"The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother)"

[fiefoe]

Rabih Alameddine's light-footed, light-hearted account of lives conducted with dignity despite what life throws at them is quite a pleasure to read.

• Every now and then, I would ask if she could sit down on the floor between my legs so I didn’t have to stand while dyeing her hair. She refused, of course. I had to suffer for her elegance, she’d say. <> My mother had intimate relationships with mirrors... Mirrors are fleeting, I said, they retain nothing. There was going to be a new her in a few minutes. I began to brush dark into light. A mirror kept no record of metamorphosis.
• I longed for the desire I used to feel for a boy like him when I was younger, a nostalgia of sorts, the deliciousness of hunger, the flush of blood. I longed for longing; I desired desire. I used to get indomitable erections when I saw a stunning guy like him, and as I aged, I’ve slid a spiral from lust to an acute echo of yearning. The helpless longing of a ghost. My mind now titillated by the memory, not the vision.
• The sun was shining, the day absently warm,
• * I begin this story with the lie, and like a great whale leading other sea creatures in her wake, it was followed by a whole pod. I wish I can say I had doubts. I didn’t. I jonahed that whale, swam right through and settled in. Gullibility and I have always been chummy.
• * I began a writing project in Japanese, an essay dealing with taking long walks in Beirut while that civil war was going on... The big hole over there was made with an RPG that missed its target by about twenty meters. I wrote it as a Lebanese stroller dissociating from his surroundings, pretending to be Japanese... A Walk with the Japanese Ghosts of Beirut. Through no fault of my own, it did rather well—okay, it did very well. It became somewhat of a phenomenon in Japan, primarily because of its exoticness. I mean, here was one of those Arabs, barely a level above a brute, who could write a book in our hallowed language... Apparently, I’d spent nine years perfecting the tone that would make the book devastating and excruciatingly poignant, not that I’d spent nine years because I found the language so difficult, nine years trying to light a small fire with the ill-formed, wet branches of my Japanese sentences.
• He compared my book to W. G. Sebald’s works, particularly The Rings of Saturn and, dear lord, Austerlitz... Yes, my book’s narrator was a walker, like Sebald’s, but the tradition of walker-narrators was as old as writing itself. It was true I wrote about the vilification of the other, but that was only concerning Beirut at a specific time. Sebald tackled the whole history of persecution. He was a master, and I a peon. The problem with the comparison was that one of the master’s strokes of genius was his use of nineteenth-century prose, updated of course, to write about the great melancholy of the twentieth century. He used hypotaxis unlike anything I had seen before.
• plastic surgery: My mother turned to her homosexual, nonbreeding son, who happened to be very gullible. I have always been susceptible to my mother’s minor needs and exigencies. I began many a battle feeling indomitable and ended up prostrate and vanquished, my mother’s flag fluttering, its pole staked right through my heart.
• I couldn’t figure out which made me rage more, that my brother was destroying her life or that he, like my irksome father, could turn her, my oak, into a simpering willow.
• We both swiveled to confront each other with only enough space between us for accusing fingers. I could smell her amber and orange flower body lotion, the scent of sumac under her fingernails.
• The table was so immense that if I needed to walk from my living room to the kitchen, I had to squeeze my butt between it and the wall, sliding crablike. I’ve had to have two sets of cleaning utensils—two mops, two pails, two squeegees—one for the kitchen, and one for the rest of the house. To open one of the windows, I would have to either crawl on the table or get to it by going out to the veranda. The monstrosity swallowed any sense my apartment might have had. Feng shui turned to folly. But what can I say, I loved it. Our history was carved into it.
• My kitchen cum dining table lived with nothing between it and the stars, lived happily in the mountains for a while, but, obviously, it wasn’t an ever after—a full happily ever after is unthinkable in Lebanon. After the three contiguous catastrophes, the last days of Ottoman rule, the First World War, and the famine, my mother’s family felt it had no choice but to follow the village river all the way down to its death and dissolution in Beirut.
• What I had always found incredible was that if you trained a caterpillar to do a certain thing, then the butterfly would remember how to do that thing, even though the caterpillar’s brain and nervous system had dissolved and gone through a soup process. So, when my mother’s family tumbled into Beirut leaving their ancestral village behind, they may have lived city lives, may have worked at city jobs, but even after that miraculous transformation, they remained peasants. And I, an heir to all their genes, to all the soup, that is.
