The Angel of History (13 page)

While I was in the whorehouse, what I knew of Lebanon came from two sources: my mother’s stories about the plush apartment of my father’s parents, and a weekly Lebanese television series that the entire house watched, a breathtakingly irritating and compulsively watchable show about the simple life of a married couple in the mountains, a show that celebrated tradition, family, and unfortunate hairstyles. We gathered in front of the television before the show began, all of us having bathed or cleaned up, as if we were going to prayers, the serial required its own ablutions. When the last commercial ended and the black-and-white screen flickered and the show’s opening music emerged from the speakers, the energy of the room palpably shifted, a new presence entered our world, we all felt it, just as Faust did when Mephistopheles appeared at his side.

Each episode always began with a shot of husband and wife in their home, she wore dark skirts, lighter tops, and always a cardigan, sometimes long translucent white scarves covered her head but we could still see how much hair spray she used, he wore the odd outfit of the Lebanese mountains, fez and black drop-crotch pants, you can’t touch this. As soon as either the husband or the wife spoke the first word, my aunties would begin to talk back to the Lebanese couple on the screen, Good morning, Abou Saleem, Good morning to you, Umm Saleem, Good to see you again, Hope you had an uneventful week. This might sound strange to you, Doc, but believe me, every single woman in that house talked to the television, when my mother needed to go to the bathroom, she would excuse herself from whoever was on the screen, women driving in car commercials, men lighting up Kent cigarettes, Pardon me, she would say, I will return momentarily.

The show itself was overstuffed with homilies and platitudes, every episode had a moral lesson to impart, Yes, it’s true, blood is thicker than water, Everything happens because God has a master plan, and the episode always ended with the lecture, the wife distilling the episode’s story, telling the men about life, love, happiness, the value of cooperation, the wisdom of the village elders, at which point my mother and every auntie would nod her head, Uh-huh, Yes, You say the wisest things, Jewels tumble from your mouth, I wish I had someone like you telling me this when I was younger.

Just when I thought I knew all there was to know about that silly little country, a third source began to arrive by mail, my father’s postcards. When I wrote him my first postcard, he replied the same day, but it took a while for his card to arrive, during which time my mother had insisted I write him
one a day, so when she rushed into the kitchen waving the postcard, I was ecstatic, not just because of that card, but for all the dozens I expected to course like a waterfall through the opened floodgates. The arrival of each card, like the Lebanese television serial, brought the entire whorehold together, all turned still while my aunties examined the picture, Look, so much snow on the mountains, Amazing cars on the streets of Beirut, Is this a damascene dagger I see before me, What kind of forest is this, Behold God’s miraculous colors in this sunset. I had to read the descriptor of each picture aloud, sunrise on Mount Sannine, the city of Tripoli, sunset on the rock at Raouché, before passing the card around, and then I had to read my father’s prose when it returned. What my father wrote sounded similar to the television platitudes, Stay in school, my son, Honesty is the best policy, Obey your mother for this is right, Do not forsake your mother’s teachings. At the time, I found his words uplifting and loving, and his claiming me, his bastard, calling me his son, was as great a gift as I could ever have hoped for. In his eyes, I was human.

During the rest of my time in Cairo, those postcards were what I lived for, I waited for them, the house waited, my desultory life had found a purpose. Auntie Badeea transcribed my mother’s letters to him and he replied, and though I never knew what was in them, I presume she lauded me, hoping he would be proud, hoping he would want me in his life and get her in the bargain, she must have implored him to help me. She insisted that I use the biggest words I could think of, that I ensure the perfection of my spelling and grammar, that I stress the paucity of available opportunities for a boy like me who was far, far ahead of children my age. Her ploy half worked, because at some point, I’m
not sure when, my father told her that I should fly to Lebanon without her, that he would be in charge of raising me to become a productive member of society, that I needed a good education, which meant that she would have to give me up, she and Auntie Badeea and the house itself would no longer have a claim on me, for my own benefit, of course. My mother might have taken a few years to mull over the offer, or a few seconds, I don’t know when it was made, but Auntie Badeea broke the news to me when I was ten, my mother and the rest of the aunties with us in the kitchen. I was going to Beirut, a great city, a wonderful city, I was going to be with an amazing man, this father of mine, and I would be taken in by his exceptionally rich family, who could buy me everything I ever wished for and things I didn’t yet know existed, happy days to look forward to.

