Hikayat: Short Stories by Lebanese Women

By Roseanne Saad Khalaf

From Lebanon's golden age, through years of civil conflict and its aftermath, these women offer a captivating portrait of a country in flux. Well-known authors such as Emily Nasarallah, Hanan al-Shaykh and Alawiya Sobh, alongside newer voices, share he desire to push boundaries, tackling subjects from the crippling effects of war in past decades, through longing for romantic adventures in a conservative society, to the functioning of families across the divides of emigration and generational conflict. The characters in these stories are on the brink of something - whether it be religious or social divides, or sexual awakening. The language reflects the great tension, and the great beauty in their transformation. And the collection as a whole reveals the rich diversity of the complex multi-cultural society out of which these stories have emerged. 'In turn lyrical, sensuous, comic and ironic ... rare and fascinating ...' Independent 'Some truly insightful, engaging work ...' New Statesman

• Language: English
• Publisher: Telegram Books
• Release date: Nov 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781846591686

Book preview

LAYLA BAALBAKI

A Spaceship of Tenderness to the Moon

When I closed my eyes I was able to see everything around me, the long settee which fills one vast wall of the room from corner to corner; the shelves on the remaining walls; the small table; the coloured cushions on the carpet; the white lamp, in the shape of a large kerosene one, that dangled from a hole in the wall and rested on the tiled floor. Even the windows we had left curtainless. In the second room was a wide sofa; a table supporting a mirror; a wall-cupboard; and two chairs upholstered in velvet. Since our marriage we hadn’t changed a thing in the little house, and I refused to remove anything from it.

I opened my eyelids a little as I heard my husband mumble, ‘It’s light and we alone are awake in the city.’ I saw him rising up in front of the window as the silver light of dawn spread over his face and naked body. I love his naked body.

Once again I closed my eyes: I was able to see every little bit of him, every minute hidden detail, his soft hair, his forehead, nose, chin, the veins of his neck, the hair on his chest, his stomach, his feet, his nails. I called to him to come back and stretch out beside me, that I wanted to kiss him. He didn’t move and I knew, from the way he had withdrawn from me and stood far off, that he was preparing himself to say something important. In this sort of situation he can become cruel and stubborn, capable of taking and carrying through decisions. I am the exact opposite: in order to talk things over with him I must take hold of his hand or touch his clothes. So I opened my eyes, threw aside the cushion I was hugging and seized hold of his shirt, spreading it across my chest. Fixing my gaze on the ceiling I asked him if he saw the sea.

‘I see the sea,’ he answered.

I asked him what colour it was.

‘Dark blue on one side,’ he said, ‘and on the other, a greyish white.’

I asked him if the cypress trees were still there.

‘They are still there among the houses that cling close together,’ he answered, ‘and there’s water lying on the roofs of the buildings.’

I said I loved the solitary date-palm, which looked, from where we were, as though it had been planted in the sea and that the cypress trees made me think of white cemeteries.

For a long while he was silent and I remained staring up at the ceiling. Then he said, ‘The cocks are calling,’ and I quickly told him I didn’t like chickens because they couldn’t fly and that when I was a child I used to carry them up to the roof of our home and throw them out into space in an attempt to teach them to fly, and both cocks and hens would always land in a motionless heap on the ground.

Again he was silent for a while, then he said that he saw a light come on in the window of a building opposite. I said that even so we were still the only two people awake in the city, the only two who had spent the night entwined in each other’s arms. He said that he had drunk too much last night. I quickly interrupted him by saying I hated that phrase ‘I drank too much’ as though he regretted the yearning frenzy with which he had made love to me. Sensing that I was beginning to get annoyed he changed the subject, saying: ‘The city looks like a mound of sparkling precious stones of all colours and sizes.’

I answered that I now imagined the city as coloured cardboard boxes which would fall down if you blew on them: our house alone, with its two rooms, was suspended from a cloud and rode in space. He said that his mouth was dry and he wanted an orange. I finished what I had been saying by stating that although I had never lived in any other city, I hated this one and that had I not dreamt that I would one day meet a man who would take me far, far away from it I would have died of dejection long, long ago. Pretending that he had not heard my last remark he repeated: ‘I want an orange, my throat’s dry.’ I disregarded his request and went on to say that with him I paid no heed to where I was: the earth with its trees, its mountains, rivers, animals and human beings just vanished. Unable to wait further, he burst out at me: ‘Why do you refuse to have children?’