• And the worst part was my brother and his wife no longer allowed her to dye her hair because it cost too much and they told her she was too old to worry about her vanity.
• “Why do you have to exaggerate all the time? Always drama. What was your first drag name again?”
  She knew the answer, so I wasn’t going to give her the pleasure of my reply.
  “Hyperbolea, yes, that’s it. The Geisha Hyperbolea, always and forever.”
• Call him and tell him he’s a charmless, heartless, witless, withered soul of a person who suffers from social halitosis and then hang up on him.
• * We lived at peace for a few years, only one fight every week or so, or maybe it seemed harmonious compared to what was to happen after. Self-delusion was our sustenance. Not just the two of us, but the whole country. Living under avaricious and murderous governments that had replaced other avaricious and murderous governments, bordered by more avaricious and murderous governments, denial of reality became a mode of survival.
• Lebanon is a nation of thieves; what the eye sees the hand filches. In the fall of 2019, news began to leak that the Lebanese banks had run out of money. Why? Because members of all branches of the government had been stealing everything... Our pilfering government trickle-truthed us. The process of realizing that my savings were gone lasted a month or so, yet it felt sudden.
• After a two-hour wait, we were told the bank wasn’t going to open. I went back to work. My mother simmered on high dudgeon. She talked to Aunt Yasmine, whose family was in worse financial shape than we were. Aunt Yasmine had a friend who was best friends with our bank manager’s secretary, a Miss Zainab, and got us an appointment with her at ten in the morning... I could see my mother through the glass under flickering fluorescents, her legs intertwined with those of a tumbled chair, her arms gesticulating wildly, her purse swinging an arc, trying to make herself look bigger, what a naturalist would call a deimatic display, an insane one.
• bank manager hadn’t provided the employees with any security that day, Miss Zainab said, and my mother began to commiserate with her, cursing bank managers and all politicians. Within a few moments, my mother was on the other side of the desk comforting a sobbing Miss Zainab. My mother wouldn’t allow any harm to befall her, she would make sure all the men outside behaved themselves, nothing untoward would happen to the secretary, but was there any cash in the bank that my mother could withdraw because we needed the money,
• Through the years, I studied the transformation, in newspaper photos, on television, from murdering hoodlum to militiaman to patriot to politician, a well-trodden path taken by everyone at the top.
• * weren’t the Lebanese amazing because we always recovered. Civil war, no problem. Israeli invasion, no problem. Syrian invasion, no problem. Financial collapse, please. Our people were the most irrepressible, so we shouldn’t blame the government for repressing.
• * “I’m so scared,” she said. “So scared. You wouldn’t survive a day without me. Why, if I go away for one hour, Monet and Manet will scratch out your eyes. Each one of them takes one eye. You’ll become blind like Oedipus, except you didn’t kill your father and you certainly can’t marry me. You make a stupid Oedipus, if you ask me.”
• “You can’t go to your room,” she said. “How can I not speak to you if you’re not here for me to not speak to?”
• Yusef was utterly comfortable with his queerness. He wore his femininity like a favorite pair of runners, and his classmates seemed to adore him. I liked and envied him.
• * Rawi: “She was probably the oldest person there. Every time a policeman came close, she’d ask him if his mother knew what he was doing.”.. Her favorite sign though, which few people understood, simply said, “Don’t Make Me Bring My Son to the Next Demonstration.”
• “You can’t accept a gift from one of my students,” I yelled. “I will not allow it.” <> “Be quiet,” she said. “I already accepted. And it’s not a gift, since I promised Mirna a jar of my homemade lamb fat to give to her grandmother. It’s a barter. I like Mirna.”
• Covid: No cars, no pollution—the city was usually crowned with a veil of dust and dirt, but the mourning shroud had been lifted. Beirut was delivered from itself. Its sparrows, starlings, and pigeons flew the skies unencumbered,
• my mother used conversations in a myriad of ways, and for many reasons. During the walks, she talked to everyone to ease anxieties, hers and her listeners’. Obviously, I’m not suggesting she did that with me. And she used different tones with women and men. With the former, my mother spoke gently, almost conspiratorially. The women weren’t exactly talking as much as massaging each other with words. Platitudes and commiseration as shiatsu and aromatherapy. All she could do with men was to provide an ear.
