The house was completely still, including the servants who went quiet too after noticing how calm the two women were. The ambulance arrived and Adil was moved onto the stretcher. Rosette went with him and Line followed in her own car.
Samir Uliyyan informed me that Adil had been moved to the hospital in Ras Beirut; he was also quick to inform me that Rosette had asked about me and that she wanted to see me. I had been intending to visit Adil in the hospital anyway, and so I visited the very next day.
As soon as Rosette and Line saw me they erupted into sobs. I must be the one remaining person who reminded them of Adil. I am the lone, distant comrade who could still be called a friend of his.
Adil never regained consciousness. He died on the seventh day, the day on which God rested. Rosette and Line left the southern suburbs.
A whole summer passed during which I heard nothing of Adil’s family. In October I received a package. When I opened it, I found a jumble of papers full of Adil’s creative ramblings, all pretentious analysis and philosophizing... his thoughts on writing. But a single paper with large handwritten words stopped me in my tracks: I am not evil. Everything I did, or claimed I did, was simply intended to be terrifying.
Originally written in Arabic.
Scent of a Woman, Scent of a City
by Alawiya Sobh
Khandaq al-Ghamiq
It was half past seven in the morning. I didn’t get out of bed, I didn’t hear the usual church bells across from my house in Hamra. Instead I woke up to the chimes of my mother’s voice saying, “The day’s almost over and you’re still sleeping. If I were the ministry, I wouldn’t pay you one cent. It’s seven thirty and you’re still lying around in bed.” My mother’s rosary of words continued until I got up.
My mother can tell the time without a clock. She lifts her finger to the sun to tell the time; I don’t know how she does this. And I don’t know how to use an alarm clock either. I’ve bought clocks many times, but they are soon destroyed or lost without me knowing why. My friend says that my relationship with time isn’t normal. I smiled when she said that and then asked her what time it was. She responded, but just as quickly I forgot what she’d said and so I asked her again. She smiled and patiently answered once more, but perhaps I didn’t hear. One of my bad habits is that I always ask questions but don’t bother listening to the answer. My mother asks and answers herself when she can’t find someone else to talk to. She told me that she’d listened to all the news reports while I was sleeping, and that a woman had been found dead in Khandaq al-Ghamiq.
I didn’t pay attention to what she said and tried to not care. Words like these weren’t strange to my ears.
I opened my eyes wide and I felt an intense swelling in them and all over my body. The exhaustion I felt was like the one you feel at the end of the day. My God, how will I feel by evening? Morning blends into evening, day into night.
I opened the window to cold shadows. The rain was heavy and the howling of storms reminded me that the earth was still turning.
Nature is there in the seasons, but winter grayness has a scent that rises from the street and enters the house, a scent like the one I smelled yesterday evening that’s remained suspended in my nose and on my body since. Before I entered the house and locked the door on another day and another world, I’d tried to walk down the street a bit to take in some air — but the air was not air.
The scent of the Beirut evening was strange, the scent of passersby clung to me. It was not the scent of people’s exhaustion and their old sweat; instead the scent resembled that of dead bodies, the scent of death which emanates from their faces and eyes. In the evening, I wanted to explain this to my friend, but I was afraid that he’d call me crazy or tell me go to a nose doctor — “Perhaps your sense of smell needs curing” — so I didn’t say anything to him. When I awoke to that very same scent in the morning, my fear grew — perhaps the smell of Beirut had changed, but I didn’t want to believe it. Or perhaps the scent was emanating from me.
I observed myself in the bathroom mirror, the scent rising from my face and sticking to the glass like vapor. I thought at first that my breath had stuck to the mirror. I wiped it with my sleeve but the vapor returned to fog it up. I couldn’t see the full reflection of my face; my features were obscured by the vapors of death on the mirror, resembling the death in the city, and resembling the scent of yesterday’s passersby. I tried to convince myself that the problem resided in my nose.
Then I tried to ignore the whole thing, as I had gotten used to facing my problems with instant forgetfulness, but that didn’t help either. I kept telling myself that perhaps I was imagining everything. But I kept hearing my mother’s voice repeat: The crime didn’t happen in that place.
Through practice, I started forgetting the whole war, not even believing it. Whenever I want to forget something, I sleep. Similarly, whenever it wants to forget, Beirut sleeps.
Sometimes it seems to me that the war didn’t happen. One day city people grew bored of peace, and since they liked to forget, they went to sleep. The city started sleeping on the night of April 13, 1975, and all the people dreamed of war.
It was perhaps the first time in history that thousands of people shared a single dream.
It was really quite strange. I used to always say that to my friend.
“Oh girl, when will you grow up?” he would say, smiling. “What came before the war was a dream, my dear.”
But I didn’t believe him, because I’m more than a thousand years old, if we’re following the Islamic calendar. He smiled again when I said that to him. Then he said, “Why isn’t the dream that old?”
Of course, I didn’t sleep through all those centuries. But my grandmother told me I was born dead, that I was murdered at birth all those years before by my grandfather’s grandfather.
Why he killed me at birth I don’t remember.
My grandmother says that the past is our roots and that the murder of women and girls in infancy is an open secret throughout our land.
But another friend informed me about a woman whose father killed her in childhood because she was too beautiful. She was four years old and looked as if she appeared from a fairy tale. He feared that someone would rape her and so he decided to kill her first.
I grew anxious when she told me this story. She continued, “Perhaps he was afraid of his desire for her — do you think that desire can lead to murder?”
I didn’t answer. I thought, I’m not beautiful. So then why did my ancestor kill me in infancy years before? I don’t remember. But I remember that I was afraid he would kill my sister’s daughter when she was born in the hospital. We didn’t know if my sister would have a boy or a girl, and I waited impatiently and anxiously throughout her labor.
The nurse came out and walked right by me without saying anything so I grew even more worried. I walked up to her and asked, “Is it a boy or a girl?” But she didn’t answer. So I asked another nurse nearby. She looked at me and didn’t answer either. I thought that something had happened to my sister.
I lost it. I stormed into the operating room and asked the doctor. He said, “It’s a girl.” I informed my mother. She said that the nurse was right, the person who informs someone about the birth of a girl shames herself before God for forty days. The nurse who hadn’t replied to me still had a look of shame on her face.