An Unnecessary Woman (21 page)

“The healthy flee from the ill,” wrote Kafka in a letter to Milena Jesenská, his unrequited love, “but the ill also flee from the healthy.”

Being around so many people yesterday unhinged me, unhinged my soul. The essential calm of habit and ritual was disturbed. Granted, being around my mother would unhinge most, and I wouldn’t wish her screaming on anyone, not Benjamin Netanyahu, not even Ian McEwan. But being around all those people was not a pleasant experience. It never is these days.

Still, I must offer Fadia thanks for her generosity. I wouldn’t forgive myself if I didn’t.

Before putting my talking head out the door, I change out of my coat and nightgown. I can’t face the witches in the same nightgown I was wearing yesterday morning. However, before I brave the firing squad I must look something up.

I don’t think the Bruckner and Mahler story is accurate; something about it is off. I remember that someone else was there as well, some other composer. I did tell you that I thought it was apocryphal, but I want to check. I wrote down that particular story, copied it from a longer article. I know I read it in a magazine less than ten years ago, which means that the notes are in the box of miscellany in the maid’s bathroom, not the oceanic darkness of the maid’s room. I will not need candles or a flashlight to find it.

Find it I do, and right I am, or I am right that I was wrong. How my memory distorted this story.

The third’s premiere was horribly received because it was horribly conducted, the original maestro having dropped quite dead right before the concert, an event not atypical considering Bruckner’s ubiquitous misfortune. During the performance, Bruckner was understandably lost in his own score because he wasn’t trained as a conductor. The audience, as lost as Bruckner, drifted, but didn’t boo or storm out. The other musician in the audience, who was with Mahler and who was just as dumbfounded, was Hugo Wolf (I like his Italian serenade). There is no mention of weeping, I’m afraid. Mahler and Wolf went on to become Bruckner’s students. For the rest of his life, Mahler spent the royalties he earned from his own music to publish Bruckner’s scores.

My notes shed more light on the strangeness of the life of Anton Bruckner. He lusted after little girls but did not, could not, act upon his perversion because he was a devout Catholic. He was not a priest. Of his own accord, he checked himself into a local institution to treat his predilection—his pedophilia, not his Catholicism. He composed his Mass in C Minor to thank God for curing his ignoble illness. Of course, this minor mass is a mess of monumental orchestrated earwax, a religiously pubertal intoxication of sounds. Let’s just say it’s childish.

Anton Bruckner died a virgin at seventy-two.

Piet Mondrian also died a virgin a month before he turned seventy-two.

I am seventy-two, but I’m not a virgin and not dead yet.

Hannah, however, died a virgin.

I will thank Fadia.

In the kitchen, I listen to what the witches are discussing on the landing. I don’t wish to interrupt them at an inappropriate juncture. Joumana is dominating the conversation. She’s announcing that her daughter, the once-loud one, has finally finished all her course requirements and all that’s left is the dissertation. The ladies are ecstatic, happy for her and immensely proud. The sounds cascading from above have a feel of rampant euphoria.

I surprise myself by feeling happy for Joumana too. I’ve watched her daughter, heard her, grow up. Joumana moved into the building while pregnant with her. How can I not be happy for the girl, and for Joumana? Her daughter—that irritating, loud, obnoxious girl who sucks all the oxygen from any room she enters—will make something of her life. She will bowl over anyone in her way—or out of her way, above, below, on the side—and she will amount to something. She’ll be happy. I’ll be happy for her.

I wait for a second before I open my door, allowing them the privacy to be happy together. In my head, I practice.
I have something important I’m working on, urgent, that requires my attention, I only wanted to thank you for your wonderful okra stew. I will eat what I couldn’t finish yesterday for lunch today.

“Thank you,” I call up to Fadia, but I intend it to be for the three of them. “That was a mouthwatering stew. I am grateful.”

The three witches have a lot of hair atop their heads this morning, having obviously made it to the salon last evening. Even from below, I note the plucked eyebrows, the manicures, though I can’t tell about the leg waxing—their legs are out of sight from the landing. Joumana, her hair rice brown with crisscrossing streaks of blond highlights, holds a coffee kettle, about to fill Marie-Thérèse’s cup. Bad timing on my part.

“Let me pour you a cup of coffee,” Joumana says. “Come join us.”

The witches must have decided on a complete makeover. Fadia sports dark red hair. I’m trying to compare it to another color in order to give you an idea, but I can’t. Like Faulkner, her hair color today is sui generis.

My white hair has little company in Beirut, my blue hair even less.

“Why, thank you,” I say as I back just a tad into my doorway, “but I’m afraid I can’t. I’m working on . . .”

Something. Just say the word
something
. You don’t have to explain.

Rain falls behind the witches as if surrounding them; there is no wall at their backs. They regard me with some concern. I notice that their seating arrangement has changed recently—recently, meaning in the last two years, since that was the last time I saw the coffee klatsch. Witches should be heard and not seen. Fadia, not Marie-Thérèse, claims the middle position now, and moreover, she has given up on the wooden-legged soft-twine stool. Draped today in a palette more
Sgt. Pepper
than
Yellow Submarine,
she reclines sideways, reposes, on an outdoor chaise longue, a pre-impressionist odalisque, paying homage to the goddess of indolence, Greta Garbo (though Fadia doesn’t want to be alone).

“Urgent,” I say.

I am becoming incompetent, an aphasic stutterer.

So much hair, so many hair-care products. Short hair is rare in Lebanon; possibly one out of fifty women keeps her hair above shoulder length, something to do with perceptions of femininity, I assume. None of us wishes to look different. My hair is up, clasped in a semi-bun right now, as it is practically every day. Rarely is it loose or down, yet I don’t consider cutting it short.

