An Unnecessary Woman

by Rabih Alameddine

Hypnos fades as Thanatos approaches.

In the margins of morning, I crouched behind my window and observed teenage Thanatophiles with semiautomatics running cockroachy zigzags. Moonlight on hand-me-down rifle barrels. As nebulae of flares colored indigo skies, I saw stars blinking incredulously at the hubris below. Set on low, my kerosene lamp murmured all night, acting as white noise. I waited and waited, kept company by a ticking clock whose dials glowed a phosphorescent lime green in the dark. I sat by the window, household chores not done. On my bulky couch next to the bulkier television, I watched my city, my necropolis, broil and crumble.

I noted that the streets of Sabra were not named and were less delineated than the other streets. “I tried,” he said, “but everything worked against me. The streets were impermanent, transmogrifying at night into something else as if to trick me.” The books behind the glass window were witnesses to what he said next: “The streets and alleys of Sabra multiply at night like rats—like rats, I tell you.” He had painted the Sabra camp a very light blue, like the Siberian tundra in some maps. The cartographer must have been loath to include the camp in his map. I considered giving him Bruno Schulz’s book, which negotiates a similar situation. Schulz wrote: “On that map . . . the area of the Street of Crocodiles shone with the empty whiteness that usually marks polar regions or unexplored countries of which almost nothing is known.” Ah, Cinnamon Shops is still one of my favorite books. That map of Beirut still hangs on my bedroom wall.

He left me sometime in 1971 because the traumatic events of Black September the previous fall forced him to reevaluate his priorities. The killings in Jordan probably convinced him that books would not open the door to his cell. In this world, a cause could—a cause could swing prison doors wide open. I mourned his loss.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, as Marxist-Leninist as it may have considered itself to be, was a mirror image of Mussolini’s Fasci Italiani di Combattimento. Political parties may argue, yell and insult, punch and kick each other, launch grenades and missiles; it is naught but Narcissus’s silly gesturing at the pool’s image. Ahmad was sure he was different from Marcello, the protagonist of The Conformist, who has no moral core, who is a follower, who has no independent personality. Ahmad claimed to be an individualist. There is none more conformist than one who flaunts his individuality.

A hospital in town recently had one of its wings remodeled to what they call “super ultra deluxe,” which means that you have to hock your jewelry just to breathe the air inside. The floors are parquet, the pillows down, and all the technology is the latest, including bathrooms with toilets that use motion detectors to flush. What no one took into account is that the detectors go berserk and have to be recalibrated every time the electricity cuts off and the generators take over. Since it’s Beirut, this has to be done twice a day if not more. The hospital had to hire an in-house toilet calibrator.

My books show me what it’s like to live in a reliable country where you flick on a switch and a bulb is guaranteed to shine and remain on, where you know that cars will stop at red lights and those traffic lights will not cease working a couple of times a day. How does it feel when a plumber shows up at the designated time, when he shows up at all? How does it feel to assume that when someone says she’ll do something by a certain date, she in fact does it?

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.

He was kind to his family and supported them. He was amiable to me, for which I was grateful. He passed away with no one who could say a bad thing about him. At the same time, he passed away with no one outside his immediate family who could remember much about him. Most people weren’t able to recognize him from one sighting to the next; he had to constantly reintroduce himself. And then he died. I myself can’t recall what his face looked like—the metaphorical cataracts, once more.

I put on my gray dress, which has gone in and out of style a number of times while I wasn’t paying attention, and a blue cardigan.

We all try to explain away the Holocaust, Abu Ghraib, or the Sabra Massacre by denying that we could ever do anything so horrible. The committers of those crimes are evil, other, bad apples; something in the German or American psyche makes their people susceptible to following orders, drinking the grape Kool-Aid, killing indiscriminately. You believe that you’re the one person who wouldn’t have delivered the electric shocks in the Milgram experiment because those who did must have been emotionally abused by their parents, or had domineering fathers, or were dumped by their spouses. Anything that makes them different from you. When I read a book, I try my best, not always successfully, to let the wall crumble just a bit, the barricade that separates me from the book. I try to be involved.

If you read these pages and think I’m the way I am because I lived through a civil war, you can’t feel my pain. If you believe you’re not like me because one woman, and only one, Hannah, chose to be my friend, then you’re unable to empathize. Like the bullet, I too stray.

Dostoyevsky’s St. Petersburg burst into such splendor around me that it became more real than my life, which I found more incomprehensible with every passing day. I belonged in his book, not mine.

She was so desperate for each of them to have a better life that she raised them not to have a place for her in it.

May I admit that being different from normal people was what I desperately sought? I wanted to be special. I was already different: tall, not attractive and all. Mine is a face that would have trouble launching a canoe. I knew that no one would love me, so I strove to be respected, to be looked up to. I wanted people to think I was better than they were. I wanted to be Miss Jean Brodie’s crème de la crème. I thought art would make me a better human being, but I also thought it would make me better than you.

Yo, la peor de todas.

scion of a Lebanese immigrant wrote a novel retelling Priam’s pleading with Achilles for Hector’s body, David Malouf in Ransom, a masterful book.

Henri Matisse once said, “It has bothered me all my life that I do not paint like everybody else.” I love this quote, love the fact that the most incandescent painter of the twentieth century felt this way. Being different troubled him. Did he genuinely want to paint like everybody else, to be like everybody else? Did he truly wish to belong? It has bothered me all my life that I am not like everybody else. For years, I was able to convince myself that I was special, that being different was a choice. As a matter of fact, I wanted to believe that I was superior, not an artist, not a genius like Matisse, but unlike the rabble. I am unique, an individual, not simply idiosyncratic, but extraordinary. I considered my individualism a virtue, protecting me from collective moods and insanities, helping me float above familial and societal riptides. That gave me comfort. Except it is failing me now. Not just now. For some time, I haven’t been able to wall off my heart adequately.

