My grandmother says that age is a lie. The coming days are an echo of the past and its shadow.
The past is truth and the truth is the infant girl murdered at birth centuries ago. But I don’t believe the news. Is it possible that the scent of blood can remain on the body for centuries?
The scent of my body has remained for centuries.
The scent of my body rose and filled the car. The people in it started coughing. I coughed too, and the dust of my breath reached the driver’s mirror. He pulled his head back and turned toward me in anger.
I knew he couldn’t understand my features. They had lived through centuries. Today they have the city’s scent. Everyone coughed again. I coughed too, and my heart stopped beating before I reached the place where the incident happened. My body had become unidentifiable.
Everyone was scared and filled with shame. They started exchanging glances with each other. When we got to the scene of the crime, the man sitting next to me opened the door and threw me out on the ground. The car took off quickly.
I stretched out on the ground, and before closing my eyes and passing out, I realized that I was the woman who was found murdered. My grandmother’s voice was ringing in my ears and my scent covered the whole place.
The scent of the city covered my outstretched body.
Originally written in Arabic.
Sails on the Sidewalk
by Marie Tawk
Sin el Fil
She went up the stairs, careful as usual not to stumble on the broken steps. It’s a long walk up to the sixth floor. She put the bags she was carrying on the landing to rest a little. She leaned against the edge of the big wrought-iron window that’s cracked in more than one place. Electricity lines hung suspended and sagging between the buildings. A drab flock of pigeons flew near the cypress tree that soared up above the buildings. Desiccation had begun to grip it from the top and some of its branches were dead. Will this affect all of its branches or will it endure in the same condition it has been in for the past few years? Why had she never noticed this before? She felt a sudden fatigue; she had to hurry up and prepare dinner.
It was a worthy occasion. She was going to talk to Farid about everything. (She liked to pronounce his new name, not what he called himself as a child but what he did now after coming back from Australia: Freddy. This was nicer, it made her feel that he’d become a new person.) She was going to talk to him about their life together, and she would try to come closer to his world because the few memories that she’s preserved of him have become cloudy. All that she can recall is his beaming smile, which bewitched all the young women, and his huge, round, black eyes that added magic to it. She also remembered how he came back happy after watching a scary film in which the heroine, who he said resembled her, had been hanged. She asked him why he was happy about her death projected onto the big-screen heroine — did he hate her that much? He didn’t reply. She also didn’t forget his lightning-quick visit through Beirut, his insistence on seeing her, and how she couldn’t be bothered. She was completely absorbed in another world, a severely blind one. She then learned that he’d married a foreign woman soon after he’d come back, and they’d divorced four years later.
She opened the door. She headed into the kitchen to put the bags on the counter, then went back into the living room. White sheets covered the sofas, like it was wartime or summer vacation. After her father died, her siblings emigrated and her mother moved to the mountains, so the house was left to her free-ranging loneliness. She threw herself on the sofa. She felt dizzy, so she got up to open the window and take in a bit of air.
She wouldn’t ever again hear her father cough as he walks up the stairs. She was so used to hearing it, she couldn’t have known that this cough would become the portent of nothingness. She wouldn’t be anxious anymore because her father didn’t answer the phone all night long. She’d nap awhile then wake up a little panicked, dialing the number again and waiting for him to answer. In the morning, he would answer her call with his shaky voice, accompanied by a strangulated cough, saying that he’d gone to sleep early and didn’t hear the telephone ring. She later considered these the first signs of his imminent death, and also fully recalled the nerve-wracking waiting for Philippe — her ex-sweetheart — to respond at the other end of the line.
The cold was severe; she closed the window. What should she prepare for dinner? The best thing to do would be to call Farid and ask him. After a bit. Nothing here called for hurrying. She found her habit of perpetual hurrying absurd. She went into the bedroom: books filled the shelves; some of them had yellowed pages, some emitted an old vanilla scent. What would be the fate of her books? Soon nothing would connect her to this world, which she built or destroyed, brick by brick. She opened the cupboard: her own clothes and some of her mother’s. In the corner, a navy-blue suit of her father’s that she thought he’d been buried in, believing that he’d only owned one. And navy blue was indeed what he’d been shrouded in. She drew it close and inhaled; it still carried his scent. How did her mother forget to get rid of it, especially since she always said, “The clothes of the dead should never be mixed with the clothes of the living”? She saw him in her sleep. She knew in her dream that he’d passed on, so she wanted to ask him about his new residence. She was sitting near him in the backseat of his car; for the first time he wasn’t the driver. She was planning to ask him about... he didn’t even once turn to look at her. He was morose and angry, knowing that she’d ask him about his death. He merely waved his hands at her nervously, saying, “You’re still rushing around.” He didn’t utter the word that he usually used: frantic.
Right now, though, she wasn’t “rushing around,” but lifeless.
During her drive down to the seaside Corniche with Hyam, she started telling her friend to hurry, with Hyam imploring her to stay with her a little longer.
“I wanted to call you yesterday, but I decided not to. I didn’t want to bother you. Lamia... you’ve seemed preoccupied for a while.”
“I’m trying to change my lifestyle. It’s the second time that Farid’s come to Lebanon. I don’t want to engage in any more stupidity.”
“Rest assured, there can’t be any greater stupidity than what you were doing back when we first met! If you’d killed someone...”
She was surprised by the way Hyam was speaking to her. Why all this hostility?
“Hyam... are you all right?”
“No — and I wanted to tell you about my new resolution to put an end to all stupid things.”
“Did you fight with Nazih again?”
“No one deserves me. Do you remember that day when we were preparing food and he refused to help us? How could he just sit there all surly and superior, refusing to be with us?”
“Perhaps he wasn’t feeling well or was tired...”
“None of us feel well; we’re all tired... There’s something else there... I’m thinking about divorce.”
“Funny, when I’m thinking about marriage.”
“It hurts me to leave him, I’m afraid of him faltering... What keeps me there is his weakness. When he gets stronger, I’ll give up on him. Later, when he’s doing better, I’ll leave him right away, with no regrets.”
“Really nice. You help him to get stronger and he gets stronger for you, then you leave him?”
“I can’t leave him when he’s in this condition. My whole life is just a postponement of divorce.”