Rabih Alameddine - I, The Divine

Only Love,

Lamia

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Dear Mother,

I should tell you I saw a play there is a week ago and it was realy strange and supposed to be alegorie of civil war and imperialism and people say the play must be banned but the goverment did not understand the play so no ban was given tonight at all. The play attacks the goverment like knife in butter but the goverment is stupid ad doesn’t understand. It is Very hard to say what the play is because it opens with a woman chorus screaming then men chorus screaming and all women wear things like vegetables but men wear things like animals and my husband says this if from a king of lions in new york but I know nothing about that. Then a chorus of people who all die during the war sing together We die, We die, But why we die. I shout because you sing realy bad so they say I need to leave because no one shouts in a theater you see but I say I didn’t know this but I go home anyway and it was better anyway because I made better tea for myself. Do you have theater like this in America?

And I killed another patient today and I know you dont like it when I do this but I did it because it was okay and he is old now and a bad personne and he likes very much drugs and wants more morphine and I gave him more morphine but he wants more and more and more and again and again. His wife calls me all the time every half an hour to make sure he is okay all the time and I say donot call me all the time and I say if there is changes I call her but she calls me more and more and he calls me and buzz me and says what time is it and I tell him. Then there is five minutes and he calls again and says what time is it and I say I’am not a cleaning woman so stop calling now but he calls again and he says he has much pain and wants morphine and he says more morphine because he has more pain and I say I gave you morphine and he wants more you see. He says the morphine is bad and I say not my fault and he says morphine is not good anymore and I say it is good morphine and he say he going to die and I say okay but he says he tells my boss that I am the very worse nurse he ever sees. He is a baby and I say pain don’t kill anyone and stop calling please so he calls me and says I’am ugly and he asks for a pretty nurse. I want to give him so much morphine he flies to see god but then he is happy so I gave him potassium IV and thats better because who knows what happens with morphine. So he start shaken and has heart attach and bye bye blackbeard and he died. I feel good and I relax my shoulder. I know what your thinking now because I know you and you say I need more patience but realy I’am very patient and I don’t kill every first personne and I care for people and I am a good nurse and everybody says I am a good nurse only not the other nurses and doctors but I don’t bother people but people are rude because of the war and no one behaves much. All the rude people come to me because the nurses hate me and send me rude people and its not my fault. I know you understand and one day you will sit me and we will talk and I wil say why all this happens and you will understand and I know you love me but I want you to see everything and not sit in new york and worry about wrong and right you see. I do the best thing for people because I’am solve problem. Okay I have to go make food for the children because if I donot make food no one eats and they will go hungry all the time.

Love,

The Good daughter Lamia.

One of my earliest memories is of the day of my father’s wedding. I remember crying, wanting to ride with him in the motorcade. I must have caused some confusion. After all, Druze tradition says nothing about a bridegroom’s offspring. His three girls stayed behind, waving our brief good-byes to all the men in the cars. They were leaving and bringing back a bride. I was carried by our nanny, Violet, and cried onto her shoulder as the blaring car horns became unbearable.

Sometimes I wonder what it must have felt like for my stepmother. A girl is supposed to be ecstatic on her wedding day. According to tradition, getting married is what we live for. Hope your wedding day is soon , they say. To young girls even, barely ten years old. May we all celebrate your wedding day . What did it feel like for her, though? She waits at her father’s house, all dressed up in white. The men in her family all proud, happy, one less mouth to feed, one less honor to defend. All parade in front of her, congratulating her, sauntering away, getting drunk. All the men happy she is marrying a man of a higher station. Good things to happen for the family. The women ululate, the groom is a doctor. She sits with her back to the window, hears the cars honking, looks back to see the caravan approaching. The ululating grows louder. The men go out to greet the arrivals. A hundred men come out of the cars, some with machine guns. Shots are fired in the air. They scream, they shout, they hail the hero. The groom will be getting some tonight. The men have come to collect their prize. More men shouting, some come into the house. She stands. The strange man, the groom she has met only twice, smiles at her. She walks out with him. Her whole family follows. She rides in the first car with her husband. Her husband’s family follow, and her own family after them.

How did she feel? I cannot begin to imagine.

My father divorced my mother, an American, and repented. He decided to marry a woman according to the traditions of his forefathers. He found himself a much younger girl, not too pretty, not too ugly, never even looked at a man, who would look upon him as her god. A simple girl from a poor, uneducated, mountain family. A girl who had been to Beirut only once even though she lived less than half an hour away.

She arrived home an outsider. She desperately tried to please the family, to belong, but we were already entrenched. We three girls saw her as a usurper, taking our mother’s place. My grandparents saw her as a usurper as well, from a lower-class family pretending to be part of ours. We criticized her cooking, we made fun of her dress. We laughed at her. Even my father did. I remember walking in on her crying in the kitchen. I have to admit I did not feel sorry for her. She was making burghul and had burnt the bottom. It was too late to make anything else because my father had to have his meal at one-thirty every day on the dot. She served the burghul, and for days my father and grandfather made jokes about her new method of cooking, smoking the meals.

Slowly, methodically, she took control of the household, and of the family. She began instilling a discipline unheard of in our home. I rebelled.

Before my stepmother arrived, my father used to teach us girls all kinds of curses, mostly pornographic swear words that would make grown men blush. Whenever his card-playing friends visited, he would trot us out and we would recite our teachings. All would laugh hysterically. In Lebanese, cursing is an art form; I was its Rembrandt. My stepmother was horrified when she heard us. She instilled a no-cursing rule. She took away my main attention-grabbing activity, my star-making vehicle. I saved my best curses for her and was severely punished. In later years, she would adopt a stray African gray parrot who would make my cursing sound amateurish in comparison, a feathered demon who would become in some ways her best friend.

And Polo said: “The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”