第3章 An Unnecessary Woman (1)

You could say I was thinking of other things when I shampooed my hair blue, and two glasses of red wine didn't help my concentration.

Let me explain.

First, you should know this about me: I have but one mirror in my home, a smudged one at that. I'm a conscientious cleaner, you might even say compulsive-the sink is immaculately white, its bronze faucets sparkle-but I rarely remember to wipe the mirror clean. I don't think we need to consult Freud or one of his many minions to know that there's an issue here.

I begin this tale with a badly lit reflection. One of the bathroom's two bulbs has expired. I'm in the midst of the evening ritual of brushing my teeth, facing said mirror, when a halo surrounding my head snares my attention. Toothbrush in right hand still moving up and down, side to side, left hand reaches for reading glasses lying on the little table next to the toilet. Once atop my obtrusive nose they help me see that I'm neither a saint nor saintly but more like the Queen Mother-well, an image of the Queen Mother smudged by a schoolgirl's eraser. No halo this, the blue anomaly is my damp hair. A pigment battle rages atop my head, a catfight of mismatched contestants.

I touch a still-wet lock to test the permanency of the blue tint and end up leaving a sticky stain of toothpaste on it. You can correctly presume that multitasking is not my forte.

I lean over the bathtub, pick up the tube of Bel Argent shampoo I bought yesterday. I read the fine print, squinting even with the reading glasses. Yes, I used ten times the amount prescribed while washing my hair. I enjoy a good lather. Reading instructions happens not to be my forte either.

Funny. My bathroom tiles are rectangular white with interlocking light blue tulips, almost the same shade as my new dye. Luckily, the blue isn't that of the Israeli flag. Can you imagine? Talk about a brawl of mismatched contestants.

Usually vanity isn't one of my concerns, doesn't disconcert me much. However, I'd overheard the three witches discussing the unrelenting whiteness of my hair. Joumana, my upstairs neighbor, had suggested that if I used a shampoo like Bel Argent, the white would be less flat. There you have it.

As I understand it, and I might be wrong as usual, you and I tend to lose short wavelength cones as we age, so we're less able to distinguish the color blue. That's why many people of a certain age have a bluish tint to their hair. Without the tint, they see their hair as pale yellow, or possibly salmon. One hairstylist described on the radio how he finally convinced this old woman that her hair was much too blue. But his client still refused to change the color. It was much more important that she see her hair as natural than the rest of the world do so.

I'd probably get along better with the client.

I too am an old woman, but I have yet to lose many short wavelength cones. I can distinguish the color blue a bit too clearly right now.

Allow me to offer a mild defense for being distracted. At the end of the year, before I begin a new project, I read the translation I've completed. I do minor final corrections, set the pages in order, and place them in the box. This is part of the ritual, which includes imbibing two glasses of red wine. I'll also admit that the last reading allows me to pat myself on the back, to congratulate myself on completing the project. This year, I translated the superb novel Austerlitz, my second translation of W. G. Sebald. I was reading it today, and for some reason, probably the protagonist's unrequited despair, I couldn't stop thinking of Hannah, I couldn't, as if the novel, or my Arabic translation of it, was an inductor into Hannah's world.

Remembering Hannah, my one intimate, is never easy. I still see her before me at the kitchen table, her plate wiped clean of food, her right cheek resting on the palm of her hand, head tilted slightly, listening, offering that rarest of gifts: her unequivocal attention. My voice had no home until her.

During my seventy-two years, she was the one person I cared for, the one I told too much-boasts, hates, joys, cruel disappointments, all jumbled together. I no longer think of her as often as I used to, but she appears in my thoughts every now and then. The traces of Hannah on me are indelible.

Percolating remembrances, red wine, an old woman's shampoo: mix well and wind up with blue hair.

I'll wash my hair once more in the morning, with no more tears baby shampoo this time. Hopefully the blue will fade. I can just imagine what the neighbors will say now.

For most of my adult life, since I was twenty-two, I've begun a translation every January first. I do realize that this is a holiday and most choose to celebrate, most do not choose to work on New Year's Day. Once, as I was leafing through the folio of Beethoven's sonatas, I noticed that only the penultimate, the superb op. 110 in A-flat Major, was dated on the top right corner, as if the composer wanted us to know that he was busy working that Christmas Day in 1821. I too choose to keep busy during holidays.

Over these last fifty years I've translated fewer than forty books-thirty-seven, if I count correctly. Some books took longer than a year, others refused to be translated, and one or two bored me into submission-not the books themselves, but my translations of them. Books in and of themselves are rarely boring, except for memoirs of American presidents (No, No, Nixon)-well, memoirs of Americans in general. It's the "I live in the richest country in the world yet pity me because I grew up with flat feet and a malodorous vagina but I triumph in the end" syndrome. Tfeh!

Books into boxes-boxes of paper, loose translated sheets. That's my life.

I long ago abandoned myself to a blind lust for the written word. Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time. It is the world outside that box that gives me trouble. I have adapted tamely, though not conventionally, to this visible world so I can retreat without much inconvenience into my inner world of books. Transmuting this sandy metaphor, if literature is my sandbox, then the real world is my hourglass-an hourglass that drains grain by grain. Literature gives me life, and life kills me.

Well, life kills everyone.

But that's a morose subject. Tonight I feel alive-blue hair and red wine alive. The end of the year approaches, the beginning of a new year. The year is dead. Long live the year! I will begin my next project. This is the time that excites me most. I pay no attention to the Christmas decorations that burst into fruitful life in various neighborhoods of my city, or the lights welcoming the New Year. This year, Ashura falls at almost the same time, but I don't care.

Let the people flagellate themselves into a frenzy of remembrance. Wails, whips, blood: the betrayal of Hussein moves me not.

Let the masses cover themselves in gold, frankincense, and Chanel to honor their savior's birth. Trivia matters naught to me.

Beginnings are pregnant with possibilities. As much as I enjoy finishing a translation, it is this time that tickles my marrow most. The ritual of preparation: setting aside the two versions of the book of choice-one English, the other French-the papers, the notebook that's to be filled with actual notes, the 2B graphite pencils with the sharpener and Pearl eraser, the pens. Cleaning the reading room: dusting the side table, vacuuming the curtains and the ancient armchair, navy chenille with knotted fringes hanging off its arms. On the day of genesis, the first of January, I begin the morning with a ceremonial bath, a rite of scrubbing and cleansing, after which I light two candles for Walter Benjamin.

Let there be light, I say.

Yes, I am a tad obsessive. For a nonreligious woman, this is my faith.

This year, though, for the first time in quite a while, I'm not certain about the book I want to work with. This year, for the first time ever, I might have to begin a translation while having blue hair. Aiiee.

I've decided on Roberto Bola?o's unfinished novel 2666, but I'm nurturing doubts. At more than nine hundred pages in both versions, it is no small feat, or no short feat. It will take me at least two years. Should I be taking on such a long-term project? Should I be making accommodations for my age? I'm not talking about dying. I am in good health, and women in my family live long. My mother is still going insane.

Let's put it this way: I don't hesitate when buying green bananas, but I'm slowing down. 2666 is a big project. The Savage Detectives required nineteen months, and I believe my work rate isn't what it was then. So I balk.

Yes, I'm healthy, I have to keep reminding myself. During my biannual checkup earlier this week, my doctor insisted that I was in sturdy health, like iron. He's right, of course, and I'm grateful, but what he should have compared me to was rusty iron. I feel oxidized. What was it that Yourcenar, as Hadrian, wrote about physicians? "A man does not practice medicine for more than thirty years without some falsehood." My doctor has been practicing for longer than that. We've grown old together. He told me that my heart is in good shape, talked to me with his face hidden behind a computer printout of my lab results. Even I, a Luddite, haven't seen such archaic perforated printouts in years. His mobile phone, a BlackBerry lying on the desk next to his left elbow, was definitely the latest model, which should count for something. I do not own one. But then, I have no need for a phone, let alone a smart one; no one calls me.

Please, no pity or insincere compassion. I'm not suggesting that I feel sorry for myself because no one calls me or, worse, that you should feel sorry. No one calls me. That's a fact.

I am alone.

It is a choice I've made, yet it is also a choice made with few other options available. Beiruti society wasn't fond of divorced, childless women in those days.

Still, I made my bed-a simple, comfortable, and ade-quate bed, I might add.

I was fourteen when I began my first translation, twenty dull pages from a science textbook. It was the year I fell in love with Arabic-not the oral dialect, mind you, but the classical language. I'd studied it since I was a child, of course, as early as I'd studied English or French. Yet only in Arabic class were we constantly told that we could not master this most difficult of languages, that no matter how much we studied and practiced, we could not possibly hope to write as well as al-Mutanabbi or, heaven forbid, the apex of the language, the Quran itself. Teachers indoctrinated students, just as they had been indoctrinated when younger. None of us can rise above being a failure as an Arab, our original sin.

I'd read the Quran and memorized large chunks of it, but all that studying didn't introduce me to the language's magic-forced learning and magic are congenital adversaries.

I was seven when I took my first Quranic class. The teacher-a wide, bespectacled stutterer-would lose her stutter when she recited the Quran; a true miracle, the other teachers claimed. She had it all committed to memory, and when she recited, her eyes glowed, her scarf-covered head swayed on a shaky neck, and her pointing stick twirled before her. In the first row we covered our eyes whenever the pointer came too close-to this day, when I sit in the front seat of a car during a rainstorm, I'm afraid the windshield wipers might poke my eye. The teacher's stick may have appeared dangerous, but it was not what she beat us with. If we made a mistake in reciting, if a girl forgot a word or had trouble recalling a line, the teacher's cheeks contracted and glowed, her lips pursed and shrank; she'd ask the child to come to the front and extend her hand, and would mete out punishment using the most innocuous of implements, the blackboard eraser. It hurt as much as any inquisitor's tool.

As if forced memorization of the Quran-forced memorization of anything-wasn't punishment enough.

"Listen to the words," she exhorted, "listen to the wizardry. Hear the rhythm, hear the poetry."

How could I hear anything when I was either in excruciating pain or fearing that I might soon be?

"The language of the Quran is its miracle," she used to say.

Consider this: In order to elevate the Prophet Moses above all men, God granted him the miracle that would dazzle the people of his era. In those days, magicians were ubiquitous in Egypt, so all of Moses's miracles involved the most imaginative of magic: rod into serpent, river into red blood, Red Sea into parting. During the Prophet Jesus's time, medicine was king. Jesus healed lepers and raised the dead. During our Prophet's time, poetry was admired, and God gifted Muhammad, an illiterate man, with the miracle of a matchless tongue.

"This is our heritage, our inheritance-this is our magic."

I didn't listen then. The teacher frightened faith out of my soul. I didn't care that the Quran had dozens of words for various bodies of water, that it used rhythms and rhymes that hadn't been heard before.

Compared to the Quran's language and its style, those of the other holy books seem childish. It is said that after one glance at the Bible, the Maréchale de Luxembourg exclaimed, "The tone is absolutely frightful! What a pity the Holy Spirit had such poor taste!"

No, I might be able to poke fun at the Quran for its childishly imperious content, but not for its style.

It was finally poetry that opened my eyes; poetry, and not the Quran, that seared itself into the back of my brain-poetry, the lapidary. I'm not sure that the discovery of love is necessarily more exquisite than the discovery of poetry, or more sensuous for that matter.

I recall the poet who ignited the flame, Antara, the jet-black warrior-poet. I remember the shock of a doomed language being resuscitated.

And I remembered you as spears quenched their thirst

In me and white swords dripped with my blood

So I longed to kiss the blades that recalled

The gleam of your smiling mouth to my mind

Then again, maybe it was Imru' al-Qays. He and Antara are my preferred of the seven included in the legendary Suspended Odes.

But come, my friends, as we stand here mourning, do you see the lightning?

See its glittering, like the flash of two moving hands, amid the thick gathering clouds.

Its glory shines like the lamps of a monk when he has dipped their wicks thick in oil.

I sat down with my companions and watched the lightning and the coming storm.

The language-we hear it all the time. News anchors speak classical Arabic, as do some politicians, definitely Arabic teachers, but what sputters out of their mouths sounds odd and displaced compared to our organic Lebanese tongue, our homemade, homegrown dialect. Television and radio announcers sound foreign to my ears. Those early poems, though, they are alchemy, something miraculous. They opened my ears, opened my mind, like flowers in water.