I don’t, even though I do look different. I can feel the witches inspecting me. Our delightfully gawky neighbor, see how wonderfully she straddles the border between woman and giraffe.

This is ridiculous. I am playing the fool. I take a long, calming breath.

“I’m sorry, Joumana,” I say. “I can’t have coffee right now. I appreciate the invitation, truly do, but I’m working on something, something I need to finish before leaving in an hour. I can’t spare the time at this moment. Thank you, though.”

Now I have to leave my shelter within an hour.

She should ask again, or at least suggest that I come up another day—any one of the witches should. But they don’t.

As I begin to withdraw—one step and I’m back in the comfort of my apartment—Joumana announces loudly, “My daughter finished all her course work for the Ph.D. program. All she has left is to write the dissertation, and defend it, of course.”

“Dr. Mira,” Fadia says, a bit too excitedly. “I like the sound of it. Dr. Mira. We have a doctor in the house.”

“That’s wonderful news,” I say, as if this is the first I’ve heard of it. “I’m very happy for you. That’ll be quite an achievement.”

“May I tell you the subject of her dissertation?” She asks the question not forcefully but insistently.

She interrupts my head chatter. As if involuntarily, I feel a minuscule grin crease my face. I do in fact want to know.

Joumana’s face brightens. “Tombstones,” she says. “She’s studying tombstones, particularly the relationship of the shape of the stones to the inscriptions and icons.”

The gravestone, upon its body, shall begin to consider where my name is to be inscribed.

Why do such thoughts cross my mind?

“That’s an awful subject,” says Fadia. “It’s so morose. Gravestones? Why would she be interested in something like that?”

“That’s incredible,” says Marie-Thérèse. “I think it could be very interesting.”

“Have you told your daughter the truth, dearest?” Fadia says. “That she’s adopted? She can’t possibly be yours. Gravestones?”

Joumana seems to hear neither of her friends.

I say, “Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo.”

“What was that?” says Fadia.

“Latin,” says Marie-Thérèse.

“Do you know the language?” Joumana asks.

“Latin? Me?” I don’t know why the question sounds preposterous. “No, I don’t speak it.”

“I do.” Joumana looks elegant this morning, a cross between the society matron she isn’t and the college professor she is. “What I mean is that I read it, of course, not speak it. Who speaks Latin anymore? I studied it in college.”

Do I react slightly, or it is possible she’s overly sensitive to her audience? In any case, she hesitates right after the last word.

“I wanted to read some of the classics in the original,” she says.

Yes, I want to say. Yes. That would be so lovely. If only.

“Virgil,” Joumana says.

“What’s that?” Fadia says.

“Ovid,” I hear myself say. I even hear a whispery wistfulness in my voice, a lilt of longing. Latin, or maybe Greek. Almost everything that men have said best has been said in Greek.

Then again, Latin.

“Tacitus,” Joumana says. She places her hand on the kettle, hesitates for a few seconds, then pulls it back to her lap. “In the original. I thought it would be good.”

You can also read a French translation of the original, then an English translation, then work as hard as you can, do your best, manage your frustrations, and translate it into Arabic before you store it in a box in the maid’s bathroom.

“Congratulations,” I say as I withdraw. “You must be so proud of your daughter. I wish you and her nothing but the best.”

If I am to leave my apartment soon, I must bathe first. I should probably eat something as well. In my kitchen I hear them being confrontational—not arguing, but challenging one another. Marie-Thérèse says something about her two companions, suggests that they were the ones who ignored something, the subject most probably being me. I move away. I wish not to listen.

Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo.

I was not, I was, I am not, I don’t care.

It is the most common text found on Roman graves.

The texts you find on Muslim stones are primarily ones extolling God and His prophets: “In the name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful. Praise be to God who created Heaven and Earth. Prayers and blessings to Gabriel, all the angels, Abraham, Ishmael, Muhammad, all the prophets, Muhammad’s daughter, his wives, his cousin, his best friend in high school, his pharmacologist.” I jest, of course. I have seen exquisite inscriptions on Muslim graves.

The stone upon my grave, what will its inscription say? So many possibilities, so much to choose from.

“Here lies Aaliya, never fully alive, now dead, still alone, still fearful.”

“Death, be not proud, for here you have overthrown but a speck.”

My favorite tombstone inscription is a writer’s, of course:

Malcolm Lowry

Late of the Bowery

His prose was flowery

And often glowery

He lived, nightly, and drank, daily,

And died playing the ukulele

As a diehard Pessoan, my deathstone should be inscribed with his words, and there I have so much—so much to choose from.

What am I saying? An interesting tombstone? To quote Nabokov, “history . . . will limit my life story to the dash between two dates.”

I’ll probably be incinerated with my books.

Since I must leave my apartment, I will visit the National Museum, my frequent escape from the world. I’ll spend the day there. If I have time, I’ll drop in on my mother. I have to know if she’ll scream again, have to know whether it was a one-time quirk, an aberration. Only if I have time. I do not look forward to seeing her or my half brother the eldest.

I jump into the shower—well, wade into it. Hot water rolls down my body as I lather my hair with my regular baby shampoo, not Bel Argent. The blue will slowly dissipate, very slowly. Another shower, another day when I wish the building wasn’t so old; I wish for hotter water, for more of it, a better pump, less noisy pipes. A Schoenberg symphony of glockenspiels erupts every time I turn the water knobs. The pipes and I have aged together.

Water glints like sprinkles of mica across my neck and shoulders. I towel it away. I twist excess water out of my hair—I have at least this in common with Titian’s Venus rising from the sea and the Aphrodite of Cyrene. The Cyrene Aphrodite is headless, but she was supposed to be twisting her hair before being decapitated by time irreverent.