An Unnecessary Woman (23 page)

The Gestapo officer in charge of the Jewish labor force, Felix Landau, decided that Bruno was no ordinary Jew, but a necessary one.

Think on the term for a moment.

What is a
necessary
human?

What saved Bruno’s life, or, I should say, what delayed his death, was that Landau fancied himself a lover of art. He forced the necessary Jew to paint murals for his son’s bedroom depicting scenes from beloved fairy tales. Landau kept Schulz alive until one day in November 1942, when Karl Günther, a rival Gestapo officer, killed Schulz to get back at Landau, who’d killed a dentist Günther favored—a necessary dentist, one presumes.

Günther said to Landau, “You killed my Jew—I killed yours.”

Worse yet, a German filmmaker, with the help of the residents of Drohobycz, a Ukrainian city now, was recently able to trace the murals Schulz made for Landau’s son. From beneath many a layer of whitewash emerged the kings and queens and fairies and dwarves of Bruno’s imagination. The artist sprang to life once more, if only briefly, before being disappeared again. Three people from Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Israel, pried fragments of the murals off the walls, stole them away in the middle of the night. The museum claimed moral rights to my hero’s work. Tfeh!

Bruno Schulz was shot twice in the head by a Nazi.

Federico García Lorca was shot once in the head by a fascist and then twice in his behind, after he had fallen forward, to mark him as a homosexual.

When I read Schulz, I am baptized with Lorca’s dark water.

In the museum, the Lebanese and not the Israeli, I contemplate an aged if not antediluvian throne. According to biblical historians, God caused the world to flood forty-five hundred years ago, so no, not quite antediluvian.

I hear the click of heels behind me, but I don’t look back. The macaroni, at least seven, most of them women. The screeching sneakers of the two boys rush toward them. All this I hear, not see. The boys don’t seem to be seeing either, since they both run straight into the pod of Italians. I hear bodies bumping, Italian cursing, but no falls or tumbles. I turn and watch chaos unfold. The Italians chide the boys in bad English, the mothers chide the Italians for hurting the boys’ feelings, the Italians berate the mothers for their misbehaving children, which produces Lebanese cursing. No guard, referee, or anyone associated with the museum makes an appearance.

This culture clash does not concern me.

The groups separate. The Italians glare arrogantly at the Lebanese-cum-Americans and walk away. The mothers regard their nemeses suspiciously, as if they are a contagious caravan of the seven deadly sins. When she’s sure the sinners aren’t looking, one of the mothers backhands her son’s head. He winces a few seconds after the fact. She flips her dark hair, which falls in sculpted waves to her shoulders, and leads her friend away from the boys. The slap wasn’t hard, but the boy seems shocked, and neither boy is sure what to do. They face each other where the women have discarded them. It is the unhit child who begins, who inducts his friend. The hit boy seems bewildered. His friend’s lips tremble, his breathing is jagged. Whether consciously or not, the hit boy follows suit in the exact order: lips, breath, welling eyes. They drop to the floor, sit on the stone, and cry—well, weep. As loud as their earlier ruckus was, this sorrow is practically noiseless. In the hall of the ancients the intermittent sniffling of young boys echoes.

The boys don’t touch, don’t hug, don’t try to console each other. They simply sit on the floor and share a cry.

I too am inducted into a sea of feelings. I am witness to an innocence that has never been mine, to a childhood that I missed and miss. No nostalgia is felt as keenly as nostalgia for things that never existed.

I am able to control my lips that want to quiver, but my breathing betrays me.

I move quickly behind the stairs so no one can see me. Though I am still in the main museum hall, the tawny light turns grayish, and the hidden air feels damper with its taste of copper. Under the landing is an altogether different universe. Tears carve a couple of furrows in each cheek. Terror creeps from chest to limbs; I’m frightened because I seem to be losing all semblance of composure and can’t figure out why. Sorrow settles on my heart like a vulture.

What’s going on?

