Zumurrud laughed: “Pay for what?” and pointed to our plates and glasses on the floor. She convinced me. Or it was more the situation that convinced my conscience to be quiet. I decided to skip the check, and not because I like free stuff, but because of the tension in the room and because I was angry at the assault I experienced.
Yeah, I was very angry.
We asked the valet to bring our car and we drove to Hamra Street without another word on the subject.
We got drinks at the Regusto then went home to our nests like all the good ducks in the Middle East.
We all had vodka 7Up because cocktails at that pub are never good.
And on my way home, I saw her.
Should I tell her story?
I’m going to tell her story.
A lady in her seventies who carries a metal bucket and wears a headscarf. She styles her hair in the summer, and gathers it under a cute colorful wool hat in winter.
She’s the lady who speaks slowly and faintly. Age has bent her back. She sells roses to buy food to take back to her Cuban husband whose illness has confined him to his bed.
His illness is clear in her eyes.
Her name is Nadia. And beautiful flowers are called Nadiy.
Every time I see her from a distance I run to her to buy roses with whatever money I have.
She makes me feel guilty.
And helpless.
I’m much better off than she is and much younger. Everything is working for me and against her.
She spent a big chunk of her life with him in Cuba. His illness forced her to come back to her country, but no help or treatment was available here either, because he’s Cuban.
A Lebanese woman can’t give her nationality to her husband. A Lebanese woman can’t give her nationality to her children.
This Lebanese woman, Nadia, loves her husband. And there’s an unfathomable look in her eyes, as if each look came from a place deep within the soul, one that rarely emerges from the body so as to not run into something fearful. She worries that a restaurant owner, a security guard, or a waiter might ask her to leave this or that place, or that one, claiming that selling roses bothers their customers.
I’m a customer, and I ache every time I see her. I get ashamed of the plates I own and their price, the glasses and their price, my laugh and how carefree it is, my straight back compared to hers, my expensive outfit compared to her clothes that lost their beauty the day she bought them long ago.
I’m ashamed of all of life’s privileges of which she is more worthy than I. She, who is old; I, who can still work.
And I feel guilty because I know that, even if I could, I wouldn’t trade places with her.
Each time I see her or feel sympathy and love toward her I hate myself because I smell the scent of my escape in the roses I buy. I escape the torture of my conscience with money. She asks for it and I give it to her, as if I’m buying her silence or buying my peace of mind. Except that my mind is never at peace, but always stuck in a cycle of pain. I’m a customer who is in pain every time she sees the fragile lady with red, white, and yellow roses.
There is a lot of exhaustion in the streets of my city. Numerous pictures of heroes hang in the streets of my city. The poor live on the streets, glued to the asphalt where some of them advertise their many disabilities so those more fortunate will give them money. The more fortunate ones are divided into categories: Those who do little, those who do a lot, those who do nothing but own a lot, and those who think it clever to shower illiterate beggars on the street with insults. That last type drives me crazy. Like a car that looks like it jumped straight out of the latest issue of a fashion magazine, a showboat of a car, with a driver looking down his nose at life. He shuts his car window if a beggar clings to it. He shoves an elderly man who asks for what is rightfully his, and is disgusted by the exhaustion of people, so he refuses to interact with them.
I used to be one of those who gave money but refused to interact, before my friend, Shwikar, talked to me about my refusal. At times, I fell back on imagination to avoid the pain lurking in every corner that housed a wronged person. When an old man held his hand out, I used to tell myself that he abused his wife when he was younger, or that that old woman mistreated those weaker than her, maybe. I tried to strip the innocence from those with their hands out.
Later, I started imagining that they were accustomed to their situation, one that I dreaded myself because I had never experienced it. “If I were in their shoes, I would have gotten used to a life of sleeping on the sidewalk, maybe.” The guilt cycle came back to trap me: I searched inside myself for reasons to justify their injustice and found comfort in them. I didn’t say a word to them, nor did I listen to them tell their stories. I didn’t give them that right.
Shwikar asked me: “Why do you give the beggar what he asks for, but never stop to talk to him?” Because I don’t want to listen to what is not in my power to change. Shwikar told me that people aren’t just stories told to hurt me. That people crave communication and acknowledgment. A look or a smile, a word or a question, a greeting or a prayer, anything that would tell the beggar that I see him as a person, not as an extended hand.
That was the day I first saw