An Unnecessary Woman (12 page)

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall.

Have I grown too old for Beirut?

Beirut, my Beirut.

Around the corner from the building I live in is a Pizza Hut outlet that proudly identifies itself as
DELIVERY ONLY
. If you happen to walk in, maybe to ask for directions, or possibly to inquire whether anyone knows what happened to the owner of the store they’ve just replaced, the young men regard you condescendingly before announcing that they only take phone orders.

The store these smug, ill-mannered boys replaced was an idiosyncratic record shop that opened its doors two days before the civil war broke out, and surprisingly kept open throughout the fighting. The owner—a portly, mustached Beiruti of indeterminate age and sect—rarely bothered to hoist his ample behind out of his chair. He always seemed oblivious to anything occurring outside the expansive world of his store. Come to think of it, he barely noticed anything outside his own mind, so content was he, so self-sufficient and complete. Nongarrulous Beirutis are as rare as vivid primary colors in the snowy Arctic, yet here we were, two of us, patient sufferers of verbal sclerosis, not more than a hundred meters apart.

Ever the autodidact, I used his store to teach myself. When he opened for business, I knew little about music. I kept track of mentions in the novels I read. For example, I first heard of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante in Styron’s book
Sophie’s Choice
—a beautiful if somewhat soppy novel, and an unbearable film. I heard of Kathleen Ferrier when Thomas Bernhard mentioned her uplifting rendition of Mahler’s
Das Lied von der Erde
in
Old Masters
.

In my thirties all I understood was Chopin, glorious Frédéric. To thank me for finding a rare book, a college student offered me an invaluable gift, a double album of Artur Rubinstein playing Chopin. I didn’t have a record player at the time and had to save up before I was able to listen to it. Once I did, Artur’s spirit wafted through my home. I played my record over and over and over and over. I bought a cleaning and care kit for albums. Once a week I delicately wiped the damp cloth across the disc to ensure it remained playable for eternity. It was the only album I had for years, and the only music I listened to. To this day, I can probably whistle the melody of Ballade no. 1 in G Minor without having to think about it. I became a Chopinophile.

Even now, I think that if I’d never listened to anything else, I’d still consider myself a lucky human being. This was Rubinstein. This was Chopin. Pole playing Pole. But I had a yearning. Sometime in the early eighties, while my city was self-immolating, while everyone around me was either killing or making sure he wasn’t going to be killed, I decided it was time I taught myself how to listen to music.

I visited the fat man’s store and looked through his stacks of records. I didn’t buy anything until the fifth visit. By that time, my fingers, imitating Olympic short-distance racers, could sift through a stack of albums in seconds. I couldn’t tell where to begin, which pianist was better than the other. I knew to begin with the famous composers (Bach, Beethoven, Mozart) but couldn’t settle on which versions. I made a somewhat arbitrary choice. I decided I would select albums from the Deutsche Grammophon label.

You might ask why, which is a good question.

Don’t laugh.

The way I looked at it at the time was that the composers were German (or German-speaking), so Deutsche Grammophon just seemed logical. Don’t you think?

But also, I just thought the design was classy; the yellow rectangle label added a touch of panache. I always wished for a touch of panache in my life.

It turned out to be a good decision, a great decision, though limiting at first. I didn’t know about Gould’s
Goldberg Variations
for ages. Someone could have saved me a lot of time by explaining things, or by pointing out that I should have listened to the bourrée from Bach’s English Suite no. 2 (Englische Suiten!) much earlier, instead of finding it by accident on a Pogorelic´ disc. What if I had missed it? The hours of pleasure I wouldn’t have known.

If only I had someone to tell me every now and then, “Aaliya, you must listen to Scarlatti’s sonatas, fils, not père.”

If only I had someone to guide me, the pillar of cloud going before me on my wanderings, to lead me and show me the way. If I had someone to offer me the benefit of her attentions.

The queen calls to her worker ants. Come back, come back, don’t go there.

I bought my Deutsche Grammaphon albums from the fat man—two a month, one with each paycheck, which was all I could reasonably afford. Beethoven came first, of course, piano works followed by the violin sonatas (Kreutzer still delivers shivers), and so on.

On the weekday my paycheck was to be deposited, I would sneak a peek out my living room window, through a tiny vertical crack between the louvered wood, and gauge whether Azari’s green shutters were up, which would mean that the bank branch in my neighborhood might be open and I had to unlock the bookshop’s doors. More likely than not, the record store would be open regardless of fighting. On my way to work, I’d stop at the bank for cash, and on the way home, I’d stop at the store for an album, one of the few rituals I looked forward to in those days. I’d plan in advance the next five or six albums I was going to purchase, the early, the middle, and then the late quartets. I would agonize over deciding whether a double album was one purchase or two.

The portly owner sat on a high toothpick of a barstool and still had to look up to me. He rarely spoke, yet as we began to know each other and feel comfortable, he’d grunt approval with every purchase. When I first bought
The Sofia Recital
by Richter, he of the pink plastic lobster, the shop owner’s smile floated toward me like a leaf on a river. With Martha Argerich’s
Début Recital
, his face wore the three-foot grin of an alligator. After such high praise, walking the three-building distance home was torture; I couldn’t wait to listen. And when I bought my first Gould, his eyebrows climbed up his forehead, his eyes shot up to the ceiling. Finally.

On new album days, while a war raged around me and chaos ruled, I felt triumphant.