Yet my first translation was not a poem but twenty dull pages. In the school I attended, the sciences were taught in French. Rarely was Arabic used for physics, chemistry, or mathematics in any of the schools of Beirut, whose main curriculum has always been community conformity. It seems that Arabic is not considered a language for logic. A joke that used to make the rounds when I was a child, probably still going strong: the definition of parallel lines in geometry textbooks in Saudi Arabia is two straight lines that never meet unless God in all His glory wills it.

The twenty pages were a curiosity; I wished to see for myself. My first translation sounded odd and displaced as well.

The translations that followed improved, I hope.

By improved, I mean that I no longer felt as awkward about writing my name on what I translated as I did in the beginning.

My father named me Aaliya, the high one, the above. He loved the name and, I was constantly told, loved me even more. I do not remember. He passed away when I was still a toddler, weeks before my second birthday. He must have been ill, for he died before impregnating my mother with another, as he was supposed to, expected to, particularly since I was female and first. My country in the late 1930s was still trying to pull itself out of the fourteenth century. I'm not sure if it ever succeeded in some ways. My father was barely nineteen when he married and twenty-one when he died, my mother a widow at eighteen. They were supposed to spend aeons together. It was not to be.

What to do with a young widow? The families convened. My mother's family, having thought they had one fewer mouth to feed, now had two more. It is said that my maternal grandfather hinted that they were given a defective model. The families decided that the young widow would be married off to her husband's brother and try once more, except she wouldn't receive a second dowry, her wedding gift. Three months after my father passed away-a three-month canonical period-my mother knelt obsequiously before a sheikh and watched as her father and second husband signed the contracts.

In time I was presented with five half siblings, none of whom I was particularly close to. Six children, one room, three narrow, lumpy mattresses on the floor; horizontal martial arts battles during the night, yawning bruised bodies in the morning.

My uncle-father was kind, if not particularly loving or affable. He paid little attention to his children, even less to me. I'm unable to recall much about him. I have no pictures of him, so in my memory his face is always obscured. In every evocation of a childhood scene, my stepfather's face is the least detailed, the most out of focus; when I think of him my memory's eyes have cataracts.

His sole remarkable trait was his unremitting passing of gas, which he had no inclination to control. Lunches and dinners, as the family sat on the floor surrounding him, were unbearable. The boys loved it, but I could barely eat after he broke wind. That's probably why I've been skinny all my life. To this day, there are certain human smells that make my stomach swirl.

At his deathbed, on a night drunk with cicadas, as the family sat in his room, he called on each of his children to offer final wisdom, but he forgot to call on his youngest daughter or me. The youngest was devastated, and all tried to comfort her. They surrounded her, cooed to her, smothered her with mollifying maxims, passed her their handkerchiefs. I wasn't distressed and none comforted me. No one passed me a handkerchief, not even a tissue. He had no wisdom to offer me; no one in my family did.

I am my family's appendix, its unnecessary appendage.

I was married off at sixteen, plucked unripe out of school, the only home I had, and gifted to the first unsuitable suitor to appear at our door, a man small in stature and spirit. Marriage is a most disagreeable institution for an adolescent. We moved into this apartment and it took fewer than four years for him to stand before me, as the law required, and declaim the most invigorating of phrases: "You are divorced." Nothing in our marriage became him like leaving it.

The impotent insect stepped out the door, and these floors never had to feel his feet again. Young as I was, I shed not a tear. I did what my nature demanded. I cleaned and scrubbed and mopped and disinfected until no trace of him remained, no scent, not a single hair, not a touch. I removed the nails on the wall where he used to hang his dirty hat and his pungent pipes that he thought made him distinguished. With a needle and spool of thread I repaired every hole in the doilies singed by the cinders of his pipe. I soaked the mosquito net in bleach.

I did not wait for the smell of him to dissipate on its own. I expunged it.

Before leaving this world, the listless mosquito with malfunctioning proboscis remarried twice and remained childless.

"Woman, you are divorced." Of course, he could have married over me and brought a second wife into our crumbly nest. Having more than one wife wasn't common in Beirut even then. He'd have been the only one in the neighborhood with two wives, but he could have done it.

My mother wanted me to be grateful. He may have rejected me as superfluous waste, he may have treated me as merely the dispensable product of his rib, but still I should be appreciative. "He divorced you. You can remarry a gentle widower or maybe a suitor of women more seemly who has been rejected a few times. Consider yourself fortunate."

Fortunate? For my mother, being a pathetic suitee was a cut above being a neglected second wife. She couldn't conceive of a world in which my husband didn't hold all the cards. In her world, husbands were omnipotent, never impotent. Mine thought of me as the cause of his humiliation and probably continued to blame his other wives. He couldn't risk having his women talk to one another.

I would have loved to chat with his second wife, or his third. Did he continue to wear his ridiculously large hat that cruelly emphasized his small head? I could have asked, "In all the years of marriage, did you ever see his penis? Did that shrivelly appendicle ever reach half-mast? When did he surrender? When did he end his fumbling humiliation in the dark? Was it a year, six months, a couple? I hazard it was merely a month. He pursued the charade for seven months with me."

In The Science of Right, Kant wrote, "Marriage is the union of two persons of different sexes for the purpose of lifelong mutual possession of each other's sexual organs."

Kant obviously hadn't met my husband.

Of course, like Descartes, Newton, Locke, Pascal, Spinoza, Kierkegaard, Leibniz, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein, Kant never formed an intimate tie or reared a family.

As a young woman, I was so frustrated never to have seen a man naked that I used to wait until my husband snored before lifting the covers, lighting a match within the enveloping womb of the mosquito net, and examining his body under his buttoned cottons. Ah, the disappointment of discovering a worm in place of the monster. Of this I was supposed to be afraid? This, the forge of fertility? Yet I couldn't rein in my curiosity. Ecce homo. I looked every chance I had, by the light of a match, not a candle, because when quickly extinguished its smoke was not as incriminating. The steady snores, the deep breathing, the lost world of sleep. Never once caught, never discovered.

Fifteen years ago, at sixty-one, my husband died, a solitary passenger on a public bus, his head leaning at an awkward angle against the murky window. The bus drove two full routes, passengers ascending and alighting, before the driver realized he was keeping company with a lifeless man. Sometimes death arrives quietly.

Wanting to put him to rest once more, I attended his burial, his final interment. No keening or wailing at his funeral. In the open casket, he lay dead. Someone had combed his hair flat and awkward, as if he'd just taken off his imbecilic hat. Seated all around me, the mourning women could not help but giggle and gossip. He had died with an erection that would not relent, priapism in the final throes, an irony worthy of Svevo.

In death Eros triumphed, while in life Thanatos had. My husband was a Freudian dyslexic.

Death is the only vantage point from which a life can be truly measured. From my vantage point, as I watched men I didn't recognize carry my ex-husband's coffin away, I measured his life and found it wanting.

I realize that I haven't mentioned my husband's name. It isn't intentional. It's just that I can call him my husband and that defines him.

There are many reasons for not naming a character or someone you're writing about. You might want to have the book be entirely about the main narrator, or maybe you want the character to remain ephemeral, less fully fleshed.

I have no such reasons, I'm afraid. He was Sobhi Saleh, a leaden sound, unwieldy. Unfortunately, I still carry his last name like a cross, nailed to it, you might say. His first you can forget. We can jettison it under sea swells, bury it under the silt of the Mediterranean.

Sobhi. Tfeh!

When I first married, though, life had possibilities. Beirut, and this building, looked different in the early fifties. A frangipani, long since disappeared, babbled mischievously before the building, spilling fragrance and flowers as I entered. Across the street was a locust tree that has also vanished, uprooted. In the early evening, the neighborhood's chatter of starlings hadn't yet been silenced. Among the many definitions of progress, "enemy of trees" and "killer of birds" seem to me the most apt.

When we moved in, the owner of the building, Hajj Wardeh, his pale face sporting sunglasses, a bristle mustache, and at least three worthy warts, turned out with his family to welcome my husband and me with rice pudding and rose water-an inappropriate double dose, I thought, since the pudding had more rose water than was necessary, and many a rose was beheaded for that dessert. I remember his perfectly tapering fingernails. I remember the first words out of his little daughter's mouth: "But she's much taller than he and skinnier." Fadia, forever long-tongued, was six then. I remember her father's embarrassment, her mother covering Fadia's mouth.

Hajj Wardeh said, "Welcome, family."

His title was recently and proudly acquired: he'd just returned from Mecca.

My black shoes were dyed earth red; I'd lugged two suitcases and several bundles, everything I owned, across town through a parasol pine thicket. Everything I owned including my trousseau: three dresses, one pair of shoes, three pairs of socks (not hose), underwear, two scarves, one gold chain, one bracelet, a brooch of crocheted cherries, two cooking pots, a serving dish that was slightly cracked, five plates, a copper and tin tureen and its ladle, a complete set of silverware for three people, my father's few things, and two textbooks from that year, which I knew I'd not use again.

I felt so rich then. The apartment seemed so wide and spacious. I look back now with longing.

From Pessoa: "Ah, it's my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me."

Aaliya, above it all, separated, disentangled.

Many Muslim and Christian hajjis are masters of pious dissimulation who covet the title but not the path. Not Hajj Wardeh; he earned his title. He lived by Javertian principles. He was generous and neighborly at first, but once my husband walked out, he wanted nothing to do with me. I might as well have worn a scarlet letter. He forbade his children to interact with me. Fadia, who used to spend all her time in my apartment, began avoiding me, turning her back when I walked by. If she had to talk to me, she employed a haughty and authoritative tone, as if I were her scullery maid. She was only ten or eleven, already an autocrat. Just a bit of that belligerent childhood despotism passed into her adulthood-well, maybe a little more than a bit.

Even though Hajj Wardeh refused to acknowledge my existence in person, he took my side when it came to the apartment. My husband's family wanted it, claiming I had no right to it. My own family demanded it, suggesting that any of my brothers was more deserving of it. Hajj Wardeh would brook none of this. The apartment belonged to my husband, and unless my husband himself claimed it, or possibly his future sons, he would not release it to anyone. My husband, of course, could risk no such thing. As long as I paid my rent, Hajj Wardeh considered me his tenant.

My home, my apartment; in it I live, and move, and have my being.

My husband's family forgot about the apartment, but mine didn't. My mother couldn't look at me without trying to convince me to leave. My half brothers had large families living in small apartments. They needed it more than I did. They had more difficult lives, they deserved it. It was my familial duty. I was selfish, insensitive, and arrogant. Did I not know what people were saying about my living on my own? My mother was the young United Nations: leave your home, your brothers have suffered, you have other places you can go to, they don't, get out.

More than once, my half brothers cursed me. More than once, each one banged on my door in an attempt to terrorize me. Terrorized I was, particularly in the beginning when I felt most vulnerable and the fear of losing my home nibbled at me. I would be in the apartment eating or reading when banging and curses would suddenly erupt from behind the door. My heart would skip, my body would tremble. At times, during the early years of being alone, I felt as if my soul was withering, like a chestnut drying within its shell.

All that-the banging, the harassing, my brothers' -demands-stopped years and years later, in 1982, during the Israeli siege of Beirut. Many inhabitants of the city had fled and squatters quickly took up residence in the empty homes. Those of us who remained, those who had nowhere else to go, were emotionally weary, fed but not nourished by fear and adrenaline. Thinking that no one was home, three men broke into my apartment in the early dawn. I hopped out of bed, still in my nightgown. There'd been no water for weeks; neither my hair nor my nightgown had been washed in ages. I picked up the AK-47 that lay next to me on the right side, where my husband used to sleep all those years earlier. It kept me company in bed for the whole civil war. Barefoot, I rushed out, brandishing the assault rifle. The men in fatigues took one look at the attacking madwoman and ran out the door-not silently, I might add. I chased after them, but only to the landing, since they'd already reached the ground floor, running in an unathletic manner-twelve independent limbs jerking and flailing haphazardly-a stampede of cartoon cows.