A decision was made, coffee stains and tea leaves were consulted, and a date for my departure was chosen. The days after the decision bred moroseness in my mother and aunties and unbridled elation in me, where they saw parting, I saw meeting my father, my desideratum. Every auntie in the house chipped in to buy me fancy clothes and even a suit, they did not wish me to feel inadequate upon meeting my prosperous family, did not wish to embarrass themselves, they had had a long discussion as to what would be the ideal outfits, decided that I would wear western clothing since I was going to modern Beirut. I have a picture of myself all dressed up, your mother didn’t filch that, Doc, a cotton suit as white as goose down and a shirt to match, shorts that barely reached my thighs, shoes and socks also white, even the belt, my darkness a contrast, I’m smiling, mouth open, all teeth, as fresh as dew I was. My mother knotted the tiny black tie
that dropped below my belt, her cologne, a scent of violets, reassured me. I was the young bride being sent to a new family, never to be seen again. You’re my young man now, my mother said, trying to instill courage in my veins, but none was needed. I had no idea that the ritual was a final farewell, everyone expected me to break down in tears, all the room was bawling except for confused me until my mother brought out the janbiya, light and fake, and I began to howl and the whore chorus stopped crying, This is not good, one auntie said, how is he to become a man, that one, I never thought he would, may God watch over him, and Auntie Badeea put the knife in her belt and my mother shut her eyes until I calmed.

When the day came for me to leave, I carried a small potted plant in a paper bag, a sage for my tummy aches, its green leaves with goose bumps peeking above the top of the bag, an old Arab tradition, travel with earth, with home mud, stay rooted to your land. Palestinian refugees kept keys to their houses for generations, hidden in boxes, in kerchiefs, their adult children’s children not knowing what the houses looked like or where they were, yet they cherished the keys, and in a poem Bertolt Brecht compared himself to a man who carried a brick to show how beautiful his house once was, and the nice Lebanese stewardess who watched over me took the sage away when I boarded and forgot to return it when she delivered me to my father.

I thought we were all fighting the fight on the same side, not so, Doc, what you wanted was to become respectable,
ignoring history, not knowing that once you climb the ranks of the upright someone has to replace you down below, but you did not want to know that. I look around me, Doc, and try to imagine where you would fit now, where you would want to, would it be with the khaki-pants crowd, gay-married with picket-fenced children, or with the freaks that come out at night, because unfortunately, the two mingle no more, the first are terrified of being soiled.

Me, Doc?

Me, through and through, from skin to soul, I am sullied and soiled.

The great Czesław Miłosz fervently believed that he was only a vessel for his muse. Now I thought the same, believe me, and I waited patiently for my muse’s deliveries, as I always have, but unlike Miłosz’s, my muse was a bitch. She inundated me with endless chatter, from the beginning she entered our contract with mala fide intentions, Doc. My muse needs an enema. I want a replacement, a trade-in. The infidels in the Holy Quran declaimed, Shall we abandon our gods for a crazy poet? Well, I abandoned my gods for a crazy muse who had trouble with rhythm, who mocked my use of a rhyming dictionary, the one Greg bought for my twenty-fourth birthday, and you admonished him, Don’t encourage the boy, you said.

English was my third language, Arabic my mother tongue, the romantic Rimbaud’s French my bridge and my crutch, I began to write at an early age, in Arabic at
first, of course, in the whorehouse, encouraged by Auntie Badeea, who believed that poetry would correct whatever was wrong. It was easy in the beginning, words flowed, my muse was gentle and seductive, the poems were lousy, of course, I was a child, but I loved them, felt they were inspired, but perhaps that was because my poems were heard and appreciated, I could write no wrong, my aunties lauded anything I recited, in their eyes I could see my face. I had little audience after that, and what I had was indifferent. At l’orphelinat de la Nativité I wrote my poems in French, two or three I submitted as class assignments, thankfully all lost to your mother now. I wrote those poems in the library, which was once the rectory, hunched over a notebook, consoled by a dozen open books on the table, aging poems with lines devoured by silverfish. While the other boys rough-and-tumbled their way through their years of school, I composed mediocre verse, where they wanted to be the next Pelé or Charles Bronson, I idolized Baudelaire and Rimbaud, he who ended up in Yemen, I too wanted to recite the unutterable, to turn silences and nights into words, to make the whirling world stand still while hormones whirled within me. While insane slathery rain battered the rectory window and pinecones fell off their tree, I churned out implausible lines, mixing the arcane with argot, pretentious they were, silly lucubration.

