Rabih Alameddine - I, The Divine

Saniya, in blue sweats and tennis shoes, pushed her arms against the wall outside the room, curved her back and stretched her calves. She looked like a Sunday jogger getting ready for a run.

“Are you sure about this?” she asked, softly.

“It’ll give us time to talk.”

“He’s going to sleep soon. I don’t see how you can talk much. You’ll be able to see him as often as you wish when he’s back home.”

In the room across from us, Pavarotti sang on television with Ricky Martin and Mariah Carey, a pre-Millennium concert.

“I rarely spend time alone with him,” I said. “I’d like to tonight. Even if he’s sleeping.”

“Come, walk with me. I need the exercise.” We walked slowly down the corridor, arms entwined, looking discreetly into each room, evaluating each family’s story. “Where’s your son?”

“He called me from McDonald’s half an hour ago. He’s going out dancing tonight. I won’t see him till tomorrow morning.” She was cozy, warm, and comforting.

“You should talk to him about eating too much junk food.”

She stopped when we got to the waiting room, looked outside at a giant green laser dueling the dark sky.

“That’s Beirut 2000,” she said. “CNN says Beirut is the third best place to be for the Millennium, after Paris and Cairo. Everybody has been celebrating for days and it’ll go on afterward too. James Brown is coming.”

“I guess I’ll have to miss that.”

She smiled, cleared her throat. “Is there something you want to tell me?”

“It’ll be fine,” I assured her. “There’s nothing specific I want to talk to him about. I won’t upset him. I just want to be with him.”

“I’ll get my stuff.”

10.

While I was visiting Beirut years ago, my son, my father, my ex-husband, and I went to see The Unbearable Lightness of Being . The war had recently ended, a few old movie theaters had reopened, running on large generators.

“It’s been years since I’ve seen a movie in a theater,” Omar said. Once the film began he worried, considered it inappropriate for Kamal, who slept between opening and closing credits while his father fretted. I sat confused, unable to understand the film, yet enraptured by Daniel Day Lewis and Juliet Binoche.

“Well,” my father said, walking out of the theater, “at least they got the unbearable part right.”

11.

“Close the door,” my father said as he leaned across to the nightstand and withdrew a cigarette and a box of matches from the drawer.

“What are you doing?” I asked and moved quickly toward him after closing the door. “You can’t smoke in here. Give that to me. You’re not even supposed to be smoking.”

I put out my hand, he crossed his arms, hid the offending cigarette behind his underarm.

“Give it to me,” I said.

He shook his head. “Let a dying man smoke in peace.”

“I’ll call the nurse.”

“Who do you think gave this to me?”

I sat on the bed, perplexed. He smiled, realized he had won, and lit up. He took a short drag, his wrinkled, quivering hand covering his mouth.

“When did you start again?”

“I never stopped,” he said, smiling sheepishly. “Don’t worry. I’ll smoke only half.”

Blue smoke curled from the tip, spiraled outward, rising toward the fluorescent lights. He looked at the chair next to his bed, Saniya’s usual seat.

“I’m surprised she lets you smoke.”

“She doesn’t know. No one knows.”

“She knows.”

“I don’t smoke in front of anyone. They all nag too much.” He grinned impishly, arched his left eyebrow. He took a last drag and extinguished the cigarette in the half-empty glass on the nightstand.

“Here,” he said, handing me the glass. “Get rid of the evidence.”

I went into the bathroom, heard him say, “I’m the great deceiver.”

Mark Twain said there are five kinds of actresses: bad actresses, fair actresses, good actresses, great actresses — and then there is Sarah Bernhardt. To paraphrase him slightly, there are five kinds of stories: bad stories, fair stories, good stories, great stories — and then there are Sarah Bernhardt stories.

I was brought up on all kinds of stories, but my favorites were the ones about Sarah Bernhardt. Those stories shaped and molded me. When I examine my life, I am amazed at how much they penetrate every aspect of it.

My grandfather named me for the great Sarah Bernhardt. Like so many men before him, the aforementioned Mark Twain, D. H. Lawrence, Marcel Proust, Henry James, Victor Hugo, and none other than Sigmund Freud (to name only a few), my grandfather was immoderately smitten by The Divine Sarah.

After having already named two girls, my parents had not prepared a name for a third. My father had a name for a boy. He was not to use it. I was born with a little tuft of red hair, direct from my American mother. When my grandfather saw me for the first time, noting the red wisp, he greeted me with, “Welcome to the world, my little Sarah.”

My destiny was written.

I have begun to see my grandfather again, in the most inappropriate places. He has been gone for over twenty-five years, but now I feel him more clearly than ever. I see him with his white hair, the slight comma across his forehead, the black-framed, Clark Kent glasses, the dark tie and pressed white shirt — short sleeves in warm or hot weather, but still a dark tie. I see him in my living room when I am alone, usually sitting across from me, smiling, happy, a smile which, if worn by someone else, I would have considered patronizing and condescending. For lately when I am with him, I am not the anxious, strange, and morbid adult, not my habitual self, but the child he taught to love the world.

I was running from my nemesis, my sister Lamia, across the hallway in our apartment in Beirut. Lamia, a heavy sleeper, had been napping on her bed, deathlike, looking solemn. I talked to her but she would not wake. I breathed on her face but she would not wake. I lit a candle, waited anxious seconds, tilted it, and allowed a tear of wax to drop onto her forehead. She woke. She screamed. I screamed. She lunged at me. I eluded her and ran across the hallway, screaming and laughing, she, screaming and threatening.

My stepmother came out of the kitchen to see what the racket was. I had reached the foyer when the door opened. My grandfather came in and scooped me up in one motion — he lived in a cavernous apartment two buildings down from ours and never knocked or rang the bell when he dropped in. He lifted me up in the air. I yelled with joy. Lamia stopped in her tracks, her eyes boring viciously into us.

“What’s my little troublemaker been up to?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I didn’t do anything.”

My stepmother, pregnant, about to deliver her first child, stepped into the foyer. She moved slowly, purposefully. She looked at my sister Lamia standing rigid, tiny fists balled up, eyebrows bunched together, nitroglycerine about to explode. “What happened, Lamia?” my stepmother asked.

Lamia kept staring at me. Her fiery eyes should have burned me to cinders. She rarely responded quickly or rashly, always deliberately. “Nothing,” she said loudly. “Nothing happened.” She turned around and stormed off to her room. If there was one person she despised more than me, it was my stepmother, the usurper. She could not complain to my grandfather. She hated him because he loved me. She could not even complain to our father, whom she blamed for making our mother vanish into thin air.