Other Lives by Iman Humaydan Read Free Book Online

prepares some food that I share with him. He doesn’t go straight back to his own house after dinner, but rather to night school where he’s learning to draw.
    In the beginning I found my house in Mombasa strange, for no reason except that to me it was like a prickly pear planted in the sand. Only the green garden that ends in a low fence separates the house from the ocean. It’s strange how precisely the sandy coast borders the garden. From the moment I arrived at this house that I’m meant to call my home, I passed my days hunting for comparisons between Mombasa and Beirut. Both have endured successive attacks that make each city what it is. Both extend along the sea. Beirut’s sea never changes, though. Its water isn’t stingy; it doesn’t recede. It isn’t surprising and it doesn’t frighten. The ebb and flow of the tide interests me. I’ve never seen this before, I tell Chris. But he laughs and says that all the seas of the world have tides. Beirut’s sea is no exception. Yes, it is! I tell him angrily, as if he is extracting something from inside me, from my memory, and I don’t want to share it with him. Chris tells me that the waters of the Mediterranean are exactly the opposite of how I think of them. He tells me that sailors of all civilizations from the time of Homer onward were afraid of the Mediterranean because it was so changeable, always unpredictable. Sailors on the oceans, by contrast, knew what was hiding beneath them before they entered deep waters.
    I know what Chris really wants to say—he’s talking about me. But I won’t get into another conversation in which his patience and tolerance will surely get the better of me. And this won’t change my opinion about either the sea or my life with him. I get up from my chair to walk around the house and exhale smoke from my cigarette, which I am constantly relighting. I reach the back garden, searching for Samuel, and don’t find him. I hear a song in Swahili from behind the garden wall and I approach the entrance to the garden, knowing that Samuel has arrived. Chris’s voice comes from the garden, strong and resolute— no doubt he’s started to get angry. “You’re not in Beirut anymore, you’re here now,” he says. He follows up in a voice meant to leave the impression that this is his final word and he won’t go back on it: “We shouldn’t need so many reasons to love a place and call it a homeland.”
    Mombasa’s morning sea is never the same. Since I arrived, the only persistent sight is of the local merchants displaying their wares right on the sands of the beach, when the tide is out and the water has withdrawn back into the heart of the ocean. They come in the morning or at noon when the water’s receded, slipping down onto the beach over the edge of the coastline. They can’t come down on the roads that lead to the houses gathered on a patch of land planted with trees. These two-story houses are all alike, as though one architect built the same structure a bunch of times. There are many dogs here, dogs trained to attack strangers. Their owners bring these dogs from faraway countries to live with them in big houses they intend to live in forever. The local merchants are frightened of the dogs and the owners of the houses. The foreigners know little about the original inhabitants of this country; their curiosity is limited to expanding their businesses into more and larger markets.
    The truth is that people from this country also don’t know much about these foreigners, who come here from a number of different countries. The few things that they do know keep them far away from the gates of the big houses. They do know, however, a lot about nature—its changes and fluctuations. They fear nature less than they fear us, the foreigners in their country. They know the ocean’s movements, the speed of the wind and the changing