• she met the woman who would, the one who would become my mother’s friend, Madame Taweel. Only my mother would find a mentor at eighty-two, let alone the most inappropriate one.
• * I tried to be discreet earlier because I’d promised him then that I wouldn’t tell anyone. However, one must sacrifice discretion if it undermines a story. Would you believe two young men spent so many nights in a corridor, threatened by obliteration at any moment, while the hounds of Hades barked outside, and didn’t have sex?... Mansour offered the greatest of gifts. He was a magnificent mechanic. He refurbished a small diesel generator, installed it on my balcony, and left clear instructions on how to care for it. I still use his generator to this day, the only one I’ve ever owned... Basically, Mansour’s true gift was that in the last forty years, I was able to avoid dealing with the diesel-generator mafias.
• It wasn’t long before a seated woman spoke to no one in particular, but loud enough for everyone in the room to hear, “I was planning on making ice cream this afternoon.” The seal perked up. My mother was disappointed that he didn’t flap his short arms. “Pistachio, of course,” the woman said. “That’s my specialty. Learned to make it from my mother, except I use both salep and clotted cream. I don’t make it often, so I don’t scrimp. And today’s heat inspired me to try for the best ice cream ever. But I can’t make it without power.”...A woman next to my mother spoke softly to another, “I’m glad she volunteered. I was about to offer my German chocolate cake, but I don’t feel like baking today.”
• I was getting ready for work. No power this early in the morning.
• A spring sky that lacked nuance, a spotless blue that matched my mother’s favorite dress 
• She looked like a Valkyrie back from a day spa, tall and oddly shaped, big-breasted and big-thighed, with a ridiculously small waist, like the number eight, like eternity.
• “Well, I am dangerous,” Madame Taweel said. <> “You’re not dangerous,” my mother said. “You’re just tall.”... I once told Madame Taweel she was a squall that uprooted our life. She hit me with her obnoxious laugh, telling me my mother was the category-five storm that uprooted hers. Both were storms that created hurricanes and I was the bewildered tumbleweed floating every which way they blew. Later, they would endlessly rehash their fortuitous first meeting... Into intimacy they dove. My marriage was a disaster, not as bad as mine, at least you go on walks with your son, I can’t bear the company of my offspring,
• “How can I forgive them if I can’t recall them?” I asked, turning to go to my room. All neighborhood hoodlums exhibited the same sociopathic machismo with varying degrees of scintillation. How could I possibly tell them apart? They were all one blob. Should I just issue a general pardon to all men?
• * Only one of the four became popular, Seven Geishas, where I recreated Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai—an abridged version, of course—and I played all the roles. I wrote, directed, produced, and shot the whole thing in my second bedroom with my Super 8 and a stupid tripod. Costumes, makeup, fabulousness, all me. And it was a disaster, bearable only if you had a fondness for camp... their tiny brain would process what they were seeing as the greatest art, and bang, Seven Geishas would come alive once more, a revenant. And my mother and Madame Taweel watched it about a dozen times. <> Madame Taweel: “Do his students know about this?” <> Raja the Gullible’s Tormentor: “All of them do. Apparently, they have an initiation ritual that has been going on for decades where his graduating classes have a party for his incoming students and watch the movies together. .. My mother: “Don’t you think I’ve tried? He always wants to teach me philosophy, Nietzsche this, Kant that, whereas when I ask him to teach me something useful like how he does his insane eye shadows, he harrumphs as if that’s beneath him.”
• You thought I’d forgotten about the email that started this tale, didn’t you? I assume you probably have. A tale has many tails, and many heads, particularly if it’s true. Like life, it is a river with many branches, rivulets, creeks, and distributaries. I’ll get to everything, I swear.
• My memory is a god, and I, its servant.
• My mother made us olive oil and za’atar sandwiches... The sandwiches might have been plain, she explained, but science had proven what every Lebanese had known for generations: Za’atar expanded mind vessels and made you smarter.
• When my father walked in on me, asking me what I was doing. I explained that the Ford and the Mercedes were visiting the English Jaguars, who would serve their guests tea, of course. I even had all the cars munching on imaginary cucumber sandwiches. Enid Blyton had taught me all about finger sandwiches with tea.
