by my grandmother Nahil — even though my mother had chosen another name, Asmahan. Olga told the story of how her grandmother had raised her and how, when her grandmother was dying, she asked my grandmother Nahil to take her in, although the family disapproved of a Druze woman adopting a Christian girl. As was her habit, my stubborn grandmother didn’t listen to anyone. She took Olga in, Olga who had no parents, and sent her to the convent boarding school to study just like the other Christian girls in the area.
The reason my grandmother agreed to care for Olga and educate her like her own daughter, despite the difference in age and sect between them, goes back to a story dating seven years before I was born, a story exactly the same age as Olga herself. While Myriam was at home giving birth to her daughter Olga, my father’s sister, who had been born with an incomplete, deformed heart, was struggling, taking her dying breaths in the hospital. My grandmother was in the hospital room beside her daughter, facing the doctor, who advised her to take her daughter home so she could die in her own bed, in peace among her family. The young woman lost consciousness and everyone thought that she had died, but a few moments later she awoke, saying that she’d just seen her mother giving birth to her not far from her family’s house. She saw herself as an infant trying to escape a narrow, dark tunnel. She saw herself for a few moments in the darkness of the womb.
“Hurry up, make me beautiful, dress me, my mother’s giving birth to me! My mother’s giving birth to me, the cross around her neck is dripping sweat,” my young aunt said feebly. Then she stopped moving and fell silent. It wasn’t hard for anyone there to guess the identity of the girl born at the exact moment my aunt died. My aunt died while Myriam was giving birth to a little girl at home, beside her the midwife who had come especially from Aley to help her. Myriam herself died only one day after giving birth to her beautiful baby girl. They said that her placenta, which refused to come out, poisoned her. The baby carried her name from the moment of her birth. While she was losing consciousness, her mother called her Olga. Everyone who believes in the transmigration of souls believes that when my aunt died she was newly reborn.
Olga cries every time incense is burned. When I ask her why she cries she tells me that the smell hurts her heart. She believes the smell pains her to the point of death and that Nahil told her how she discovered Hamza’s betrayal from the changed smell of his skin and breath whenever he came home after being away. Nahil told her that she knew about his betrayal from the beginning, but she chose never to bring up the issue with him. Every time he came back from seeing the other woman, she would ask him about his work selling ice. She told him that the trade in ice was a losing proposition and that he needed to change his business.
The hospital waiting room is drowning in sick people and there’s only one empty seat, right beside an enormous ashtray filled with cigarette butts. I offer the seat to Olga and stand next to her, waiting for our turn. I know what the doctor will say. I know there’s no magic cure for Olga’s illness except in fairy tales. But I wait to hear what the doctor will say. I wait for him, looking past him at the x-ray he’s busy hanging on a transparent white board that emits light.
“I haven’t visited Dhour al-Choueir for years,” Olga says with something like hope. “There’s an old hotel, an old house whose owners turned it into a hotel. Take me there. I want us to go there together on the weekend.”
Olga and I never ever speak about our relationship— things happen between us spontaneously, without words. I’ve learned how a woman takes off her clothes in front of another person. I have always felt, in the depths of my heart, that my relationship with her was a temporary way station, as I waited for another experience that would be more real. When I told her this, she laughed and hugged me. I waited for her to tell me that what I was living with her would be the most real thing in my life. But she didn’t say anything. Her smile betrayed a certain compassion for a younger girl that always left me uncertain. Many years have passed and I can still taste Olga’s skin on my lips.
That’s magic, right? Magic, by God! She tells me flamboyantly, describing the aromas of the dishes she loves that fill the house. With her left hand she lifts the cover of the pot on the fire and with her right hand she stirs what’s boiling in the pot. She sprinkles in the spices she likes, then lifts the spoon to her lips and tastes the food. “Oh mama, how delicious,” she says. She’ll cover the pot and start to sing. She’ll look at me and say, “Your eyes are still just like they were when you were small. Your eyes were always full of questions. It’s as if they devour the answers, every word, every motion, whether coming from a human or an animal. They’re never satisfied, like open lips thirsty for a sip of water.”