A shot fired from the fourth floor frightened me out of my hysteria. Fadia had aimed at one of the sandbags at the end of the street. Like me, she only intended to scare them, but she actually fired her rifle.

"Don't you dare come back," she shouted. "This is the smallest gun I have." Then, to her kids, "Get back inside. There's nothing to see here."

She too hadn't washed her Medusa hair or her tattered nightgown for quite a while. She probably looked as much a fright as I, but as usual, her fingernails were impeccably manicured. From two floors below, I was able to note the finely shaped scarlet nail of her forefinger pressing the trigger. From inside the apartment her husband shouted that she was insane. She blinked red eyelids at the limpid blue sky. I told her not to shoot anymore or the Israelis would bomb the building. It took her a moment to recognize me.

"That's a big gun you have there," she said.

Once the story of the crazy women went out, the maenads and their semiautomatic thyrsi, my half brothers stopped demanding the apartment.

Aaliya, the above, the crazy one.

I turn on the light in the reading room. Though it is barely seven thirty, the dark outside is oppressive. Winter is calling.

Ever since I retired, my dinnertime changes with the season. When I worked at the bookstore, I used to eat when I returned home, always at a fixed time. Since then, I'm not sure why, I feel hungry as soon as the sun sets and evening begins to fall. My stomach has its own circadian rhythm.

I feel tired, but it's too early for bed.

I decide against making myself a cup of tea. Caffeine in the evening throws my system off kilter, and I can't abide herbal infusions or the bland taste of the decaffeinated kinds. I say this as if my system were well balanced otherwise.

Of all the delicious pleasures my body has begun to refuse me, sleep is the most precious, the sacred gift I miss the most. Restful sleep left me its soot. I sleep in fragments, if at all. When I was planning for my later years, I did not expect to spend every night in my darkened bedroom, lids half open, propped up on unfluffable pillows, holding audience with my memories.

Sleep, the lord of all gods and of all men. Oh, to be the ebb and flow of that vast sea. When I was younger, I could sleep anywhere. I could spread out on a couch, sink into it, forcing it to enfold me, and disappear into the somnolent underworld. Into a luxurious ocean I plunged, into its depth I plummeted.

Virgil called sleep death's brother, and Isocrates before him. Hypnos and Thanatos, sons of Nyx. This minimizing of death is unimaginative.

"Nothing is less worthy of a thinking man than to see death as a slumber," wrote Pessoa. Basic to sleep is the fact that we wake up from it. Is waking then a resurrection?

On a couch, on a bed, in a chair, I slept. Lines would melt away from my face. Each quiet tick of the clock rejuvenated me. Why is it that at the age when we need the curative powers of slumber most we least have access to it? Hypnos fades as Thanatos approaches.

When I was planning for my later years, I hadn't considered that I'd be spending sleepless nights reliving earlier years. I hadn't thought I'd miss the bookstore as much as I do.

I wonder at times how different my life would have been had I not been hired that day.

I love Javier Marías's work. I've translated two of his novels: A Heart So White and Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me. I'll consider a third after I read the French translation of the final volume of Your Face Tomorrow, although at more than thirteen hundred pages, I'll probably balk at that as well.

But I digress, as usual.

In one of his essays, Marías suggests that his work deals as much with what didn't happen as with what happened. In other words, most of us believe we are who we are because of the decisions we've made, because of events that shaped us, because of the choices of those around us. We rarely consider that we're also formed by the decisions we didn't make, by events that could have happened but didn't, or by our lack of choices, for that matter.

More than fifty years ago, on a gloomy day when hope followed my shrimp of an ex-husband out the door, or so I thought at the time, my friend Hannah led me by the hand to a bookstore owned by one of her relatives. The relative, a second cousin once removed, had opened the bookstore as a lark, a ground-floor store with an inadequate picture window in a distressed building off a main street and no foot traffic. There were more stupid stuffed toys than there were books, and everything was covered with dust. The bookstore had as much chance of making it as I did.

Yet of all things, the flint that sparked a flame in my soul was the huge, darkly stained oak desk where the owner sat. To a practically penniless twenty-year-old divorcée, sitting behind such a desk seemed so grand, so luxurious--something to aspire to. I needed grandeur in my life.

Hannah told her relative he should hire me, and he informed her that he wanted to hire someone with more experience and, just as important, with more class. He spoke as if I weren't there, as if I were invisible, as if his face were hidden behind a perforated printout. Hannah, my champion, wouldn't accept defeat. She explained that I loved books and read constantly, that I knew more about them than he ever would, and, just as important, that I could dust and clean and scrub and mop. He'd have the cleanest bookstore in the city, I piped up, the most sparkling, a diamond. I would rid it of its acrid and musty odor. He pretended to mull over the offer before deciding to hire me for the time being (still talking to Hannah and not me), until he could bring in someone else to be the face of the bookstore.

What I didn't know at the time was that the first face he offered the job to belonged to a pretty girl whose family was so classy that they immigrated to Brazil and one of their scions had recently become the governor of S?o Paulo. The girl left without ever showing her countenance in the bookstore. The second didn't show up either; she married and no longer needed or wished to be employed.

Had either of these women made an appearance, my life would have been altogether different. I didn't realize how the fate of those two had influenced mine until a few years ago when the owner mentioned it in passing. He hadn't thought for a moment that I could do the job. He credited my success to his diligent training.

I worked for the paperback dilettante for fifty years, and mine was the only face anyone associated with my bookstore.

That huge, darkly stained oak desk I once longed for now sits comfortably in my reading room, behind it a window letting in early evening darkness, and next to it my overfilled bookcases. When the owner, my boss, died four years ago, his family closed the bookstore, sold the books and inventory for a pittance. I ended up with my desk.

How safe I will feel once I begin my translation, how sheltered, seated at this desk in the dark night, as Sebald as Jacques Austerlitz described, seated at this desk "watching the tip of my pencil in the lamplight following its shadow, as if of its own accord and with perfect fidelity… from left to right"-right to left, in my case-"line by line, over the ruled paper."

On this oak magnificence I place the new notepad, next to the pencils, next to the pens. I unscrew the primary pen, an old Parker, and inspect the ink. The walnut-shaped inkwell, a fake antique of porcelain and copper, is lushly full. It is always a delicious thrill when I prepare for a new project. I feel at home in my rituals.

The real antique on the desk is a comic book, an illustrated A Tale of Two Cities in Arabic, wrapped in red cellophane. Its value is sentimental only. It was woefully damaged-four pages missing, two torn, others water stained-when I received it some sixty years ago.

It was summer, I was ten. My mother took her children to the public garden of Beirut. I had only three half brothers by then, I think, the youngest still in the pram. I may not remember my siblings clearly, but I do the day and I do the dress I was wearing, my best one, a blue taffeta with white trim. It came with a white plastic handbag that wouldn't unsnap and was, in any case, too small to hold anything but a lonesome stick of gum. I remember clutching it to my right hip at all times. I remember the sky as clear and breezy, the whitish sun lazy and indifferent, neither too warm nor too bright. My mother-hunched over, her knees touching, both feet on the ground-sat on a wooden bench that was painted an overworked brown and was missing a board in its backrest. My half brothers and I clustered around her, planets orbiting our tired star. Shoo, shoo. She wanted us away. We weren't used to being around strangers.

In tentative steps with tiny feet I did separate, slowly and hesitantly, but I did.

A chestnut-haired boy, plump and pale, with eyes the color of newly pressed olive oil, sat forlorn, all alone on a bench, longingly watching gaggles of dizzyingly loud children rush about on bicycles, tricycles, and those topless, floorless miniature red cars. The lonely boy looked a few years younger than I. Rolled up in his hand was the comic book that lies on my desk right now.

I envied him. I wanted that comic book more than I'd ever wanted anything.

I asked him if he wanted to play. I used the word play, I remember that, giving him the option of choosing what game he wanted. He lit up, flushed as if he'd drunk a glass of Bordeaux. He did want to play, most certainly he did. He nodded and nodded and nodded. I asked if he was willing to share his comic book. He didn't mind at all, he let me hold it. My dress had no pockets because it came with a purse that didn't open. I gave it to him, my purse. A fair trade, no? He laid it on the bench and neither one of us noticed or cared when it disappeared. We played tag. My half brothers joined us, and others did as well. He had a good time. He left us grasping his mother's hand and waving wild good-byes, a wide smile turning his double chin into a triple. I remember his jolly face, his joy, and his lovely smile to this day. There must be a reason that this survives so clearly in my imagination.

I went home with my comic book, my mother giving me a tongue-lashing for losing the plastic handbag.

How would I ever grow up to be a proper lady?

There's another relic on the desk, though not as ancient, a souvenir from the war years in Beirut: a copy of Calvino's Invisible Cities, scorched in the lower right corner, but just the back cover and the preceding twenty-two pages. The front isn't damaged. I was reading the book by candlelight while people killed each other outside my window. While my city burned, I had an incendiary mishap, something that seems to have happened regularly to Joseph Conrad-the incendiary mishaps, not the burning cities.

The burning city, what a time. I have to mention here that just because I slept with an AK-47 in place of a husband during the war does not make me insane. Owning an assault rifle was not an indicator of craziness. You had to consider the situation. In the early days of the civil war, I used to descend to the garage beneath the building next door when the shelling began; our building didn't have one, being a decade older. I hated those nights. Residents of the neighborhood, anxious and sleep deprived, sat around the rodent--resplendent garage in inappropriate dress: nightgowns, boxer shorts and undershirts, holey socks. I spent many a night there in the beginning of the war, until one day in 1977, while I was underground, a group of Palestinians broke into the apartment, rummaged through my belongings, and one of them defecated on the floor of the maid's bathroom. That was the first break-in.

You might think that the Palestinian chose not to use the toilet because I had no running water. He might have felt it was beneath him to use the bucket filled with blue water-I'd hung toilet cleanser inside it-to flush. Not so; it was not uncommon for men to do such things. Israelis left their shit in houses they broke into; Palestinians left their shit; the Lebanese, the Iranians, the Syrians; Christians, Jews, Muslims. For man, this urge, which had been deposited in his cells at Creation, would forever be bestially liberated during war. It said: I was here, like it or not. I am told that toddlers in China do not wear diapers; their pants have a vertical opening along the seat making it easier for them to crouch and excrete. All soldiers should wear pants with slits.

Someone shat in my home. I procured a Kalashnikov.

I waited for a lull. After the incident, I was unable to sleep for three days, and no longer descended into the bowels of the neighboring building when the shelling gained heft and weight. I would choose to die with my apartment rather than live without it. 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.

On the morning of cease-fire number 53,274 (the earlier one lasted all of thirty seconds, the one before that probably even less-okay, okay, so I exaggerate, but there certainly were more than one hundred cease-fires by 1977, two years into the war), I changed out of my nightgown into a pink tracksuit and espadrilles. Across the street, the Dexedrined Thanatophiles were playing poker, with matchsticks as chips, on a green felt folding table with slender legs, in front of Mr. Azari's grocery store, the true litmus test of whether a cease-fire would hold-the store, not the card game, for Mr. Azari was intimately connected to various militia leaders. The store was the war's weather vane. If its poison-green shutters were shut, no one ventured out of the house. If they were open, the neighborhood wasn't in imminent danger. By my count, there were five bullet holes scattered across the metal shutters. Mr. Azari waved at me, obviously wanting to talk, but I only nodded in his direction and rushed past. I berated myself for not being friendlier, for not trying harder to make him like me, since he hoarded food and water from his meager stock and offered it to his preferred customers. I reasoned that I would never be one. His favorites offered him home-cooked meals, and I was a mediocre cook. I was lucky, though; Fortune watched over me. Fadia was by far the best cook in the neighborhood, and fed him constantly. Since the war began, he had gained fifteen kilos. I may not have been Fadia's favorite person, but I was her neighbor and tenant (she'd inherited the building after her parents' deaths). A few mornings a week, I'd wake to find on my doorstep a couple of bottles of water, maybe a sack of rice, sometimes a bag of fresh tomatoes or a few oranges. After nights when the clashes were fiercer than usual, she'd leave a dish of the same meal she offered Mr. Azari. With the first bite, I would turn devout and pray for her welcome into Paradise or God's bosom or any beauty spa she chose.

