“Last time we spoke, you didn’t tell me you were coming so soon…!” Olga comments. She’s harassed me with this same comment since I arrived in Beirut. It’s as though she doubts everything I say and doesn’t believe I’ve returned simply to reclaim the house in Zuqaq al-Blat. I don’t tell Olga that I’ve read her doctor’s report and his description of a treatment that she rejected. I’ve also seen the test analyses and results.
I’ve collected no fewer than thirteen suitcases during my scattered migrations between Lebanon, Australia and Kenya. I put what I need in these suitcases. I still don’t understand why a person would need to empty her suitcases. My suitcase has become my home. I’ve become a suitcase expert — special suitcases for backache, others that hold a lot though they weigh very little. I’ve had to find extra space in my house to put the suitcases, safe places I can get to easily when I need to.
“What a surrealistic life!” My English husband Chris mounts a reserved protest as he counts the suitcases piled one on top of the other.
“How many lives do you need to fill all those?” he asks, adding yet another comment: that I should be reincarnated and live other lives in order to fill all these suitcases. According to him, I do nothing in Mombasa except “try to find a permanent location to store my travel apparatus.” This is how he describes my suitcases, trying to make a joke. When we first knew each other, his sarcastic comments would make me stop and think. I used to believe that there was poetry in his remarks and that he needed great powers of imagination to create these sentences. But with time, I’m no longer interested in these kinds of comments. I no longer laugh at his jokes; instead they make me angry. I now believe that he’s so sarcastic because he can’t understand that I can only calm my fears and ease my time in Mombasa by creating stable, settled places within this kind of temporary residence and deferred departure. I’ve started putting in ear plugs, those little wax balls wrapped in cotton, when he talks nonstop about his research and other ideas. I nod my head, agreeing with what he’s saying as if I’m listening. I see him talking on and on, gesturing with his fingers, hands and arms. He looks like one of those sign-language interpreters on the six o’clock TV news broadcast. When he makes a circular motion with his fingers that means that everything’s going as he wants it to, I don’t really understand him. I laugh and doze off. No doubt I doze off while laughing.
My life feels like interrupted sequences of time, like scenes in a film that begin just as another scene ends. My memory of everything that has happened is not continuous, but circular. I always come back to where I began. When I tell my doctor this, he tries to reassure me, saying that circular memory is a peculiarity of women and that men remember differently. But I don’t find this answer logical. I mix up the relationship between events and places. I’ll be thinking about the day we left Beirut and then find myself suddenly jumping to the years that I’ve spent with Chris in Kenya. Perhaps this is why my story now takes on a circular and sometimes spiral form.
I live in Adelaide for four years that pass like the taste of the wind. I stay eleven years in Mombasa, always on the verge of leaving. “On the verge”—this expression perfectly summarizes a life scattered between Australia and Kenya. I’m like someone waiting to get out but who, at the very same time, isn’t even inside. Between inside and outside, I live a suspended life, like someone waiting in a purgatory with locked doors, no bridge, no way out. I remember what Mary Douglas, the anthropologist and scholar, said in a book I read in Australia when I was trying to finish my Masters thesis. She described the state of being in-between, or “in-betweenness.” She said that people pass through this stage and move into another one, which is clearer, when their lives and relationships become more regulated. My situation in no way resembles Douglas’s description. For me, “in-betweenness” is a permanent way of life that will never change or be transformed into any other state.
I am going to Beirut, then.
In the Dubai airport, I pass my time in a bar on the first floor. I choose it because it has large sofas that allow me to stretch out and relax. I have to wait six hours for the plane to take me to Beirut. I have to wait what seems like a whole night. Time passes in a strange way here. I don’t feel like it’s nighttime, nor do I fall asleep. The place seems like a giant space station stuffed full of jewelry, toys, gifts and food. A world full of light that never sleeps. A place that I imagine withers and dies when people leave it, as if it’s an imaginary world that doesn’t exist. As if it’s on television. The music of the whole world plays here all at once. Filipinos and Indians and Sri Lankans and Europeans and Americans. People from every country in the world walk through this airport’s halls. The place lives off of them; they illuminate it. But emptiness consumes its heart, just as the desert sand consumes buildings and transforms them into skeletons that age at the speed of light.
The man in his fifties who sits on the other end of this sofa is turning the pages of an English newspaper and when I’m about to sit down he adjusts how he’s sitting, closing and folding the newspaper as if offering me more space. I don’t need more space; the pages of the newspaper don’t hinder my movements. I put my suitcase on the seat across from me, my book and papers on the table. He starts gathering up his stuff as though getting himself ready for a trip he’s unprepared for. He seems puzzled and concerned with knowing the identity of this woman who’s sitting near him — that is to say, me — so he raises his head after a few minutes and, smiling, asks me in English, “Traveling to Beirut?”
I nod in response to his trivial question, glancing at him to be sure that this voice was his. He adds, smiling, that he’s a sorcerer and in touch with the supernatural. His smile broadens as he looks at then nods toward my passport on the table in front of me, with my Middle East Airlines ticket sticking out of it. An unimpressive attempt at seduction, I say to myself wearily. I need a better, more powerful seduction to conjure up a passion I haven’t lived for a long time. Despite this, a flood of feelings, like what children feel when they rush off to play with a new toy, sweeps me away. Feelings of fear and excitement together. I can smell his cologne from this distance. Perhaps it’s the scent of his skin. When he stands up and comes closer, he seems cleaner and livelier than a traveler usually can be.
“My name is Nour.”
He says to me in English, extending his arm out in front of him as though to shake my hand. Nour… I smile. I didn’t expect him to have an Arabic name with his American accent. He’s wearing jeans and a blue shirt with thin white stripes. He acts as though he’s spent a long time preparing for the excursion to come over and introduce himself to me. He asks if he can share my hot chocolate and then gently places my leather suitcase beside me so that he can sit down across from me before I’ve even answered.
I don’t know how much time passes before I look him in the eyes. Without extending my hand, I say in English, slowly and neutrally, “I am Myriam.”
Slow and neutral, I think, while sipping hot chocolate, which burns my tongue and the roof of my mouth… “Slowly and neutrally.” I keep reminding myself that since leaving Beirut my behavior has been formed by a selection of well-learned techniques that I use to connect or not to connect to people. He tells me that he’s lived in America since he was ten years old and that he left it for Lebanon this year. He was visiting Dubai for just a week for his work as a journalist and now is returning to Lebanon because he was born there and wants to get to know the country that he hasn’t visited since 1967. He’s returning to search for his roots. It’s amusing to me that when talking about his roots, repeating the same sentence many times, he curls his lips and raises his voice higher and sharper than before: