An Unnecessary Woman (30 page)

Hannah, happy as could be, relayed all this to me the following day. She so appreciated that on her deathbed, with her last breath, the lieutenant’s mother acknowledged her as a daughter. She mentioned that last sentence but glossed over it, laughed it off even. Choosing between the lieutenant and her? What choice? Later, when I received the journals, I saw that she’d written down the first two sentences the dying woman spoke, but hadn’t recorded that disturbing promise.

She moseyed along through her life for quite a while after that, nine or ten months, but I imagine that like a mosquito buzzing in your ear, that last sentence, vague as it may have been, wouldn’t let her sleep. A buzz of doubt that became the roar of the crowd at the Colosseum?

Reality may have tempted her, the serpent may have offered her the apple.

She may have woken up one morning and realized that the lieutenant had never desired her. She may have woken up one morning and found one of Spinoza’s lenses.

Flashing a light on a dark corner can start a fire that scorches everything in its wake, including your ever-so-flammable soul. Cioran once said that “one touch of clearsightedness reduces us to our primary state: nakedness.”

I am tired, always tired. An amorphous exhaustion smothers me. I wish to sleep. I wish I were able to sleep.

We had a dreary, curiously gloomy winter that year, cold but not freezing, with heavy rainfall. Hannah seemed to compete with the weather: Who is more overcast? At first the changes were gradual and practically imperceptible. She seemed a bit withdrawn, less talkative. It took me a couple of weeks to realize that she hadn’t been writing in her journal. I asked her about it, but she dismissed my concerns with a flick of the hand.

In a strange way, I felt she was there but she wasn’t there with me, or to put it another way, that she occupied her body, but not her soul. Does that make sense?

In the evenings at home I would make her a cup of tea, and at times it would sit before her untouched. I would remind her that it was turning cold.

“Silly me,” she’d say. She’d take a sip and then forget about it once more.

One evening, as I sat across from her at my gaudy kitchen table, I caught her transfixed, studying a limpid pool of lentil and chard soup as if the bowl were a vessel for divination. Another incident really triggered my anxiety. It involved the knitting. I saw her fingers stop, just stop—the needles didn’t move for at least thirty seconds. That was unthinkable, inconceivable. Hannah could knit in her sleep, an indubitably automatic motion for her. She could pick up her knitting and carry on a conversation, watch television, talk on the phone, the needles never stopping. She could read, only pausing briefly to flip the page. I saw her—I saw her stop knitting and stare out into the ether, her gaze fixed on a spot in the middle of my living room, and I panicked.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Thinking,” she said in a conversation-ending tone.

We had an early spring in 1972; after the groaning winter, the temperature grew mild. Even a few butterflies dipped their wings into the air. One of those pleasant days, I was busy at the bookstore. I don’t think customers bought much, but I had heavy walk-in traffic. By closing time, Hannah hadn’t shown up, even though she’d told me she would. I assumed she wanted to be by herself to think of her deceased mother, of both her parents. I didn’t bother her. However, she ended up missing three days in a row, and I finally telephoned. She admitted she was sad, yet she sounded rational.

We had a laugh when she inadvertently said I’d be cheerless as well if my mother were to pass away, then thought better of it. “Well, maybe not so much,” she added.

The following morning Hannah entered my bookstore in flamboyantly high spirits. It was spring, she insisted in reply to my inquiries, the season of mad flowerings and lovely beginnings.

“Must there always be a reason for one to be happy?” she asked in feigned innocence. She sang her words—no, it was more that she spoke them in an exuberant cadence. Her face was dotted with color. She picked up books off the shelves and replaced them without looking at title or content. Her eyes gleamed with mischief, like those of a fox just discovering that she has the run of the chicken coop. I did believe her—believed that she was happy that morning, that her bubbling joy, momentary or not, was real. What I needed was an explanation—always with the causality. What makes
you
happy?

After much parrying—she answered most of my questions with a short burst of laughter—she told me she’d had a good night’s sleep, the first in years.

How, what, why—an hour of evasions and obfuscations before Hannah confessed all, or at least what I thought was all. She’d felt terribly despondent the previous evening, she couldn’t handle the weight of such sadness. She spoke of this melancholy in abstract terms (this heaviness, this pressure), she spoke of it as something outside her, something entering her, and now it had disappeared, a good night’s sleep was all that was needed it seemed. But last night she hadn’t been happy. No, she hadn’t been. She didn’t see a way out of the fog. Yes, she had been in a colorless midwinter fog, a peculiarly oppressive fog. The evening before, she’d been disconsolate, that’s what it was.

“I was weary,” she said, looking and sounding anything but. “I was wandering in my head, if you know what I mean, without any aim or plan, lost, unable to see what was in front of me.”

She was tired, but not afraid, she told me. She spent at least three hours looking out the window in her room, looking out into the darkness, no streetlights. Not pitch-black darkness, mind you, not the deep world of darkness we dread. The city’s electric grid was humming. Her brother and his wife watched television in the living room. She could have turned on the night lamp, but she didn’t.

“Last night,” she said, “I misplaced the light of God.”

She wasn’t herself, so she put on her dress of fine linen and purple, and she was cold, so she put on her black cardigan.

“I wanted to recognize myself,” she said.

She took out the hated pills of so many years ago, the Seconals and the Valiums. She swallowed all of them, around thirty-five altogether, drank two full glasses of water so the pills would journey smoothly through her system. She told me that it had been years since she’d had more than a sip or two of water after eight in the evening. She had a thimble-sized bladder, which meant that anything more than a sip would keep her running to the bathroom throughout the comfortless night.

“I felt a tingle of guilty pleasure,” she said. “Those two glasses of water almost made me regret my decision. I felt sinful with two glasses. Can you imagine if I’d had three? Now, my dear, don’t mock me.”

