Learning english, p.1
Learning English, page 1
Learning English
First published in 2007 by
INTERLINK BOOKS
An imprint of Interlink Publishing Group, Inc.
46 Crosby Street, Northampton, MA 01060
www.interlinkbooks.com
Copyright © by Rachid al-Daif 2007
Translation copyright © by Paula and Adnan Haydar 2007
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise with out the prior permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Da’if, Rashid.
[Lirningh Inghlish. English]
Learning English / by Rachid Al-Daif ; translated by Paula and Adnan Haydar.
—1st American ed.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-1-56656-674-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-56656-674-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
I. Haydar, Paula, 1965– II. Haydar, Adnan. III. Title.
PJ7820.A46L5713 2007
892.7'36—dc22
2006031354
Printed and bound in the United States of America
To request our complete 40-page full-color catalog, please call us toll free at 1-800-238-LINK, visit our website at www.interlinkbooks.com, or write to Interlink Publishing
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e-mail: info@interlinkbooks.com
Works available in English by Rachid al-Daif:
Dear Mr. Kawabata
Passage to Dusk
This Side of Innocence
That was all I needed. To hear the news of my father’s murder by chance! Two whole days after it happened. After his funeral and after his burial were already over!
He was killed at noon on Saturday, buried Sunday afternoon, and I didn’t hear about any of it until noon on Monday.
I was in Beirut, at the Café de Paris as I usually am every day at noon. A friend, who was sitting beside me, suddenly stopped reading his newspaper to ask me with shock who Hamad D. was in relation to me.
“My father,” I said, and he was even more shocked. Then, with a mechanical motion, he handed me the paper to read. The item appeared in the daily police record. A few terse words in tiny print like some bit of scattered news hardly worth mention:
TEL SQUARE, ZGHARTA, shortly after noon Saturday, Hamad D. (age 60) was murdered, a case of blood revenge.
I stood up from my chair like a madman.
“Really?” I exclaimed.
When my friend saw how upset I was, he tried to make me feel better by saying, “Couldn’t there be someone else with that name?”
I didn’t answer. I appeared even more shocked and upset, so my friend said, as if trying to apologize for the unintentional damage he had caused me, “Are you sure he’s your father?”
Oh God!
He killed me with that question. He blew my mind with that question.
Could he have felt something, or sensed something, even though he had absolutely no idea? He knew no more about me than what any other coffee shop acquaintance knew. Or had he sensed certain reverberations about me and repressed them all these years only to have them suddenly leak out now from the shock?
No!
If he knew something or had suspicions, then he wouldn’t have asked me that question, because coming from someone who had knowledge about such matters (particularly such matters) such a question would lead to very serious consequences.
(Oh God! Innocence and lack of knowledge can cause so much harm!)
But what should my friend matter to me now? Whether he knew something or not, it didn’t change the fact of what had happened, and the fact was my father was murdered, and even more importantly, he was given a funeral and was buried in my absence and without my knowledge.
How could that possibly be?
Had my uncles seen in my father’s murder a golden opportunity to take revenge on my mother, and on me, too? Or had they all been in on the plan, my mother and my uncles, to take revenge on me in this cruel manner? Otherwise, how could it be?
How could no one have told me? When I’m right here in Beirut, a mere phone call away from Zgharta, or an hour by car on a Saturday afternoon when the traffic to Beirut is light? There is not a single means of communication available in Lebanon that I’m not registered for. I have a regular phone line at my house, and a cell phone—and let me point out that I was one of the first people to register for that cell phone, a good six months before cell phones came into common use in 1995. And I have Internet access, too, and love everything to do with computers and anything digital; I’m enchanted by all of that. I sometimes spend all my monthly savings on it. The easiest thing in the world is to get in touch with me, easier than reaching the absolute majority of people, including the privileged, the well-to-do, and even the ruling class who hold the country’s future in their hands. So how come I wasn’t informed?
Furthermore, I left my house hardly at all those two days, not at night or during the day, and when I did leave for a couple of hours I left my answering machine on and I know it was working, because several messages were left on it Saturday and Sunday and I listened to them without any problem.
So how could this be?
Had time run its course all these years just to finally come around and prove that those nightmares I lived in fear of, especially in my early youth and adolescence, actually had a basis? Were actually based in fact? Could it be that what I thought were just “things” everyone else forgot about, even if I continued to struggle with them alone, were actually on the minds of everyone around me, especially my uncles?