Instead of going to open the bookstore, I took a bedraggled jitney to Sabra. No Lebanese car would drive into the Palestinian camp's labyrinth once the civil war erupted, so I got out at the entrance. I had the need of Theseus and the knowledge of Ariadne, no ball of yarn for me, so I sought the Minotaur, not to kill him, but to ask for his help. I sought Ahmad.

Ahmad's mother lived in a shack, or, to be more precise, a jerry-built structure consisting of a concrete wall onto which three sidings of asbestos and corrugated iron were jammed, with a tin roof on top. Its door, also of shingles, was not hinged; you simply removed it to walk in or out and replaced it when through. No lock needed since neighbors were atop one another; if anything went missing, all knew which neighbor had borrowed what. I'd been there once before, years earlier, at which time six people lived within the structure. I only had to deliver a book, a present for Ahmad's seventeenth birthday, and didn't enter even though his mother, kind and gentle at the time, kept insisting that I honor her with my presence in her household.

What was difficult before the war, navigating the maze of alleys, had become tribulation. Puddles that used to form only after rainfall had become permanent lakes of sewer-brown, the stench suffocating. My thighs were sore from being unnaturally stretched with each lake-avoiding step. I had to maneuver my way around heaps of discarded furniture, rotted beams, broken plates, and twisted silverware. A giant eucalyptus, seemingly the only living thing in sight, added to the confusing aromas (shit and Vicks); it flourished in its exotic environment, dwarfing the surrounding shacks of brick, of cement, of aluminum siding, even cardboard. A happy and content immigrant, proud of its achievement and splendor, the tree would probably have laughed off any suggestion of returning to Australia. Its sadly hued green appeared bright against the poverty of color, all faded grays and dirty whites. If only someone had planted a bougainvillea; it would have flourished in these fecund crannies.

When Ahmad's mother, who'd metamorphosed into a small bundle of jerky gestures and imprecations, answered the shingles door, she said that her ungrateful son hadn't lived there for years. I should tell the coldhearted mother-hater that the woman who conceived him, the woman who carried him for nine painful months and cared for his every need as he grew up, needed bread.

Ahmad had moved up in the world, out of Sabra.

Forgive me a brief digression here. It's only to offer you a fuller idea of Sabra.

Years later, after the war, in the midnineties, a local artist asked me to help him sell prints of a map of Beirut and its suburbs that he had lovingly painted by hand. He was obviously smitten with our city. He'd painted Beirut as if it were the whole world, complete within itself, each neighborhood a different country with its own color, streets as borders, the tiniest road documented, every alley, every corner. He'd even drawn in little hydrographic symbols (fleurs-de-lis) where all the water wells are supposed to be-Beirut, whose name is derived from the word well in most Semitic languages because of the abundance of its belowground water.

A complete sphere, Beirut as the total globe, the entire world. The painter even created a Greenland effect, stretching the longitude lines at the top and bottom, with increasing distortion of size as one moved north or south of the city. In the map, Beirut existed outside of Lebanon, apart, not part of the Middle East. It was whole.

As a Beiruti through and through who in a long life has spent only ten nights away from the suckling breasts of her city (Grünbein: "Travel is a foretaste of Hell"), I considered the map a chef d'oeuvre, a stunning, glorious work of inspiration. The more I lauded, the wider his smile. We stood side by side in my bookstore, staring at the print I had hung on the wall. He tried to light a cigarette, but his hand shook too much. I told him he couldn't smoke inside. He confessed nervousness. I led him outside, carrying the map. "Let's see it in Beiruti daylight." In front of the store window, he shrugged off his uneasiness and regained confidence. 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.

Sabra? I haven't been back there.

Back to Ahmad. I first met him when he was a timid teenager in 1967, lanky and wispy, a character out of a Chekhov story, with peach fuzz and kaffiyeh, trying to emulate his hero Yasser (George Habash and the Popular Front, which was beginning to form that same year, wouldn't come into his life for a while yet). He wore bone-framed glasses that were too big for his face. I didn't notice him standing before my desk until he ahemmed. I was confronted by the smell of licorice and anise, his tooth-crushing candy drops. He was sent to me by another bookstore in the city, told that no one else could help him. He was looking for a book by an Italian, but couldn't remember the title or the name of the author. He had to give me a little bit more to go on, I told him. Italians had been writing books for hundreds of years.

He said, "The hero of the book was not a hero, he killed many lizards."

I didn't laugh, but my eyes must have betrayed me. He blushed and backed up a step. I walked him over to a stack and handed him The Conformist.

"The lizards are in the early pages of the book," I said.

He held it in his hands as if it were the Quran. Did I have it in Arabic? I didn't think it had been translated (I wouldn't translate it because I found it didactically dull, not that I would have showed him the translation had I done one). His English wasn't very good.

"I'm not a teacher," I said. "Reading a book would definitely help your English."

Was it all right with me if he examined it to see if he could read it?

I returned to my desk. He sat on the floor leaning against a bookshelf, his legs splayed before him, the rubber soles of his shoes facing out, conspicuously visible. Three books faced out as well, As I Lay Dying, Goodbye, Columbus, and A Moveable Feast, the last two having recently arrived in Beirut. Separated by the spines of other books, they formed a triangle that floated atop his head. It was only then that I understood he couldn't afford to buy a book, any book. The army pants he wore were neither a fashion nor a political statement-they were inexpensive.

I asked if he had killed lizards when he was a boy. He asked for the meaning of the word magpie, the word austerity, and the word covet.

I liked him.

He loved the book, finished it in twenty-three days (the bookshop wasn't open on Sundays). He appeared every afternoon, sat in the same spot. On the infrequent occasion that I had a customer when he arrived, he'd sheepishly wave and tiptoe to Moravia's book, which he'd returned to its position the day before. By the second week he began to do little things around the shop, by the fourth he was signing for deliveries. I tried to have him hired, but the owner refused. I needed the help. I was the only employee. If I was sick, the bookshop didn't open.

"Give him part of your salary," the owner replied. "The bookshop isn't a moneymaking enterprise. It's a labor of love."

Not exactly. I provided the labor, I provided the love, and he enjoyed the fugitive cachet of owning a bookstore. Ahmad worked in the shop without pay for four years. He didn't seem to mind. He helped me whenever he could, sat in his spot and read during slow periods. He came and went as he pleased, may not have been punctual, but he was fervently devoted to the bookstore, to his reading, desperate to educate himself. When I apologized for working him without pay, he replied that sons always worked without recompense.

One day he decided to paint the interior of the shop. He'd ended up with free cans of light lavender paint. It seems someone at the refugee camp had bought them for a bargain before realizing that no one would want their walls that color. Ahmad left the spaces behind the stacks unpainted because we didn't have enough cans. I loved the color and kept it till the bookshop closed and I retired.

I relied on him. A few young men used to trickle into the bookstore before his arrival, solitary and in groups, without any intention of buying books. With a single woman working at the store, a boy could practice flirting, try his luck. I dealt with them by ignoring them. They were harmless, but I found them irritating. My friend Hannah, who often visited me at the store, found them amusing. She didn't interact with them, but her face lit up whenever one of the lads walked in. Ahmad, on the other hand, considered them offensive. He glared, followed them around until the offenders left the bookstore. One time after he chased two teenagers out, Hannah asked him if he was sure that they were not going to buy anything.

"They only wish to harass respectable ladies," he said.

"Are you sure respectable ladies don't wish to be harassed?" she said. "I don't know about Aaliya here, but maybe I want to talk to a handsome young man, just a few words here and there."

He looked up at both of us and smiled for the first time that day, his glasses sliding a little along his nose as he did so.

"If you talk to one," he said, "you wouldn't be able to get rid of him. He would never leave."

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.

Even though I believe that the choice of a first book, the book that opens your eyes and quickens your soul, is as involuntary as a first crush, I still wish he'd chosen a different one. He loved The Conformist and saw himself as utterly unlike its protagonist, but in light of what he would mature to become in later years the choice now seems so pathetically predictable, almost a cliché. 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.

Let me revisit the events of Black September, not so much to paint the political or historical landscape, important though that may have been in changing Lebanon and sending it into the abyss of civil war, but to show the changes in Ahmad. I wish to paint the transformation of his face.

I am familiar with only the broad strokes of his background. His family hailed from a small village east of Haifa, expelled by the Yishuv during the Nakba of 1948 (his terms, not mine). The village was leveled and erased from all but the villagers' memories. He was born in Sabra. His family, uncles and aunts, were dispersed across refugee camps in southern Lebanon, Jordan, and the West Bank.

In September 1970, Jordan was in turmoil. Palestinian fedayeen were launching operations from that country, and Israel was retaliating-excessively, as has always been her wont-by bombing Jordan. The Palestinians were practically running the country, a state within a state. Feeling threatened, King Hussein of Jordan declared war upon them. Scores and scores perished. The conflict, the death and dying, lasted until July 1971 with the expulsion of the PLO and thousands of Palestinian fighters to Lebanon.

Lucky us.

During those months, Ahmad changed. He considered the king an Israeli agent, an American lackey. If brother could kill brother, then anyone was suspect, anyone and everyone. He was devastated. Already taciturn, he turned practically mute. He wasn't sullen as a teenager, but became so. He withdrew unto himself. His skies clouded with black.

But his face.

His face.

Joseph Roth once wrote: "It takes a long time for men to acquire their particular countenances. It is as if they were born without their faces, their foreheads, their noses or their eyes. They acquire all these with the passage of time, and one must be patient; it takes time before everything is properly assembled."

Ahmad acquired his countenance during Black September. His eyebrows wove together, almost becoming one, giving him an expression of permanent starkness. There was no need for patience before everything was assembled. Once the transformation began, it was quick and hurried. I could almost see each eyebrow hair stitch across the bridge of his nose. Disappointment hid in the tiny furrows of his forehead, fury in the corners of his mouth. The eyes darkened, the skin tightened; he lost what little baby fat he had, and the bones beneath his face grew more defined. The peach fuzz became a beard.

For a while, he still showed up at the bookstore, but he was no longer accessible. It was as if I became part of the problem, someone to mistrust, the other. We shared the same space, but no longer the attentiveness, the empathy, or the companionship. We were like a married couple. I didn't understand why he kept returning for those few months after Black September, but I wanted him to. I felt he needed me to be there in some inexplicable way.

One day he entered the bookstore in high sulk, and I noted that the transformation was complete. He reeked of testosterone. I also noted that the army pants were no longer the cheap kind. I felt crushed.

I looked him up and down, from the boots to the kaffiyeh. He smirked, turned around, showing me his back, and exited the bookstore.

He left me.

A few years later I went looking for him.

Yes, Ahmad had moved up in the world, out of Sabra, out of Siberia. By 1977, when I knocked on his door, he was living in a lively neighborhood of Beirut, far from the camp. He was still a vivacious picture of youth, but there was nothing peach-fuzzy about him. I had to remind myself that the peach fuzz was already gone the last time I saw him. At twenty-six or twenty-seven, he was in his prime, and amid a frenzied civil war, he was in his milieu: the slacks pressed and tailored, the white shirt fitted and expensive, the face smiling and clean-shaven. A zebra skin on the floor of the entryway greeted me, and it felt as though Ahmad had flayed the prey before breaking his fast that morning. The anteroom was bigger than his mother's shack.

I was slow to understand, it took me a few minutes, that he was relishing what he considered a role reversal. Of course he'd help me. Whatever I wanted. I had always been kind to him. Sit, sit in the majestic living room, plush seats. I sat ensconced within a room of Balzacian embellishments-a cloverleaf of small Lalique ashtrays, Lladró and Hummel figurines approximating a modernist Nativity scene, a grandfather clock, a rug that might have been twice my age at the time.

He inquired whether I'd had breakfast. "Yes," I replied, "I ate two days ago."

"Wonderful," he cheered, "wonderful."

Did I care for coffee?

A maid from the Philippines brought out the coffee. I couldn't disguise my surprise.

"It must be worse where she comes from," he explained. "They have their own wars."

One sip and I cut to the point. I told him I wanted to protect myself. I'd had intruders in my home. He lit up, happy to help. He suggested the AK-47: cheap, reliable, never jams, easy to use, lightweight. They were flooding the market; he had three of them in his apartment. I wanted to pay for one. He couldn't take my money, but I could give him what he'd always wanted.

