Other Lives

OTHER LIVES

 

First published in 2014 by
INTERLINK BOOKS
An imprint of Interlink Publishing Group, Inc.
46 Crosby Street, Northampton, Massachusetts 01060
www.interlinkbooks.com

Copyright © Iman Humaydan, 2010 and 2014
English translation © Michelle Hartman, 2014
Cover illustration by Evguenia Evenbach (1889-1981)
Originally published in Arabic as
Hayawat Okhra
(Beirut: Arrawi, 2010)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Humaydan, Iman.
[Hayawat ukhrá. English]
Other lives / by Iman Humaydan ; translated by Michelle Hartman.
   pages cm
ISBN 978-1-56656-962-0
I. Hartman, Michelle, translator. II. Title.
PJ7874.U475H3913 2014
892.7'36--dc23

2014002427

Printed and bound in the United States of America

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For Inaam and May,
eternally here even though they're gone

W
hen will you be back home?

He asks me on our way to the Mombasa airport. I don't say that I am coming back. I don't say that I'm leaving. I only say that I miss Lebanon. I know that longing is not for a specific place. It's for what's inside myself that I'm losing everyday, for what I lose while away, for what I've created from the images I've preserved in my head for so long. It's as though nothing is left of them now… More than fifteen years have passed since I left. I know that by going back to Beirut, I won't retrieve what I've lost. Instead I'll simply confirm my loss. I'll confirm that what I've been missing is in my head, only in my head, and I won't be able to convey it to him.

I leave Chris behind. And I leave his letter to me on my bedside table, without opening it. I know what's inside: money I don't want and a question about when I'll come back to him. Since we've been married, he's left me money in envelopes. Our hands have never touched, not even once, when he's given me money.

The day before my trip from Kenya to Lebanon, Chris is busy in his laboratory when I call him. His assistant answers. I hang up so that Chris can call me back a few moments later. He's so completely taken up with what he wants to say that he doesn't even ask what I want. In an excited, anxious voice—almost crying—he informs me that he's gotten amazing results from the experiments he began a year ago. Of course he's happy with the results of his experiments. But his happiness doesn't make me forget either my decision or my anxious desire to pack and lock my suitcases and put them by the door. I open an empty suitcase and without thinking put some clothes and other things in it. I start by opening the drawers in my wardrobe, take out my underwear, cotton t-shirts and jeans. After I pile them up on the bed, I think it's too much—I should get used to traveling lighter.

I tell myself that the airplane is taking off tomorrow morning at eight, so I have to be at the airport at six. This means I have to wake up at four in the morning—it's already past midnight and I haven't slept yet. I'm going to travel first from Mombasa to Nairobi. I don't know how long I'll have to wait in the airport there until the plane carries me to Dubai and then to Lebanon. Chris will accompany me on my journey as far as the Nairobi airport. Then he'll come back to Mombasa where our house and his work are. I won't miss anything. This is what I tell myself when I visit the rooms of the house where I've lived for eleven years and haven't left except for a quick trip to Adelaide every year, where my unbalanced father, Salama, and my silent mother, Nadia, live. Or for a short break to South Africa. I don't leave him except for intermittent weekend trips. I used to travel from Mombasa to Nairobi to pick up things that Olga sent me from Beirut. The English-language lessons dedicated to eradicating illiteracy that I used to give at UNICEF schools in Mombasa were not enough to fill periods of time as vast as the Kenyan plains, nor were the private Arabic lessons I used to teach. I've never gotten to know Kenya, despite going as a tourist on organized trips through the Kenyan mountains, the surrounding savannahs and to its parks and wildlife reserves.

Beirut… How faraway it is now. How many lives have I lived since I left it? I think while closing my second suitcase, pulling it toward the door of the house to leave it there. Did I live many lives or only one life that was enough for many women?

Questions I don't know how to answer. I'm aware that it didn't take me long to realize that ever since I left Beirut my life changed. As soon as I arrived in Australia with my incomplete family, everything changed—even the names of holidays and when they fall. The Christmas holiday changed into the summer holiday in Adelaide, the Australian city where I lived for four years before I got married and moved to Kenya. The date of winter's arrival changed. Winter started coming in July.

We wouldn't have chosen Adelaide, except that my mother's brother Yusuf lived there. He left Lebanon before the civil war started. He was an active member of the Syrian Nationalist Party and participated in the coup of 1961, fleeing before the Lebanese army could put him in prison. An Australian man whom he met when he was training at the Tiro, the shooting range near the airport, helped him flee. He arranged travel for him first to Cyprus and from there on to Australia. I was five years old at the time. But I feel as though I can still remember my mother Nadia's fear and worry about her only brother. Perhaps this was the first shock she ever had, long before my brother Baha''s death, when she received the false report of her brother Yusuf's arrest and liquidation. That was before she learned the truth about his rescue and escape from the country.