“Calm down, Rashid!” I said. There’s no reason to assume the worst. Certainly it is incredible for your father to be murdered and for no one to inform you, but that’s all it is: your father was murdered and no one told you. Nothing more, nothing less. It’s not revenge, or banishment, or a disowning. So don’t go opening up closed cases no one cares about anymore but you—there is nothing that merits doing that. Your friend’s question had to do with the uncomfortable situation he found himself in; he did not mean anything by it. He asked you that question, not because he wanted to know if you were sure the man who was murdered was really your father, but to apologize for the pain he had caused you, and to convey his wish that the news wasn’t true, that it wasn’t your father who had been killed. His question was an attempt to get out of a predicament he suddenly found himself in involuntarily and unknowingly. It was not a direct result of your not having been informed about the incident, and the relationship between that and whether your father is really your father. Moreover, he did not deduce whatsoever from the appearance of the news item or from your reaction to it that your mother and your uncles did not inform you of your father’s murder, for there was nothing that inferred such a deduction. The only thing a person could possibly deduce was that your father was murdered and you didn’t know. That’s all, so calm down! Take it easy. Get a grip on yourself, because the victim was your father, and the motive was revenge, and that gives rise to consequences, and you know very well what they are.
I was in complete shock.
It’s no simple matter to lose your father, but it’s even worse for him to be murdered, and then for you to find out about it in this way—in a coffee shop, by chance. I tried to get hold of myself but the shock and surprise were stronger than I was, and I was overcome. My usually calm and quiet nature did not succeed in stopping the feeling that my head was spinning around a hundred revolutions per minute. It was as if my brain had multiplied and now I had many brains, each one working independently and in a different direction. It was as if the world had lost consciousness, or simply disappeared.
From the coffee shop to my house I walked on a sidewalk that had disappeared, to a place that had disappeared, in the middle of a day that had disappeared, amidst human beings who had disappeared and cars that had disappeared. The clamor was without sound, and sound itself had no chord to sound on.
Some sort of instinct, whose nature I cannot explain, led me to my house.
That’s why the first thing I had to do was take a tranquilizer to help me get back in control and consequently back home right away so I could make some necessary phone calls before heading to Zgharta without delay. Tranquilizers are a sort of habit of mine, but only in very stressful situations. I’m not addicted to them—I just use them when I need them is all, which is not very often, only a few times in a whole year.
On my way from the café I stopped at a drugstore located at the entrance to the building where I live and bought some low-strength Ativan (one milligram). And I asked the young pharmacist for a glass of water, too. That confused her, as she knew I lived in the same building. No doubt she wondered about this need of mine that was so urgent I couldn’t bear a few more seconds, which was the amount of time it would take to go up the few flights of stairs to my apartment. But after some hesitation she fulfilled my request. I took one pill and left.
I’m actually a very calm man by nature, with or without the tranquilizer that is, but with it, the situation would be better, because dealing with the matter currently at hand required much concentration.
I was surprised to find the contents of my apartment out of their usual state; they were dead. I mean, they were solid blocks, as if my dead father had somehow infected them and transformed them. Only a dead father could possibly leave that kind of effect,
I headed directly for the phone. There was a message on the answering machine (it was working!) so I listened to it before calling our house in Zgharta. I thought the message might be from there, from Zgharta, but it was from my girlfriend, Salwa, and it consisted of one short sentence that contained the entire history of our relationship, with all its chronic problems: “It’s me, Salwa!”
And that meant, “I’m at home and I want and am able to come over and I’m waiting for you to call me so I can come, and if you don’t you’ll hurt my feelings and embarrass me in front of my mother who is always chiding me and saying that I’m always the one calling you and you hardly ever call me, which means to her that I’m ‘chasing you and you don’t want me.’”
After listening to that message, which was from Salwa and not from anyone in my family, I immediately plugged my cell phone into the charger and turned it on so all the means of communication I had would be in perfect running condition. That would prevent giving anyone an excuse to claim he or she couldn’t get hold of me. Because what was going on was serious, very serious. That I realized right away, without any introductions, explanations, or deductions. No, by a natural instinct inside of me, in my flesh and bones and blood. I was after all a child of that town, of that particular town, not the child of any other city or region in Lebanon or elsewhere in the Arab world, and certainly not of New York or anywhere else in the West where blood revenge, they say, has completely disappeared from their customs and no one encounters it anymore. Actually, family ties there have loosened, most people would agree. But I am from that town that has been notorious for a half century or more for its blood-revenge customs, like those of the pre-Islamic tribes of the Arabian Peninsula where blood revenge was a kind of religious duty. To a large extent, those same customs are still being preserved with no significant modifications or substitutions, as if there were something about them that was even stronger than the passing of years and centuries, as if they were of a different nature than years and centuries, and time was incapable of having any effect on them. People still believe that their fallen relative cannot rest in his grave until his blood is avenged, and they still swear against enjoying any of life’s pleasures until their lost one is avenged. Some won’t even receive the body until the victim has been avenged, forcing the men of religion to step in and the other civil authorities, too, with methods they know well, methods that will move things along. Some of these people receive the body but won’t bury it before the victim has been avenged, while some bury the body temporarily and then transfer it to its final resting place once vengeance has extinguished the flames of the loved one’s blood.
