How did she escape mockery for her awkwardness?
Her family was liked and respected. Her brothers, who watched over her, were popular. She wrote that if it hadn’t been for her infirmities, she would have had suitors begging for her hand, and she was probably right, but that wasn’t all there was to her being somewhat accepted. She had an insatiable desire to please, “an ignoble craving,” as she described it in her journals. She had an uncanny ability to read what people wanted, even as a youngster, and was ever ready to offer what was needed. At home, she understood when her mother needed help around the house, when her father wanted a back rub. At school she always carried two of everything, pens, pencils, erasers. Just as a girl’s pen ran out, Hannah’s extra seemed to appear as if by magic. She was not disliked, was tolerated when not ignored. She was studious, of course, since that was what pleased her family and her teachers.
She wrote of what it felt like when a neighbor or teacher asked her a question or spoke to her, how fast her heart beat, how the skin of her hands flushed, how her lungs shrank, how her throat constricted, and how her jaw ached.
When she was seven, she moved back into her parents’ bed. Their house had only two bedrooms, four boys, one girl. It seems that when one of the boys reached a certain age, her father decided Hannah shouldn’t be in the same room with her brothers. Until her father built another two rooms when she was fourteen, she slept with her parents: father on the left, mother the middle mote, Hannah on the right. She wrote fondly of those days. She had no trouble sleeping at that age, a talent inherited from her mother. She would climb into bed behind her mother and disappear into the movie world of dreams. Her father lacked that aptitude, and since she also inherited her mother’s snoring, his nightly insomnia became a long-running joke in the household.
“We breathed his air,” she wrote.
She was socially inept, an affliction I am quite intimate with. In some ways, that’s probably what brought us together, but I’m getting ahead of myself as usual. There was something else that classified us as quite different, at least in my book, and in her journal. Throughout her teenage years, she wrote her fantasies. They were detailed and intricate descriptions of romance, of marriage, never of sex, always of rescue. It was as if she was anticipating the sanitized romance novels that would hit the Beirut market a few years later. When she was older, she was addicted to Italian photo-romans (translated into French), mawkish love stories told in photographs and see-through talk balloons. However, those didn’t appear in Beirut until the early fifties, so they couldn’t possibly have inspired her elaborate adolescent fantasies. She was ahead of her time.
The fantasies were well drafted and delightfully drawn up. One impressive journal entry when she was fourteen described in minutest detail the future drawing room where she and her husband would entertain. The descriptions of her future beau tended to be more fugitive, changing from entry to entry: tall, medium height, hairy, smooth, mustached, clean-shaven. How they would meet — strolling on the corniche where eyes glance in passing, looking up from a schoolbook to encounter blue eyes filled with amorous and admiring desire — had more variations than the Goldberg.
One of the surprising things — it astounded me really — was that who she was varied as well. In over a hundred journal entries of romantic fantasies, not a single one included her. She wrote of a different Hannah. In some she was a blonde, in others a brunette. She was an Egyptian actress, an abandoned European princess, an exiled Russian countess. She kept her name but not herself. She was rich, she was penniless, she had long eyelashes, a small nose. She walked with the grace of a gazelle, of a poplar, of a girl without a limp. She wrote herself out of her fantasies.
What about my fantasies? I wouldn’t consider them that — more like mild dreams or tame aspirations. I rarely dreamed of romance or adventure, never of love and husbands. I would be married, I knew that, but I treated that fact as a fact, an impeding fait accompli, not as something to look forward to. I didn’t spend time considering whom I would marry or how. I wanted to be allowed to work. I hoped for a career as a secretary. In those days, I couldn’t envision any other job. The only workingwomen I came across at the time were in the service business: maids, cooks, store clerks, secretaries, schoolteachers. By temperament, I couldn’t be around a lot of people. Secretary seemed like an idyllic job — an assistant to an intelligent, honest, and decent man, of course. I spent more time dreaming of my ideal boss than of a husband.
How does the old cliché go? When every Arab girl stood in line waiting for God to hand out the desperate-to-get-married gene, I must have been somewhere else, probably lost in a book.
I do understand that it isn’t just Arab girls who have that gene, but it is dominant in our part of the world. A force of nature and nurture, an epigenetic hurricane, herds us into marrying and breeding. Social cues, community rites, religious rituals, family events — all are meant to impress upon children the importance and inevitability of what Bruno Schulz calls the “excursion into matrimony.” No girl of my generation could imagine rebelling, nor would she want to. A kernel of imagination begins to sprout in the minds of women younger than I. Fadia rebelled, yet her idea of rebellion was the same as that of every other girl of succeeding generations. She wanted the right to choose whom to marry. In time, the shackles of arranged marriage were dumped in the Mediterranean; families grew inured to exogamous marriages, be they interfaith, interclass, or interclan. Dating, premarital cohabitation, adultery, and promiscuity became ordinary painted scenes of the current Beiruti landscape.
Feminism in Lebanon hasn’t reached espadrilles or running shoes yet; sensible heels are where it’s at. The choice not to marry hasn’t entered the picture. It may be entering now, but I wouldn’t know. I don’t associate much with the young.
As I write this I wonder if what I said about not dreaming of a husband is accurate. I’m not suggesting that I’m consciously dissembling. But to paraphrase the ever-paraphraseable Freud, who said something to the effect that when you speak about the past you lie with every breath you take, I will say this:
When you write about the past, you lie with each letter, with every grapheme, including the goddamn comma.
Memory, memoir, autobiography — lies, lies, all lies.
Is it true that I didn’t think of a husband, wish for one, or has the image I have of myself, the way I like to think of myself, superimposed itself on what was happening then? Does that question make sense?
Let me put it another way. It is quite possible that I, like every Beiruti girl, dreamed of getting married, had fantasies of what my future husband would look like, but that after growing up, after having had a sad and incomplete matrimonial experience, I reinvented myself, convincing myself that I hadn’t dreamed of such trivial matters. It is possible. I sincerely believe that I didn’t, but I also don’t see myself having had that much courage as a young girl.
I keep the possibility open.
There are images that remain with me. I remember reading an essay — I believe it was by Nuruddin Farah, but I can’t be sure — where the writer says that all we remember from novels are scenes or, more precisely, images. I don’t know if that’s the case, but a number of authors seem to write their novels in one image after another — Michael Ondaatje is probably the best practitioner of the form, as his novels seem to me to be not so much plot as a series of discrete divine images. I still can’t remember who wrote that essay. Maybe it was Ondaatje, but I doubt it.