I’m sure you’ve noticed that I dislike Israel, that ridiculous pygmy state dripping with self-overestimation, yet many of the giants I respect are Jewish. There is no contradiction. I identify with outsiders, with the alienated or dispossessed. Like many nation-states, including its sister pygmy state Lebanon, Israel is an abomination.

I love the idea of homeland, but not the actual return to one.

My mother prodded me back onto the street, grasped my hand once more, and continued her march back home. She ignored me the rest of the way, but she mumbled to the sky, to herself. She didn’t hit me, she didn’t backhand the top of my head, but she was furious. She was a one-handed gesticulating fury on the go.

I am proud that I finished the Austerlitz project. I consider it one of the best Holocaust novels. I have to say that much of what is being written about the Holocaust these days seems to be directed at the petite bourgeoisie. I find that when a subject has been heavily tilled, particularly something as horrifying as the Holocaust, anything new should force me to look with fresh eyes, to experience previously unexperienced feelings, to explore the hitherto unexplored. When I first read Primo Levi, my body shivered and spasmed at the oddest of moments for a week. I couldn’t read Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen without clutching the edge of my desk. But then it took years, wading through mostly melodramatic books until I came across Kertész’s Fateless, to feel challenged once more.

Kertész, like Levi and Borowski, escaped the gas chambers of Auschwitz, and he’s the only one of the three who hasn’t killed himself—not yet, at least. In 1951, Tadeusz Borowski, all of twenty-eight years old, opened a gas valve and put his head in the oven. The Gestapo had arrested him, a non-Jew, for surreptitiously printing his poetry. Anyone who says the pen is mightier than the sword has never come face-to-face with a gun. Two of my favorite books are The Emigrants and Ota Pavel’s How I Came to Know Fish. What I love about them is that they deal with the Holocaust by looking at it indirectly; I don’t recall the word being mentioned in either. Both refuse to soil grief with sentimentalism, and so they are devastating.

There must be a word in some language that describes the anguish you experience upon suddenly coming face-to-face with your terrifying future. I can’t think of one in any of the languages I know. Maybe it exists in Swahili or Sanskrit. Maybe I can make one up, like Hamsun’s Kuboaa. Maybe the word is just mother.

wonder if she too is lonely—if she too is in possession of that vast, heavy isolation that’s so difficult to bear. If she would sometimes happily exchange it for any kind of interaction, however trivial or cheap, for the tiniest outward agreement with the first person who came along, even the most unworthy. If so, then today I happen to be my great-niece’s first person, the most unworthy.

If during those last days she had written in her diary instead of going silent, I might be able to know whether Proust killed her, whether she encountered something in the text that unnerved her, something the great dandy wrote. I wish I could know. I desire more explication.

As she approached fifty in 1972, the Valium and Seconal pills would become part of her story, though not in the way one might assume. She plummeted—she dove into her abyss before Beirut dove into its own.

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.

grew insatiable. Books became my milk and honey. I made myself feel better by reciting jejune statements like “Books are the air I breathe,” or, worse, “Life is meaningless without literature,” all in a weak attempt to avoid the fact that I found the world inexplicable and impenetrable. Compared to the complexity of understanding grief, reading Foucault or Blanchot is like perusing a children’s picture book.

From what I read tonight in Microcosms: “Why so much pity for the murderers who came after and none for those before, drowned like rats? He should have known that together with every being—man or beast—evil entered the Ark.” Say what you will about the God of Israel, but consistency is not His forte. He hasn’t been fair to my kind. The One God is a Nazi.

Can I risk missing the rite of beginning a translation on the first of January? I wonder if I’m able to break my own rules. The rules are arbitrary. I recognize that, but I also know that they make my life work; my rules get me through the day. If I have to, I can begin the translation on another date and the world will not reverse on its axis. I’ll not lose any more sleep than I already do if I postpone. Still, I prefer to stick to what I know, creature of habit and all that.

Cursed is this world and cursed is all that is in this world. Cursed is this age of relentless humiliation and slapstick. Here’s your damn epiphany.

I resist the urge to go Merkel to her Bush.

“Your hair was nice,” says Fadia. “It had so much possibility, but you never dyed it, and when you did, you had to dye it blue. I don’t understand you.”

“She’s not Shirley MacLaine,” Joumana says. “You are. You’re just as loud and inappropriate as she is. What happened to your manners?” “They aged,” Fadia says. “They grew old to keep me young.”

This was one of my earliest translations, probably the third or fourth. I love Anna, but that’s not the only reason she’s important. Karenina was the first project where I began to feel I knew what I was doing. I shouldn’t say that. I’ll say it was the first translation where I didn’t feel as inadequate, where the struggle was no longer as arduous or titanic, where the translating itself became enjoyable—just as pleasurable, if not more so, than the anticipation of finishing the project. Anna Karenina was the first time I allowed a book and its world into my house.

“Thank the Lord,” she exclaims. “I’ve read this. I was worried because I hadn’t even heard of the others. I felt so small. In all the other piles not one name I recognized. I felt inadequate.” “Don’t,” I say. “I’m the one who should feel so.” “But I’ve read Anna Karenina,” she says. “I read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky as a young girl. It’s been a long time, but I did.” “It’s been a long time for me as well.” Those were the books that led me down this path, the books responsible for both the peak and the abyss.

“That’s quite all right,” I say. “Husbands mean so little to me.” She laughs. “Did you fall in love with Vronsky as well?” she asks. “No. I loved Anna.”