And the women still bury themselves in black and stop taking care of themselves for long periods, sometimes until the blood revenge has been taken.
True, incidences of blood revenge have decreased and are no longer carried out in the same manner as in the past. But for the killer to remain on the face of the earth, enjoying sunlight and fresh air, is still absolutely impossible for them to put up with. And they still don’t believe in any other form of justice in this matter but the justice they take into their own hands and according to the whims of their unwritten laws.
What has changed today about their customs touches on the form but not the essence. They used to fight each other more, now they fight less; they used to fight with daggers or swords, now they fight with guns; they used to travel on mule or horse back, now they travel in cars; and the compensation used to be an eye, now it’s money.
Yet despite that!
Yet despite all that, no one called to tell me about my father’s murder, and I didn’t find out about it except by chance, two whole days later, after his funeral and burial.
So what is it all about? And what sinister scheme lies behind this behavior?
What if chance had turned things the opposite way and I never found out about it? Would I have remained ignorant of the fact that my father had been murdered less than a hundred kilometers from where I live, while at the same time people living in the States knew about it, and people living in Australia knew about it, and people in South America and Africa? I might have gotten sympathy cards from Zghartans scattered on all those continents, via the Internet, as I did eventually find later that evening when I opened my e-mail. And none of the letters clarify anything I need to know. All they offer are words of sympathy and advice. “Take it easy,” and “Be patient,” in a mixture of English, French, and Arabic written in Latin script (Rooq! Tawwil balak!) (Calm down! Be patient!) And there were a few with offers to help me take revenge.
It isn’t just a matter of not having been informed, and there is much more to it than just forgetfulness or negligence. Behind it is a clear attempt to cause serious harm and injury, the kind after which you can’t be hurt any more. What lies behind it is of utmost seriousness. Behind it is nothing less than an assassination attempt. Yes, an assassination attempt.
Did they want to say to me, “If you really and truly are the son of our brother, then go ahead! Avenge your father!”
But then again, I must reflect before reaching any conclusions. I decided to call our house in Zgharta right away in order to talk to my mother and ask her some questions that might clarify things. I should also tell her I am coming. It is absolutely necessary to call before heading there so I would be traveling in daylight, not total darkness. There is no wisdom at all in going before calling. Right now patience is a virtue. What happened happened, and hours of waiting, or even a night of waiting, will not change that in any way. But no one answered. I let the phone ring many times, but to no avail. I thought that maybe I’d dialed one of the numbers incorrectly because of the state of shock I was in, or maybe they moved the phone to another place away from where they were receiving condolences. I decided to wait a little while before trying again.
But then, while I was waiting to try calling our house in Zgharta again, I started wondering. What do I have to do with those people anyway? What relationship do I have to them, what connects me to them? And I thought that they, too, must be feeling this estrangement from me, and that was why they hadn’t called me. That was quite understandable. Natural, in fact. They really meant something to me, but in a former life. I suddenly felt like I had entered another person’s skin and some force was hurling me now once again into a matter that did not concern me. Those things don’t concern me anymore. They no longer relate to me, are no longer of my world, no longer suit me, for I am from a different time, and my world is now another world that has no connection to that world I was raised in, that world that seems like some other life, other than the one I am living. Une vie anterieure, as they say in French. I am happy in this milieu I am living in, at this Lebanese University where I work as a professor in the department of Arabic language and literature, in the College of Arts and Sciences, earning a salary that allows me, despite all the inflation and over-pricing and everything related to that, to have a house (old rent of course!) in an upper-class neighborhood in Beirut near Hamra and near the luxurious Bristol Hotel, in close proximity to the house of the Prime Minister Mr. Rafiq al-Hariri, one of the richest men in the world.
And I’m a divorced man now, after having been married to a French woman I met in Paris while studying for my Ph.D. in Arabic literature. She lives there now, and I don’t hear anything from her that can irritate me, nor does she get any irritating news from me. (Maybe that was one of the benefits of marrying a foreigner.) I have one daughter from her who’s “all grown up.” (Fortunately we don’t have a son, for a son is more concerned with his father’s history, whereas a daughter melts into her husband’s family.) She’s a university student now in Paris close to graduating and has a grant that, for the most part, allows her to get by without having to ask me for help. We have a very good relationship. It’s been some time now since I’ve gotten through the painful problems related to the divorce, and my emotions have finally settled into perfect calm, wisdom, and reflection.