I was sad, my heart was wrung, the tears welled up into my eyes, but I didn’t open my mouth.

‘How long is it since we married?’ he asked. I didn’t utter a word as I followed him round with my eyes. He stiffened and went on: ‘It’s a year and several months since we married and you’ve been refusing and refusing, though you were crazy about children before we married, you were dying for them.’

He swerved and struck the settee with his hands as he burst out: ‘Hey chair, don’t you remember her entreaties? And you lamp, didn’t you hear her wailing? And you cushions, didn’t she make you into tiny bodies that she hugged to herself and snuggled up with as she slept? Speak, you inanimate things, speak! Give back to her the words which are burried in you!’

Quietly I said that inanimate things don’t feel, don’t talk, don’t move. Angrily he inquired: ‘How do you know they’re dead?’ I replied that things weren’t dead, but that they drew their pulse beats from people. He interrupted me by saying that he wouldn’t argue about things now and wouldn’t allow me to escape solving the problem as I always did. Absent-mindedly, I explained to him that the things around me, these very things – this settee, this carpet, this wall, this lamp, this vase, the shelves and the ceiling are all a vast mirror that for me reflects the outside world: the houses, the sea, the trees, the sky, the sun, the stars and the clouds. In them I see my past with him, the hours of misery and dejection, the moments of meeting and of tenderness, of bliss and of happiness, and from them I now deduce the shapes of the days to come. I would not give them up.

He became angry and shouted: ‘We’re back again with things. I want to understand here and now why you refuse to have children!’ No longer able to bear it, I shouted that he too at one time refused to have them. He was silent for a while, then he said: ‘I refused before we were married, when it would have been foolish to have had one.’ Sarcastically I told him that he was afraid of them, those others, those buffoons in the city. He used to beg for their assent, their blessing, their agreement, so that he might see me and I him, so that he might embrace me and I him, so that we might each drown the other in our love. They used to determine our meeting-places, the number of steps to be taken to get there, the time, how much we could raise our voices, the number of breaths we took. And I would watch them as they secretly scoffed at us, shamelessly slept with the bodies they loved, ate three meals a day, smoked cigarettes with cups of coffee and carafes of arak, and guffawed as they vulgarly chewed over stories about us and thought up patterns of behaviour for us to follow the next day. His voice was choked as he mumbled, ‘I don’t pay attention to others. I was tied to another woman.’

Ah, how can I bear all this torture, all this passionate love for him? He used to be incapable of confessing the bitter truth to her, that he didn’t love her, wouldn’t love her. Choking, he said that it wasn’t easy, he wasn’t callous enough to be able to stare into another human being’s face and say to her, after nine years of getting up each and every day and finding her there, ‘Now the show’s over’, and turn his back and walk off. I told him to look at my right hand and asked him if my blood was still dripping from it hot on to the floor. ‘You were mad,’ he mumbled, ‘mad when you carried out the idea. I opened this door, entered this room and saw you stretched out on this settee, the veins of your hand slashed, your fingers trailing in a sea of blood. You were mad. I might have lost you.’ I smiled sadly as I pulled the shirt up to my chest, my face breathing in its smell. I said that my part in the play required that I should take myself off at the end, and the exit possible for me, the exit I could accept and bear, was a quick death rather than a slow, cruel crawling, like that of the turtle in the film Mondo Cane that lost its way in the sands, held in the sun’s disc as it searched for the river bank. He repeated sadly that he didn’t know I was serious about him. I asked him sarcastically whether he was waiting for me to kill myself in order to be sure that I was telling the truth. I told him that I had lost myself in my love for him: oblivious to all else, I slipped unseen, like a gust of wind, through people’s fingers, scorching their faces as I passed through the street. All I was conscious of was the weight of bodies, the height of buildings and his hands. I asked him to draw closer and give me his hand which I longed to hold. He remained standing far off, inflexible, and at once accused me that after all that misery and triumph I was refusing to become pregnant by him, had refused again and again and again, and that from my refusal he understood I no longer loved