Look at me, I say to him choking on my tears, Look at me! You are not with me…!
He doesn’t respond. He opens his eyes, looking straight ahead, far away from me, and not meeting my gaze.
“I got rid of my baby like a little bug. Now I want to get pregnant and I can’t…!” I whisper in a voice emerging from deep inside me, trying to stand up at the end of the session and forgetting that the person in front of me doesn’t understand the language of my skin.
I collapse on the chair and drown in a torrent of tears.
Before the plane takes off, Chris and I have a coffee together for the last time in the small building that is the Nairobi airport. The coffee is thick and I feel nauseated. The airport looks like debris from the surrounding buildings, or just broken, nothing in it working. Even the few airport employees sitting around appear to be just visiting a place where they don’t understand how things work. All it takes is a glance at the windows, where flimsy nylon bags have replaced broken glass, to remember that this vast country has lived through continuous but interrupted wars, not so different than our wars. In different countries little wars have a tragic resemblance, I think, not paying attention to Chris’s repeated questions. “When are you coming back home?”
“When are you coming back home?” he reiterates and then, when he’s lost hope of me responding, “Are you coming back home?” I don’t speak since I can’t find a way to answer these two questions at the same time. I think about what he says, “coming back home.” I think that we— Chris and I — simply don’t see eye to eye on anything, not even on the meaning of words. For me, “coming back home” is exactly what I’m doing right now. I reflect that perhaps I’m overcome by a desire to live life, while this man spends his time dissecting that same desire. Like any serious, systematic scientist he remains at a measured distance from life in order to dissect it.
I remember the first time I arrived in Kenya from Australia. I found Chris waiting for me at the airport in Nairobi. I was scared. It was the first time I’d been in a place where I could see only black-skinned people. All of them Africans. I asked myself at that moment why I was scared. Was my fear derived from a collective memory I carry inside me, a memory of my ancestors’ theft of these people’s wealth — their mines and their natural resources? Was I scared of having to settle the accounts of those who came before me, whatever their nationality… those people who came, exploited them, got rich and never paid a price for anything?
Those first faces I saw remain in my mind. I’ve never forgotten even one of the people I saw at that moment of my arrival in the airport. I’ve remembered them for years. Whenever I travel, I search for them. Sometimes I spot one of them and find that he’s gotten a bit older, his eyes grown hard. I recall these people when Chris is on top of me. I close my eyes and think about them. I imagine Samuel, the man who works in the garden of my house. I picture his face and his shining black skin, while Chris, after reaching orgasm, tells me about the types of malaria that people here suffer from and the differences in malaria between one African country and another.
But why am I thinking about Chris right now? Why am I remembering the habits of his that I never really related to? Is it because I am a woman without habits? Is this why the years that I spent with him in Kenya still remain somehow outside my life — as though I didn’t live them? Or is it the years themselves that are outside my life? Or is it because I am outside of any place that connects me to life? Or perhaps it all goes back to Chris being particularly systematic, his life intimately linked to the ticking of the clock. He sees his life as a system of unchanging habits, while I … drink coffee in the morning… No, no … actually I drink tea. I smoke… no, I don’t! But yes I do, I smoke sometimes. I go for a walk every morning… no, not most mornings. I always prefer to be alone at home… alone with my novels that Olga took pains to send me all those years.
Perhaps my sole habit is tied to memory: a permanent feeling of being in a transient state since I left Lebanon. In my house in Mombasa I leave my handbag on the table in the entryway, as though I’m about to leave at any minute or only there on a short trip, visiting strangers. “Myriam, this is your house. This is your house and you are its mistress, why don’t you put your things away? Why do you leave stuff scattered around like this, in suitcases?” Chris always repeats these questions impatiently, in his English accent, when he sees my things left for days in the small hallway next to the front door of the house. He looks at my address book and the leather bag where I keep the novels that I receive from Lebanon. I take them with me in the car or leave them in the front garden of the house where I often sit. But Chris’s words don’t diminish my feelings of alienation from him — if anything they make it worse. I’m well aware that my habit of always being on alert and nervously ready for anything is something I brought with me from wartime Beirut, from the memory of bomb shelters and needing to move from one place to another, safer one. This remains inside of me, never leaving me, throughout years of nomadic moving and wandering between Adelaide and Mombasa. I know that my anxiety has become like my shadow and long ago left its imprint on my personality.
Only Samuel the Kenyan gardener offers me some sense of security. He gives me peace of mind when he tells me that moving doesn’t have to mean anything, that it’s possible for a person to remain at home in his heart wherever he may be. He tells me that he feels able to live multiple lives while in the very same place. When he’s somewhere else, he can feel that there’s another person inside him.
Samuel approaches the chair where I’m sitting in the garden and starts flipping through the books that fill the bag lying open on the grass near my feet. Some of the books are in Arabic, so look like a puzzle to him. He leaves the books, looks at me and says that every book has a life here and a life there, where it came from. He continues, “This is how I live both inside and outside.” I don’t understand exactly what he means, but right away I connect what he’s saying to something he once told me about his old grandfather, who left the bush half-naked and came to Mombasa to live, have a family and settle down, dressing like the foreigners who lived in the city. That time he told me that he feels I understand everything, as though I too have started to carry his memories — though I’m a stranger to this land, I live this life here and share these experiences. I have started spending more time with Samuel than with Chris, who is entranced by his little insects, painstakingly fixed on glass slides under his microscope. He says that if they multiplied enough and filled the world, they could finish off humankind.
In Kenya, as in Australia, I’ve started taking tranquilizers and sleeping pills, but the migraines still won’t leave me. I wake up in the morning and am unable to open my eyes. I close the curtains again, banishing the morning light to the outside. Light makes my migraines worse and would keep me in bed for the whole day. The curtains of my room remain drawn and I only see the daylight in Mombasa when my pain subsides. When I feel a bit better, I go out into the garden and watch Samuel cut the grass while water gushes out of the hose, submerging his muddy feet and watering the plants and trees.