Nadia remembers the past in relation to the incidents that marked our lifetimes. She tells me that I was born on the day of the tripartite military aggression against Abdel Nasser's Egypt in 1956 and that she was terrified of losing me while I was still a fetus in her belly on the day of the earthquake in Lebanon which cracked open many houses in the village, including her parents' house in Hasbaya. She says that my brother Baha' was born after the events of 1958 in Lebanon, when my father was in prison. She also says that my uncle Yusuf, her brother, left the country to travel abroad a few days after the coup of 1961. Nadia's no different than my grandmother Nahil, my father's mother, who sees dates of public importance in the family tree before she sees the names of individuals, to say nothing of the fact that her memory would recall any event in history before it would come up with my date of birth… or even that of Salama, i.e., my father. It's as though the individual in my family has no story unless the beginning of her or his life can be associated with an important date in history. I've often believed that our destinies are linked to these dates that describe our lives, the link mysterious, hard to untangle or reveal.

I don't know if what I remember of my uncle Yusuf is what I saw and experienced myself or if the stories about him that his sister Nadia, my mother, told made me invent a memory that grew up with me and never left. I believe that I remember the day my uncle was arrested but my grandmother Nahil tells me that I was very little and it's impossible that I could remember. She tells me that I hadn't even completed my fifth year of life yet. Despite this, whenever I think about my uncle, I can imagine how angry he must've been the night before the coup—how he would've cursed the government and the state, denouncing so many of its members as traitors.

My uncle Yusuf arrived in Australia and lived in Paradise, one of the small suburbs of Adelaide. I found the name interesting after I learned that the largest cemetery and the first crematorium in the area were located near it. This is also where the Druze who immigrated to Australia built their first cemetery. Perhaps they chose this suburb for its name, which to them means that paradise is always found on earth. Or that it's a dream deferred, equidistant between earth and heaven.

We had to live in my uncle's house when we arrived at the beginning of 1980. I hadn't seen my uncle since I was a small child. He seemed like any Anglo-Saxon who'd been born and raised in Australia, especially with the broad Australian accent that he'd adopted soon after marrying an Australian woman who worked in an office for immigrants and refugees. He'd bought a house in Adelaide and didn't move from one place to another like most of the Lebanese who arrived on the continent before and during the war. When we emerged into the arrivals hall at the Adelaide airport, my uncle ran toward us, hugging my mother for a long time and crying while he asked her how she was. She said a few incomprehensible words, also choking on her tears. He started reminding her of things that she seemed to have forgotten or things whose details may have been buried under the weight of other memories that forced her to be silent. My mother loosened the knot around her silence while hugging my uncle, murmuring a few words, her eyes filling with tears. She began talking and spoke for a few minutes and then returned to the silence that she'd chosen from the moment of my brother's death. From then on, from the time of our arrival in Australia, it seemed that her silence began to wear her out—as though what she'd chosen for herself began to exhaust her.

Everything that she'd said about Yusuf is still true. Even though he knew the story of how she fell silent after my brother Baha''s murder, he was not surprised at her words. But her words surprised me, like summer rain. They revived me and helped me recover from the wearying journey that lasted more than two days. I didn't care what she'd said about my uncle Yusuf, my only concern was that she had spoken after her long silence. In the car on the way to the house, my uncle hugged her and she cried while my father looked out of the car window at people, buildings and streets. His face was red. Sweat ran down both sides of his head and neck as though he was in a sauna. He was still wearing the woolen sweater that he'd worn to travel in from Lebanon. He insisted that it was winter and wouldn't take it off even though it was so hot in Adelaide. At that moment he seemed weak and yielding, with no power or might. He stuck his head out of the car window, turning it every which way to look at buildings and people walking by as though watching a film that was whizzing past him. He kept repeating, like a broken record, “Ism Allah, Ism Allah, keep the Evil Eye far away.”

My uncle hadn't changed, that's what my mother said. But he had really started to belong to his new country over there—from a Syrian Nationalist to an Australian no different from the Anglo-Saxons. This didn't prevent him from also being an active and influential member of the Druze association that's had many different names throughout the different stages of the life of the Druze in Australia. It was first established as the Syrian Druze Association, then after Lebanese independence it became the Lebanese-Australian Association for the Druze. After the emigration of a large number of the Druze to Australia in the 1960s, before the civil war in Lebanon, the name changed three more times. It finally became and remained the Australian Druze Association and Yusuf is now in charge of it.

We stayed in my uncle's house for a few months before we found a house to move into. We rented a house nearby, in an area with few buildings other than a number of nearly identical houses all lined up next to each other on one side of the street. We left my uncle's house carrying many things that we'd accumulated. But we'd lost some of my mother's complicity with my uncle, a complicity that had always felt alive and burning to us, all those years that we were far away from him.