In Other Words | Sorrow in My Heart by Hilal Chouman

Sorrow in My Heart is the upcoming fifth novel of Lebanese writer Hilal Chouman. Set between Berlin and Beirut, the novel captures the bittersweet reality of post-war Lebanon, a motif that we can trace in in Chouman’s earlier novels: Stories of Sleep (2008), Napolitana (2010), Limbo Beirut (2012) and Once Upon a Time, Tomorrow (2016).  This time, the Beirut-born, Toronto-based Chouman explores the locality of Beirut, the home, from the lens of an outsider. He does this through linguistic experimentation,  where questions of identity, memory and loss are explored through fast-paced storytelling and a local tongue. In this excerpt, we present the first nine chapters of the novel. 

Step soft! I think the earth's dirt skin is compost　

of all those bodies' decomposed remains.

Abu al-ʿAlaa al-Maʿarri (ca. 973-1057)*

 

*  Quote translated by A.Z. Foreman

Part one

Berlin

Ever since he confessed his desire to accompany me to Beirut, I told myself that he wished to be there for me since he knew the city. However, it was not like I needed to conduct further investigation, as the addresses I had obtained from the orphanage were precise, and I gathered from the staff that I was not the first person who had come to inquire about their origins, and that it would be easy to find them.

A long time ago that seemed to grow longer the more I read about it, the German media revealed the story of the children smuggled out of Lebanon in the 1980s. There were clear instructions to facilitate helping anyone asking about their biological family. At the time, the police cooperated with the relevant ministries and agencies, and visits were arranged with the children’s adoptive families to discuss the legal status of their adopted children. With the Lebanese civil war at its height and given the state of lawlessness in the country, the Lebanese government and embassy did not cooperate with the Germans, so the entire matter was left in the hands of the German police to investigate.

I disregarded the press coverage and tried to recall what happened in our home, but could only remember that one solitary visit by the police. I could remember “my father” calling me into the living room, where there were two police officers sitting with him and “Mom.” They asked me a few questions. I answered whatever I could understand briefly. Then I went back into my room.

When I informed “my father” of my wish to look for my biological parents, he listened quietly. I took his silence as indication that he was paying attention to me. When I had nothing more to say, “Dad” got up, and asked me to follow him to his room. He sat down on the edge of his bed and took out the blue notebook in which I always saw him jotting things down, and wrote something in it for a minute. Then he ripped out the page and extended it towards me.

I visited the orphanage at the address on the piece of paper to inquire about the identity of my biological parents. The receptionist was puzzled by my request for basic information that my adoptive parents were supposed to have already given me. When I showed no reaction, he did not continue to probe, and went to retrieve what I had requested.

The receptionist did not know that any attempt I made to relate to “my father” ended before it could even begin. Yet these endings were not final. They were deferred endings, dominated by silence and signs. For a long time I wondered, why did I not get to enjoy the kind of relationship my friends had with their parents? I could stop agonizing over this ambiguity and conclude decisively that it was because he was not my biological father, but one cannot explain matters away just like that. If the explanation was that simple, many stories in this life would have ended before they even began.

But why did he wish to accompany me on this journey? If he had really wanted to return, he could have done so in the days following the withdrawal of the Syrian army from Lebanon, as was the case with his friends who visited us and informed him of their decision. But he did not do so. He shook their hands, patted them on the back and gave them a hug, and said he supported their decision. Yet when they invited him to go back with them, he did not commit to a clear answer. He merely replied with a smile and a shake of the head, so they departed hoping that he would follow them soon.

 

2

I stared at Azo from where I sat on the couch. I saw the mole protruding from his left shoulder and glimpsed the marks that had appeared on the skin of his lower back from his ongoing weight loss. I thought he was fast asleep, so I continued looking at him, descending my gaze down to his waist, his fingers, then his rear and his thighs.

I could have kept gazing at his body without tiring of it. It was not the first time I gawked at him like this as he lay asleep. It was not a sexual thing. I mean, ultimately I would get aroused, but I did not feel that I was driven by arousal, as much as I was by the pleasure of rediscovering his body over and over. I treated it as a journey doused in both sorrow and pleasure.