But when I began to write in English that was when my poetry matured, no longer a mélange of the great and awful, it distilled, decocted into pure mediocrity. Some of my lines were published, so I wasn’t bad, I wish I were, mediocre poetry is worse than terrible, it’s a sin. Let me try, Doc, you always used to accuse me of swimming against the current,
said I always managed to do the opposite of whatever was in vogue that season, and I did, eternal rebellion, that was me, but whether I flowed with or swam against the current, the work remained stuck in that river, my poems that I considered idiosyncratic were anything but, they wore the same drenched clothing, soaked in the same water, a great poet has nothing to do with currents, Doc, she is the eye of a storm, neither its thunder nor its lightning.

I loathed the poetry of nostalgia, so I chopped down the olive trees of my ancestors, if I hear one more stanza eulogizing the scent of orange blossoms in Palestine, I will buy a gun, I swear. In response to much-lauded poems dealing with implausible angst, the mild suffering of the fortunate, mine soared on magic carpets offering a bird’s-eye view of the world. I despised false domestic poems most, my reaction to those was the elegy “Jeffrey Dahmer Was My Lover.” Perhaps I thought I was fighting the dishonesty of contemporary poetry, but mine was fraudulent as well.

My failures were my fault, my cowardice, my muse kept offering Socrates’s cup, Drink, she would say, and I hesitated. Maybe it was Satan, I disliked them both. That was why I tried prose, a story here, free verse there, anything to get me out of my dull quagmire. I miss so many things, Doc, I should have saved one small, warm, true thing from the Flood so I might go on living, maybe from the rectory days the two-color click pen, or maybe the yellow pencil, upon its body the pensive marks of my teeth, keeping me company through dozens of bad poems until it was no more than a nib that I disposed of, I should have kept it, for gratitude if nothing else, I am nothing if not a betrayer.

I keep looking at online videos of home, a missile, a bulldozer, a bomb smacking a wall, the house genuflecting, the home kneeling, the roof diving, dust rising, the women howling, drone strikes in Yemen, car bombs in Lebanon, shots of the entire Middle East, beatings and non-coups in Egypt, chemical weapons in Syria. Images of children dying of sarin gas flicker on the screen, mouths trying to capture air for lungs used to breathing, noses dripping with an uninterrupted flow of mucus, there was a time when I could watch similar scenes and be no more affected than any American watching horror unfold on the safe screen of television, Oh, that’s sad, can I have another beer? Something had shifted within, the wall that defended my heart had crumbled. I was pulled into the drama, I was in Douma, I was in Damascus’s suburb Moadamiyeh, I stood above the suffocating child, the dying mother as she wiped her child’s face, the father holding both, I was there, I was there with my attendant. Look at that, Satan said, happy times for Mr. D, you can’t negotiate with him now, sarin turns him on so, how gleeful he is, so many souls to take, Death doesn’t mind the overtime, look how quickly he moves from one to the next, waiting, shivering with anticipation.

I told Satan that Mr. D looked a little different here in the Middle East, and he replied that Death grew younger with each life. Marvel at Death, he said, look how childish he is prancing around in such excitement, by the time this so-called Arab Spring is over, he will be back in his pram shaking his rattle.

I could not keep at it, I had to leave the apartment, to take a walk, Behemoth jumped when I entered the bedroom,
I realized that I was rushing, moving erratically, my cat was my metronome, I slowed down, I was shivering, took a long calming breath, I gathered my sneakers, a baseball cap that made the sides of my hair look like oversize earmuffs, Hell hath no fur like my hair. Around the corner from my apartment, fifty-seven steps to be exact, was an intersection with heavy foot traffic and few cars, on the northwest corner a Palestinian called Faisal ran an idiosyncratic smoke shop that specialized in drug paraphernalia, sixties tchotchkes, his biggest sellers were hookahs painted to look as if they were tie-dyed, he had a sign on his window that announced,
WE CHEAT POTHEADS
. On the southwest corner a Syrian called Pete, Boutrus Americanized, ran a grocery store with his wife, Sofia, and their three children.