Leaning her head toward me with the warmth and collusion of a lover, Olga asks me about Nour. I tell her that he’s just a friend.
“What? You’re going to stay strong this time? Or will you get all romantic and stupid like you always do?” Olga says, “My darling, a woman has to be a whore to live with a man.” I don’t answer, but struggle to recall some of Olga’s failed romantic adventures, which I’d witnessed as a teenager. I realize that Olga isn’t speaking to me but to herself. She’s speaking to the young woman she once was and who couldn’t choose the right man for her life. It’s as if she’s finally discovered what she should have done in the past and wants another chance. But the past is the past; we don’t get to correct our mistakes. Olga’s words come too late, like a woman who discovers birth control only after she’s already turned fifty.
I believe that Olga is a desirable woman, and not only because I first learned love with Olga when I was just a teenager. But I see her life as an ongoing loss of faith in love. It took a long time for Olga to lose her faith that love could cause miracles.
I haven’t seen Nour for a week. He’s still in Amman. Sometimes I contemplate his perpetual travel and his ever-present worry. He uses his time to research, collect stories and transcribe old newspapers that he’s found in the AUB library. He wants to know everything: the history of his family and their properties, which he believes are still there and still rightfully belong to his grandmother, his mother’s mother.
Today is the twelfth of January, 1996. I’ve been here for five months. It was this exact same day sixteen years ago that we left Lebanon. Our voyage that day wasn’t easy. We had to drive to Damascus and fly from there to London and then onto Australia. It was snowing and just before we reached Dhour al-Baidar, we had to wait for a long time until we could pass through because of snowstorms. The long journey was hard for Salama and for Nadia, who decided after Baha’’s death to resign from life — to resign from all responsibility and even from speaking. She no longer cares about Salama, neither his madness nor his perpetual anxiety.
She would look at him and then turn toward me, as though to say, “Enough… I’m done! I can’t take it any more, now it’s your turn.” Nadia hadn’t spoken since Baha’ was killed. Perhaps she no longer had anything to say. Sometimes I believe that she decided to stop speaking; she came to this point through a conscious decision-making process and not as a result of shock. Perhaps the death of my brother made it easier simply to go silent. I know that my mother didn’t love my father when they married; I know that her father forced her to marry Salama, after she’d been engaged to a man she loved. Nadia always thought that it was because she loved this man that her father forced her to leave him. I also know that Hamza had traveled to Hasbaya, my mother’s village, to ask Nadia’s father for her hand and that he had consented without Nadia’s knowledge. A distant kinship between my mother and father’s extended families meant they both took it for granted that this marriage would happen.
My grandmother Nahil says that Nadia fainted on her wedding night. That she fell ill from fear and because Salama wasn’t patient with her. But the real reason that she passed out is that she couldn’t be with the man she loved. She had to accept that the person on top of her on her wedding night was someone else — a man she didn’t love; she didn’t even like how he smelled. She had only seen this man a few times, but his smell alone was enough for her to recognize him. She came to know him from his scent. She knew when he was coming to visit her father before he crossed the threshold of the house, as if his scent had a voice she could hear from far away.
I only remember one sentence that the speaking Nadia used to repeat to us: she had only ever once loved one man and she lost this man on the day she married Salama.
Nadia was destroyed by Baha’’s death. He was her son, so she died too. She died because she’s no longer really alive. For me, the tragedy of Baha’’s death is no more terrible than Nadia’s silence. She remains silent while the kitten meows at her, wanting food. She goes into the kitchen to feed Pussycat, who walks behind her silently, as though they have a lasting understanding that her silence will never change.
My brother looked like my mother — his eyes, his skin color and the shape of his face were all like hers. He even inherited the big mole on his ear from her. His height and build, however, are like my father’s. As for me, I inherited Nahil’s face — her dark skin and her big, black eyes. I inherited my thin, well-proportioned build from my mother. Baha’ was distinctly Nadia’s son, as if he were a part of her body. My father, who never showed any emotion toward his son during his life, cried at his funeral and then went mad. Perhaps my father didn’t lose his mind because of the shrapnel that pierced his skull and stayed lodged there, but because his son died before ever hearing one loving word from his father.
My silent mother. I see how silent she really is when my brother is killed. Should I have waited for my brother’s death to protest against my mother’s silence? Salama inherited the house from Hamza and if Baha’ had lived he would have inherited it from Salama. Should I inherit Nadia’s silence? Especially now when, with Baha’’s death, I’ll inherit the house? But how can a woman who didn’t learn how to speak from another woman inherit a house? Only now do I know how much I resemble Nadia. I needed to embark on my journey in order to know this. I actually resemble Nadia quite a lot. I wasn’t aware of this resemblance before, not when I was with Georges, nor with Chris, nor even with my British-Indian therapist. I see it only when I pick up pen and paper and start to write. I begin writing everything I’ve been silent about for years.
“I won’t feel pain after today,” I wrote at the time. It’s as if the pain inside me has been mummified. It’s inescapable. It’s like needing a lot of fresh air to live and trying to gulp it down because you can’t survive with just thin gasps.
I call Nadia in Australia; I ask about Salama. She says a few words and then falls silent. When she starts speaking again, she speaks in English, a language she started to master only after arriving in Australia. She speaks for a long time. Her voice seems as though it’s healed from a chronic illness. Here, cancer spreads through Olga’s body, while there my mother’s voice remains silent. Her original language is in exile. She now speaks only in another language.
Her effusive words on the phone make me think that my mother’s silence was a cancer of the soul. Her silence is not silence so much as a fragmentation and failing of her original language. This is how I understand my mother’s silence in Arabic. It’s the silence of a fragmented, failing woman. I have dreamed about her a few times, and in my dreams she’s a strong woman who takes on the world, riding a bicycle furiously down the open street. I remember this dream when I call her. It’s as if my dream has become real.
She tells me about her work in Adelaide, about the new immigrants who are Baha’’s age. She can finally speak of Baha’; she speaks of him in her new language. There’s only hope and power in these words, no sadness. We cry together for the first time, my mother and I.
Hamza’s words are tantamount to action; he writes on stone, carves words. I don’t understand the sentences he engraves on the doors. Nadia doesn’t understand them either. He says they’re there to protect the house and family. He always repeats this to people at Thursday evening get-togethers. Writing makes Hamza even stronger than he was before. Words make my mother more silent. Perhaps this is why people believe that words are for men alone. Words and writing are for men, only men, women have no right to them.
Did Nadia’s silence begin here — even before she was born? From the time that these sentences were carved in stone, never to be erased or disappear? Carved in Arabic, carved in stone, in the body. How can I destroy those words? How can I transform them, make them into my own writing, my mother’s writing?