We leave Lebanon for Adelaide two years after my brother Baha’’s death and my grandmother Nahil’s failed attempts to get my father to have another son by a younger wife. My uncle Yusuf comes up with the idea of immigration in a letter. He tells us that staying in Lebanon is a slow suicide and that my mother’s silence and my father’s madness are both signs of this. The day we leave, my sick father still thinks that his mother Nahil will be traveling with us to Australia. Even though she’s told him, “Here and there are just the same, why would I travel?” following up with, “Every country on earth is just the same, everywhere you go, all people are the same too.” When we leave, she doesn’t wait at the door like someone who has come to see people off; she doesn’t cry in front of us. Rather, she turns her back after saying goodbye to my father and goes into her room, locking the door behind her. To someone from the outside looking at her, she might appear angry at her son Salama. Angry that he’s failed to take care of us, angry that his second marriage, which she arranged for him, has failed, that he’s failed to have another son who could take Baha’’s place. Angry that the family is splitting apart despite her belief in her efforts to plan its future. But I know that there are sure to be tears in her eyes at the moment of farewell. I know that after she locks the door behind her she takes out the Hikmeh, which she keeps with meticulous care in her closet, and opens it, letting the pages fall open at random and reading whatever passage it opens to. She reads, peering into the words transcribed in front of her in a wide, black, zigzagging handwriting, and seeks a full future for the family. Only at that moment would Nahil’s faith return to her and her anger pass. She’d stop doubting that the future the book shows her would be realized. It’s as though for her the future were a film playing over and over, its scenes seeming more natural each time.
My grandmother Nahil won’t agree to leave with us, just as in the past she wouldn’t agree to leave her house in the mountains and come with my grandfather Hamza to live in Beirut after he bought the Turkish Damad family’s building in Zuqaq al-Blat. This is likely because she believed that my grandfather Hamza would no longer put effort into his work or business after buying this two-story building. “The threshold to this house is ill-fated,” she used to always repeat, adding, “Nothing pure nor good can come from nourishment you’ve taken from your friend’s mouth by deceit.” Nahil’s convictions and fears, however, didn’t stop Hamza from renovating the old building, adding new rooms on the second floor, which had consisted of just two small rooms and an empty roof. He decorated the high walls and new door frames with calligraphy carved by masons who came from the mountains especially for this work. He added carvings of gilded letters, in green and yellow, blue and red, placing them on top of the five gates of the house. Nahil’s resistance didn’t last long. She left the house in the mountains when Hamza finished renovating the house in Zuqaq al-Blat. She wouldn’t return to the mountains at all until after he died.
My grandfather tries in every way he can to suggest that the house is his, that he’d inherited it from relatives about whom we know nothing. Perhaps all the changes he makes to the house are an effort to erase the story of its family and his own story too. How he came as a child from Syria with his impoverished parents and worked in construction on the train station in Sofar. He then worked as a driver for the Turkish Damad family, who showered him with money and assistance so that afterward he became a businessman, selling bread and drinks and ice to passengers on the Beirut — Damascus train line, which passed through the Sofar station. How he bought the house cheap from the Damad widow after her husband’s accidental death in the Gallata fire in Istanbul that destroyed everything the man owned. She needed money to emigrate to America, following her family who was already there, so she sold her house cheap — for the price of dirt, my grandmother Nahil used to say. My grandfather Hamza, though, told a completely different story. He would always say that he bought the house as a favor to the Turkish man’s widow. He’d say that he would’ve rather bought land in his village that was covered with profitable olive trees, but instead bought a modest, ramshackle old house with hardly any land around it, except a small lot filled with prickly pear cactus. People in the village made fun of him and said that he’d lost his mind. He’d claim that he chose to buy the house as a favor to a man who helped him and died leaving behind a wife with no money who wanted to emigrate and join her family in America.
In Kenya, I always dream that I’m in Lebanon, in the house that I’ve left. I wake up many times in the night and I fall back to sleep every time to the sounds of Indian Ocean. The waves almost reach my always-damp garden, then recede in a never-ending play of ebb and flow.
Sometimes I leave my bedroom and go into the garden when the moon is full and I don’t need anything to light my path. The light of the moon shines on the ever so slowly receding water and I quickly fall asleep. I fall asleep on the sand or on the straw chair at the bottom of the garden near the walls made of the trunks of coconut trees.
I’ve always lived my dreams there as though they were a part of my life. They accompany me in the daylight hours and I don’t forget them. I wake up in the morning and think about what I was dreaming the night before. When I tell Eva, my Austrian neighbor and only friend in Mombasa, about what seemed to be my only dream, she tells me not to be scared. She tells me that the skies of Kenya are vast and that dreams, however many you have, evaporate in the sky.
Perhaps I should call my dreams nightmares. I remember the explosion that murdered my brother Baha’ in Beirut. From that time on God stopped visiting me in my dreams. Perhaps that was the moment when my dreams became nightmares. We wanted to go down to the shelter that day, but my mother Nadia insisted on staying on the second floor. She usually didn’t insist on anything, but that day she did. She usually lived the fairly submissive life that Nahil wanted — because my grandmother controlled her life just as she controlled the house and our lives — detached from her own desires. Nadia lived submissively. And then when she finally asserted an opinion, she was immediately silenced! She went silent both out of shock and as a protest. Her silence angers me just as the submissiveness she showed to my father Salama’s family angered me in the past. She didn’t want to go down into the shelter and insisted that we all stay together on the first floor. It was as if, on that one day, she wanted to avenge her life. But instead she lost my brother Baha’.