An Unnecessary Woman (9 page)

After one of the Palestinian fighters defecated on the floor of this bathroom, a hand’s width south of the drain, I spent hours on my knees cleaning the soil of the soldier, the silt and dregs. I used a coarse wire scrubbing brush, like a blackboard eraser, most innocuous of instruments. Out, out. Even though no trace remains, I always step over the spot as if it were an Israeli landmine—
upborne with indefatigable wings over the vast abrupt
. The passel of Palestinians didn’t steal much, there wasn’t much to steal—there was never much of a market for books.

I place the heavy box on the floor next to the reading armchair. With a slightly damp cloth, I wipe off the dust. I tear open the masking tape and remove the lid. The reams of paper are there, of course, just as I left them so many years ago. I remove a short stack from the top. The first page has the title of the book in Arabic written in indelible ink, Sebald’s full name, and mine, Aaliya Saleh, below it, a bit smaller. The sheet is slightly brittle at the edges, nothing too worrisome. I stretch my back and consider whether I want another cup of tea before delving into Sebald’s world of melancholy.

I shouldn’t have opened the door, should have looked through the peephole, but I certainly wasn’t expecting my half brother the eldest to appear. I haven’t seen any of my half brothers in years, and none has been to my home in a decade or more. Yet I should have known it was he. I’d heard Fadia’s voice say, “Trouble,” when my doorbell rang. From the landing, she has an unobstructed view of my door, my comings and goings. He rang the bell, and because my movements have slowed and it took me a few extra seconds to get to the door, he rang the bell once more, a longer, more persistent ring. My half brothers, like so many men and boys, have the impatience of the entitled.

He bristles with fury in the doorway, carrying two old-fashioned suitcases, aged but not worn. His wrinkled face is deformed by unchecked emotion and fat, his body by the weight of the suitcases. He huffs and puffs, displays the anger of Achilles and the countenance of the little pig. His square head, his face, and his neck flush and blotch with red—a bloated, color-saturated Cubist figure. He storms in, drops the suitcases, slams them onto my floor.

Even under nonhostile circumstances, each of my half brothers has the ability to induce jitters in me. This is more than simply hostile. I can feel the room’s temperature rise. My tongue tastes of copper, which means I’m overbreathing, getting ready for fight or flight, ready to pick up my sword or jump on my horse. I slow my inhalation. I focus on calming myself.

I gently ask him what he’s doing.

“Dropping off your mother,” he replies. “It’s your turn. We shouldn’t be taking care of her. She’s your responsibility. You’re her daughter and you don’t have a family. You were supposed to be taking care of her for all these years. It’s time, it’s your turn. We can’t do it anymore.” He doesn’t yell, but waits for me to contradict. He wants a reason to shout.

I don’t give him one.

He takes a cigarette from a pack in his shirt pocket, holds it between his dry lips, dangling weakly, but he doesn’t light it. He’s a once-strong man reduced to mere rough and vulgar: doughy neck, broad shoulders, soft chin, eyes ringed with fatigue, distracted comb-over. His brown polyester pants, from a different suit than the jacket and vest, flap and squeal as he paces the foyer. He stares me down, waiting for me to cower. I do.

I cower because even though he looks like a parody of a tough guy—always did—I knew him once to be dangerous and menacing. At the beginning of the civil war in 1975, he put on the cheap camouflage outfit of one of the militias, a tragicomic dress rehearsal. Don’t ask me which militia. I didn’t care then and I don’t now. He looked like a caricature, his spindly torso (not fat then, just slightly convex) decorated with medals and his shoulders with betassled epaulettes, triumphantly imitating Napoleon, the Corsican Comet.

Bluster and hubris, that’s what he was, what he is, but that’s what makes him more dangerous in some ways.

Think Bush—that indecent amalgam of banality and perdition.

How nations sink . . .

When Vengeance listens to the Fool’s request.

An unpleasant thought.

Whenever I think of Bush, I think of an image: a shattered visage in the desert sand.

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

A more pleasant thought.

