I would never have been able to buy them otherwise. Once I paid my rent, I could afford little, and because I had to put something away for retirement, the days of agonizing leisure, I had even less. I began to cook vegetarian fare early because any kind of meat was way beyond my meager means. I survived — still do — on fruits, vegetables, grains, and rice. I haven’t had lamb on Id al-Adha in years. Luckily, I never smoked, because I certainly couldn’t have managed to pay for that. During the lean years of the war, Fadia upstairs, who smokes as much as a French philosopher, and who could certainly afford more than I ever could, used to break her cigarettes in half for economy’s sake and stuff them in an elegant gold-plated holder. She halted the practice after the war ended.
I like to consider my little thefts a public service. Someone had to read Eliot’s The Waste Land as the glow of Sabra burning illuminated Beirut’s skyline. No, seriously, had I not ordered some of these books, they would have never landed on Lebanese soil. For crying out loud, do you think anyone else in Lebanon has a copy of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood? And I am picking just one book off the top of my head. Lampedusa’s The Leopard? I don’t think anyone else in this country has a book by Novalis.
Why did my mother scream? I wish I knew. What I do know is that I shouldn’t have stopped seeing her. As crazy as she was becoming, I shouldn’t have abandoned her. When was the last time I’d contacted her? Not since I stopped working, probably earlier than that. Once I’d decided not to have her to my apartment all those years ago, I began to call her from work and ask her to meet me at a café or restaurant. But when she crossed into her eighties, she grew more difficult to bear, less civil, more ornery. Trouble was all I received from interacting with her, toil and trouble. I’d call her and the first thing she might ask was why I was calling. I’d invite her to lunch and she’d tell me I was being silly since she had a serviceable lunch at home. She leached out sanity and equanimity from my head. I stopped calling. I understood she was getting old and cranky, but it wasn’t as if she didn’t remember who I was. She was lucid, just difficult.
I don’t think she knew who I was today. I don’t recall her ever being so terrified, not even during the war years. The only time I’d seen her scared, though not as deeply as this morning, was when my half brother the eldest, eight years old then, was kicked in the head by a mule. He was playing an imaginary war game with other boys in the neighborhood. He was retreating, machine-gunning anything that moved, when he backed into the mule’s behind, irritating the beast. My mother rushed out of the house, and when she saw my half brother the eldest lying prone with blood seeping from his head, she wailed as if it were Judgment Day and she had been judged wanting. We, she and I alone, waited outside the hospital while the doctors fixed my brother. They wouldn’t let us in the waiting room because it was too crowded and we certainly looked like we didn’t belong. My mother, small and wilting, leaned on the hood of a doctor’s car. When I leaned on the car beside her, she said, “Don’t,” in a low voice. She added, “Don’t do what I do.”
I remember that an intern came out to talk to us after a few hours. He explained that my half brother the eldest was going to be all right. The intern interspersed French phrases into his Lebanese sentences, which only scared my mother more.
If this were a novel, you would be able to figure out why my mother screamed. Alain Robbe-Grillet once wrote that the worst thing to happen to the novel was the arrival of psychology. You can assume he meant that now we all expect to understand the motivation behind each character’s actions, as if that’s possible, as if life works that way. I’ve read so many recent novels, particularly those published in the Anglo world, that are dull and trite because I’m always supposed to infer causality. For example, the reason a protagonist can’t experience love is that she was physically abused, or the hero constantly searches for validation because his father paid little attention to him as a child. This, of course, ignores the fact that many others have experienced the same things but do not behave in the same manner, though that’s a minor point compared to the real loss in fulfilling the desire for explanation: the loss of mystery.
Causation extraction makes Jack a dull reader.
I do understand the desire, though, for I too wish to live in a rational world. I do wish to understand why my mother screamed. My life would be simpler if I could rationalize. Unfortunately, I don’t understand.
While a traffic war rages around me and chaos rules (lest you forget this is Beirut), I flash to a theory about why we desperately wish to live in an ordered world, in an explainable world.
No, wait. I don’t mean to imply that I thought about it just this instant, or that it’s some sort of philosophical treatise. Neither French nor German am I.
Let me rephrase: I’d like to consider a possibility concerning our incessant need for causation, whether in books or in life. I’ve trained myself not to keep inferring or expecting causality in literature — the phrase “Correlation does not imply causation” keeps ringing in my head (think Hume) — but I constantly see it, inject it, in life. I, like everyone, want explanations. In other words, I extract explanations where none exist.
Imre Kertész says it well in Kaddish for an Unborn Child. Here you go:
But, it would seem, there is no getting around explanations, we are constantly explaining and excusing ourselves; life itself, that inexplicable complex of being and feeling, demands explanations of us, those around us demand explanations, and in the end we ourselves demand explanations of ourselves, until in the end we succeed in annihilating everything around us, ourselves included, or in other words explain ourselves to death.
I want to know why my mother screamed. I do. I will probably not be rewarded with an explanation, but I need one.
Let me elaborate.
So many people died during the war. The woman who lived above me was one of the first. A different family lived in that apartment before Joumana and her husband (I don’t remember his name, but no matter). In the early months, fall of 1975 or thereabouts, the wife, the mother from upstairs, was shot in the head while driving home from work. Within two weeks the family cleared out and immigrated to Dubai, where every day is the same bright.
The rumors and false stories that circulated in those two weeks were astoundingly vivid, all attempts at explanations. She was a spy, she worked for a bank and was carrying large amounts of cash, she was sporting a flashy diamond necklace, she didn’t see a checkpoint until it was too late. All untrue, all drawn with soft pencil, easily erasable, all attempts to explain the unexplainable.
It turned out she was simply unlucky. A stray bullet killed her.
We needed an explanation because we couldn’t deal with the fact that it could have been any one of us. Assuming causation — she was killed because she couldn’t hear anything since the radio was too loud — lets us believe that it can’t happen to us because we wouldn’t do such a thing. We are different. They are the other.