Other Lives by Iman Humaydan

I’ve crossed the threshold of forty; I’ve started putting on make-up before leaving the house. But despite all this, I think that I haven’t changed that much and that everyone will still recognize me. I’m sure they’ll recognize me by my big, black eyes… that’s what I think, but perhaps I’m wrong. Does my face truly betray me? It’s true, I haven’t endured what others have… does my long absence betray me? Do I seem so strange because I don’t share this collective memory? A memory that should show in my movements, the way I walk, and my speech. Did the intensification of violence during my absence distance me this much from the people I love? Did it deprive me of all intimacy and collective memory? Does absence not merely erase the memory of the absent person, but also the memory of the person waiting for her?
    She wouldn’t leave with us. She says that life here is no different than people’s lives elsewhere. Though she’s never traveled, she can imagine the cities of the whole world. She can imagine the people there—how they cross the streets and wear their clothes and what they eat. She doesn’t need to go anywhere to understand all that, she sees it all from her spot in her mountain house. After the death of my grandfather Hamza, Nahil returned to this mountain house and stayed here, leaving the house in Zuqaq al-Blat to my father. She carries the whole world in her soul without ever changing her location. She never goes to see anything. She says that she can imagine everything. She invents her own pictures from the news and the images on the television that she has finally allowed into her room. I return and find Nahil exactly as I’ve imagined her, surrounded by religious books handwritten in a large script I can’t decipher. She is sitting in her bed, the Hikmeh in her hands. It wasn’t easy for her to get a hold of this book—when my grandmother requested a handwritten copy of the Hikmeh, the presence in the house of a Christian, Olga, created some difficulties for the Druze religious men. I’ve never turned the pages of the Hikmeh in my life. My mother had one but it disappeared when we left the house in Zuqaq al-Blat after my brother Baha’’s death. The bombs started falling on the roofs of the buildings and we had to flee our home to take refuge in the house in the mountains. We left, taking nothing with us except a few clothes, our passports and the documents that we needed to travel.
    I come back and find Nahil unchanged, as if she hasn’t grown older. A mild case of Parkinson’s, which comes and goes, restricts her movements. When it comes on, her whole body shakes and she can’t be still. Her head jerks awkwardly to the left and right, her tongue gets thick but she insists on talking. She hasn’t changed, though she’s started covering her head with a long, white mandil. In my memory, she’s a woman who never covered her head, her thick, wavy hair that’s a color between gray and black. She would go out without her head covered even in the winter, leaving her white mandil draped over her shoulders. She went out like that, in front of people, without a care and then came back all wet, soaking from head to toe. Her face would glow a little then return to normal, though deep in her womb a little climax had burst forth, then just as quickly dried up and disappeared. She wasn’t afraid of anyone and in fact felt she was stronger than everyone else. Perhaps these feelings were simply the result of what people used to say about her. She could be stronger than everyone else because they knew about her powerful curses. “God save us from Nahil’s curses!” is what people said. They’d say this and repeat the famous tale about the army officer her curses killed.
    This was in 1958, when a soldier entered the house by force to arrest my father and interrogate him about a