My half brother the eldest frightens me. He didn’t while we were growing up; then, he only irritated me. We shared a mattress and I regarded him as nothing more than a space eater. He was obtuse, careless, and, according to my mother, infallible. He found inordinate pleasure in practical jokes and all manner of horseplay. He cultivated an obscene satisfaction in bullying his younger siblings.

After my husband left me, my mother did her best to convince me to follow him out the door and leave my home. She suggested that I exchange apartments with my half brother the eldest—his was small, fit for a lonely one; mine was larger, fit for a still-growing family, which included her, of course.

“Look at how many rooms you have,” she used to say. “How greedy do you have to be? How selfish?”

At first, I argued with her, but then I noted that it was more effective to ignore her, to allow her tongue unlimited flapping until it flagged. When it became obvious that her words weren’t having the desired effect, my half brothers jockeyed into the conversation. Each began to involve himself when his family increased its numbers—irresponsible reproduction being the family’s ennui annihilator.

My half brother the eldest first appeared at my door after the birth of child number two or three—I should know which because I was there at the hospital for the birth (I was still not ready to abandon the family completely). Bluster and hubris. He wasn’t able to talk then, to converse or negotiate, but simply began shouting, demanding that I do the right thing. I stopped opening my door when I knew it was he. My half brother the eldest banged his simian chest and cursed outside. He terrified me, an incontinent terror.

He returned and returned, again and again, the big bad wolf scaring me with his obstreperous threats, but you know, that worked against him. You not only inure yourself against the fear, finding it bearable after a while and coming to terms with it, you also absorb it. I absorbed it. It belonged to me and I to it; faithful companions, sisters, my fear and I.

I remained afraid, but I was no longer scared. Children get scared. With every return, with each bang on my door, my fear and I matured a little.

Before the AK-47, I waited with a sharp chef’s knife next to me (I wasn’t much of a cook, but I found a chef’s knife the most versatile). I waited, walked in circles, ovals, and squares, moved from room to room in my spacious apartment carrying the knife. Just in case. I don’t doubt that had he ever broken into my home, I would have stabbed him. I was that afraid. The imbecile.

My half brother the eldest’s first job was as a doorman at a three-star hotel. He loved it because of the uniform, felt it gave him some class, some cachet. The peasantry, when it wishes to escape peasantry, has always, for centuries, across all borders, escaped into a uniform. That was the only paying job he’s ever had, he loved it that much, but in the early days, he had a lot of problems with one of the managers, who mistreated him, he felt. Unfortunately, I may have unintentionally added to those problems. It seems the manager didn’t trust some of the employees, my half brother in particular. He’d wait at the employee exit and search certain people as they left, probably looking for towels, linens, or miniature toiletries. My half brother the eldest felt humiliated, and to his horror, one day as I was walking home from the bookstore, I saw him standing outside the hotel’s back exit, his arms and legs spread, the hotel manager kneeling before him patting him down.

Rage veined his face when he saw me.

Sad, because in that moment I felt sympathy, compassion even; in his vulnerability I identified with him, I saw him as family.

By the time the war started in 1975, I’d stopped inviting my mother to my apartment. I’d call her and she’d join me in one of the cafés on Hamra Street. One day her son and a group of his friends dropped her off. They were wearing imitation military outfits, driving a beat-up convertible and not a Jeep. When the car stopped, my half brother the eldest looked my way and whispered something to his friends, who sniggered. They looked less like militiamen than like a group of fraternity brothers out on the town, naive hooligans, ill-mannered boys trying to look suave. I could see them in bright red suede windbreakers and flower-patterned silk shirts with wide lapels. My half brother looked to be the eldest of the group, a man playing at being a boy. He had already begun to collect medals.

“He sleeps with them on,” my mother told me as we ordered our coffee.

I couldn’t tell from her straightforward tone whether she was proud or dismayed that her son kept the intimate company of fake medals in bed.

Sleeping with the medals was not what horrified me. She informed me that he had captured an Israeli spy and they’d dealt with him. She used the innocuous word
dealt
. I tried to extract more information but she knew nothing. Boys’ dreams are mothers’ nightmares, but in my mother’s case, her boy’s dreams were her oblivions. I couldn’t imagine my half brother being able to deal with anything more complicated than opening car doors for his betters.