I inhale from deep in my belly. I can’t allow sobs to escape these lips. Like the boys, I need to remain noiseless. To my right an oblong of dense darkness attracts my attention. I sneak into the room, lean against the wall next to the door, and cry. I can discern walls but not their color. The room’s temperature isn’t a pleasant eighteen degrees centigrade—no, not pleasant. The febrile heat turns the room into humid summer, August in December. I expect to be attacked by mosquitoes at any moment. My throat is parched. I sweat. I’m overdressed for August, of course. I can’t breathe as deeply because of a suffocating smell of paraffin and tobacco. I stroke the foldable umbrella for comfort. The fact that it’s wet as well does comfort me, as does the room’s atrocious odors.

I must hold on to my sanity. I must compose myself and leave this oppressive place.

I slap my head, once, twice—a habit to alleviate stress, or to make myself think when I’m acting stupid, just a slap on the top of my head. I run my fingernails through my hair, pull it back, and retie the scarf. I fan my face with the palm of my hand. The sweating, the wetness, seems to be contained in the triangle between my two armpits and my navel. I hold my handbag against it, take a breath of courage, and head out into the museum’s light, which by contrast is now blinding. I wish I’d thought to bring sunglasses.

The hall is empty, no sign of the boys, their mothers, or their Italian nemeses. This is how I like my museum, empty and desolate and all mine, but I can’t linger anymore.

The guard who always looks amused looks concerned. “Are you all right, Tante?” he asks.

I consider spouting the usual “I’m fine” refrain and continuing my rush through the exit, but I halt. He deserves better.

“I will be,” I say, turning to face him. “I came here to escape some family problems, but wasn’t able to.” I hesitate, notice that I’m stuttering slightly. “Everything will be all right, though.”

He nods slowly but assuringly, and relays the obligatory Lebanese homilies about family: its necessity, its insanity, its quandary, its mystery, and its comfort.

After the indoor heat, the cool air chills my bones; the drizzle has halted and is now hanging, damp in the air. I descend the outside stairs, cross the heavily trafficked street, and begin to walk. I don’t care where or in what direction. I need to circulate my blood.

Why can’t I be like my museum guard? Normal and imperturbably happy he seems—normal and belonging to the world he resides in.

Henri Matisse once said, “It has bothered me all my life that I do not paint like everybody else.”

I love this quote, love the fact that the most incandescent painter of the twentieth century felt this way. Being different troubled him. Did he genuinely want to paint like everybody else, to be like everybody else? Did he truly wish to belong?

It has bothered me all my life that I am not like everybody else. For years, I was able to convince myself that I was special, that being different was a choice. As a matter of fact, I wanted to believe that I was superior, not an artist, not a genius like Matisse, but unlike the rabble. I am unique, an individual, not simply idiosyncratic, but extraordinary. I considered my individualism a virtue, protecting me from collective moods and insanities, helping me float above familial and societal riptides. That gave me comfort. Except it is failing me now. Not just now. For some time, I haven’t been able to wall off my heart adequately.

“Every man guards in his heart a royal chamber,” wrote Flaubert. “I have sealed mine.”

I haven’t done as good a job as Gustave. My sealant leaks. Jagged cracks have surfaced in my walls through the years. The weeping episode at the museum may have been unusual, but it certainly wasn’t the first. They seem to occur more often these days. The walls are showing ineluctable signs of decay, cracks. I don’t recall ever crying like this before I reached my midfifties.

I wonder at what age Flaubert wrote the line above. He died a couple of years before he turned sixty.

Pessoa, more a connoisseur of alienation than even Flaubert, wrote: “I’ve surrounded the garden of my being with high iron gratings—more imposing than any stone wall—in such a way that I can perfectly see others while perfectly excluding them, keeping them in their place as others.”

What a way with words this poet has, what a grasp of images.

I am becoming one of the many things I despised when I was younger, a sentimental fool. These corroding walls can’t even defend me against the predictable emotionalism of bad movies; bad Hollywood movies starring big heroes with bigger motivations now make me cry.

You want bad?
Imitation of Life
with Lana Turner. That manipulative film sank its sappy claws into my heart during a recent viewing.
Terms of Endearment
? I’m embarrassed to admit that it did too.