What did he want?

"You know what I want," he kept repeating, "you know what I want."

It seemed suddenly as if the two Ahmads, the young shy one and the older rough one, were struggling, a soul battle. He'd grown both more confident and more bashful. He'd only briefly look at me before his gaze dropped to his loafers. When nervousness used to smite him years earlier, his gaze would drop to my shoes, not his.

"You know what I want."

I didn't. I racked my brain. What was he talking about? He always used to want books, but not in a while. He couldn't blurt out what he wanted from me, could not enunciate desire. I stared, thought, actually scratched my head. Finally, as if inspiration had descended from above, I asked the most inconceivable of questions: "You want sex?"

It was what my Ahmad wanted.

"With me?" It was my turn to keep repeating-"With me? With me?"-like a silly Swiss cuckoo clock.

Why? I was a mess. I stank of sewage. I looked like the witch from Hansel and Gretel. I was forty. I was wearing a pink tracksuit, with swirling sequins no less. I didn't even have lipstick on.

He had a shower.

"A shower?"

He nodded.

"Hot water?"

Ahmad must have killed many a lizard. During the war in Beirut, the powerful had power, but only those with true power had water.

I laughed, a bit nervously, dislodging air and apprehension from the nooks of my lungs-laughter of agreement. He met my eyes, more confident, delighted, having read the signs of my capitulation. They say laughter is the ultimate conjoiner.

I knew what Ahmad was. I'd heard rumors, mysterious stories, most too strange to be believed. One of the war's preeminent torturers, he was called Mutanabbi (he could make a mute speak, a variation on the poet's most famous stanza), an apropos literary nom de guerre, while other torturers chose generic names like Kojak, John Wayne, Belmondo, Jaws, or Cowboy. I knew the rumors to be true the instant I saw the apartment, and if not the apartment, every rumor would have been confirmed by the bathroom-marble, stainless steel, hard lines (to use Nabokovian and not Balzacian descriptions).

I knew, and I agreed to what he wanted. It was probably I, not Marcello or Ahmad, who had no moral code.

I wanted a gun. I wanted a shower. I made a choice. This could be a problem, being intimate with an almost intimate, but I decided to let him worry about things, let him contemplate if he chose to do so. I would not. I refused to be embarrassed. The water called my name.

The shower felt like a monsoon: hot, succulent, and baptismal. As filth dissolved off my skin, as grime emigrated, I felt rejuvenated, I was reborn. The near-scalding water changed my body from rigid to supple, turned my skin the color of a pink peony. My senses were sharpened. I used Ahmad's razor to shave.

Drying myself with the luxurious towel was as close to a religious experience as I was ever likely to have. He waited for me in the bedroom; he fully dressed, I wrapped only in luxury. Excessive light. The Lladrós on the nightstand were bathed in molten sunlight gold. I nodded my head toward the translucent curtains. Ahmad rushed to draw them, plunging the room into demidarkness. The Ahmad I knew had momentarily returned, astonishingly sensitive, servile and compliant, content and optimistic. Toward the bed I tiptoed barefoot like a thief wishing not to be discovered, wishing not to arouse noise or echoes.

Before I unwrapped, I turned the Lladrós around. He must have thought it was excessive shyness. It wasn't. I preferred not to have ugliness stare.

He said I was beautiful. I told him the figurines weren't. He moved around the bed and scooped them all into the wastebasket. Once more, he lied and said I was beautiful. I told him I was alive.

From Donne:

Love's mysteries in souls do grow,

But yet the body is his book.

Ahmad was not the first, nor would he be the last. He was surprised I didn't lie down like a corpse. I wished to tell him that though I was by no means an experienced lover, I had been intimate with a few. I had studied Georges Bataille and Henry Miller, submitted to the Marquis, devoured the racist Fear of Flying, and cavorted with lewd Arab writers of the golden age who constantly thanked God for the blessing of fucking, al-Tifashi, al-Tijani, and al-Tusi, ibn Nasr, ibn Yahya, and ibn Sulayman; so many had taught me. I wanted to tell Ahmad that he shouldn't have interrupted his studying. I wanted to tell him that it was Moravia, his deflowerer, who had written about the natural promiscuity of women. I did not, none of it.

How can one describe the ephemeral qualities of sex beyond the probing, poking, and panting? How can one use inadequate words to describe the ineffable, the beyond words? Those salacious Arabs and their Western counterparts were able to explain the technical aspects, which is helpful, of course, and delightful. Some touched on the spiritual, on the psychological, and metaphor was loved by all. However, to believe that words can in any way mirror or, alas, explain the infinite mystery of sex is akin to believing that reading dark notes on paper can illuminate a Bach partita, or that by studying composition or color one can understand a late Rembrandt self-portrait. Sex, like art, can unsettle a soul, can grind a heart in a mortar. Sex, like literature, can sneak the other within one's walls, even if for only a moment, a moment before one immures oneself again.

I was intrigued enough by the strangeness of the situation that my memory retained a few palimpsests of the lovemaking, early images, when everything was technical or mechanical. Memory chooses to preserve what desire cannot hope to sustain. The images I retain, though, couldn't have happened. In my memory, I can see myself with Ahmad, as if a part of me participated in the encounter and another floated high in the air, near the ceiling, and witnessed with disinterest.

Aaliya, the high one-Aaliya with the bird's-eye view, above the mud and muck and life's swamps.

What seeped through the mortar of my walls was not his technique (adequate) or his ardor (more than). I was on my knees facing away, he behind me still smelling of licorice and anise, engaged in an age-old rhythm. He slowed, and his fingers explored the topography of my lower back. I could feel his face descending, examining a tiny city on a map. His fingers squeezed gently before he removed them. At first, I tried to dismiss this interruption, considered it a possible sexual quirk, but his fingers resumed the exploration of the region, lower back and upper derrière. His fingers squeezed once more, and this time I realized what he was doing, I recognized the feel of a blackhead being extruded. When he removed a third, I looked back, and it was more likely that I'd have turned to butter than to salt. He apologized, begged my forgiveness. It had been unconscious. He couldn't see a blackhead on his own skin without removing it and didn't realize he was doing the same with me.

I asked him not to stop. I loved it.

His fingers happily reconnoitered my entire back, delicately, gently, and ever so slowly turned my skin into a smorgasbord of delicious feelings. I was touched. I buried my face in the pillow to hide my ecstasy and my tears.

My heart had momentarily found its pestle.

Ecstasy and intimacy are ineffable as well, ephemeral and fleeting. Ahmad and I didn't repeat our interlude, never resumed the exploration. He won what he wanted, as did I.

Yeats once said, "The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul."

We lie down with hope and wake up with lies.

When the warlords ended their interlude a few days after, I felt protected within the walls of my apartment, sat vigil with the Kalashnikov close to my bosom.

Aaliya, the high one, the separate.

I, Aaliya, the aged one, should get to bed-lie in my bed, call upon the gods of rest, instead of sitting at my desk remembering.

The receding perspective of my past smothers my present.

Remembering is the malignancy that feasts on my now.

I feel tired and weary, my mind leaden, my hair still blue.

And so the days pass.

My bedroom is quiet except for the flapping of laundry in the breeze, sails of minor ships in soft gusts; the building behind me has verandahs on every floor (ours has none), and each has multiple laundry lines. I don't mind these night sounds; I call them organic white noise. My bedroom has quieted over the years as Joumana's family upstairs and Marie-Thérèse's downstairs grew up and the rambunctious children departed. For as long as they lived below, Mr. Hayek had unidirectional screaming sessions with Marie-Thérèse at least once a week, throughout their marriage, until he died last year. I heard Fadia once say that you can tell how well a marriage is working by counting the bite marks on each partner's tongue. Mr. Hayek had none. He held nothing back. You can't do anything right. You always say the wrong thing. Why can't you do what I tell you? You're so frustrating. It was like listening to a less witty Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with a mousy, mute actress playing Martha.

It is much quieter now.

It's much easier to sleep now, if only I could.

I had a troubling night. I must have dozed off briefly, because in the early morning my heart found itself disquieted by a short unrestful dream-not one with my mother, the protagonist of my most disturbing dreams, but one about Hannah, probably the woman my mother disrespected most in life, and in death.

How does this memory of mine work? How it betrays me. What thunderous ministorms of neurons were fired in my mind during the dark of morning, what ghosts!

While I dozed, Hannah materialized-healthy, younger, in her late thirties-and it seemed irrelevant at first that she was much younger than I. My almost sister-in-law appeared corporeal and sturdy, yet somehow askew, resembling a posthumous oil portrait more than herself. She wore one of her familiar unshapely dresses, fine linen and purple. There was an affectionate formality in the way the arms of a black sweater crossed around her shoulders, in the care of the woolly knot's placement and position. Her shoes, not her face, were furrowed with wrinkles. Her gaze was kind, open, and amused.

"Sweetheart," I said softly, extending my hand toward her cheek. "No one wears her hair like that anymore." She grinned and I answered with my usual smile that begged forgiveness. She made an appearance to offer me -courage, and I worried about her appearance. Shame. Such a worry-wart I am. I miss miracles blooming before my eyes: I concentrate on a fading star and miss the constellation. I overlook dazzling thunderstorms worrying whether I have laundry hanging.

The archipelago of liver spots on the back of my hand kept distracting me from her face. I jerked it back, covered it with my left, and held both like a bouquet of prayers before my heart. She ignored me and walked toward the lieutenant, her husband-to-be, her husband-who-never-was. He was much younger than she in my dream. She kissed him, which couldn't possibly have happened while she was alive, and he returned her kiss, matching passions. She undressed him with uncommon verve, her kisses deeper, her lust brazen.

An observer would receive the wrong impression from this salacious tableau. Their ages were wrong, I thought. Incompatible. Insidious Nabokov insinuated himself into my dreams once more, not allowing me to lose myself in watching what was before me, not allowing me to engage life. Hannah was Humbert, the lieutenant the ingénue. Fire of my loins. They fucked, no other term can be used. Hannah and her lieutenant fucked and fucked.

Why Hannah? Why now?

There was a time when nary a minute passed without my thinking of her, without my wondering about her last days, her consummate loneliness and how well she masked it, her insatiable longing. She'd come into my thoughts unsought, uninvited. Maybe Hannah and her ghost stayed away before this morning's dream because they felt sorry for me in my old age, for me and my weary remembrance, maybe they felt it necessary, if only to relieve me of one of my grotesque obsessions. You have to move forward, try to live.

But life isn't necessarily as considerate as its ghosts, or as compassionate.

Nor is it fair.

"She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line." I won't translate Lolita even though I've always wanted to. It's against the rules. Nabokov's earlier work in rowdy Russian I could. "But in my arms she was always Lolita."

"Lo. Lee. Ta."

My memory has aged into an unruly child but is still quite precocious.

It is the loneliness, the abject isolation. Hannah reappears in my memories to remind me of how alone I am, how utterly inconsequential my life has become, how sad.

I have reached the age where life has become a series of accepted defeats-age and defeat, blood brothers faithful to the end. I struggle to get out of bed, as I do every morning. Still night outside, no light trickles through the short slats of the bedroom's wood shutters. I've been awake for over an hour, probably more. I move my feet toward the edge of the bed and lower them to the carpet, which helps me sit up with less effort. Ouch. I extend a sleepy arm and turn on the bedside lamp, a fifty-year-old relic that barely functions, one of the first possessions I bought on my own.

Barely functions, like me: swollen limbs, arthritis, insomnia, both constipation and incontinence, the low and high tides of aging nether regions. In my morning veins, blood has slowed to the speed of molasses. My body is failing me, my mind as well. When my body functions, it seems to do so independently of my desires, and my mind regularly forgets what those desires are, not to mention where I've left my keys or my reading glasses. One could say that every day is an adventure.

I sit up tentatively, rest my feet on the night carpet next to the bed, the first of many offerings from Hannah. It is a peculiar prayer rug, small and handwoven, Persian or Afghan, with a miniature qibla compass at the top so I can spread it to the east. The compass still points eastward, but the rug does not. It does prevent my feet from facing the cold floor every winter morning.