“There is no pleasure for me without sorrow,” I once told Adrian, my psychotherapist, who knitted his eyebrows to show that he was unconvinced by my firm opinion.

As I stared at his body, my mind went back to when I first met Azo. He was standing in the queue at the entrance to the nightclub where I saw him for the first time. I sensed that he was looking at me, before he left his place in the line and went past me to join others standing in the back.

I tried to listen in on his conversation with his friends. I got so absorbed in listening that sometimes I forgot to step forward in the queue, and the person standing behind would have to nudge me. I heard them speaking first in Arabic and then in a language I did not understand, before finding out later that it was Kurdish. Before I knew it, I was inside the nightclub, and I met up with my friends who had been waiting.

I suggested that they check out the other dancefloors in the club, and told them that I would catch up with them in a few minutes. I remained standing at the bar and kept my eyes trained on the door in anticipation of Azo’s entry. But the darkness and flashing colors inside prevented me from making out the faces of those entering, and before long my wait was interrupted by the arrival of another friend from my group, who invited me for a drink.

I did not stay late at the club as I usually did every weekend. I made an excuse to my friends that I was suddenly feeling sick and that I preferred to not end up drinking more than I should.

As I stood outside, a feeling of sadness took hold of me, the kind that follows a lost opportunity. I do not know why I thought of Azo at the time as “an opportunity,” since I had never seen or heard of him before we stood in line, not at the nightclub, where I was a regular, nor anywhere else.

I felt certain that my chances were gone, but I did not feel like going back home. I waited near the entrance, smoking a cigarette. Then I decided to take a walk and see where my feet would take me. I walked around for nearly an hour, and found myself back in front of the club, standing on the sidewalk facing the entrance. I had unknowingly made a full circle and returned to the starting point.

I was about to light a cigarette when I saw him emerging from the nightclub’s entrance. He staggered out and put a cigarette in his mouth as he wobbled. It seemed that he would not succeed in lighting it. Driven by how hot I found him, I thought about crossing the street to offer him my lighter, but then hesitated. Seconds later Azo looked in my direction, flashed a weird smile and headed in my direction. When he arrived, he merely said hello. He grabbed the lighter from me without asking first and lit his cigarette, then returned it and said thank you, before sitting down on the step of a nearby staircase, and invited me to join him.

We introduced ourselves to each other and kept sitting on the steps, quietly smoking our cigarettes, before Azo muttered a phrase I could not understand. I did not have the opportunity to ask what it meant, as Azo had already tossed away his cigarette and begun to throw up between his legs.

Azo patted the pillow next to him and pursed his lips. “Yousef?” he inquired, still lying in bed, “Have you been watching me while I was asleep?” I got up from my spot, and tried to jump over him to the empty side of the bed, but he flipped over and lay on top of me.

I shook my head. He raised his eyebrows as he usually did when declaring that he was not convinced. I took back my initial response and explained that I liked gazing at him. He drew his face closer to mine and said that it was OK, I could keep gazing. I gently pushed him aside and went back to where I was sitting at the foot of the bed.

“Remember how you threw up in my lap the first time we met?” I suddenly asked. He corrected me, saying he threw up on the sidewalk, adding, “Relationships are nothing but mutual vomiting.” Then he held me between his arms and apologized to me, saying he knew how stressful things were for me these days. He kissed me on the shoulder and lay back down again.

This time, I found myself drawn to him. I kissed him with my eyes closed, so I could not tell if he was looking at me or not.

 

3

I can now recall the scenes in fragments, like white clouds in a blue sky. I see things that no longer exist, things that have moved from where they were before and things that have survived where they were. The color of the furniture becomes duller and I can see dust gathering on its edges and in the corners of the rooms. The walls gradually turn yellow. Couches move to rooms that had been shut and chairs are stripped to become scraps of metal tossed into the backyard of the house. It is as if the slowness of the transformation reminds you that there are sediments built up of some life that was in this place once.