• It was an oven-impersonating August.
• I was always Raja. <> “Calm down, brazier of my heart,” she said. “I will tell you, and you all have to listen.”
• Aunt Yasmine thought it was wonderful that I loved wrestling, that I should wrestle Nahed, and hopefully regain some of the honor my father had lost while backing the nice guy. I was confused... I was told to stand in front of Nahed, and when Aunt Yasmine said the word, I was to try and take Nahed down. I wasn’t sure what take her down even meant, but I didn’t have time to ask or think about it because Aunt Yasmine said the word and Nahed jumped on me.
• They had fewer things in the living room, fewer unnecessary things. I loved that. You could see where everything was. There was nowhere for a mouse to hide. My family was partial to excess in almost every form.
• * I dropped to my knees to examine it, the first bonsai I’d ever seen. I thought it a glorious contradiction, imprisoned and tortured yet regal and utterly gorgeous. I had this inexplicable urge to pet it. Its grace ravished reason... I was sure that Japan would be the one country that would be the direct opposite of Lebanon in every way I could imagine.
• I was technically a teenager, but still in the stammer of adolescence.
• “We bought this couch so whoever was guarding Joe would be able to sleep. We spent three weeks planning this abduction. We cleaned this place up. We got some kitchen­ware and filled the pantry. .. But then oops, poof. Now you get the benefit of the investment.”
• * He was the one who had to set up the apartment for hostages, he said. He had to surreptitiously find out from his mother what was needed, particularly when it came to the quantities of dry goods, or olive oil, just as an example.
• A Lebanese belly dancer is somewhere in between, relying primarily on hip movements, similar to the Tahitian. The Lebanese Dabkeh, a dance for both men and women, relies on staccato feet movement.
• On the fifth day of my captivity, my jailer brought to me a bottle of hair conditioner (I’d asked for that) and a stupid magazine called Monday Morning that was three years old (I certainly didn’t ask for that).
  On the sixth day of my captivity, my jailer brought to me a sack of rice, a can of tuna, and three bottles of Pepsi Cola, and I hated cola, so I screamed at him for thirty minutes that just because he liked cola didn’t mean I did.
• “Everyone is trying to kill each other out there and you want me to look for cat toys?”
  “Wash my clothes,” he said. “You have nothing to do, so wash.” <> “Just because you’re busy killing people doesn’t mean I should do your laundry.”
  “We don’t have butter, only olive oil.” <> “Which is better for eggs with pomegranate molasses. Wait till you taste my mother’s pomegranate. It’s divine.”
  “You can’t threaten me while smiling,” I said. “If you want me to take your threat seriously, you have to make a menacing face or something, maybe like Dracula before he sucks your blood, not the way you do it, like a happy Mickey Mouse.” <> “It’s a good thing I like you, because you’re so unlikable.”
  “Because I’m happy,” he said, with a mischievous lilt in his voice. “Don’t ruin it. Follow my lead. Let’s dance, Micheline.” <> We moved again. He squeezed my ass again and again. Weirdly, his butt-squeezing kept a better beat than he did. One, two cha cha squeeze; one, two cha cha squeeze. Our dancing was terrible, but he was having fun.
• Those in French first: Crime and Punishment, Memoirs of Hadrian, and then Story of O. “This one to give you some ideas.” Then the ones in English: A Tale of Two Cities, Love Story, Valley of the Dolls, and with a big flourish, War and Peace. “This one should, what was it, engage you for a while.”
  Treasure. These were gallons of water after spending so much time in a desert. I wanted to hide them under the bed to keep them safe.
  He took the red dress out of the bag.
  “Put this on,” he said.
  “Now? Can’t I look at the books first?”
  “I want you in this dress.”
• We slid into the furrows of routine.
• He looked so happy. His smile felt uncontrolled, like it could fly up to the ceiling... “I fucked Micheline,” he said. “I finally did it. I didn’t need to dance. I just fucked her.”
• “She’s a person, you rat. And what am I? An anthill you can shove your dick into whenever you like.”
• * “She’s threatening people. She now comes into command yelling at everyone. Today they refused to open the door for her, and she broke a window. She threw a huge rock through the window. She could have hurt somebody.” <> “That can’t be my mother. She wouldn’t do anything like that. My father would never allow her to do anything, let alone something like that. She’s the most timid human in the universe... I had to lie to command and tell them I wasn’t stupid enough to call her and tell her you were alive, but I’m not sure anyone believes me. It’s a mess and it’s all your fault.”
