Immaculately committed to the process, she wrote every night, and some days, until a couple of months before her death. Those months, those weeks, are the ones I’m most interested in. I have a general idea of what happened to her, or at least I’ve formed a plausible theory, but if I had her writings of the last few weeks, I might be able to understand fully what induced the Ovidian metamorphosis, what she was thinking, to understand her pain, or possibly humiliation, the second transformation of her life, from butterfly to self-conscious housefly. Those months were lost to me.
Hannah wasn’t only speaking of physical hunger. The year of her birth, 1922, fifteen years before mine, was after the Lebanese famine had ended for the most part — Ottoman soldiers and a plague of locusts, the interchangeable pests, had feasted on all our food during the Great War. She arrived into a lower-middle-class family, though by no means poor, the fifth child, the only daughter.
It was said that her mother was in labor for a whole week because Hannah was much too shy to make an appearance in our world. It was said that when she was finally forced out, she was too embarrassed to cry, or even whimper. Her face, her bottom, her entire newborn body, was as red as a dry-farmed tomato. All this was told as if it were fact, without a trace of irony. She did have fox-red hair.
As a child, her parents loved her, her brothers adored her, doted on her. She was the family’s baby. She was fed. She did not sleep on an empty stomach.
She was born with two deformities: a slight clubfoot and that excessive shyness. The latter was healed in her twenties, the former never completely so. Treatments for her left foot began when she was still an infant.
Three buildings to the right of her father’s home, the house where she joined our world, stood an azadirachta tree and a faux Ottoman three-story building in which an Arabic healer lived. Out of respect, many Beirutis called him an Arabic doctor; ungullible people called him a quack. The azadirachta, also called a neem, or zanzalacht in our beautiful language, was his bread and butter, or bread and sap. The alleged medical benefits of the tree’s resin brought the ill to his doorstep from all over Lebanon. (In the 1990s, years after our pretender ungracefully expired, years after Arabic doctors ceased to practice, a resourceful Sri Lankan laborer struck the rich tree and sold ampoules of the resin to the thousands of Ceylonese maids in Beirut. The neem’s curative powers were known in their homeland as well.) The sap seeped into every medicine the Arabic healer prescribed. He even mixed it in with the plaster he used to set bones.
Hannah wrote of the pains she endured at that charlatan’s hands, some remembered, some reimagined. Hoping that it would reset correctly, he broke her foot twice before she was four. She couldn’t possibly remember what the first time was like, she wrote, for she was barely six months old. Yet when she was informed of the incident, she began having nightmares about wailing infants that lasted into her early twenties. She wasn’t anesthetized for any of the breaks. She couldn’t recall the procedure itself, whether any implements were used — unfettered minds might imagine anvils and mallets and blacksmith’s aprons — but she recalled the resulting agony.
I’m intrigued by the details she remembered, what she wrote in her journal — details recorded in her late teens, more than ten years after her visits to the quack. She remembered a clean white waiting room; the Arabic doctor’s Jordanian wife mopping a constantly wet floor and dusting every nook but unable to reach one corner of the ceiling, from which dropped a bunch of plastic grapes and their dusty, insincere leaves. Hannah’s father, not her mother, at her side. The second room, the torture chamber, outwardly clean but suffused with a subtle purulent scent. Light air, subtle air, shallow breathing. The man himself: lanky, emaciated, with bright, clear eyes and a malevolent smile. Was it all reconstructed? He wore frayed moccasins with no socks. Her father’s courtesy that bordered on the extravagant. On a shelf, jars of powders, herbs, and viscous liquids. The pain.
Hannah didn’t think her shyness had much to do with the inflicted pain — no causality, at least not according to her. Her barely perceptible hobble didn’t explain her shyness, but she thought that it certainly didn’t help matters. You and I might not have noticed much of a limp, but she did (she described her walk as that of a non-alpha gorilla). It was difficult for her. She was also right in suggesting that any prospective suitor, and his keen-eyed family, would notice.
There were no suitors, except for the lieutenant, and he wasn’t exactly one either. I’ll get to him in a minute.
Nothing could explain the hunger, however.
Hannah ate and ate, anything and everything that was before her. She couldn’t stop, nor did it occur to her to. As a child, she had a fondness for fruit. Apparently, her mother realized there was a problem when Hannah single-handedly ate an entire cluster of bananas that her father had brought home and placed on the kitchen table. That’s about twenty-five bananas in one sitting. She was four.
Her family was slow to catch on because she wasn’t fat, or, I should say, she wasn’t obese. I knew her as well rounded, buxom and curvaceous, but not unattractively so. It seems she looked much the same as a child and teenager, robust and flush with good health. When her mother began to pay attention, she realized that Hannah was eating constantly. As in any Beiruti kitchen, rich or poor, food was always around, and Hannah partook.
Her mother began to put food away, offering it only at prescribed times. Hannah was confused at first, but adjusted. Since the meals were common plates that all shared, she still ate everything before her, except now that included everybody else’s meal. Food landed on the table, food disappeared from the table. She swallowed food as if it were going to vanish, and, of course, it was going to. Dinners became a family race. A brother who hesitated for a second missed his meal. Her parents tried to talk to her, but she was too young to understand. She was hungry.
Her father tried a different tactic. He brought home a case of mandarins. He explained to Hannah that it was all for her, no one else was to touch it. She could store it in her room and eat at her leisure. The case of mandarins wasn’t going to disappear.
It did, of course. By herself in the bedroom, she ate the whole case in one evening. At midnight she was wailing because of a major bellyache.
There were many drawings in her journals, mostly doodles and meaningless sketches. One, though, informed by hunger, as she called it, was striking, at least to me. Later, much later, as an adult woman, she wrote of her need to be loved, to be desired, as a ravenous monster with an exigent appetite living in a black hole within. Whatever love was thrown her way, the monster devoured it and left her with nothing. The drawing of the insistent beast was delicate and finely rendered. A dragonlike creature peeks its equine head out of the hole, a perfect circle — perfect ellipse because of the viewer’s perspective — crosshatched unto death to show how dark it really was, how black the hole.
That was my Hannah.
Like all of us, she lived, she survived. Contrary to what you’d expect, or what I would, she wasn’t teased or tortured in the neighborhood. A plump, freckle-faced redhead (not that rare in Beirut, but still) who had a limp and blushed bright blood at the appearance of any human of an unfamily variety?