Other Lives by Iman Humaydan Read Free Book Online Page B

clinging to my shivering body, my small radio emitting unintelligible signals.
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    Thus I’m returning to Beirut to sell the building and then return to Mombasa. I have spent more than eleven years traveling between Australia and Kenya, almost as long as I’ve been married to Chris. Chris was my father’s GP. He left his clinic in Australia for Kenya two months after our wedding to direct a British research association that’s working to develop a vaccine against malaria, the virus that kills so many people across this vast, poor country. I began my second immigration—from Australia to Kenya—to follow Chris.
    I don’t refuse Nour’s invitation to share a taxi from the Beirut airport. “I left my little notebook on the plane!” I shriek while getting into the taxi. Nour steps back from the taxi door, saying that he’ll go back into the airport to ask about it. “Forget about it… Just forget it!” I say hopelessly, waving in his direction, gesturing at him to get into the car. As though what I’ve written in this notebook is no longer important. As though I’ve started to accept loss as natural, something I can never change. But then I remember that this notebook of observations contains everything about Joe—the last time we met, our break-up and my return to Beirut. I’ve written there about my desire for children and my perpetual failure to get pregnant. I’ve written about the boredom that almost pains me when Chris and I go to bed together. I persevered and wrote everything in Arabic. I find Arabic letters and words exciting in a strange city like Mombasa. Particularly because then I don’t worry about Chris finding my notebook some day and reading what I’ve written.
    When I arrive in Beirut, I don’t go straight to the building where we used to live before we emigrated to Australia. This is the building that I’ve come back to reclaim after receiving a letter from Olga saying that the Ministry of the Displaced was offering financial compensation to internally displaced families to vacate houses they occupied during the war. I pass nearby the house in Zuqaq al-Blat but I don’t want to get closer. I tell Nour that I miss the intensity of my relationship to my house as it was. And it’s changed. Instead of visiting our two-story house that’s still occupied by displaced people, I ask the driver to take me to my grandmother Nahil’s house in the mountains. On my way up the mountain, the view of rocks and rough terrain—a land rich with images and colors—is repeated over and over. People think that this area has no vegetation. But it produces many-colored rocks and their outgrowths, fertile rocks with little, tough trees growing from them whose leaves stay green all year round.
    Nahil doesn’t recognize me when she first sees me. She greets me coldly and with a whisper asks Olga about me, while covering her face with a cloth that she lifts over her lips while she asks Olga who I am. “It’s Myriam!” says Olga, who has lived with my grandmother Nahil since childhood. She embraces me and directs seemingly pointless words at Nahil, “What’s the matter with you? Did you forget your granddaughter Myriam? She’s your son Salama’s daughter!” Nahil’s face lights up when she hears my name. She lifts her head toward me and straightens herself up so that she can reach out and touch my hair. Her thin hand brushes over my hair, down my neck, and she kisses me. “Dark-skinned with big, beautiful eyes!” she says to me in a weak, broken voice. Then she smiles and repeats as she always used to that I’m still beautiful like her, even if I am built like my mother and not slender. I know that some things about me have changed. I’ve dyed my hair a deep aubergine color, I weigh seven kilos more than I did, I am fifteen years older than the last time she saw me.