“My father” never opened the door for me once. When I came home, I would ring the doorbell and wait, then knock on the door. My knocking would become louder as the minutes passed, before I would lose hope and stuff my hands into my pockets. Why did I hesitate before using the key? Was I waiting for him to open the door for me, or was I afraid of going in to find he had died in my absence? Or was I giving him a window of time so that I would not see him naked with another woman? Why was I doing that? Why did the thought of him being with some other woman stress me out? He was not my real father, nor was his wife my real mother, so why the wait?

Every time I stood at the doorstep, the most grotesque images appeared in my mind. Every time I waited there, fear grew inside me, so I would try to drive it away by telling myself: “I went out from here, I will go back into here, and I will — certainly — go out again from here.”

In this apartment, my talent for constructing scenarios in my mind thrived. I would create a scenario, add to it or detract from it, then destroy it. Whenever I finished constructing a scenario, I would move to a new one, using new details to set it apart from the previous one, until I became convinced that I had made it perfect. All I had to do was wait a few moments before it all came out and turned into reality in front of my eyes. 

However, this ability to imagine things diminished after I moved out of the apartment. I started sleeping more, and dreaming less, both at night and in the daytime. When I told Adrian about it, he did not seem surprised. He simply wrote down something in his little notebook, and asked me to continue. I lost my temper at him at that moment, and told him that every time he gestured or made a facial expression and waited for me to carry on talking instead of answering my questions, he reminded me of my “father.” 

I ended the session and went out. I walked for a long time, wondering, “why is it that when we expect people to say something, they say nothing? Why do they speak only at the moment they choose to? Does what we say change when we defer it further and further? Do words acquire alternative meanings when they are spoken at the wrong time?

I found my feet taking me back to the apartment once again, as if it were my solitary return. As if in my repeated returns to it, I had been looking for another return that I had lost. I would always enter it with slow footsteps, and keep the door open, as if I wanted to ensure my subsequent departure. I would hear the grating sound coming from the garden. I would follow the sound to find him — every time — sitting on the swing in his white undershirt and blue pajamas bent over nuts and bolts of various shapes and sizes, with his drink close by. He would make room next to him, pour me a glass of arak and then go back to whatever he was preoccupied with.

When he handed me one of these metal parts for the first time, I did not understand what he wanted me to do. He took it back, grabbed one of the tools lying in front of him and showed me how to disassemble it. Then he passed it back to me. He spoke about the necessity of taking things apart. According to him, when things are disassembled, their layers are stripped away. After having been one among a set of elements, the thing goes back to being by itself and can be reassembled in new forms.

Every time he went on and on like this (which is what he did most of the time), it occurred to me that he was not saying these things to me specifically, and that he would have said the same thing to anyone where I was sitting. I did not find myself a part of what he said in any manner, but I did not stop listening to him. On the contrary, I would focus on what he was saying and continue to disassemble the spare part I had been given, and in the end I would be drawn into his world.

But then he would suddenly stop talking, look up at me and smile, as if he had just then become aware of my presence, and ask how Azo was doing. 

 

4

Azo continued to throw up in my lap — or between his legs, or on my shoes — for several minutes more. After he had emptied out whatever was inside him, he leaned back on the steps. He let out a sigh signifying that he had relaxed, smiled that weird smile of his and shut his eyes. I thought at the time that his body was drained and that his listless smile was akin to how we nod our heads to anything when we are about to drop off to sleep.

I would later come to know that he always smiled like this.

When we first meet people that seem strange, there are those we warm up to, those that make us uneasy and those whom we find absolutely repulsive. Whatever our initial reaction may be, when we first observe new people who have come into our lives, we see some strange things. As we discover more and more about them, we get to have those moments with them where things are slowed down, moments where we start paying attention to how the person moves their hands, which direction they look in, how they smile or laugh, how they knit their eyebrows in moments of seriousness or anger, the facial expressions that bring out their wrinkles, the way they walk, and the way they inhabit their body.

