The Woman Upstairs (24 page)

His big brothers scoffed and said he’d either dreamed it or seen the neighbor’s tabby, inflating it in his tiny mind; but in the subsequent days there were two nocturnal sheep killings higher up the mountain, and everyone in his family changed their tune.

Skandar, like every good storyteller, allowed for the possibility of ghosts and sorcery. “I always assumed,” he said, “that it was someone’s dark spirit, his avatar.”

And then he went on to explain about the local bey’s son, a boy in his late teens at that time, handsome as a god but cursed by rage, who’d beaten an old donkey so badly it had to be shot, that same summer. It was a famous incident in the village, for which the boy received no known punishment, and Skandar said he’d always wondered if the cold black cat slinking across the yard was not this boy’s black soul, or the devil who’d claimed it. And then, with a smile, and lighting another cigarette—the last of that first long walk—he said, “Of course, that black soul would have its moment, and its comeuppance, too, over ten years later, after the war began.”

“How so?” I was like a child, panting for the next chapter.

“Ahmad Akil Abbas,” he said. “By 1975, he was like all of us, that much older, his soul that much darker. A lot of drinking, drugs, a lot of so-called courage. And in ’77, maybe ’78, he organized a local militia—a band of bandits—that murdered Christian neighbors in their beds. Thank God my grandmother was already dead by then—hers was a mixed marriage, a true love match, and this sectarian warring would have destroyed her. The Khourys next door to her had their throats slit and their hands cut off. Their three children had gone to Buffalo, New York, and were too frightened to come back even to bury them; so the other Christian families in the village buried them instead. There weren’t many, already then. Those who could leave, left. But for Ahmad Abbas, when you live this way you also die this way, even if
you’re as beautiful as a god, and not long after the Khourys, Ahmad was also murdered and left in the alley behind his father’s house, next to his precious motorcycle. He’d been fed his own testicles. And maybe that, too, was the work of a black cat. Maybe it was the spirit of Leyla Khoury herself. She was stout and placid with a gurgling laugh that came out of her like water from a pump, slowly and then faster, and she was a fantastic cook. Maybe it would have occurred to her to serve him his testicles for his last supper. Maybe she had the last laugh.”

It was impossible not to listen. I would have walked to Provincetown and back. Skandar’s youthful experiences were so far from Manchester-by-the-Sea. When I was fifteen, I painted faux-anarchist slogans after school in the art room and tried to hang them up around the halls. For me, a day trip to Faneuil Hall was the acme, the ne plus ultra. When he was fifteen, he saw neighbors and classmates slip out of view, either into militias or out of the country; and eventually he, too, boarded a plane for Paris and finished school as a boarder there. When he was barely more than twenty, still studying in Paris, his oldest brother was killed by a bombing: he’d been visiting a friend, had stayed overnight, and the apartment building was destroyed. It was another family friend, working with the Red Cross, who’d pulled his body from the rubble.

“When you’re young—but even now—how do you understand this?” he said when he first spoke of it, walking the night streets. “You can’t understand it. It makes no sense. You can allow yourself to be swallowed by your anger, but this will kill you. And yet how can you look at the panther, how can you look him in the eye, when he won’t stay still? When he’s nowhere and everywhere, belongs to no one and to everyone? So if you’re me, how you deal with this is that you say, I’ll look at how we talk about the panther. I’ll study the history of history, the ways that we tell the stories, and don’t tell other stories, and I’ll try to understand what it says about us, to tell one story rather than another, to tell it one way rather than another. I’ll ask the questions about what is ethical, about who decides what is ethical, I’ll ask whether it is possible, really, to have an ethics in the matter of history.”

“I don’t know quite what that means,” I said. I didn’t want to seem stupid, but it was more important to me to try to follow. He had very
handsome square hands, and he waved them about in the cold air, displacing smoke, or breath, or both.

“Why did I start with the panther? Is it that I’m trying to make you see, and feel compassion for, the small six-year-old boy that I was? Now this will be your first thought about Lebanon because of me. Well, maybe Hariri first—I would have avoided that if I could. So, violence first, but second, the small boy full of dreams. But I could have started by telling you about PLO raids into Israel at that time, the mid-sixties, or about the war much later, or about the Israeli role in Sabra and Shatila, or I could’ve started by telling you how Beirut is today, all beautifully rebuilt like the city of my childhood and yet different from it. I could have told you the Hariri story, which I haven’t yet done …

“What does it mean, you see, that the first thing every American child knows about Germany is Hitler? What if the first thing you knew was something else? And maybe some people would say that now it’s important, after the Second World War, it’s ethical and vital that Hitler is the first thing a child knows. But someone else can argue the opposite. And what would it do, how would it change things, if nobody were allowed to know
anything
about Hitler, about the war, about any of it, until
first
they learned about Brahms, Beethoven and Bach, about Hegel and Lessing and Fichte, about Schopenhauer, about Rilke—but all
this
, you had to know first. Or one thing only, the Brahms Piano Quintet in F Minor, or the
Goldberg Variations
, or
Laocoön
—one of those things you had to know and appreciate before you learned about the Nazis.”

“But the world doesn’t work like that.”

“No, it doesn’t.” He smiled in that vague way, as if amused by a joke only he had heard. “But what does it mean that it doesn’t? And what would it mean if it did?”

Skandar didn’t always—or even often—tell stories about his youth, although surely, as he insisted, it was significant that he told one of them first of all. He talked about their time in America, and global politics, and Paris, a bit; but often about Lebanon, its history—bits of
history over centuries, millennia: Phoenician history, Roman history, Ottoman history. He told me that Rome’s capital in the Middle East, Heliopolis, could still be visited, a hundred kilometers over the mountains from Beirut, and he described its enormous scale, the columns reaching to the skies in the middle of an arable plain, and the snowy mountains at the horizon. He described fallen stone blocks taller than any man, scattered like so much gravel around the site, and the beautiful, dwarfing temple of Dionysius, almost intact, with its perfect mosaics and elaborate friezes—the result of hundreds of years of labor by the Romans in the time immediately after Christ. He made you think that Pontius Pilate might have walked there, or certainly his grandson.