She lay on the bed, her head on the feather pillow, her eyes fixed on the ceiling, waiting for trumpet-tongued Gabriel to come calling for her. Everything was in its perfect place.

“I was ready,” she said.

She woke up at eight in the morning, having slept wonderfully and deeply for ten continuous hours, her most fervent fantasy fulfilled—woke up refreshed and rejuvenated, with the minor inconvenience of a painfully full bladder.

“As you can see,” she said, “I don’t even have a single crease in my dress.”

To say that I was aghast would be an understatement. I was horrified because I discovered then, and only then, how lonely she was, so late into the game, and that I had failed her. “How could you?” was the only phrase my voice could articulate. Why didn’t you come to me when you needed help? Was I not your friend and confidante? Look for me when you misplace the light of God.

I shouldn’t worry, she insisted. It was a misjudgment. She had to clear her head. She’d made a few vows that morning. She must fulfill them. I made her promise to return at closing. We would talk more that evening. I decided not to open the store the following morning. Instead I’d take her to a physician to make sure everything was in working order. She may have found the lost divine light, but I thought a medical doctor would see to it that she had a flashlight handy.

She suggested that we overindulge that evening, purchase two whole rotisserie chickens with full accoutrements: pickles, lots of pickles, and especially pink turnips, her favorites, and at least two tubs of garlic paste. We’d kill insects by breathing on them, she said.

She returned to her room, and sometime in the following hour she packed all her journals in two boxes and wrote my first name in florid Arabic script on yellow notepaper that she left discarded atop them. She changed into her most comfortable shoes, climbed the stairs to the roof of the building, and jumped. The four-flight fall did not kill her on impact, the poor thing. She died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.

I should have realized that Hannah was going to try again after her failed attempt. Her sister-in-law Maryam blamed herself. She was in the house when Hannah was packing the boxes and hadn’t paid attention. She was in shock for a long, long time. She brought flowers to Hannah’s grave weekly. Maryam is still alive, I believe, and since Hannah died so many years ago, I assume she has quite recovered. At times I think I have.

I try to console myself with the thought that many have killed themselves and their loved ones weren’t able to halt the proceedings. The incredible Italian writer Cesare Pavese committed suicide, overdosing on barbiturates in a hotel room in 1950, the year he won the Premio Strega. Who would have expected that?

Yet I could have been more observant. After the first suicide attempt, I should have understood that the meaning of her life, the meaning she’d assigned to her life, had come detached from its moorings. The shrine of self-delusion had crumbled. When she told me she’d swallowed those pills, I should have thought it through. I didn’t know any better then. I should never have let her out of my sight.

I blame myself. When I wish to feel better, I blame other people: her family, since she lived with them and no one noticed; the lieutenant’s mother, who couldn’t take her secret to the grave. If Ahmad hadn’t left me, I would have had him mind the bookstore while I stayed with her. I blame King Hussein and Yasser Arafat for Black September, which caused Ahmad to abandon me. I blame Hannah herself. I blame me again.

These memories—these memories make keen the pain that time has blunted.

As I walk toward home I hear the hollow, distant roar of commercial planes descending, so many of them at this time of day, so many of them at this time of year, bringing the Lebanese emigrants home for the holidays.

I blame Ahmad, the emigrant, or, more precisely, the exile. Somewhere in my apartment I have a photograph I clipped out of a newspaper of Ahmad leaving Beirut. He was among the throng of Palestinians forced out of the city in order to end the Israeli siege and their insane bombing. In August 1982, we had the great Palestinian exodus redux redux redux, etc. There were many pictures of the event. A few of Yasser Arafat from different angles, insincerely triumphant, broad smile, fingers of both hands celebrating victory like Nixon; weeping women bidding farewell, stoic mothers, children carrying posters and placards. The photograph I kept appeared in the newspaper the following week. Surprisingly, it showed Ahmad, one of a dozen men ready to board the ships to Tunis, kaffiyeh on his shoulder, but no Kalashnikov. Some of his armed companions hid their faces behind the black-and-white kaffiyehs, but not my Ahmad. He and his cohorts seemed neither defiant nor ashamed, more resigned, their heads drooping like sunflowers.

That was the last I saw of him.

I walk a small street that ends at a perpendicular intersection. A gutter running from the top to the second floor of a nearby building pumps a torrent of excess rainwater to the street, an unnatural pastoral brook in the middle of the city. A troubling noise, I have to say. I didn’t realize it had rained so much.

Water, water, everywhere,

And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water, everywhere,

Nor any drop to drink.

There is a wonderful story about Pavese, after his death. When he returned from exile in the late thirties, he worked for Einaudi, the leftist publisher, translating and editing books. The house of Einaudi published his works and supervised his estate after his death. On the day that the right-wing prime minister Silvio Berlusconi bought Einaudi, Pavese’s old home was flooded. A pipe burst, destroying all of his papers. From his grave, Pavese would not let that rat-faced popinjay make a penny from his work.

I can continue on my way home by turning right or left, since bend after bend, street after street, there’s not much to distinguish either route. What does distinguish this junction is the presence of three full-grown weeping figs, panniers of green, forming an equilateral triangle across opposite pavements, none of them having to fight human-built structures for air to breathe. I love this working-class neighborhood. The buildings on the street are architecturally contiguous and consistent—no modern monstrosities. They’re not aesthetically beautiful—dull colors past their due date—but since they’re organic and coherent, this part of town makes sense.

One building has a recent addition: its outdoor staircase, similar to the one in my building, is now covered in unpainted concrete. What used to be quite common before the war is becoming extinct. Like foals born ready to run, new buildings are born gated, protected, able to force the city out instantly with their cadres of doormen and security guards.