It was only with Azo that I got to know this unhurried clarity. While he was inclined to describe relationships as vomiting, for me, vomiting was synonymous with hurriedly unloading something. I, on the other hand, experienced a relationship as something that is slowly uncovered over time.

I kept looking at him, not knowing what to do next. I decided to wait until any of his friends came out of the club so I could ask them to take care of him. But none of the people coming out came toward us. I started examining him closely, and found him to be overweight, with a bushy, unkempt beard. Azo had all the features that I thought I disliked in men. I did not know why I was attracted to him, but I had the feeling that I could trust him, and that we could talk for hours.

I tried to find common characteristics between him and the men I had had short-lived relationships with. I thought of all the men that I had slept with whose names I did not know. I remembered the guy who I fucked silently so that his roommate would not be woken, and another who slept with me but refused to kiss me. I remembered a third who deliberately made sounds that made me lose my arousal from the start, and a fourth who wanted only to suck my cock and nothing more, and a fifth who repeated constantly that he wanted to rough sex and kept saying “more, more...” I remembered the room full of mirrors in which I fucked a man in his sixties. Every time I tried to avoid looking at his flabby body, I found my reflection repeated dozens of times in the room’s mirrors, and had to close my eyes to not see myself.

Before Azo, my relationships with guys had been limited to quick, casual sex. A single swipe on my phone on Scruff, Hornet, or Grindr would bring up dozens of men looking for sex without any commitment. A little bit of chatting, a few pictures exchanged, and I would be on the U-Bahn on my way to the address given to me. A few minutes later, I would find myself fucking people I did not know.

I avoided inviting anyone over to the apartment. Well, I did it once, when “my father” was out of town, but I failed to maintain my erection. I looked around just for a moment and was reminded that I was still here, in this house, and I went completely limp. It was embarrassing because the other person had taken the trouble of coming from the center of town, and I felt obligated to play along with him and pleasure him a little, so I sucked his cock until he came, an act that I find completely distasteful.

Before Azo, sex did not leave any lasting impressions for me. It was limited to the moments in which it happened, and did not take on any other meanings. Of course I felt pleasure when I ejaculated, and I would do what was necessary, like changing up positions. But as my sexual experiences multiplied, it became meaningless. My cock would have difficulty becoming erect when I tried to sleep with people I did not like, so I became more selective and did not accept to have sex with just anyone.

Before Azo, I had not been in “real” relationships, even though there had been plenty of opportunities; I was just not interested in the idea of a relationship. I thought about it often. I explained my misgivings to Adrian, and would tell him that it might have to do with my own state of mind, that I had to feel psychologically stable before entering into a long-term relationship. He would not say anything, but his facial expressions would show that he was not convinced. Once, even though I knew he would not answer, I asked him, “Do I have to be in a stable place before starting a relationship, or will being in a relationship help me to become more settled?” As usual, Adrian explained that he did not give opinions, and that his job was specifically to listen and ask questions. I argued back saying that his questions were what directed the course of our sessions, and that this steering was an opinion in itself. He simply smiled and waited for me to continue.

What is it that changed after Azo appeared? Why did I feel that I had lost an opportunity when he first disappeared inside the nightclub? Why did I find myself going back to that same place? Why did he reappear? Why did he cross the road and come towards me? And why did I sit down next to him on the steps near the pavement instead of going away?

These questions went through my mind as I looked at him sleeping on the steps. Ten minutes passed, and then he opened his eyes, so I got up. He raised his head towards me, and in the manner of someone just starting their day asked where I was going to. I’ll take you home, I replied. He laughed and said he did not have a home. Then he offered me a chunk of hash that he said he had not used yet.

“Now the night has begun,” he announced.

Suddenly what he said took on the strangeness of the literal truth when said for the first time: “Now the night has really begun”.

And now, after everything that we went through together, I understood completely what happened that night. Before Azo, I was the one that pursued men for sex; when he appeared, someone was now pursuing me for it.

