To feel better, I always need to lean my head slightly forward so that the muscles on my neck press backwards and relieve the pain a little. When I go to bed, I need to put a pillow right under my neck, to ease the pain so I can sleep. But now nothing relieves the pain. When I bend my head forward it hurts, so I lean it back and the pain only gets worse. I tilt my head to the left, then to the right; later I feel that it’s so heavy I can no longer hold it up. I take two Advil. Two hours later I follow up with two Diantalvic and then before I sleep a Toradol, then a Stilnox. I go to bed still in pain, but the pain just sleeps. It gets tired, turns over and goes to sleep, while I toss and turn in the bed.
As soon as Chris comes home, he starts gathering up all my stuff that’s lying around. He tidies everything back where it belongs and says again how worried he is about me and how he wants me to be more present and at home here. He walks over to the cassette player, lowering Asmahan’s voice so much that he almost strangles it. I’ve grown used to his running commentary and the presence of two speeds and rhythms of life in the house. His rhythm and my rhythm. My rhythm is like the music of the people whom Samuel brings every day to work in the house and in the garden for a little money, who leave in the evening always carrying food that I’ve shared with them. As for his rhythm… it’s stable and calm. Nothing about his inner life ever changes. I only feel his presence in the house when he goes into his office and stays there until after midnight, when I’m in bed, covered with a thin blanket, novels that I’ve started to read but haven’t finished scattered around me, Asmahan’s voice filling the room, keeping me company while I sleep until morning. Of course he doesn’t understand why I keep the music playing while I sleep. And he doesn’t understand how I can listen to the same recording one, two, three times throughout the night. These tapes of Asmahan that I brought with me from Lebanon. Other tapes that Olga sent me. Still other hard-to-find, rare ones, most of which I bought at a place near Suq al-Hamidiyyeh when I went secretly to Damascus with Georges just before Baha’ was murdered in 1978. When I sleep, sometimes I dream of Asmahan. I imagine a young woman who’s twenty-six years old, dying at the height of her glory. I was about her age when I lost my brother Baha’ and we decided to leave Lebanon for Australia. From the time I was young I tried to invent things she and I had in common. I’d say that we both loved singing, we both came from the mountains, we both lived through wars that changed the course of our lives, our destinies. Then I’d backtrack and say that she was different from me in many ways, the most important of which is that she didn’t know fear — this adventuress had no fear, the kind of fear that’s inhabited me since Baha’ was killed and Georges disappeared. Indeed well before this I might almost have said that it was this fear that caused Baha’’s death.
As a child, I stood on a thick white fence, on the outer wall of the house’s courtyard, in front of my mother Nadia and sang, “Ya habibi, come… Follow me and see what happened to me because you’re away… I’m up all night because of my love, calling your shadow. Who’s like you? I’m keeping my love a secret, but my love is destroying me.” My father, sitting far away from us, clapped as if I were actually Asmahan and my mother encouraged me by nodding her head. When I forgot or mispronounced words she’d mouth them to me. She’d start with just the first word of that part of the song to help me remember. Then her voice would emerge, clear and deep, as if it had never been used, and then just as quickly would fall silent once I’d recovered the rhythm I’d lost for a few moments and started singing again. Sometimes she accompanied me when I sang, her voice weaker than mine. My grandmother Nahil would come outside and see me fearlessly swaying on the edge of the wall, my mother below gazing up at me, her laughing eyes brimming with tears. Nahil whispered harsh words to scold her son Salama, as usual, chastising Nadia’s laxity and her failures in raising me.
She’d say all this without looking at Nadia, ignoring her presence beside me. Nahil took me down from the wall herself, telling me to go in the house where my books and lessons were, adding that Asmahan died young because she never knew God and that too much distraction will ruin girls and lead to their demise.
In Mombasa I spend my time with Samuel. When he’s finished with the gardening, he comes into the house at my request and he prepares some food that I share with him. He doesn’t go straight back to his own house after dinner, but rather to night school where he’s learning to draw.
In the beginning I found my house in Mombasa strange, for no reason except that to me it was like a prickly pear planted in the sand. Only the green garden that ends in a low fence separates the house from the ocean. It’s strange how precisely the sandy coast borders the garden. From the moment I arrived at this house that I’m meant to call my home, I passed my days hunting for comparisons between Mombasa and Beirut. Both have endured successive attacks that make each city what it is. Both extend along the sea. Beirut’s sea never changes, though. Its water isn’t stingy; it doesn’t recede. It isn’t surprising and it doesn’t frighten. The ebb and flow of the tide interests me. I’ve never seen this before, I tell Chris. But he laughs and says that all the seas of the world have tides. Beirut’s sea is no exception. Yes, it is! I tell him angrily, as if he is extracting something from inside me, from my memory, and I don’t want to share it with him. Chris tells me that the waters of the Mediterranean are exactly the opposite of how I think of them. He tells me that sailors of all civilizations from the time of Homer onward were afraid of the Mediterranean because it was so changeable, always unpredictable. Sailors on the oceans, by contrast, knew what was hiding beneath them before they entered deep waters.
I know what Chris really wants to say — he’s talking about me. But I won’t get into another conversation in which his patience and tolerance will surely get the better of me. And this won’t change my opinion about either the sea or my life with him. I get up from my chair to walk around the house and exhale smoke from my cigarette, which I am constantly relighting. I reach the back garden, searching for Samuel, and don’t find him. I hear a song in Swahili from behind the garden wall and I approach the entrance to the garden, knowing that Samuel has arrived. Chris’s voice comes from the garden, strong and resolute— no doubt he’s started to get angry. “You’re not in Beirut anymore, you’re here now,” he says. He follows up in a voice meant to leave the impression that this is his final word and he won’t go back on it: “We shouldn’t need so many reasons to love a place and call it a homeland.”
Mombasa’s morning sea is never the same. Since I arrived, the only persistent sight is of the local merchants displaying their wares right on the sands of the beach, when the tide is out and the water has withdrawn back into the heart of the ocean. They come in the morning or at noon when the water’s receded, slipping down onto the beach over the edge of the coastline. They can’t come down on the roads that lead to the houses gathered on a patch of land planted with trees. These two-story houses are all alike, as though one architect built the same structure a bunch of times. There are many dogs here, dogs trained to attack strangers. Their owners bring these dogs from faraway countries to live with them in big houses they intend to live in forever. The local merchants are frightened of the dogs and the owners of the houses. The foreigners know little about the original inhabitants of this country; their curiosity is limited to expanding their businesses into more and larger markets.