• It had always been difficult to assess a sound’s distance or direction from within the apartment. I was within an enclosed womb within an enclosed womb. Echoes thrived.
• I knew, like every Beiruti, that I would be able to find my way if I were to reach the sea. The smell and feel of salt in the air, the undulant pulse of the sea, would lead me to the Mediterranean, and the perpetuity that is the Mediterranean would lead me home.
• And I looked down, noting that I was indeed wearing a dress, having forgotten all about it—a nice dress, too, the red one. It didn’t go well with my sneakers, though.
• With each step I took, the heat of August made the air change color: sky blue, rosy, scarlet, white, transparent. One could ladle the humidity... The summer must have been exceptionally hot and humid, oppressive enough that the bougainvillea that was only huge last summer bloomed dragon-sized, spilling friendly fire.
• * “She said you’ll understand. She asked me to tell you she would break the world for you.” <> And the world was broken, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again. You could say a civil war that would last for fifteen years crumpled everything, but truly, it was the dress that did. The fact that I reentered the world above wearing a simple summer dress and sneakers, and carrying a cat no less, was a devastation.
• The third in the concatenation of calamities. <> The fear that bad luck or disasters happen in threes, triskaphobia or triophobia, is said to have started during the First World War with what was called third light: the unlucky third person to light a cigarette from the same match. (A sniper sees the first light, takes aim on the second, and fires on the third.)
• * My right arm reached to stop my mother’s rattan from falling backward, which it was because my mother, dismissing senescence and reclaiming agility she’d lost no less than forty years earlier, had jumped off her chair and placed her body between the world and me. <> It arrived. And what an explosion it was, a great, discordant blow from Gabriel’s horn... My hand, still holding her chairback, raised above my head. The mini speaker singing Montserrat Caballé arias jumped off the balcony to its death, Tosca-style.
• * We were lucky. We were protected by the buildings across the street and our windows were open. The apartment above us had all theirs shatter because they had their air-conditioning working. The one below had only two windows left standing. You could say that Madame Taweel’s providing the building’s generator with lower-cost diesel ended up costing more.
• The largest nonnuclear explosion in history.
• “Your mother thought you might be hungry, and Madame Taweel suggested that Mounira cook for you,” the big thug said, his voice filled with nothing if not high admiration. “She began working for the boss last week.”... I assume I don’t have to tell you it was incredible. Leg of lamb with rice and sauteed nuts and spices that could penetrate any cell.
• “Think about this,” Madame Taweel said. “You can curse her every day, call her all kinds of names, and she won’t remember, and you can do it again and again. Therapeutic, if you ask me.” <> “I can’t tell which of you is worse than the other,” I said. “You’re like two butts in the same pair of knickers. Why are you helping my mother with this?
• My mother claimed both her mother-in-law and sister-in-law treated her with no little disdain until she did what every traditional wife had to do to gain respect. She provided my father with his first son, my brother.
• * Within minutes, more of my neighbors showed up with brooms, and lots and lots of garbage bags. The butcher Abou Sami had a huge dustpan, thankfully. The grocer; the three concierges; my neighbors from the second floor, the husband, the wife, and their two daughters; the neighbors from across the street. We all swept. No one talked much, or even said hello—a silent, synchronized cleaning. Odette Y., on her knees, scoured the tiles with a steel-wool scrubber and an oven cleaner of all things. We would walk on sparkling ground.
• And yes, I admit to having had sex with Kamal that first year. It was a mistake, even though it happened toward the end of the year. What can I say, at that age, my libido vampired me.
• port explosion: Like a sudden rainstorm appearing out of nowhere, veils of sorrow overwhelmed my heart. I had lived through a civil war, I had crossed the infamous green line of Beirut several times, but nothing—nothing had prepared me for what I saw. As if the war years, the numerous Israeli bombings, the Syrian destruction, the car bombs, were lease installments to the lords of grief, but now the balloon payment was due.
• Shards and scraps and blood covered everything. My gaze relinquished one atrocity for another, one horror for another. And people—people like me who came to see, standing in groups or not, together yet all alone. We, the shocked, the horrified, too stunned to do anything but gawk. <> Ours is a tale of unremitting death, violence, and destruction, narrated with apathy.
