I’m not a proponent of the above idea, because if all we retain from a novel is an image, then the obvious conclusion is that photography, painting, or film would be a better medium of communication and a higher art form. Not a satisfying conclusion. Also, I loved The English Patient as a novel, but the movie, with the exception of the lovely Juliette Binoche, is much too syrupy.
I bring this up, however, to mention an image that is seared into my memory — an image by the exquisitely disconsolate W. G. Sebald. He describes a great-uncle Alphonso in the act of painting: “When he was thus engaged he generally wore glasses with gray silk tissue instead of lenses in the frames, so that the landscape appeared through a fine veil that muted its colors, and the weight of the world dissolved before your eyes.”
Beautiful.
Sometimes I think I look back on my life wearing glasses with gray silk tissue in the frames.
If I am to think of what image you’ll retain from reading these paltry pages, I assume it will be my mother’s screaming, the frail body, the position of her hands, the skirl of terror.
Am I right?
Most people say they feel nostalgia for their childhood, or for a first love, or maybe for Beirut as it once was, or for parents who have passed away. I don’t, not in the sense everyone means. I feel nostalgia for scenes. I don’t recall the years of my youth with affection; I don’t my family either: my dead uncle-father, or my mother still alive. However, I do recall with a certain fondness the manner in which we children slept on summer nights with their pitiless heat, windows open and the smell of jasmine floating in, the colors and patterns of the sheets in the dark. What was most irritating then — having to get out of bed when my little half sister wet the mattress — I now remember with a tinge of devotion, not for her or her predicament, but for how we always stood in the same spot around my mother as she examined the wet abstractions on the sheets, how we carried the mattress outside to air and sun-clean it. I feel a certain tenderness for the way the furniture was arranged in the main room, the way the large brass tray sitting atop the round burlap ottoman was set for dinner.
But then I feel nostalgia for the walks by Swann’s Way, as well as by Guermantes Way, for how Charles Kinbote surprises John Shade while he’s taking a bath, for how Anna Karenina sits in a train.
I met a secretary once, a classmate’s mother. She walked her daughter to school one morning and delivered her to the gate, at which point the grizzled Armenian guard stepped briefly out of his kiosk to greet them, which he always did when a parent appeared.
Was Hercules the gatekeeper of Heaven? I wouldn’t describe the aged Armenian as Hercules in any case. His job was to make sure that none of the students left before school was out and that none but students and teachers entered, which meant that even though he approached the mother obsequiously, he was in essence taking her child away and forbidding her entry. So no, not Hercules. As much as I loved it and felt at home within its cages, school is more Hades than Heaven — a ritual killing of childhood is performed in school, children are put to death. The guard was the ferryman.
As she handed him her daughter, the mother bathed him in a patrician smile. She wore a tailor-made dress that looked as if it belonged to someone else, as if she intended to grow into it though she carried it off. It was a gray dress of a shade quite different from the pewter gray of the menacing sky that day. Around her shoulders she had wrapped a bright blue shawl. Unlike the arriving teachers, all afflicted with a plague of inattentiveness, she seemed to be relating to the world around her, awake and participating. As I write this, I recall how wonderful I felt while watching her, how young she seemed as a mother, still retaining something organically girlish about her.
I watched the handoff from behind the school fence, looking out through the bars — yes, actual metal bars that my head could fit through only the year before. The bars were covered with lumpy layers of cheap yellow paint, caged-canary hue; it was peeling and chipping, the rust that peeked through complementing the yellow nicely. I was staring. My hands held on to the bars, my face squeezed in between, both cheekbones pressed to painted metal.
The daughter, my classmate, strolled to my side. She watched her mother exchanging unnecessary pleasantries with the ferryman. We, on the other hand, didn’t exchange a word. He mother noticed us and walked over. She politely inquired who I was, whether I was a friend to her daughter — a brief, kind question that only required me to nod yes or no.
“I wish you a most pleasant day, girls,” she said.
She extended her arm through the bars. I can still see the shawl slip from her right shoulder as she ran her fingers through my hair — the one time, as far as I remember, that anyone ever did that — after which, she left.
“She can write shorthand,” my classmate said.
I’ve strayed too far once more. Sorry. Let me get back to Hannah.
What brought Hannah and me together wasn’t so much our social ineptitude, as I’ve mentioned, but her meeting my brother-in-law that fateful day, though that fateful day occurred long before I was married, when I was still a child.
She was twenty-two when she met him, embarrassingly single by the standards of the time, but not yet a certified spinster. Her journal entries then were mostly meditations on what her future life would look like, which girl in the neighborhood had been proposed to, how her status in the family was changing. By the time she harpooned the lieutenant, all her brothers had already married. Thirteen weeks before that fateful day, one of her sisters-in-law had a baby boy, the first grandson in the family, the fourth grandchild.
She described a telling incident. The newest sister-in-law, Maryam, recently married and relocated to Hannah’s home (only two of the brothers were still in the small house then), was deep in conversation with Hannah’s father. The discussion might have been beyond her depth, Hannah wrote, but the girl, a few years younger than she, was happy, peppy, and loud. Hannah wrote that her new sister-in-law “couldn’t understand stillness”—quite a wonderful phrase, if you ask me.
The family was having afternoon coffee in the living room. Hannah’s father slurped his coffee as the girl went on and on. When Hannah finished her cup, she picked up her mother’s empty one and carried both toward the kitchen. As she approached, Maryam, still jabbering and hooting, eyes only on her father-in-law, held her own cup out, left arm extended straight in Hannah’s way.
Hannah stopped, her toes curled, her shoes digging into the carpet. Of course, she was more embarrassed than furious at that point. She didn’t know what to do. The girl hadn’t even looked at her. Hannah tried to carry the extra cup but she wasn’t as dexterous as her mother. Ticktock, the room’s clock mocked her, but none paid attention.
“I’ll bring the tray,” Hannah told her sister-in-law. “Just one minute.”
Maryam jumped up, horrified by her indiscretion and insensitivity. “Please forgive me, sister,” she said, “I wasn’t paying attention. I am shamed. Let me relieve you, please. I will take all.”
“There is no need for forgiveness,” Hannah said. “None.”
Both girls took the cups to the kitchen.
Let me take a brief detour, very brief. Ticktock.
Pundits these days keep jabbering and hooting about the Internet being the greatest advancement. Web this, web that, and let the resident spider suck the life out of you. Being connected to the world doesn’t appeal to me.
As someone living alone, as an aging woman, the technological discovery I love most is the electric clock, though with Beirut’s electricity, I should say the battery-operated clock. Do you have any idea how much anxiety those old clocks induced? Ticktock, you’re all alone in an empty apartment. Ticktock, the world outside is going to come and get you. Ticktock, you’re not getting any younger, are you? Give me a tranquilizer, please.