None of us knows how to deal with the aleatory nature of pain.
I was lucky. I knew that what happened to the woman upstairs couldn’t happen to me because I never had a car. I walked or used public transportation.
I wasn’t like her.
That’s my theory anyway. I’m sure more erudite minds have dealt with this. Sartre I’m not, but then neither am I ponderous and portentous. One reason we desire explanations is that they separate us and make us feel safe.
In a silly essay on Crime and Punishment, a critic suggests that Raskolnikov is the epitome of the Russian soul, that to understand him is to understand Russia. Tfeh! Not that the proposition isn’t true; it may or may not be. I’ve yet to meet Russia’s soul. What the reviewer is doing is distancing himself from the idea that he too is capable of killing a pawnbroker. We’re supposed to infer that only someone with a Russian soul could.
If you think that Marcello of The Conformist becomes a porcine fascist because he killed lizards when he was a boy, then you assure yourself that you can never be so. If you think Madame Bovary commits adultery because she’s trying to escape the banality of Pleistocene morals, then her betrayals are not yours. If you read about hunger in Ethiopia or violence in Kazakhstan, it isn’t about you.
We all try to explain away the Holocaust, Abu Ghraib, or the Sabra Massacre by denying that we could ever do anything so horrible. The committers of those crimes are evil, other, bad apples; something in the German or American psyche makes their people susceptible to following orders, drinking the grape Kool-Aid, killing indiscriminately. You believe that you’re the one person who wouldn’t have delivered the electric shocks in the Milgram experiment because those who did must have been emotionally abused by their parents, or had domineering fathers, or were dumped by their spouses. Anything that makes them different from you.
When I read a book, I try my best, not always successfully, to let the wall crumble just a bit, the barricade that separates me from the book. I try to be involved.
I am Raskolnikov. I am K. I am Humbert and Lolita.
I am you.
If you read these pages and think I’m the way I am because I lived through a civil war, you can’t feel my pain. If you believe you’re not like me because one woman, and only one, Hannah, chose to be my friend, then you’re unable to empathize.
Like the bullet, I too stray.
Forgive me.
I stray but not too far. I circle the streets around the building, avoiding home, but go no farther than a prescribed distance that I instinctively cling to, like a pigeon flying above its coop.
Next to the street that parallels mine is a small plot of land that is still undeveloped and used as a car park. Toward the northwest corner, where cars can’t reach, tiny red carnations miraculously flourish in a small patch of earth. When I saw them a week ago I assumed they were confused red poppies — Lebanon’s flower, and Proust’s, the wondrous wildflower with its color-saturated tissue-paper petals. I’d never seen carnations blossom naturally in the city before, and certainly hadn’t expected them to last until winter.
The winter air smells metallic, of bronze. In fading tawny light, the city glimmers, except for one large box of a building, concrete hued, that absorbs and swallows surrounding color. It has a name; in human-sized letters it calls itself THE GARDEN CENTER, yet not a sprig of green can be found anywhere in its vicinity.
I am a blob in a photorealistic painter’s cityscape canvas. I stay out until evening, until my bladder begins to scream.
Before the final turn to my home, I see one of the neighborhood’s teenage boys holding court, leaning against a wall that already needs a coat of paint even though it received one in spring. Two beer cans — one squashed, the other only dimpled — loiter at his feet. I often notice this fifteen-year-old around this grand realm of his when school is out. He disappeared for a few weeks this summer after his mother chased him about the neighborhood with a rattan, but he seems to have returned to his full form and splendor. His mother must have woken him from an afternoon nap and kicked him out of the house before he had a chance to comb his haystack hair. His court, three younger boys, probably eleven or twelve, throw respectful — no, worshipful — eyes at him while desperately pretending nonchalance. Slim, wired, and cocky, he must have practiced his how-to-smoke pose before many a mirror. He appears the celebrated philosopher enduring the intellectual infirmities of his inferiors, an appearance that belies preening and nervous self-consciousness — in other words, he looks like a typical Beiruti teenager.
“First you wet the filter with your spit,” I hear him say as I approach. He sticks out his long, overly moist tongue and impresses the end of the cigarette onto it. “Then you inhale deeply, which you can’t do until you’re old enough to know how to smoke without coughing, and the filter will darken to show an alphabet. See?”
The court of boys oohs and aahs as he continues. “That will be the first letter of the name of the next girl who’ll sleep with you. It always works that way.”
“It’s a T,” says one of the boys.
“I see an M,” says another.
I don’t slow down, but I hear myself say, “It’s a C for Cancer.”
What words are these have fallen from me?
Have I just channeled Fadia or, worse, my demented mother before she went completely insane? I feel my face flush and my pulse quicken.
But the court doesn’t seem to have heard me, doesn’t catch my small, disembodied retort. The boys and their world persist without me.
“It’s an S, of course,” the kinglet now says. “Can’t you tell that it’s an S?”
On the way home, a scarf veiling my blue-tinted hair, I remain invisible.
Allow me to stray once more — briefly, I assure you.
Raskolnikov was the catalyst for my obsessive translating. Crime and Punishment, the vehicle, was one of the first books I picked up at the bookstore — well, Crime et Châtiment, because at the time my French was more seasoned than my English. I loved the novel. (I’m not sure I still do, but that’s another subject. I promised you I wouldn’t stray too far.) I remember it as the first adult novel I read, or the first with a fully developed theme. Dostoyevsky’s St. Petersburg burst into such splendor around me that it became more real than my life, which I found more incomprehensible with every passing day. I belonged in his book, not mine.
So thoroughly impressed by the novel, I read the English translation, and was less so. It was the Constance Garnett translation, and it would be years before I came across the controversies surrounding her work. At the time I hadn’t even heard of Nabokov, let alone his vitriolic rants against her. It was so long ago that I’m not certain he’d even published Lolita yet.
The Garnett version was by no means awful. Had I not encountered the French one first, I would have considered it a spectacular book. Only in comparison did I find it lacking. I thought the Garnett version was less charming, more matter-of-fact. I didn’t know which version was the more accurate one, more Dostoyevskian. I thought that if I translated the book into Arabic, I could combine both. I did.
Constance Garnett taught herself to translate. She began with small steps, with Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is Within You. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky began with the most difficult Russian bear of all, The Brothers Karamazov. I began with Crime, the right novel for me. Call me Goldilocks.