In the newspaper a few days later, there was a small item saying that the hotel manager had been found dead on a side street, bound and tortured. I couldn’t imagine my half brother killing the man. He was too much of a coward. I could, however, imagine that he lied, that he informed others about his nemesis, that he poured pestilence into the ears of a future politician, that he witnessed the elimination of his humiliator.

Do no harm to your fellow man unless he’s your boss.

I tried to imagine that I was mistaken, or, if not, then to justify his actions in my mind. This was during a civil war when innumerable crimes were committed—crimes that made my half brother the eldest’s seem like lunch-recess pranks in comparison. Vengeance was in the very air then. To quote the poet Czesław Miłosz, during the Lebanese civil war, “causing someone’s death was dissociated from the reek of demonism, pangs of conscience, and similar accessories of Shakespearean drama.” Young men in perfectly clean uniforms were able to shoot people while gnawing on a kebab sandwich and sipping Pepsi.

I tried to justify but I couldn’t.

I don’t know what to think.

He may be my half brother, but we’re not related. A chasm of incommunicable worlds lies between us.

When my stepfather died, my half brother the eldest magically morphed into the man of the house that he had never moved out of. My mother went on living with him. She wouldn’t have considered living with me, nor would I have wished it. My mother loves her sons only and never cares to be discreet about it. She treats her youngest daughter as a second-class citizen, a second-gender offspring. I, her eldest, hardly register in her consciousness. Once I stopped trying to impress myself into her life, she forgot about me. If she considers her youngest daughter Fanny Price, I’m her Quasimodo, to be confined in the bell tower.

For my half brother the eldest to bring her to my home means that every one of his brothers has adamantly refused to take her off his hands.

I tell him, calmly, that I don’t think it’s feasible. I’m about to suggest that she won’t be happy when I see her standing in my open doorway, held erect by my sister-in-law. My mother, alarmingly fragile in all black, is hunched over, as if she has walked out of Goya’s
A Pilgrimage to San Isidro
. The face has the paleness seen in skin long hidden from the sun. Hair is still dyed black, fading, with a thumb’s-width vein of white at the roots. She barely keeps her head up; breathing is an effort, as is living. The lines of her body, of her form, seem to have melted; for a moment, incongruously, as light streams through the door behind her, it seems that I can see both the front and the back of her. My mouth drops, my shoulders droop. My mind becomes congested, jammed with feelings and thoughts that I can’t formulate nimbly enough. I haven’t been in her presence in so long. I’ve forgotten how scrambled my brain becomes when she’s around. My sister-in-law walks my mother gingerly into the foyer, holds her tightly like an overboard sailor clutching a piece of driftwood, but also delicately, as if she’s gossamer. My sister-in-law’s wedding band glimmers as her fingers wrap around my mother’s elbow.

I receive a whiff of the musty, sour odor of my mother’s age.

“She belongs to you now,” my half brother says. The wormlike vein in his temple throbs and thickens.

“She’s yours now,” my sister-in-law says, spitting the words out of tightly pressed, raggedly crimsoned lips. Her mousy face reddens, like a wet shirt brightens on a laundry line.

My mother, a modern-day succubus, has the ability to drain my soul and my voice without having to resort to something as rudimentary as a kiss. But I can’t allow this charade to go on much longer. I take a long motivational breath.

“No,” I say, in a low, sticky tone. “She is not mine.”

My mother raises her wraithlike head and looks at me. Her furrowed face contorts, shrinking the wrinkles and multiplying them tenfold. Her mouth draws open in toothless horror. Her gnarled hands rise, her palms face me, warding off evil. My mother tries to pull back from her daughter-in-law’s arms. The black shawl drops from her bony left shoulder, but doesn’t fall off completely. Her eyes display strident, unspeakable dread. She screams, a surprisingly loud and shrill shriek. From such a frail body, a defiant skirl of terror that does not slow or tire.