 

5

I left the orphanage and found Azo waiting on the opposite sidewalk. I crossed the street in his direction. I gave him the file and continued walking, as if in a hurry, over to our favorite cafe. He followed me. I pushed the door, and nearly collided with someone coming out. Azo apologized to him while I headed directly to the spot we usually sat in, but someone else had already taken it. I cursed them under my breath and turned around, only to collide with Azo, who hugged me, asking me to calm down. Then he whispered a few words in my ear that sufficed to soften my anger.

We chose a table outside that Azo said would be covered in sunlight in a few minutes. I sat on the chair closest to the street, and he sat down on the opposite side holding the file in his hand.

I had not opened the file yet. The experience of waiting for two and a half hours to find out what happened to me as a child was highly ludicrous. While the cesspool of bureaucracy had succeeded in making me lose my temper, what made the experience much worse were the slimy phrases used by the idle staff at the orphanage who seemed accustomed to verbally harassing people like me.

Azo took the papers out of the file and placed them on the table. We both looked at them, then he pushed them in my direction. I shoved them towards him and asked him to read what was in them. He got up from his seat and kissed me, then started to flip through the papers. The waiter brought us our coffees. Azo moved the file to one side and turned his head to continue reading out of the corner of his eye.

“It’s strange,” he explained. My first name was the same, and so was my date of birth. The only thing different was the surname; instead of Fattal, it was Zahra: “Your name is Yousef Zahra. You were born on March 1, 1989 in Bsharre in the province of Mount Lebanon. Your mother’s name is Zahia Barakat. She was born in 1950 in the same town. As for your father, his name is…”

When I returned home that day, I did not wait for “my father” to open the door for me. I used the key straight away and headed to the backyard. On my way, I stopped at the table to find a white folder left on it. It was strange that it was lying there, since “my father” was fussy about leaving nothing on the table except for the vase and the embroidered tablecloth. I picked up the folder and took out its contents. To my surprise, they were the same documents I had obtained from the orphanage.

I heard the grating of the swing coming from the direction of the garden. I went out there, carrying both folders, and as usual found “my father” absorbed in drinking a glass of arak with a plate of raw meat in front of him. He invited me with a wave of his hand to join him. I drank from the glass he poured me and told him of the information I had received. He smiled. I mentioned my real name and surname, my family registry number, and the names of my biological father and mother. His smile turned into laughter, the kind that only comes over him when he gets drunk. Without thinking I found myself laughing along with him. His eyes brimming with tears, I asked him why he had laughed. He guffawed even harder until he was overcome with a bout of coughing, so I hastened to fetch him a glass of water.

His behavior reawakened the feeling inside that he was always a step ahead of me, just one single step, and that he knew what I was thinking just by looking at me and would carry it out before I could. It was no different this time. He knew, and still let me go get lost in the maze of bureaucracy and chaos of paper trails in old systems of information. He knew, and knew that I would know that he knew, but that did not stop him not only from leaving the folder on the table, but also from asking me to come sit with him.

I told Adrian many times that my relationship to “my father” was akin to endless rounds of scurrying and scrambling all over, and it all occurred without us speaking to one another. When did this game begin, and when did I discover it had begun? Who was the cat in it and who was the mouse?

 

6

We went all over Berlin that night. I danced with him in two clubs. We visited bars that I had passed by but never ventured into. We smoked hash together. I tried cocktails whose names I had never heard before. And when I threw up on the sidewalk, Azo laughed and said now we were even.

 I had never experienced such a wild night before. When my energy finally ran out, Azo was still going, as if his throwing up and falling asleep for a few minutes outside the club had enabled him to start a whole new day with a fresh burst of energy.

He suggested that we go to his apartment, and I did not object. But after realizing from the address how far away it was, I reckoned that I would not be able to walk that whole distance. We had gotten close to “my father’s” apartment. I asked him to stay with me until I arrived there. I began telling him in detail the location, before being struck by a strange kind of fear, which was most likely brought about by the effects of the hash.

