An Unnecessary Woman Read Online Free PDF Page B

nightgown into a pink tracksuit and espadrilles. Across the street, the Dexedrined Thanatophiles were playing poker, with matchsticks as chips, on a green felt folding table with slender legs, in front of Mr. Azari’s grocery store, the true litmus test of whether a cease-fire would hold—the store, not the card game, for Mr. Azari was intimately connected to various militia leaders. The store was the war’s weather vane. If its poison-green shutters were shut, no one ventured out of the house. If they were open, the neighborhood wasn’t in imminent danger. By my count, there were five bullet holes scattered across the metal shutters. Mr. Azari waved at me, obviously wanting to talk, but I only nodded in his direction and rushed past. I berated myself for not being friendlier, for not trying harder to make him like me, since he hoarded food and water from his meager stock and offered it to his preferred customers. I reasoned that I would never be one. His favorites offered him home-cooked meals, and I was a mediocre cook. I was lucky, though; Fortune watched over me. Fadia was by far the best cook in the neighborhood, and fed him constantly. Since the war began, he had gained fifteen kilos. I may not have been Fadia’s favorite person, but I was her neighbor and tenant (she’d inherited the building after her parents’ deaths). A few mornings a week, I’d wake to find on my doorstep a couple of bottles of water, maybe a sack of rice, sometimes a bag of fresh tomatoes or a few oranges. After nights when the clashes were fiercer than usual, she’d leave a dish of the same meal she offered Mr. Azari. With the first bite, I would turn devout and pray for her welcome into Paradise or God’s bosom or any beauty spa she chose.
    Instead of going to open the bookstore, I took a bedraggled jitney to Sabra. No Lebanese car would drive into the Palestinian camp’s labyrinth once the civil war erupted, so I got out at the entrance. I had the need of Theseus and the knowledge of Ariadne, no ball of yarn for me, so I sought the Minotaur, not to kill him, but to ask for his help. I sought Ahmad.
    Ahmad’s mother lived in a shack, or, to be more precise, a jerry-built structure consisting of a concrete wall onto which three sidings of asbestos and corrugated iron were jammed, with a tin roof on top. Its door, also of shingles, was not hinged; you simply removed it to walk in or out and replaced it when through. No lock needed since neighbors were atop one another; if anything went missing, all knew which neighbor had borrowed what. I’d been there once before, years earlier, at which time six people lived within the structure. I only had to deliver a book, a present for Ahmad’s seventeenth birthday, and didn’t enter even though his mother, kind and gentle at the time, kept insisting that I honor her with my presence in her household.
    What was difficult before the war, navigating the maze of alleys, had become tribulation. Puddles that used to form only after rainfall had become permanent lakes of sewer-brown, the stench suffocating. My thighs were sore from being unnaturally stretched with each lake-avoiding step. I had to maneuver my way around heaps of discarded furniture, rotted beams, broken plates, and twisted silverware. A giant eucalyptus, seemingly the only living thing in sight, added to the confusing aromas (shit and Vicks); it flourished in its exotic environment, dwarfing the surrounding shacks of brick, of cement, of aluminum siding, even cardboard. A happy and content immigrant, proud of its achievement and splendor, the tree would probably have laughed off any suggestion of returning to Australia. Its sadly hued green appeared bright against the poverty of color, all faded grays and dirty whites. If only someone had planted a bougainvillea; it would have flourished in these fecund crannies.
    When Ahmad’s mother, who’d metamorphosed into a small bundle of jerky gestures and imprecations, answered the