He told me about the community of the fishermen of Tyre, who considered themselves the earliest Christians because they’d converted when Christ preached to them, well before he was crucified—so they claimed they were technically Christians before Christ himself was a Christian. He told me about attending the recent wedding of a young Palestinian friend of his at a beach club by the sea south of Beirut, more than four hundred people from all walks of life gathered with the soughing surf behind them, the stars overhead, dancing and singing and drinking orange Fanta (no alcohol at a Muslim wedding—I was shocked by that: four hundred sober people at a feast), while the bride in her resplendent finery arrived at her celebration gliding the length of a giant swimming pool on an inflatable raft draped in white satin, pushed from behind by invisible swimmers, as flaming Catherine wheels illuminated her path on either side and fire-eaters and sword-swallowers performed at the end of the pool in her honor.

“This is typical,” he said. “He’s a writer, my friend, he doesn’t have much money. His bride is a schoolteacher. But if you’re going to celebrate, in Lebanon you must do it properly. So Sirena and I, we came from Paris for the party, we sit at a table and next to us is an old couple from the camps, in traditional dress, and their daughter, very pretty, with sparkles in her hijab.

“We greet each other, but otherwise we don’t speak, and the daughter sits and smokes her nargileh, and the mother sits and chain-smokes Gauloises, filling up her dinner plate with wrinkled white cigarette ends, like grubs, and the father, who has very few teeth, drinks all the
bottles of Fanta on the table, sip after sip. They don’t smile, or get up to dance, they eat barely at all. It’s hard to know what they make of it.” He paused. “I’ve been in the camps, I can picture the sort of place they live—fluorescent lightbulbs, flaking paint, mismatched chairs. The glitter in the daughter’s hijab—she will have saved for months to buy that cloth. And the father with no teeth and creases in his skin like canyons, he will have been no older than I am, although I thought of him as a grandfather. And they sit next to us, and there’s the question in my mind, who has had to travel farthest, them or us? In our lives, we span many worlds and many centuries, sometimes without taking a step.”

He said this while we were walking, and I laughed and gestured at the Cambridge streets around us, and replied, “And sometimes you take many steps and stay in just one world.”

“Yes,” he said. “That’s possible, too.”

Although that was not my experience of our walks. If, in the studio, I felt free to travel to imaginary lands, and in fact to travel into someone else’s imaginary land—an altogether unforeseen adventure—then as I walked the city streets by night, I was transported out into an actual world, a world of wonders the existence of which caused me to marvel, and to dream. Suddenly, at the age of thirty-seven, I was the opposite of Lucy Jordan: all I could be certain of was that I’d been wrong to be certain of anything. Who could tell me, with any plausibility, that I’d never ride through Paris in a sports car, with the warm wind in my hair? I walked to Heliopolis, I idled in Tyre, I fucking
built
Wonderland! I felt like one of my third graders, like Chastity and Ebullience with their pet chicken, or like José when he made his exploding volcano for the Science Fair. Lili with her hidden world under Esther and Didi’s porch table had nothing on me. Not even Reza, in his little bedroom of dreams, with Zidane kicking the ball on the wall and the jazz musicians parading in the dark—even his imaginary worlds were mere villages next to the travels on which my soul was embarked that spring.

It’s no wonder that I came to dress up as Edie, to dance around the studio half drunk in my underwear. I was suddenly aware, almost in a
panic—a joyful panic—of the wealth of possibility out in the world, and also within myself. My everyday Appleton life, my phone calls to my father, my occasional beers with friends, my Saturday-morning jogs around the reservoir—what was all that, but the opiated husk of a life, the treadmill of the ordinary, a cage built of convention and consumerism and obligation and fear, in which I’d lolled for decades, oblivious, like a lotus eater, as my body aged and time advanced? I felt all this with the zeal of someone newly wakened—by God, I
felt
and
felt
and
felt
.

In those heady weeks it seemed clear that I owed it not only to myself, but also to my mother—that my fear (the fear that had kept me from pursuing my art more seriously, that had kept me in Boston, that had kept me employed, and surely had kept me single, also) was in fact just
her
fear, that I’d shouldered all her anxieties and disappointments, along with her basic good-Catholic-girl-ness, an inability, ironically, to have faith—truly to believe in the value of my own efforts, in the uniqueness of my own soul. Oh great adventure! Life there, before me, the infinite banquet lying in wait.

8

The two weeks before my mother died are branded in me, each hour of each day of her final hospitalization. I remember where her room was in the unit, how it was, and what was in it, the print on the wall, and at any time, where I was in the room and what the light was like and when my father was there and at what point Matt arrived—without Tweety and the brat, who appeared only for the funeral and seemed chiefly to have seen it as the occasion for a dark-colored shopping spree. There are times in life like that, where you know intuitively that everything hinges on this time and nothing will be the same again, when, as a consequence, your brain remembers, it notices the small things—the male orderly with splayed feet who hummed Chopin waltzes while he mopped, or the young respiratory therapist with heavy brows, who couldn’t look at you when he was explaining that your mother’s lungs, even with help, were now giving out—he looked about six inches to the right of you, as though you were a shadow of some other self that stood, just there, just beside you, which, in that strange time, felt almost possible. Your mind retained all these things of its own accord, as if they might be necessary to know—simply because it was Important. The mind will do this.