Rabih Alameddine - An Unnecessary Woman

Sviatoslav Richter refused to give a concert if his pink plastic lobster was not with him. I used to think it was red — I read it somewhere, a red plastic lobster — but then I saw a picture of it. It certainly looked like a crustacean, oversized pincers, but not like a lobster, or at least not like any lobster I’d recognize. And it was pink, a rose pink, not red.

“I find things confusing,” he said on film.

In this film, Richter: The Enigma , he looked baffled and bewildered, befuddled by life. Bald, bony, ragged, and old, a face that couldn’t face the camera, a face that fully understood what had been lost, what had been given up. He looked real to me. I don’t know if he was a virgin, but he was a homosexual.

Richter spoke to this plastic lobster and felt lost without his companion. If you talked to him without his lobster, he sounded autistic. When he played, though — when he played he could liquefy your soul. He walked on water — well, his fingers did — liquid supple and fluid smooth, running, dripping, flowing.

“I do not like myself,” he said on film.

Once more, I stand transfixed before the mirror in my bathroom. I take out a pair of scissors, shut my eyes for a moment, and cut off a handful of blue hair. As Richter works his mellifluous magic, I snip and weep, snip and weep. He tears my heart. I am a sentimental fool. I cut and cry. Blue hair falls around me, collecting in a wispy cloud on the floor, the halo of a saint encircling my feet.

“For if a woman does not cover her head,” says Corinthians, “she might as well have her hair cut off.” Since no one reads anymore, Bible or otherwise, everyone assumes that Muslims invented the hijab. “Every man who prays or prophesies with his head covered dishonors his head. But every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head — it is the same as having her head shaved.”

Without my hair, I am no longer uncovered. I begin to sweep up the blue clippings on the floor. Slowly, methodically, each movement measured, each distracted, my mind in a fog, I clean and sweep.

In Germany, cut hair used to be wrapped in a cloth that was then deposited in an elder tree days before the new moon. A similar ritual can be found among the Yukon Indians of Alaska. In Morocco, women hang their hair clippings on a tree growing on or near the grave of a wonder-working saint to protect themselves against headaches. In Saudi Arabia and Egypt, they stow the fallen hair away, in a kerchief in a drawer. I sweep it all into the dustpan and dump it in the garbage.

My hair is sheared, lopped off to be exact. It is now white, the frost of old age. I don’t know whether I look like a cancer patient, a Red Brigade terrorist from the seventies, or an avant-garde artist, but I do look new. Since I only used scissors my hair is uneven and choppy. No, I don’t look like any of the above. I look like a Catholic postulant or a novitiate of some obscure monastic order.

I feel lighter, though I know it’s unreasonable to feel so. It’s only hair.

The albatross fell off, and sank

Like lead into the sea.

This evening I will contemplate the world from my bathtub. I’ll soak today away. I’m going to wash my mother right out of my hair. Wash her out, dry her out, push her our, fly her out, cancel her and let her go. I will fill the tub to the brim with cleansing water, rattle the pipes, conduct the Schoenberg symphony of glockenspiels once more. I’ll light a couple of candles for mood. I can’t retrieve those in the maid’s room, so I’ll make do with a couple of stubby ones lying around the bathroom, ugly and functional. Fire and water, I’ll end up with baptism, cleansing, and rejoicing all around.

I will shorten the hours of this evening, for I am tired. I will read, though. I am still more or less sane because of my evening reading.

I will continue with Microcosms this evening.

I sit by the window in my living room. The sky puts on its darkening blue coat. My socked feet join me on the couch, my hands interlock around my knees. Even though I rubbed it dry with my good towel after the bath, my hair still feels wet. Phantom hair syndrome: I touch my scalp and my hair feels dry, but a minute after my hand grasps its partner around my knees, the sensation of wetness returns.

Out my window, all I see is a small section of my street, a cropped rectangle of the building across the way, and my lonesome lamppost. When I was a little girl I wished for a window that would overlook all of Beirut and its universe. Once I was married and in this apartment, my dreams shrank to more reasonable dimensions; I wished for a window on a higher floor, maybe the fourth — Fadia’s apartment instead of mine on the second — wished for a marginally more elevated, slightly more expansive view. These days I wish only that a Finnish or maybe Chinese company would invent some inexpensive utensil to clean the city grime off the outside of my window without my having to strain my back.

I should reread Johnson’s The Vanity of Human Wishes and be admonished once again.

It is fitting that I’m allowed only a glimpse of Beirut’s vista through my window, a thread of a sliver of a slice of a pie. Nostalgists insist on their revisionist vision of a hospitable, accepting city — a peaceable kingdom where all faiths and ethnicities were welcome, a Noah’s ark where beasts of every stripe felt at ease and unthreatened. Noah, however, was a son of a bitch of a captain who ran a very tight ship. Only pairs of the best and the brightest were allowed to climb the plank — perpetuate the species, repopulate the planet, and all that Nazi nonsense.

Would Noah have allowed a lesbian zebra aboard, an unmarried hedgehog, a limping lemur? Methinks not.

Never has my city been welcoming of the unpaired or the impaired.

I never cared for the story of Noah or Edward Hicks’s stilted paintings of Stepford animals.

From what I read tonight in Microcosms : “Why so much pity for the murderers who came after and none for those before, drowned like rats? He should have known that together with every being — man or beast — evil entered the Ark.”

Say what you will about the God of Israel, but consistency is not His forte. He hasn’t been fair to my kind. The One God is a Nazi.

I sit in the dark. And it would be hard to figure out

which is worse: the dark inside, or the darkness out.

I must try to sleep tonight. I must.

Of course I don’t sleep. I don’t recall the entire night’s affair, so I may have dozed off a bit, my usual fare. I bend down to pull on woolen socks and feel every vertebra crack in order as if in a roll call: C1, here; C3, present; T4, yes; L5, I’m here; coccyx, ouch, ouch. All that’s missing is a reveille-playing bugle.

It is much too cold. A chilly tremor runs through my shoulders, chasing away any inclination to sluggishness. I scratch my scalp. Still shorn. I’m not sure I can risk the bathroom mirror this morning.

A night of storms and heavy rain, of bumps and sounds in the dark. I heard floods and sirens outside. Comfortably tucked under three blankets, I heard a ghoul scratch his fingernails on the windowpane, a militiaman fire his machine gun into street puddles. Above me, I heard Joumana murder someone, probably her husband, and drag the corpse around the house in circles over and over while hitting the skull with a Tefal frying pan. Nothing else could have made those night noises.

I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were . . warmer.

I wear my robe over my nightgown and top it off with the burgundy mohair overcoat. I trudge to the kitchen to begin my early morning tea ritual. The apartment smells of damp and rain. The radiators diffuse sputtering heat in spurts. Indoor winter winds interrogate my ankles.