• a light but firm touch. I was forced to open my eyes. Of course it would be one of my students, Randa, the impressive Randa, whom I had not seen since she graduated more than thirty years ago, the attorney who became my mother’s friend during the demonstrations, possibly the last person I would want to see me in this state. I tried—I desperately tried to control myself, but she was so beautiful and her new blue Adidas sneakers were covered in newer dust and everything was so wrong and if I had thought my predicament couldn’t get worse I was wrong because she leaned over and hugged me and wouldn’t let go and I was Alice-lost in grief. I was lost, and I lost the battle of maintaining any dignity.
• I noticed her short, well-manicured nails, chartreuse, and I was envious. I’d always loved that color, considered it both beautiful and ugly, yet I’d never tried it as nail polish during my geisha days.
• Nahed: “I’m trying to say I’m sorry,” she said. “I promise I’ll do my best to find somewhere else to stay, but in the meantime, I don’t want to impose further by making you pretend you’re okay with all this. I don’t want you to have to lie.” <> “I’m not lying,” I said. “Not in this case. You don’t have to apologize for staying here. I would do the same if I were you. My mother is the one who needs to apologize. Your brothers need to apologize. You and your mother have a lot to answer for, but not for coming here.
• It took less than a minute for me to start moaning ecstatically. It took less than a minute for her to realize she no longer needed to watch her step around me, that she could stomp on me, and I’d allow it. I began to understand why so many believed in heaven. And we began to talk—well, she talked a lot more than I because my face was usually buried in the pillow. We talked about everything, not just catching up, but explaining ourselves, trying to understand ourselves. With every knot she worked on, she would release pain and endorphins, feelings and stories.
• She accused me of stealing her Barbie dolls. I didn’t. She gave me one and I didn’t get to play with it. I didn’t think she liked playing with dolls. She most certainly did, though not in the traditional way. She liked rubbing Barbie on her vagina.
• I showed the bird to my mother, telling her I was going to call it Raja because it reminded me of you. She wound her arm back to slap me but stopped midway. She told me I was too old to be slapped anymore and that I shouldn’t name an animal after you. But you were a broken bird, so terrified most of the time.” <> I certainly was terrified as a child, like many gay boys of my generation.
• I read Dostoyevsky, of course. I read all his novels, one after another, and then reread them. He made me feel supersmart. That was his great talent, making teenage boys feel righteous. At that age, and only at that age, I considered his philosophical questions to be deep and poignant, and the fact that I understood them meant I was superior to everyone. Please remember that my brother’s greatest intellectual achievement during those years was turning up his shirt collar in the back.
• * I wouldn’t speak to my mother. And of course she forced me to reveal what was troubling me. I shouldn’t worry, she said. I could give Mrs. Murata the army address of her brother-in-law, Aunt Yasmine’s husband. The books would be certain to arrive there. No postal worker, or anyone else for that matter, would dare steal from an officer... I received a wonderfully encouraging letter from Mrs. Murata as well as all thirteen novels, the novellas, and the short stories in Japanese. She not only refused payment but would continue to send me books on a regular basis for the rest of her life. Obviously, my mother insisted I send her thank-you notes as well as little gifts whenever I could.
• * “I’ve always loved you,” he said, “and always will.” <> “And that matters to me because?” I realized I was about to lose it just as I did. My veins swelled and distended. “I stopped giving a damn about you on the day you left. You think I’m going to care now, forty-six years later? Get over yourself.” I was screaming, gesticulating like a maenad, performing a bizarre play in the middle of a long road leading nowhere, in Virginia of all places. “What has you loving me got to do with me?”
• I shrieked, “You should have finished your baccalaureate in Lebanon instead of coming here and becoming a cowboy. Even stupid Sartre would have helped you.” I was yanked backward by my shirt collar. “Even Nietzsche could have pointed you in the right direction, and that’s saying something.” Firas dragged me around to the passenger side. “You’re a cliché,” I screamed at Boodie.
• Once someone was delivered into medical hands, they were drained of both individuality and dignity. No nurse or doctor said anything directly, but they weren’t doing much more than pain management, awaiting her final breath. My mother called Aunt Yasmine’s sons, who promised to fly from Saudi.