Azo held my hand the entire way, laughing at my comments. After he noticed that I was becoming increasingly afraid of anyone we passed near, he calmed me down and urged me to keep walking. When we arrived, I thanked him, then turned around and tried to enter my building, but I tripped on the edge of the sidewalk and fell.

He insisted on making sure I got into the apartment. On the stairs, I was overcome by a fit of laughter, and stopped to confess to him that I had eavesdropped on his conversation with his friends even though I did not understand their language, and that I had looked for him inside the club, then left disappointed and then came back and waited for him on the sidewalk to come out. I told him that I did not know why I had done that, since he did not look like the men I was usually attracted to.

He opened the door with the key I took out from my pocket for him. I laughed while asking him to lower his voice, even though he — as he later claimed — was not saying anything. In my room, I kissed him, then unbuttoned his shirt and contemplated his body. Before I could go any further, he gave me a quick kiss and said that I should sleep. I gestured at him and did not get annoyed. I was ready to do anything he asked of me. When he was about to leave, I grabbed him by the arm, and asked him to stay with me. He gave me that weird look that later I would always see in my dreams, and asked if I was all right. I lied, telling him that I was frightened and asked him not to leave me. He nodded, and sat down on the small couch next to my bed. I clutched his hand until I fell asleep.

When I woke up the next day, he was no longer by my side. I found myself putting on the same clothes, and tried to remember what had happened but could not. I had a splitting headache. I went out of my room into the kitchen, and could hear voices coming from the backyard. I stood at the door to the backyard, looking out. I found Azo sitting on the swing with “my father” drinking coffee and laughing. 

 

7

Was I annoyed that they had made each other’s acquaintance? I needed a moment to collect my scattered thoughts and to try to remember the events of last night. What had happened? Had we slept with each other? What or who was he chatting to “my father” about? Me?

I went into the bathroom, locked the door and sat down on the toilet. From the way my shit came out, I was able to determine that I had not been fucked by Azo last night, as I did not feel that burning sensation that I usually felt from the use of lubricants, and my stool passed normally without difficulty. So, did the reverse happen? Did I have sex with him? Or did we do something less than sex and more than cuddling?

To my shock, my cock became erect while I was shitting. I was disgusted and decided to take a shower immediately. I entered the bathtub and masturbated under the shower. I stayed under the warm water for a while, during which I tried to clear my thoughts, but a gentle knock on the door of the bathroom broke my train of thought.

I emerged wrapped in my towel to find him waiting outside the bathroom door. He had the kind of smile on his face one has after laughing, but it quickly evaporated when he noticed my annoyance. He apologized and said that he wanted to use the bathroom. “You may use it now,” I said and went on to my room.

I got dressed and lay down on the bed. I got diverted into checking my phone. A few minutes later, Azo appeared through the door that was slightly open. “I will leave,” he said.

I gestured to him with a motion of the head without getting up. He looked at me as if he was expecting a different response, and then went out without saying anything further.

After he left, I got up and shut the door of my room. I went back and lay down in bed for a couple of hours. Then I decided to go out, and walked in the streets for half an hour. Then I rented a bicycle and rode it to areas of Berlin I had never been to before. I passed by the club we had met the previous night, but I did not stop. After about an hour and a half, I parked the bike near the river and lay down on the grass. Only then did I notice that there was a message on my phone from him: 

“I hope you are OK. You were really scared last night. By the way, your dad is a fun guy.”

I did not reply. But his indication that he had enjoyed himself with “my father” made my gut clench up, which drove me to tell Adrian in our next therapy session what happened. I began elaborating to him whatever little I could remember about that long night, and how I felt when I saw Azo sitting with “my father.” As usual, I was explaining things to him in order to explain them to myself, and what I ended up concluding was: “My father” had taken me away from parents I never knew, and now he wants to take my friends away from me too.

I knew that all that was not quite correct, that I was being excessive in my analysis, and that my anger should be directed at the parents who had abandoned me, not at the ones who had saved me from growing up in the orphanage. Adrian smiled and declared the session was over, saying: “Your expression of anger is a good thing.” However, I did not let the session end like that and I launched into another monologue that made Adrian sit back down in his chair. I ended it with an idea that I had long been evading: “I think I must search out my actual parents and visit my birthplace.”