I stand up carefully, lean and twist to stretch my back. The lower back pain isn't necessarily age related-I've lived with mild back pain for years. What has changed is the complexity of the knots: in my younger years the back muscles felt like a simple bowline knot, whereas this morning they feel more like a couple of angler's loops and a sheepshank. I'm able to name a few knots used by sailors, but I have never been on a boat. Joseph Conrad's novels planted the seeds of love for sea stories. Annie Proulx's The Shipping News led me to read The Ashley Book of Knots.

I am a reader. Yes, I am that, a reader with nagging back pain.

When my bones ache or my back rebels, I consider the hurt punishment for the years of alienating my body, even dismissing it with some disdain. I deplored my physicality when I was younger, and now it deplores me right back. As I age, my body demands its rightful place in the scheme of my attentions. It stakes its claims.

The mind over body then, but no longer.

Aaliya, above it all. Aaliya, the separated.

Aaliya, Aaliya, über alles.

Sad, sad, sad.

I walk gingerly toward the door, probably looking like a waddling gnome. My bedroom is one of the safe spaces in the apartment from which I've banished mirrors. In one of her books, Helen Garner says that all women over sixty instinctively learn to pass by a mirror without looking. Why risk it is what I say.

Of course, by avoiding my reflection, I end up ignoring Rilke's exquisite admonishment:

Though the reflection in the pool

Often swims before our eyes:

Know the image.

How lovely that is!

I'll move more gracefully, or less awkwardly, in a few minutes, once my muscles and joints have warmed up.

I flick on the ceiling lights in the kitchen, boil water for my tea. As the stovetop flame wavers livid and blue, the bulbs in the ceiling hiccup once, twice, and die, as does the one streetlight outside. The government electricity is down again. The building's generator won't be turned on until at least six a.m., until someone else wakes up, most likely Marie-Thérèse, who calls for one of her roaming cats every morning, which wakes Fadia, who'll turn on the generator.

I'll wait in the dark for the lights to come on. I'm used to it.

Without power, night is night once more, not the cheap imitation that passes for night in a modern city. Without electricity, night is the deep world of darkness once more, the mystery we dread.

Darkness visible.

My city seems to be regressing to an earlier age. Barely functions.

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.

Darkness risible.

As I sit in the dark kitchen sipping darker tea, I think in a flash of an evening long ago, when I was still a child-must have been winter as it is now; it was dark early. The meal, simple and barely enough to feed the family, waited impatiently on a big brass tray sitting atop a round burlap ottoman. The apartment wasn't large enough for a dining table and six children. My mother refused to feed us until the return of her husband, a tailor's assistant in a downtown shop, as he remained until he passed away. The moment my mother heard him turn the key, she stood up. The electricity went out, plunging the room into blackness and causing my mother unspeakable distress, for her husband might injure himself entering a dark room. As she ran to greet him, warn him, and guide him, her leg knocked the tray, which flipped and banged my half brother the eldest on the head; he'd used that instant cover of darkness to sneak a slice of white cheese. Food landed all about us like shrapnel.

"Don't move," warned my mother, "don't you dare move."

She tottered blindly into the kitchen, returned with a fluttering kerosene lamp. We remained stock-still, but entering the apartment, her husband stepped in the spilled olive oil. When he moved his shoe away, we could see a footprint stain in the carpet. All of us knelt and began to pick up food-cheese, black olives, radishes, sliced tomatoes, white onions-only the olive oil was unsalvageable. We sat around the tray and ate our dinner silently. All evening, my mother's cheeks blushed a deep red that could be noticed even in the low light of the lamp.

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?

Compared to the Middle East, William Burroughs's world or Gabriel García Márquez's Macondo is more predictable. Dickens's Londoners are more trustworthy than the Lebanese. Beirut and its denizens are famously and infamously unpredictable. Every day is an adventure. This unsteadiness makes us feel a shudder of excitement, of danger, as well as a deadweight of frustration. The spine tingles momentarily and the heart sinks.

When trains run on time (when trains run, period), when a dial tone sounds as soon as you pick up a receiver, does life become too predictable? With this essential reliability, are Germans bored? Does that explain The Magic Mountain?

Is life less thrilling if your neighbors are rational, if they don't bomb your power stations whenever they feel you need to be admonished? Is it less rousing if they don't rattle your windows and nerves with indiscriminate sonic booms just because they can?

When things turn out as you expect more often than not, do you feel more in control of your destiny? Do you take more responsibility for your life? If that's the case, why do Americans always behave as if they're victims?

Hear me on this for a moment. I wake up every morning not knowing whether I'll be able to switch on the lights. When my toilet broke down last year, I had to set up three appointments with three plumbers because the first two didn't show and the third appeared four hours late. Rarely can I walk the same path from point A to point B, say from apartment to supermarket, for more than a month. I constantly have to adjust my walking maps; any of a multitude of minor politicians will block off entire neighborhoods because one day they decide they're important enough to feel threatened. Life in Beirut is much too random. I can't force myself to believe I'm in charge of much of my life.

Does reliability reinforce your illusion of control? If so, I wonder if in developed countries (I won't use the hateful term civilized), the treacherous, illusion-crushing process of aging is more difficult to bear.

Am I having an easier time than women my age in London?

Marie-Thérèse calls for her cat to come home, the daily aubade. The uncaring, intricate world begins to rouse. In time the curtain edges will grow light.

"Maysoura!" Marie-Thérèse's voice has risen in volume since her husband passed away. "Maysoura!"

I don't understand why she allows her two cats to roam the streets of our neighborhood. Beirut isn't a pet-friendly city. Like my mother, Marie-Thérèse loves cats. However, my mother never owned a cat; she showered her love on the city's ferals.

The generator comes on with its soft hum. Fadia must have awakened. I don't turn the light on, remain in the not-quite-as-dark.

I think of Brodsky:

I sit by the window. The dishes are done.

I was happy here. But I won't be again.

The sun rises, and the kitchen takes shape, revealing its details. The awakening of my city is more beautiful to my eyes, and to my ears, than the breaking of dawn in some bucolic valley or sparsely populated island paradise, not that I've actually been to a bucolic valley or an island paradise. In my city, the sun multiplies its effects on the myriad of windows and glass in colorful reflections that make each morning distinct. The faint light creeps through the window, curious to see what is happening in my kitchen. It falls across my face and falters. I make myself stand up. I sway a little, lean on the wine-red and urine-yellow abomination of a breakfast table that my husband brought with him when we were married and left when he left. I shake the loose folds of my robe de chambre. Dust motes hang thick in the air. The kitchen has two windows on adjacent walls. A spider with shockingly long front legs busies herself with prey caught in her web. All that remains is a wisp of gossamer with striated veins. The spider chose the wrong window; her home will be washed away with the first rains. I stretch on my toes, draw back the short drapes of the second window, and unveil more morning light. I allow brightness to flood the kitchen from both sides. I slide open the pane for the first time in a couple of days. This window looks onto the outdoor stairwell, and my neighbors are able to quench their curiosity as they click-clack up and down. A slight breath of air makes the stagnant motes waver; a handful of sunlight kindles them golden and luminous.

Apollo, ever the alchemist, still sails his chariot in the skies of Beirut, wielding a philosopher's stone. Into gold I transmute the very air.

You must change your life.

The surprising sound of Marie-Thérèse's strapless sandals floats through the window-surprising since my downstairs neighbor hasn't made the trek upstairs in a long while. After she passes the window, I lean over to observe. She doesn't seem to be dragging her shadow and isn't wearing a mourning dress. It takes me a moment to remember that this is the day after the one-year anniversary of her husband's death. As my heels return to the floor, I realize my neck has stiffened.

Fadia's voice descends from above. "Well done, my love, well done. I'm proud of you." The voice sounds invigorated, as if its owner has been dunked in an Italian fountain of joy.

The coffee klatsch is reuniting this morning. Good for them.

The three witches have been having syrupy coffee together every morning for almost thirty years. On the third-floor landing, in front of Joumana's apartment, my neighbors gather around the round brass tray, smoking, gossiping, and getting ready for the day. Marie-Thérèse hasn't sat on her stool at all in the last year-a bit too much mourning, if you ask me, but understandable. That she's making the trek upstairs is a grand occasion.

"You light up the day," Joumana calls down. Her voice rings out along the stairwell and drops right into my kitchen.

It's a glorious, gilded Levantine morning.

The acoustics in the building are such that in my kitchen I hear every word spoken on the landing. Every morning, I hover intimately among my neighbors. I hear the clink of cups on their saucers, the clank of saucers on the brass tray, the pouring of the coffee, their sacred ritual-"irrigating the Garden," Joumana calls it. I hear them chatter and gossip: Have you heard this? Can you believe that? They curse enemies and laud friends. I hear every sigh and giggle. I listen to them make plans, compare notes, exchange recipes, and exhibit every newly purchased inessential.

Years of conversation.

So many mornings: Fadia unleashing her frightening trademark laugh, a crackling falsetto exhalation that makes her elongated throat swell and undulate like a baker's bellows, a wild and epidemically infectious laugh, and she's prodigal with it. Joumana's husband putting his head out the door; he good-mornings the women, jokes with them, and shouts down to Mr. Hayek, Marie-Thérèse's husband and tormentor, in the apartment below mine to make sure he's ready for their walk to the American University, where they both teach. Joumana teaches at the university as well, but she drives her car and never rushes her coffee. She pokes fun at the men because most days they walk in a dawdling mosey and she picks them up along the way. "They want exercise," she says, "but not perspiration."

Poor Mr. Hayek no longer makes that walk.

I pick a fragrant mandarin out of the bowl, poke a hole in its bottom with my finger, and begin to peel. I pour myself a second cup of tea.

"I'm so happy you're out of mourning," Fadia says. "A year is too much."

I concur, of course. A year is too much if you loved your husband. It is much too much for Mr. Hayek.

"I understand why you chose to do it," Fadia goes on. "I'm with you, my love. But I say six months-six months is more than enough. I loved my husband, everyone will vouch for that, but I couldn't keep wearing black."

"I didn't mind the black," Marie-Thérèse says. A loud car horn from the street obscures her next sentence.

"It's better that you took it off," Joumana says. "He'd have wanted you to. Your husband hated black."

"And don't wear those black nylons anymore," Fadia says. No car horn, no backfiring truck or rumbling motorcycle, is able obscure her voice. "Although they do cover a lot."

"Fadia!" Joumana admonishes.

"What? Don't look at me like that. Fadia tells the truth. You know that. I think we could all use a little depilation. That's all I'm saying. Am I lying? Tell me. No, I most certainly am not. We all need a good pedicure as well. Am I right? Am I right? This evening we'll all go to the salon. Just the essentials, that's all. Top to bottom. And you know, my love, unshaved legs are contagious. If we don't do something about yours, who knows what will happen to mine? It's even worse with unpedicured nails. Look, look." Fadia's voice hoots and shrieks. "The color is chipping as we speak. We need an emergency intervention." Fadia, who always enjoys her own joke, laughs, the crackling falsetto.

"Girls' night out," Joumana says.

"We can be young again," Fadia adds.

At sixty-two, Fadia is the eldest of the three. I, of course, am much further along. She isn't aging gracefully; she fights every slight sign of decay with vigor and bitterness. Her makeup keeps getting thicker and her fashions more adolescent, a late desperate grasp at a fondly recalled youth. Even so, she looks younger and fresher than Marie-Thérèse, ten years her junior, who is aging without bitterness and with obvious resignation. Her elbows have collected as many furrows as a walnut, as many furrows as mine. She's become a paltry imitation of what she once was. Her eyes settled into incuriosity a long time ago.

Marie-Thérèse has an inscrutable face, a life-is-but-a-dream look giving the impression that she wishes not to be disturbed by disturbing realities-a mask, really, for the impression is not true, the facade doesn't match the house it conceals. For some reason she reminds me of the girl Fernando Pessoa tried to befriend, the single romantic liaison in his life. I can't tell you why. I don't know what that girl looked like. I'm not sure anybody does. I can't even remember her name-Blanca, Maria, Francesca? My memory wishes to frustrate me this morning. The girl worked in the same import-export office as my poet, and he considered asking her out, or whatever hopeful twosomes did back in 1929 Lisbon.

I must say, I imagine that Marie-Thérèse looks like that girl as she aged, not as she was when the genius considered her.