• “Stop it,” she said. “You’re so frustrating at times, and annoying. The idea that forgiveness as a cure for everything is silly, but—”
  “She said if I forgive him my life will open like a flower. A culture that serves and protects the perpetrators of crimes will always try to convince its victims that they will feel better if they forgive and move on.”...
  “I’m not trying to tell you forgiving him is good for you.” I loved the way she nodded her head whenever she wished to make a point. “Maybe I’m saying that if you’re able to forgive him it will make him feel better. Is that so bad? I mean you forgave my mother. Why can’t you forgive him?”...
  “Yes, it is,” I said. “It is for me. You think working things out with him could be helpful for me, but that assumes I can deal with going over the hell I went through. I can barely manage my life as it is, and you think opening Pandora’s box is worth the risk because he will feel better? I should suffer over and over again to make him feel better and maybe after all my suffering, I might heal in time. You shouldn’t be defending him.”
• * You, my mother, everyone assumes that the kidnapping traumatized me. It didn’t, or at least not much. Some things during those two months were horrific, but quite a bit of that experience was exhilarating. I’m not going to bring up Sartre again, I promise, but let’s say that in some way, I felt free in that situation. Maybe even happy. What was traumatic was returning to this reality. I ascended from the underworld into a world, into a culture, that would do everything in its power, everything in its considerable power, to crush me. Being with him in the garage allowed me to set the boulder aside for a moment.
• “I didn’t say I can’t. I choose not to. I wasn’t hurt because he kept me hostage. I was hurt because I realized I couldn’t participate in a system that seeks to destroy people like us. I had to resist, to live life my own way. He chose to take part in that murderous system, decided to wallow in that pig trough, and continues to do so to this day. From the beginning, he chose war. He chose to kill people who were not like him to fit in. I’m sorry he’s not happy now, but I’m not asking for him to apologize, nor do I want to forgive him.
• The gray roots had begun to make their monthly appearance. It would have been time to help dye her hair.
  I wished for a different day, for a day of snow and frost, for a thunderstorm to end all storms, for the sky to unzip itself and release, but it was August.
  I lay by her side. I tried for a last hug, but it was impossible. It felt all wrong. A sourness. I couldn’t touch her. I couldn’t.
  The world should have raged, raged.
• “We wanted to bring Miriam, but she’s coming with her class at three,” she said. “We thought we’d get here before the rush. We tried to organize all the parents who are coming, but we’re not as good at WhatsApp as the kids are.”
  I sat down, knowing I was about to weep. My mother did this, and I wanted to kill her again and again.
  “How many are coming?” I asked Nahed.
  “A lot,” she said. “I told you yesterday. It’s August. So many are back in the country for the summer holiday.”
• Sylvie pointed at another ex-student, gray-haired Omar, who waved at me from across the room, looking as if he was a teenager once more. “That one’s greatest accomplishment is having married my sister, class of 2000,” she said. “Except he took her with him to Australia, and they only come to visit every couple of summers.”
  “I wanted her to come with me,” Omar with the historical nose said from across the room, “but she wanted to come with her class.”
• * I broke down with the fourth group, 1986, my first official class. I was doing fine, I really was. I had better control of my feelings. Randa even joked that there were only seven of them downstairs, so they were all squeezing into the elevator. I thought she was standing up to greet them, but then a lightbulb moment—she was one of them. I couldn’t explain why her walking over to line up and pay respects with her class tore my heart. They looked so elegant, so gorgeous, all eight of them. I couldn’t bear it... And if I thought things couldn’t get worse, they most certainly did. The rest of her class—Janane, Joumana, Amer, Hani, Sofia, Mohammad, and Basma—decided that it was appropriate to have a group hug. Insufferable.
• And somewhere along the line, all my ex-students decided it was quite okay to hug or kiss me, and there was no way I could stop these heinous acts without causing a scene. My cheeks had been tenderized with all the damn kissing.
• To the guy trying to blackmain Raja: But then this wasn’t enough for her. She followed him down the stairs, mind you, while trying to take off her other shoe to send it flying his way. She stumbled and broke her leg. It wasn’t a major break, a hairline fracture or some such thing, but at her age, she had to wear a cast for six weeks. Of course, she thought it was completely worth it.”