A few years ago,
The Color Purple
appeared on television after the news. I’d disliked the novel for its lack of subtlety, but it was a study in diaphanous nuance compared to the film, which aired on one of the tertiary Arab satellite stations, maybe Sudanese or Libyan, so even the television picture was mediocre. I couldn’t stop watching. Yes, hating myself for it, I sat through
The Color Purple
in its fuzzily pixilated entirety. When the fallen woman—a former prostitute, once a lesbian, now a married blues singer who used to sing in the choir—leads the sinners back to the bosom of the church, whose pastor is none other than her strict, upright father who has disowned her for her wayward ways but now engulfs her in his forgiving embrace because she enters His demesne singing (wait for it) “Maybe God Is Trying to Tell You Something,” while the gospel choir backs her up, and just in case you and I missed any of the portentous cues careening about the screen, she, the wandering daughter, tells her father, “Even sinners have soul”—when all that happened, every pretense of rationality abandoned me, and I bawled like—well, like a fallen child now redeemed.

Soppy stupid girl, that’s me.

But it’s not just movies. People make me cry as well.

Aaliya, the above, the bellower.

Fadia’s lover, Abdallah, died about fifteen years ago; his heart gave up one evening. A mutual friend called her early the next morning. She had to force herself to listen to the news stoically, as if Abdallah were simply an acquaintance of not much import. Oh, his poor children, she must have been forced to say, his suffering family. She had to wait until she was out on the landing, after the men of the building had left. She had to wait till she was alone among her friends and their coffee.

Can you imagine how lonely she must have felt when she received that phone call? Your lover has just died, your companion has abandoned you, but don’t you dare make an inappropriate sound, because your family is around. No one to touch you the way he did, no one to understand you, no one to hug you to sleep, but don’t dare allow your face to show a glint of grief. The cutting pain of feeling alone amid loved ones.

I was waiting for the kettle to boil when I heard her break. She mentioned that Abdallah had passed away, mentioned it as if in passing, and at first I was shocked that she seemed so casual about it until I understood that she was waiting for Joumana’s husband to leave with Marie-Thérèse’s. The coffee klatsch didn’t react, or at least I couldn’t hear anything from my kitchen window. Then Joumana’s husband and his prework commotion stumbled down the stairs, followed by more racket when Marie-Thérèse’s husband joined him.

The women waited for a few seconds after the men’s departure. Then Joumana and Marie-Thérèse began their comforting, and Fadia uncorked her grief. On the landing, Fadia couldn’t wail, Joumana and Marie-Thérèse had to keep their voices low, but standing at the sink with yesterday’s dishes drying in the wire rack, I heard every word, every whimper, every sob, every susurration. As you might anticipate Joumana and Marie-Thérèse deployed a litany of Lebanese condolences, still trite after so many generations: “God wants him close to His bosom,” “Time heals all,” “You still have your health,” “God will help us.” You’d think this would have been irritating. While crying together, they repeated the platitudes over and over—stupid, worthless, inconsequential, hollow words over and over, signifying nothing and definitely not full of sound and fury. It worked. They wept and grieved.

I wept and grieved in my kitchen, silently so as not to disturb them. I wasn’t able to control my feelings. I’d never met Abdallah, I’d only heard his stories while listening to the women. I felt sorry for him. I felt sorry for Fadia. Like a sentimental teenager, I grieved for a love lost.

Now, I don’t cry at the drop of a hat or at the drop of a bomb. What I’m saying is that I used to be stronger. I didn’t cry when I was a child or a younger woman. The fact that I do now, rare as it is, the fact that I’m unable to control my weeping at these infrequent times, is disconcerting. That’s all.

I’ll have you know that it’s not common.

I’ll admit that I also lost control four years ago when Joumana’s daughter announced to the coffee klatsch that she’d been accepted into a doctoral program at the Sorbonne. Amid the screeching congratulations and ululations on the upper landing, I shared their joy and wept over my gray stone countertop.