That was the moment in which I made my decision, even if I would be too busy to carry it out for several months. It was in that moment, with that setting: when I saw the man who would become “my beloved” sitting drinking coffee and having a laugh with the man who before him had become “my father.”

 

8

A week later, he called.

“I would like to talk to you,” said Azo.

“I’m busy with my friends right now,” I replied, so as to end the call, “Maybe later. Call me and we’ll see.”

He caught me off guard: “I can be with you in a minute. I can see you from where I am.”

I looked up from where I was sitting in the cafe, to see him standing across the street. There was nowhere to run. Immediately, he crossed the street to come join me, and sat down at my table.

“Listen,” he declared immediately after he sat down, “I am not trying to intrude on you. I just need you to help me. I need to talk to someone about myself.”

I would have turned him down politely, and it seems that it showed on my face because Azo then continued by reminding me: “I held your hand that entire night in your room, and had the most uncomfortable sleep I’ve had for as long as I can remember, so I think you are at least obliged to listen to me.”

I asked him what he wanted to drink, but he said he preferred to take a walk.

We walked along the riverbank as he spoke. It was the first time I listened to someone else if we did not count listening to myself in front of Adrian. Azo said that he was under stress, that he had lost seven kilograms in a single month and that he was not going out or talking to anyone. He talked about his brother who died three years ago from a disease that corroded his brain. His brother started to lose his memory little by little, so much so that once he could not remember who he himself was. After that happened, Azo spent time making notecards for each member of their family, on which he wrote down the family member’s name, age, what they did (their job or field of study), current romantic relationship and some instances of experiences his brother had shared with them, and then stuck a picture of the person on the card. 

But his brother did not have enough time left to use the notecards.

After his brother’s death, Azo went into a bout of depression that lasted months. He came out of it only by completely turning his life around. He applied to university, after he had worked “meaningless” jobs — as he called them — from being a bartender to a bicycle delivery worker to working in an Arab bakery. He used the word “meaningless” and then stopped to explain that it was the word his dead brother, who had worked these kinds of jobs, used. Azo’s brother was convinced his capabilities far and away exceeded what these jobs required. 

His brother was the only one who knew that he was gay. Azo did not tell him; his brother took him out for a walk one day and told him that he knew, and that he should not be afraid. Azo felt that his brother had freed him from the prison that he had voluntarily put himself in. But after his brother’s death, the feeling of insecurity returned and he retreated into his shell. He did not want anyone in his family to know. And even though his psychological condition had improved since he was awarded a scholarship to continue his studies in literature, and had moved into his own room, the things that he thought he had buried deep inside himself had come back to the surface in a single instant.

“When you remember something, Yousef, you also remember that you have forgotten something, and that you have carried on living as if it is no big deal. Nothing is more painful than the act of forgetting. To know that you have forgotten is to know that you have moved on and that at some moment, you decided that a certain thing is no longer worthy of remaining in your memory. Why then, and how did you remember once more? Did you force yourself to forget when in reality you had not forgotten, or what? Whatever the reason, after I left your house, I was fortunate enough to have that moment in which I realized that I had forgotten. At the building entrance, when I happened to put my hands into my jacket pocket, I foundthe note cards I had made for my brother that I had lost after he passed away. Three years had passed since I lost them. I had looked everywhere for them, and then I lost hope. Going out of your house was not a random occurrence. Had I not entered it, I would not have been able to come out of the state I was in.”

Azo kept speaking on and off for two hours. We would walk, sit down, then he would get up and walk by himself in the direction of the river, and then come back and sit next to me again. I did no more than listen to him and did not make any remarks. I wanted to tell him things about me, but refrained out of a feeling that this walk should be especially set aside for him. I was suddenly seized by a desire to kiss him, but I limited myself to interlacing my hand with his. I squeezed it and looked at where he was looking while he talked.