Buying music was almost my sole expense but not, of course, my sole luxury. I have far more books than I have albums, far more, but I didn’t buy most of them. Do not judge too harshly. I’ve had to live on a minuscule salary. No one was making any money on my bookstore’s sales. The owner kept it open because he was proud of its reputation among Beirut’s pseudointellectuals and high priests of literature as the only place in the city where one could find obscure books, which none of them read. These literary dilettantes know books about as well as an airline passenger knows the landscape he overflies; they talk about novels in highlights as if they’re reading a fashion magazine. I ordered books, and if no one bought them, I carried them home. I’ll admit that sometimes I ordered two of each just to make sure—all right, sometimes three.

I would never have been able to buy them otherwise. Once I paid my rent, I could afford little, and because I had to put something away for retirement, the days of agonizing leisure, I had even less. I began to cook vegetarian fare early because any kind of meat was way beyond my meager means. I survived—still do—on fruits, vegetables, grains, and rice. I haven’t had lamb on Id al-Adha in years. Luckily, I never smoked, because I certainly couldn’t have managed to pay for that. During the lean years of the war, Fadia upstairs, who smokes as much as a French philosopher, and who could certainly afford more than I ever could, used to break her cigarettes in half for economy’s sake and stuff them in an elegant gold-plated holder. She halted the practice after the war ended.

I like to consider my little thefts a public service. Someone had to read Eliot’s
The Waste Land
as the glow of Sabra burning illuminated Beirut’s skyline. No, seriously, had I not ordered some of these books, they would have never landed on Lebanese soil. For crying out loud, do you think anyone else in Lebanon has a copy of Djuna Barnes’s
Nightwood
? And I am picking just one book off the top of my head. Lampedusa’s
The Leopard
?
I don’t think anyone else in this country has a book by Novalis.

Why did my mother scream? I wish I knew. What I do know is that I shouldn’t have stopped seeing her. As crazy as she was becoming, I shouldn’t have abandoned her. When was the last time I’d contacted her? Not since I stopped working, probably earlier than that. Once I’d decided not to have her to my apartment all those years ago, I began to call her from work and ask her to meet me at a café or restaurant. But when she crossed into her eighties, she grew more difficult to bear, less civil, more ornery. Trouble was all I received from interacting with her, toil and trouble. I’d call her and the first thing she might ask was why I was calling. I’d invite her to lunch and she’d tell me I was being silly since she had a serviceable lunch at home. She leached out sanity and equanimity from my head. I stopped calling. I understood she was getting old and cranky, but it wasn’t as if she didn’t remember who I was. She was lucid, just difficult.

I don’t think she knew who I was today. I don’t recall her ever being so terrified, not even during the war years. The only time I’d seen her scared, though not as deeply as this morning, was when my half brother the eldest, eight years old then, was kicked in the head by a mule. He was playing an imaginary war game with other boys in the neighborhood. He was retreating, machine-gunning anything that moved, when he backed into the mule’s behind, irritating the beast. My mother rushed out of the house, and when she saw my half brother the eldest lying prone with blood seeping from his head, she wailed as if it were Judgment Day and she had been judged wanting. We, she and I alone, waited outside the hospital while the doctors fixed my brother. They wouldn’t let us in the waiting room because it was too crowded and we certainly looked like we didn’t belong. My mother, small and wilting, leaned on the hood of a doctor’s car. When I leaned on the car beside her, she said, “Don’t,” in a low voice. She added, “Don’t do what I do.”

I remember that an intern came out to talk to us after a few hours. He explained that my half brother the eldest was going to be all right. The intern interspersed French phrases into his Lebanese sentences, which only scared my mother more.

If this were a novel, you would be able to figure out why my mother screamed. Alain Robbe-Grillet once wrote that the worst thing to happen to the novel was the arrival of psychology. You can assume he meant that now we all expect to understand the motivation behind each character’s actions, as if that’s possible, as if life works that way. I’ve read so many recent novels, particularly those published in the Anglo world, that are dull and trite because I’m always supposed to infer causality. For example, the reason a protagonist can’t experience love is that she was physically abused, or the hero constantly searches for validation because his father paid little attention to him as a child. This, of course, ignores the fact that many others have experienced the same things but do not behave in the same manner, though that’s a minor point compared to the real loss in fulfilling the desire for explanation: the loss of mystery.

Causation extraction makes Jack a dull reader.

I do understand the desire, though, for I too wish to live in a rational world. I do wish to understand why my mother screamed. My life would be simpler if I could rationalize. Unfortunately, I don’t understand.

While a traffic war rages around me and chaos rules (lest you forget this is Beirut), I flash to a theory about why we desperately wish to live in an ordered world, in an explainable world.

No, wait. I don’t mean to imply that I thought about it just this instant, or that it’s some sort of philosophical treatise. Neither French nor German am I.

Let me rephrase: I’d like to consider a possibility concerning our incessant need for causation, whether in books or in life. I’ve trained myself not to keep inferring or expecting causality in literature—the phrase “Correlation does not imply causation” keeps ringing in my head (think Hume)—but I constantly see it, inject it, in life. I, like everyone, want explanations. In other words, I extract explanations where none exist.

Imre Kertész says it well in
Kaddish for an Unborn Child
. Here you go:

But, it would seem, there is no getting around explanations, we are constantly explaining and excusing ourselves; life itself, that inexplicable complex of being and feeling, demands explanations of us, those around us demand explanations, and in the end we ourselves demand explanations of ourselves, until in the end we succeed in annihilating everything around us, ourselves included, or in other words explain ourselves to death.

I want to know why my mother screamed. I do. I will probably not be rewarded with an explanation, but I need one.

Let me elaborate.

So many people died during the war. The woman who lived above me was one of the first. A different family lived in that apartment before Joumana and her husband (I don’t remember his name, but no matter). In the early months, fall of 1975 or thereabouts, the wife, the mother from upstairs, was shot in the head while driving home from work. Within two weeks the family cleared out and immigrated to Dubai, where every day is the same bright.