Muhammad Abi Samra - Beirut Noir

Despite the shrink’s advice, her mother refused to move the object. Nonetheless, nineteen years earlier, it was she who had brought her daughter for a consultation, on the advice of a friend. She followed her friend’s directions to reach the clinic. After arriving at the top of the street, they passed by an old lady with disheveled hair and too much makeup who was pacing back and forth on the sidewalk. Her comings and goings gave off the smell of cheap perfume.

“If you pass a crazy lady standing on the sidewalk,” her mother’s friend said, “that means you’re there. She rents a flat on the third floor; she’s a nymphomaniac at the end of her career who picks up clients on the street. She’s ugly and she stinks. Since no one wants her, she offers her body — for a fee — to construction workers to jump on after work. From time to time she finds clients who are in greater distress than she is who are interested in her decrepitude.” Then, her mother’s friend added seamlessly, “Avoid the crazy lady, bypass her, and ring for the second floor at the large gate just behind where she is.”

Her mother did as she was told. She pushed her daughter’s wheelchair, climbed up onto the sidewalk, and rang the building’s intercom behind the old lady. The man on the second floor who opened the door to them was charming. A tall man, he had a carefully tended mustache jutting out below severe, dark eyes. A certain intensity radiated from his profile. Hanane remained indifferent to men’s charm. She stared at her feet. The shrink motioned to them to come into the room in which there was a chaise lounge and two armchairs facing a desk, sitting behind which he seemed mostly to be protecting himself against the world. When he invited them to speak, Hanane said nothing.

“Doctor,” her mother said, “for three months my daughter has found it pointless to move, walk, or eat. She remains stuck in the same position — sitting, her eyes staring at her legs. She froze, all of a sudden, on the very same day that my husband bought an hourglass. As soon as he took it out of its package, my daughter stiffened up. At the beginning, she was still walking normally — though more slowly — but nothing foreshadowed her refusal to move at all. It happened suddenly, shortly after the hourglass was bought. In fact, she stopped walking completely when her father died. She abhors her feet. She accuses them of wanting to make her move ahead. The idea of putting one foot in front of the other terrorizes her. She even refused to take part in the funeral procession. We visited practically every doctor in the city and did all the tests you can do. Physiologically, they detected nothing abnormal. She still stares at her legs, repeating endlessly that it’s pointless to insist; she won’t move forward. Sometimes she attacks them, swears at them, and accuses them of wanting to betray her. She screams at them, tells them that she’s going die anyway, that she’s already dead. Other times, she says she’s going to be born later. I don’t understand her delusions at all. Her father’s death made her go mad... Even to sit her down on a wheelchair I had to twist her around...”

The shrink listened to the mother’s speech, his eyes riveted on the barely pubescent girl who gave no sign of life. And what if delusions consist of misunderstanding delusions themselves? He nodded his head before interrupting the mother and proposing that she take a forty-five-minute walk without her daughter. When she came back, he took her aside.

“Ma’am, your daughter suffers from an inversion of time and an inability to adjust her perception of time to its usual standards of measurement. For her, moving ahead is regressing into the past. She moves ahead by going back toward yesterday. In other words, her future has already happened. She speaks of an hourglass sitting on a mantelpiece. It seems that this object is the trigger for this inversion. The sand moving through the vial terrorizes her. For her, it would need to slide from bottom to top. She’s devastated by the idea that time moves forward.”

Her mother understood nothing about this explanation — a future mixed with an inversion of measurements that advance backward toward tomorrow from bottom to top — and even less about the link between the hourglass and her daughter’s illness. Until then, she had connected her daughter’s illness to her father’s death, on January 20th, 1992, a few days after the purchase of the hourglass. Seeing the object was when the troubles with her motor skills became apparent, but her paralysis didn’t declare itself until the funeral. Just a little before, Hanane had struggled to even walk past the hourglass. Each time she came near it her breathing became constricted. Sometimes nausea followed her dizziness. Violent headaches took hold of her. She felt she was being sucked into a hole. Sometimes she’d scream, “No, not inside! Not into the hole! I refuse to move, the past is dead!”

Her father would lecture her: “Have you finished your tantrum? Move on.”

Hanane would stagger forward.

A few hours before he died, on that January 20th of 1992, Hanane struggled really hard to brave the living room door and walk toward the fireplace. Coming right up to the object, she took a deep breath, quickly grabbed it, and put it away in the dresser drawer next to the wall.

When her father came back home, he took off his shoes as usual, breathing a long, satisfied sigh. Then, sprawled in his armchair — one hand on the armrest and the other fingering his rosary — he looked at the fireplace. Seeing the flat surface of the mantelpiece, as empty as it was smooth, his breathing slowed and, without any sound at all escaping from his mouth, a pain in his chest pinned him down right where he was. If it hadn’t been for the sound of the rosary falling onto the marble-tiled floor, her mother wouldn’t have realized that he died. When she saw her husband’s body spread out, his head tilted backward, she moved quickly: she phoned the doctor, called her daughter, phoned the doctor again. Powerless, she’d witnessed the first heart attack in a series that her husband would eventually succumb to that very night.

Hanane observed the scene with equanimity. It was from that day on that she started making preposterous statements, accompanied by reverse body movements her mother couldn’t recognize. It was now impossible to make her put one foot in front of the other. As soon as the period of receiving condolences was over, her mother did two things that to her mind were urgent: she took her daughter to a shrink, and she put the hourglass back in the same spot where her husband had placed it before his death. Superstitious, she associated it with his death and feared that removing it would mean that long years of unhappiness would befall her and her daughter. The shrink indeed had to concede on this point, finding it wise that his patient should stay in contact with some kind of object that measured time, despite the symptoms from which she was suffering.

“Births, I hate births. Out of birthing spasms, my father was born, right before my eyes.” This is how Hanane told the story of her father’s death to her shrink the next day. She pointed her finger behind her to indicate tomorrow and wrote down her next session on pages of her daily planner that had already passed. He stared at her, while her movements remained all entangled, disjointed. Even the war had no impact on how entrenched his patient was. The mounds of dead bodies on TV elicited no compassion in her whatsoever. She feared living much more than dying, and showed no response to destruction. The few times that she revealed any interest in life during these nineteen years were in an effort to not upset her mother. She knew very well that her illness was making her mother sad. She would have really liked to take her in her arms, to tell her to stop calling upon “the Lord’s help in this curse.”