Of course, Pessoa didn't go out with that girl, didn't do whatever they did back in 1929 Lisbon. Her name was -Ophelia Queiroz. I am growing senile. Forgetting an -Ophelia? The liaison's brevity was due to the malicious interference of none other than álvaro de Campos, Pessoa's own creation, one of the seventy-two literary identities he used, the bisexual dandy who loathed Ophelia and believed her to be a distraction to Pessoa's literary ambition. He wrote the poor girl and told her to flush any ideas she had about a relationship with Fernando down the toilet.

There is no evidence, at least none that I know of, that Ophelia had any idea who Fernando was, let alone that he spent his time inventing literary personas that wrote some of the great masterpieces of the twentieth century. She worked in the same clerical office, but I can't imagine that they ever exchanged words. I can't imagine him exchanging words with anybody.

Fernando died in relative obscurity, a virgin and a recluse.

I thought I'd be reading a new book today, but it doesn't feel right, or I don't feel like it. Some days are not new-book days.

After reading Sebald yesterday, I realized that translating Austerlitz was an easier project than The Emigrants, possibly because the latter laid the bitumen, smoothed the ride, for Austerlitz. A troublesome issue arises in translating Sebald into Arabic. His style, drawn-out and elongated sentences that wrap around the page and their reader, seems at first glance to be an ideal fit for Arabic, where use of punctuation is less formal. (Translating Saramago's The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis was a relative breeze.) However, Sebald's ubiquitous insertion of Jacques Austerlitz's tongue into the unnamed narrator's first-person narrative was difficult to convey precisely, since Arabic, like Spanish, drops pronouns more often than English or German. Sebald's I spoke for at least two people.

The above problem has invaded my thoughts like algae this morning. I'll reread my translation of The Emigrants, which I haven't looked at in years. I must examine how I solved the problem then. But first I must bring it forth out of storage.

I don't wait to finish my tea before searching for a flashlight-from the dark I come and into the dark I return. I have two flashlights, but can't find either. Both are in the kitchen, I'm certain of that. I count to ten before searching once more, repeating every step in case I missed something the first go-around, returning to where I've been before. In vain. I down my tea, place the cup in the sink, and wax two candles onto the saucer. The rim of the saucer's depression is lightly discolored-a dusting of rust and red and brown, remnants of teas gone by that did not wish to be washed away, refused to be forgotten, the age rings of a small plate. The maid's room, barely larger than the boxes stored in it, is in the back of the kitchen behind the maid's bathroom. I live in an ambitious building: all four apartments have identical layouts, with midget maid's quarters, yet no resident has ever had a live-in maid that I know of. The room has no light; its ceiling bulb expired years ago. I am tall, but I'm uncomfortable with heights. I depend on a handyman to change high lightbulbs, hence the need for a flashlight or candles.

I begin the march toward the room, saucer and candles in hand, a breath of smoke and sulfur in my nostrils.

Crates fill the maid's bathroom. No need for candles in here. No shower, no bathtub, just a low metal spigot and a drain, toward which the tiled floor is slightly angled. A street-facing lofty window, a wedge of early northern light, illuminates the cartons of manuscripts. The toilet has three boxes stacked atop one another. These aren't what I'm looking for; these are boxes from the last ten years, overflow from the maid's room.

The windowless maid's room devours light and messes up my circulation. It has been more than a few years since I've opened the door-since the room overflowed into the bathroom, I no longer enter as often. The room induces an irrational heart. Sometimes upon entering, my heart works so hard it reaches the point of seizing. Other times, it thumps so joyfully it approaches the point of bursting. On still other occasions, it slows to the beat of torpor and dies out. This morning the veins in my temples throb with a big, blooming, buzzing confusion.

"Irrational heart"-I love the phrase, read it in Murphy years ago, and it carved itself a prominent place in my memory. I could also have written that my heart behaved "like a rocket set off," from Welty's "Death of a Traveling Salesman."

I'm unable to translate Beckett because he wrote in the two languages that I don't allow myself to work from. Early on, I decided that since some Lebanese can read English or French, I wouldn't translate writers who wrote in those languages; might be a somewhat arbitrary decision, but a necessary one I felt. Restricting choices is not always a bad thing. I have never translated a French writer, an English writer, or an American one. No Camus, no Duras, no Faulkner, no Welty, no Hemingway (thank the Lord), and not the young writers I admire, Junot Díaz (wonderfully macaronic language) or Aleksandar Hemon (macaronic in a single language). My self-imposed rules meant that I couldn't translate some African writers, say J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, or Nuruddin Farah, since they wrote-write-in English. No Australians, not Patrick White, whom I adore, not David Malouf. I can't translate Milan Kundera, the Czech, because he wrote and rewrote the French versions of his books, nor can I work on Ismail Kadare, because the English versions of his novels were translated from the French, not the original Albanian.

However, I'm fluent in only three languages: Arabic, English, and French. So I invented my own special system: to achieve the most accurate representation of a work, I use a French and an English translation to create an Arabic one. It is a functional and well-planned system that allows me to enjoy what I do. I know this makes my translation one step further removed from the original, like Kadare's English novels, but it is the method I continue to use. Those are the rules I chose. I became a servant, albeit voluntarily, of a discipline, a specific ritual. I am my system, and my system is me.

I wouldn't translate Beckett's Murphy even if it were written in another language, say Serbo-Croatian, because I dislike the novel. I've read Waiting for Godot three times and I still can't tell you what it is about. If, as some critics claim, it is about being bored while waiting for God to return, then it's even duller than I thought.

Crates, crates, boxes, and crates. The translated manuscripts have the two books, French and English, affixed to the side of the box for identification. Tolstoy, Gogol, and Hamsun; Calvino, Borges, Schulz, Nádas, Nooteboom; Ki?, Karasu, and Kafka; books of memory, disquiet, but not of laughter and forgetting. Years of books, books of years. A waste of time, a waste of a life.

Sebald's box lies atop Nooteboom's, under three other translations. I place the saucer of candles on a pile. I take the top boxes down, making sure they don't fall on me. Sebald is weighty, as if it added heft during its perfectly sedentary lifestyle all these years. I can barely carry it, so the saucer is out of the question. I blow out the candles, throwing the maid's room into darkness, just the smell of smoke and must and dust.

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 Czes?aw Mi?osz, 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.

None of us budge; in a well-lit 1950s foyer we stand like Italian terra-cotta sculptures, Renaissance, all of us terrified, my mother screaming and screaming. The normally invisible dust in the foyer dances and prances in the light, mocking the immobility of the humans.

Her body exudes a cold of ancient winters. The chill rises up from my feet. I shiver and tremble.

My half brother the eldest finally turns to me, his hand palming his right chin; his body, his face, the age-old universal pose of the horror-struck. "What have you done?" he asks, while my mother screams some more.

Nothing. I'm still in my nightgown and robe de chambre, for crying out loud.

Nothing. I've done nothing.

Fadia storm-troops across the foyer, her clogs loud enough to be heard alongside the scream, but not till she is almost upon me does she ask, "What is happening here?" Her eyes are questioning, more surprised than anything. Eyelids already hued with blue eye shadow, azure-not fully made up yet, but on the way. Her lips are outlined with black eyebrow pencil, but not filled in with color. Girlish golden hoops adorn her ears.

"She doesn't recognize you," shouts my sister-in-law, still holding my mother. "That's all. She doesn't recognize me most of the time either. It's nothing. She'll get used to you. I know she will. She has to."

"Can someone shut her up?" yells Fadia, her open mouth showing teeth stained by nicotine. "My nerves can't handle this."

I can't tell whether Fadia means the screamer or the speaker. No one is asking about my nerves.

I notice that my upstairs neighbor Joumana has entered my apartment as well. Marie-Thérèse remains in the doorway, curious but considerate, too many people in my small foyer. Joumana, in a winter dress with scalloped neckline, positions herself next to Fadia, holding a long-handled broom bottom side up, other hand on hip, looking less like a menacing sentinel than a burlesque of a Pontormo painting. Why did she rush down with a broom? Did she expect a swordfight? Dumas, Marías, Conan the Barbarian?

Joumana and a broom, a university professor and a housecleaning implement, an incongruous vision.

My mother tires suddenly, looks hopeless and threadbare. The decibels drop; her screams are reduced to mewls and whimpers.

"Tell her she must keep her mother." My sister-in-law nudges her husband, who appears the most shaken. His white comb-over stands on end. "She must. I'll not take her back. I cannot bear it. You tell her."

"I will do no such thing," I say.

"You tell her," yells my sister-in-law.

My mother begins lowing softly, like a sick cow. She drops her head as if she wants to fold into herself. She is tiny, making it difficult to imagine that I, the tallest person in the room, am related to her in any way, let alone that I'm her offshoot.

"You want to leave her here?" asks Fadia. "Are you insane?"

"This doesn't concern you," my sister-in-law says. Her teeth crowd together as if trying to jump out of her mouth.

"Of course it does." Fadia's eyebrows fly up toward her hairline. "Everything in my building concerns me. Leave now. I've had all I can take from your family for fifty years. No more. Get out."

My sister-in-law tries to move my lowing mother forward, and the scream returns. I cover my ears.

"Take her back," shouts Fadia. "Leave and take her with you. Take her back."

I lean against the glazed door separating the crowded foyer from the rest of my apartment. I wish to be transported to another dimension. Nothing makes sense. I watch the proceedings as if I were at a screening of an Antonioni movie without subtitles. My hands, usually so calm, tremble slightly, and my left eye moves restlessly, independently. In my head, and only in my head, I hear a fast rendition of one of Liszt's transcendental études, played by Sviatoslav Richter on 78 rpm.

There is a remoteness to the air about me. I am off kilter.

Take her back.

I am slowly beginning to regain my composure, to collect its dispersed shards, when I realize that my neighbors and I are emphatically forcing my mother out of the house-my own mother. How rude it is.

Kicking your mother out-your dying mother.

Now, describing my mother as dying doesn't mean much, signifies almost nothing. All of us are dying; all days are numbered. My mother has been at death's door for quite a while, but has willfully managed to keep from opening it, or knocking for that matter. Yet that body, that vessel, can't withstand life much longer.

Above her head a ticktocking alarm clock should be floating, one of the old ones with a metal dome on top.

At the end of every summer, my mother cooked lamb fat in salt to store for winter, and kept up this ritual even with the advent of refrigeration and the availability of meats year-round. She shouldn't cook lamb fat this year. No green bananas. She'll soon be departing this building, my life, and this world. But not soon enough.

"Take her back," Fadia keeps repeating, "take her back," in an unrelenting tone that brooks no discussion, no disagreement, a tone that grows stronger and more insistent with each repetition. "Take her back."

Let me go; take back thy gift.

Of all the lovely phrases and images, the bright jewels embedded in Tennyson's "Tithonus," this sentence, "take back thy gift," is my favorite. Lodged in my memory from the moment I first read it, it quickens my essence.

I wither slowly in thine arms,

Here at the quiet limit of the world.

Joumana and her broom remain silent as Fadia talks and talks. How she, a university professor, can be so close to Fadia, who was unable to pass her baccalaureate, is difficult to understand, a most odd pairing. They're conjoined like an orange and its navel.

Fadia, arms wide like wings, guides the invaders out the door. Her offensively bright housedress, Yellow Submarine palette, is long enough to sweep the floor as she moves. My sister-in-law seems dispirited, like a weary actress in a failed play.

Take her back.

Here at the quiet limit of the world it isn't so quiet.

Untangling my feelings toward Fadia is as challenging as any of Psyche's tasks, and more difficult still is trying to understand hers toward me. The child looked up to me as a young bride; she despised me as a divorcée. Yet as we aged, after she married and had her own family, she seemed to soften. She became civil; she may not like me, but she doesn't loathe me either, and from time to time she exhibits a kindness and generosity so profound as to confound me.

The war forced us to be strangers no more. We helped and supported each other during the battles, though that didn't transform our relationship into any recognizable kind of friendship. Other than uttering polite meaningless words, we hardly spoke. A word here, a phrase there.