 

9

I do not know how people organize the events of a story in chronological order. My memory does not work in this manner. Each time I begin one thread, I forget some details after going past a certain stage, and so I go back to explaining things excessively once again. Yet instead of gaining a better understanding and putting everything in its proper context, the narrative breaks into fragments and I find myself condemned to the chaos of thoughts that rule over me. I find myself facing multiple stories that are connected then disjointed. So many stories, which are in fact one story to begin with.

We were now going out with each other on a daily basis. I would go over to his place and he would come over. If I was not at home, he would still come in to sit and chat with “my father.” Did “my father” open the door for him? I do not know. And if so, how did he know that someone else was standing at the door? I do not know. Why he opened the door for him and not for me, I also do not know.

Whether in his apartment or in my room, our conversations were endless. We would open a topic of conversation and it would devolve into multiple conversations. We would start watching a film and end up watching two more in a single sitting. We introduced each other to the music we listened to and our favorite songs. Without knowing exactly how, his sadness subsided and my perpetual anxieties went away. A sense of comfort prevailed between us. It was as if we had known each other forever, as if we had long since become accustomed to how to act with each other, what to say and what not to say and how to respect each other’s personal space, so we would be quiet when necessary and talk when we had to.

We used to look at each other a lot. I caught him more than once staring at me while I was in the middle of doing something or talking to others, and the same happened to me. I would be engrossed in looking at him and sense that I was smiling; he would notice and smile back or dismiss my smile with a raised eyebrow, so I would laugh. At this stage, we were not intimately touching each other, and did not go beyond unintended touches like the brushing of our hands or the bumping of our bodies.

I do not recall how things began that night. Most likely we were returning from some place we had been partying in. We went to his place and did it for the first time. We stayed in bed, just like the way we were, looking at each other without doing anything, smiling then getting caught up in a silly argument. We would get fatigued and pass out, only to look at each other once again, or at the ceiling, or start talking.

I do not know why I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and looked at my body. I found a black birthmark above my chest whose existence I had not noticed before. It jolted me that I had not carefully examined my body before. Azo stood at the doorstep and looked at me, then he came closer. He embraced me from behind, and kissed me below my neck. He noticed how I was touching the mole with my hand. He stepped back a little and looked at my body. “Fuck!” he exclaimed. He had found the same birthmark between my shoulders. He took a picture of it with his phone and showed it to me. As he embraced me once more, he said that when I was a child, a ray of light had penetrated me, leaving two puncture marks at the spot where it entered on my back and the other one on my chest where it exited.

He continued his interpretation. The air in the bathroom became heavy and the movement of his mouth slowed. I looked in the mirror, at my body and his body hidden behind me. Even though I could not hear a thing he was saying, I desired him. My cock became erect, and I found myself turning around and quieting him with multiple kisses, until we eventually ended up in bed.

I left him an hour later and returned home, to find “my father” in the backyard listening to a Lebanese song, oblivious to the curses coming from a neighbor who wanted him to lower the volume so that he could sleep. “My father” waved from where he sat and invited me to sit with him. 

As I headed to join “my father, ” I recalled what Azo once said : “Now the night has really begun. The night is more beautiful than you can imagine. Beautiful, and it will remain so.”

In Other Words is a series of translated excerpts from contemporary Arabic literary works, by emerging or established authors, published in English for the first time. For a long time, the process of selecting works written in Arabic for translation, which gives them the opportunity to reach a wider audience and to potentially join the ever-expanding canon of “world literature” (as problematic as that term is), has been largely confined to a designated community of “gatekeepers” — mostly made up of Western publishers and translators — who decide which narratives they deem most “representative” of the region and are therefore worthy of traversing cultural borders and crossing over to other parts of the world.

By offering translated glimpses of works that we believe are significant — in their language, format, or thematic resonance — we are attempting, at least in part, to perhaps effect that selection process by bringing more attention to stories that we think deserve to travel far and wide. We hope to create more space for diverse voices from the region to be heard elsewhere, not for what they “represent,” but for the unique, singular vision each of them provides.