The longest exchange we ever had was on a cold morning in 1995 as I was heading to work. Coming out my door, I surprised her, cheeks ruddy with cold and good health as she ascended the stairs to the daily gathering of the witches, having bought a warm tray of kenafeh, its smell hunger inducing even wrapped in waxy paper. Good morning, good morning, and Fadia suggested I wear an overcoat on such a cold day. I told her I was warm-blooded, but she insisted that once I was out on the street the wind was freezing cold.

"Once you're out there," she said as her hands stroked her camelhair coat, "you'll thank Fadia."

She was right that day.

I stopped dismissing her as inconsequential early on. Fadia was outrageously frivolous as a child, and remains so as an adult, yet she possesses a courage, a gumption, that few of her generation have. One night years ago-she was nineteen, possibly twenty, definitely no longer a student-the sky was inky, India ink, and she was outside her door fuming much too loudly. Sartre wrote, "Hell is the Other," which I agree with, of course, but I also agree with Fernando Vallejo: "the torment of Hell is noise." That night Fadia was the inferno of my soul.

At the time, Fadia was causing her father, Hajj Wardeh, great concern, and concerned he should have been, as it turned out. The favorite and the youngest, she was the only one of his three daughters who was still unmarried. Worse yet, her delight in Egyptian romantic movies, her obsession with them, banished sleep from his nights. He correctly worried that she not only watched them with her girlfriends but was also sneaking into theaters by herself when she had the chance. Having watched a few of these films himself, he understood that they were breeding grounds of illusion, planting misbegotten seeds in the minds of impressionable young Arab girls and sowing unhappiness and discontent when life turned out to be less ideal than it appeared on those cursed screens.

He tried to forbid her from going with her girlfriends, but the truth was, and he was fully aware of it, that his family had reached the point where his daughter ruled the realm. She could inveigle her father to agree to whatever she wanted, within reason, of course. She considered his demands mere suggestions. She possessed a potent weapon: her pout. He loved her so deeply that all it took was for her to curl her lips and push them out, squint her eyes and stare at him, and he would hastily rescind whatever it was that he had merely suggested.

Hajj Wardeh arrived at the most expected of solutions: it was high time she was married. He found the perfect suitor, a son of a good friend of his. The husband-to-be's name was Abdallah, a handsome twenty-six-year-old, educated, intelligent, decent, a good Muslim, an engineer who had graduated from the American University of Beirut with high honors. When Hajj Wardeh invited his good friend's family for dinner, he noticed with great glee that Abdallah practically fell over every time Fadia looked at him. He kept expecting the poor young man's eyes to jump out of their sockets as in the popular cartoons. Nothing was said during the dinner, of course, but he foresaw a full proposal by the next day.

Joy caressed his heart, if only briefly.

That night, after she figured out the purpose of the dinner, Fadia the noisemaker threw her infamous tantrum, which the entire neighborhood heard. She would not marry just anybody, and certainly not this son of her father's good friend. She would marry for love, and only for love. She would not reenter the apartment until her father promised he wouldn't give her to that man. She didn't care who heard her night cries. She'd sleep on the landing. All of Beirut would know her father was an indecent man for forcing her to marry against her will. She didn't care how he was to tell his best friend that she wasn't interested. She wouldn't set foot inside her home unless her father relented. The poor man did, and a suddenly meek Fadia was smart enough not to gloat in her triumph.

What Hajj Wardeh didn't know at the time, although he was wise enough to understand it later, was that Fadia already had her eyes set on a future husband. Yes, she would marry for love. She and her girlfriends had noticed a young man at the theaters, attending the same movies they were. They approached him the third or fourth time they saw him. They found him charming and delightful, as enamored of Egyptian movies as they were. He was a gentleman from a good family and treated them with the utmost respect. All of Fadia's girlfriends wanted him as a husband, this well-mannered, considerate man with a good job who had the same interests they did. What girl would want anything more?

I should have slipped them a copy of Giovanni's Room or, had they been more intelligent, Corydon.

Fadia worked on him for two years before he understood that he was supposed to propose, and propose he did, asking for her hand officially from her father. Their marriage worked in its way. In time she lost her infatuation with Egyptian films, but he never did. 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.

He was a dutiful husband who never cheated on Fadia or strayed. She, of course, did, as I had expected. What I hadn't expected, and neither did Fadia, was the choice of whom she strayed with. She encountered Abdallah at some gathering, and apparently, as a married woman, she found his interest in her more intriguing. She claimed he seduced her while sitting next to his wife; he removed the red rose in his boutonniere, plucked it, and ever so inconspicuously allowed the petals to drop from his hand along her path as she passed him. She was his faithful mistress for twenty-three years. They were somewhat discreet in order not to hurt their families, but the whole city knew of their affair-knew of it discreetly, of course. I heard her talk about him regularly to Joumana and Marie-Thérèse up there on the landing. It is noteworthy that only Fadia's eldest child takes after her husband. The rest of them do not take after Abdallah, but they certainly don't look like their father, whatever he looked like.

Had it not been for Abdallah's untimely death by sudden cardiac arrest while in an unsober condition, the lovers would probably still be together. She mourned him more than anyone in his family; she mourned him more than she did her husband, of course. After her lover's death, she discreetly accepted condolences. She was considerate enough not to attend his funeral. However, she was inordinately pleased to hear that at the obsequies an old lady made the egregious blunder of addressing her lover's wife as Fadia.

She was certainly pretty all those years ago, and as she shoos my mother, half brother, and sister-in-law out of the apartment, I can still see who she once was, how she was. Framed by the light crossing the threshold, Fadia's old face seems to be dismantling, and the face I remember breaks through like a newborn chick out of its shell. I sometimes see her as impervious to time.

"Out, out!" Fadia says, even though my interloping relatives have already left the apartment. Fadia wants them out of her building. "Don't make me call the gendarmes," she says as they slowly lead my mother down the stairs. "I never want to see you here again. I don't like you."

My feet feel as if they're swelling in their slippers, my knees unable to bear my weight. My robe hangs heavily upon my shoulders. I wonder if I can simply lock the door against Fadia, but Joumana is still in the foyer, joined now by Marie-Thérèse, both regarding me quizzically, wanting to know, looking like characters out of a bad Lebanese soap opera.

"I must sit," I announce as I take slow steps, tread softly across the worn kilim, and retreat to my reading room. "I must sit." As I fall back into my trusty fauteuil, I realize it's a mistake, a grievous error. My throat constricts. I shut my eyes. I haven't allowed anyone in this room in decades.

My breath shudders within my body's unyielding limits, my heart seems to be walking about inside.

Joumana and Marie-Thérèse, my neighbors above and below, follow me into my sanctuary. Joumana crouches before the chair. She wants to know if I'm all right. That must have been traumatic. Am I okay? Is there anything they can do? Joumana has a strong face, with features more Slavic than Semitic, more Israeli than Lebanese, slightly rough but not unattractive, broad brow above shrewd eyes that make me uncomfortable. Do I know why my mother screamed?

No, it felt like an aberration. I can't tell what scared my mother. I'll never know. What was it that was unleashed from the chambers of her memory? How can I know?

Delicately and discreetly, Joumana examines my hair, then shakes her head. Does that mean she doesn't think the blue dye is what caused the screaming? I say nothing.

A mistake, a lapse. They shouldn't be in the room. I try to catch my breath, try to concentrate on the vase of hothouse flowers on the stand next to me: red dahlias, white delphiniums, glass vase, sweetish smell. Perishable flowers, they cost more money than I can afford, but once I saw them in the shop, I couldn't return home without them.

Like most Lebanese, Joumana speaks rapidly, one sentence dovetailing into another, producing guttural words and phrases as if gargling with mouthwash. I prefer slow conversations where words are counted like pearls, conversations with many pauses, pauses replacing words. I prefer my visitors elsewhere. She's looking slightly above my chair. Her eyes, the color of quince jam, reinforce her easy demeanor, her loquacity.

"I need to rest," I say. "The air feels humid." Pause. "I might be getting a headache."

Joumana's eyes suddenly dart from one side to the other, gathering information at high speed. The crow's feet around them tighten. I shut mine in despair. "Oh my Lord," exclaims Joumana, "what is all this?" She twirls unhurriedly in place, looking up and down. Her face lights up and glows. "What have you been hiding in here?"

"It's only books," I say. "Only books."

I imagine looking at the room through a stranger's eyes. Books everywhere, stacks and stacks, shelves and bookcases, stacks atop each shelf, I in the creaky chair that hasn't been reupholstered since I bought it in the early sixties. I have been its only occupant; years ago its foam molded into the shape of my posterior. The accompanying ottoman holds two stacks of books that haven't been disturbed in years, except for semiweekly dusting. How many hours have I moved around this room, from nook to nook, making sure that everything is in its proper place, every book in its proper pile, every dust mote annihilated? An unframed circular mirror-when did I put that up and why had I kept it?-hangs by a nail on the door. I'd completely forgotten about it. Every surface in the room shines with dedicated cleanliness except for the mirror, of course. I've trained my eyes to avoid my reflection so admirably that I forgot it was there. Helen Garner is right. The vegetable-dyed Kazakh rug with noticeable rips was once a boisterous pomegranate, but the vacuum cleaner, after hundreds of passes, has sucked the fresh life out of it. I found the tortoiseshell floor lamp during the war, lonely and abandoned, outside a building that had just been looted-the pilferers had no use for a reading lamp. I spent an entire week restoring its luster. From one of its elegant metal loops, I hang a pair of reading glasses for easy access. The vase sits on seven books, liver-spotted paperbacks of the Muallaqat; each contains one of the poems with its annotations and essays. My favorite poems, four versions of them scattered, though not haphazardly, around the room.

The Suspended Odes, the Hanging Poems, seven poems from seven poets before Islam. The myth tells us that these poems were once written in gold on Coptic linen and hung on the drapes of the Kaaba in the sixth century. Erroneous, of course, since poems were memorized, rarely written, but a beautiful story nonetheless. I love the idea of a place of worship with hanging poetry, gilded no less.

In Joumana's apartment upstairs, my reading room, this room, was her daughter's bedroom. I know that because I heard her music through the years, her dancing with her boyfriend, her walking, her stomping, and, every so often, her yelling and door slamming. She's now studying for a graduate degree in art or art history in France-quietly, one would hope. In Marie-Thérèse's downstairs apartment, this was her son's room, the no-longer-there boy. He was much quieter. I have no idea what Fadia uses hers for. I have never been in their rooms. Why do they feel it's their right to be in mine?

A draft originating from the still-open front door, an unseemly breeze, brazenly ruffles the hairs at the back of my neck and peeps into a stack of papers on the desk.

"I knew you worked in a bookstore," Joumana says, "but I had no idea you had so many… so many… this is a stockroom of books." She moves cautiously and reverently, tiptoes almost, occasionally craning her neck to read titles.

I want to tell her to stop, to let me be; no, I want her to stop, she must stop. I open my mouth but the sound gets stuck. Her fingers, her profane fingers, drum-the index, middle, and ring finger of her right hand drum a commotion, they drum on my chairback, on a shelf, on the spines of my books, the torturous tap-tap-tock clattering over everything.

A greater commotion makes a grand entrance.

"They're gone," Fadia announces. "I waited till I saw the car leave. They'd better not come back if they know what's best for them." Her forehead is damp and pearly, the hair above it flat against her skull. The flush of her cheeks is exaggerated, and naughtiness twinkles in her eyes. She too is surprised at the sight of so many books.

"So this is what you do indoors," Fadia exclaims. A lit cigarette sizzles close to her fingertips. The sunlight filtering through the windowpanes wreathes her right hand in blue smoke. "I always wondered how you spent so much time all by yourself during the war. Oh, wait. While the Lebanese were experiencing bloodlust, yours was booklust." She emits a bubbling brook of laughter. When she realizes I'm not laughing, she adds, "You have to admit that was clever."

"Yes." I nod patiently.

"And funny, right?"

"Thank you for your help," I say. "That was very kind of you. I'm not sure how I'd have handled the situation had you not arrived when you did."

"Think nothing of it," Fadia replies. "Someday you should come up and see my library."

"Your library?" Marie-Thérèse asks.

Joumana shakes her head as if to say, "I can't believe you didn't see that one coming."

"My library has two books," Fadia says, "and I have yet to finish coloring the second one." She brightens, and her laughter grows louder when she realizes I've cracked a smile. "Fadia can be funny sometimes."