Other Lives Read Online Free PDF Page A

to sleep every time to the sounds of Indian Ocean. The waves almost reach my always-damp garden, then recede in a never-ending play of ebb and flow.
    Sometimes I leave my bedroom and go into the garden when the moon is full and I don’t need anything to light my path. The light of the moon shines on the ever so slowly receding water and I quickly fall asleep. I fall asleep on the sand or on the straw chair at the bottom of the garden near the walls made of the trunks of coconut trees.
    I’ve always lived my dreams there as though they were a part of my life. They accompany me in the daylight hours and I don’t forget them. I wake up in the morning and think about what I was dreaming the night before. When I tell Eva, my Austrian neighbor and only friend in Mombasa, about what seemed to be my only dream, she tells me not to be scared. She tells me that the skies of Kenya are vast and that dreams, however many you have, evaporate in the sky.
    Perhaps I should call my dreams nightmares. I remember the explosion that murdered my brother Baha’ in Beirut. From that time on God stopped visiting me in my dreams. Perhaps that was the moment when my dreams became nightmares. We wanted to go down to the shelter that day, but my mother Nadia insisted on staying on the second floor. She usually didn’t insist on anything, but that day she did. She usually lived the fairly submissive life that Nahil wanted—because my grandmother controlled her life just as she controlled the house and our lives—detached from her own desires. Nadia lived submissively. And then when she finally asserted an opinion, she was immediately silenced! She went silent both out of shock and as a protest. Her silence angers me just as the submissiveness she showed to my father Salama’s family angered me in the past. She didn’t want to go down into the shelter and insisted that we all stay together on the first floor. It was as if, on that one day, she wanted to avenge her life. But instead she lost my brother Baha’.
    On the night before my trip from Mombasa to Beirut, Chris comes to me filled with desire and kisses my face and neck. He runs his hand over the breasts he loves and with his other arm tries to pull my body close to him, repeating, Oh Myriam, love me, love me please.
    I feel utterly weak, almost paralyzed, when we are in bed and Chris starts talking. To overcome this paralysis, I resort to a fantasy that gives me pleasure. Over time, I’ve grown used to this thing that happens between us: him approaching me and letting his hand discover my body anew. I’m also used to putting my fantasies to work as soon as he starts kissing me, stripping off my clothes and repeating words under his breath that increase his desire. I let myself be free and move my body to the rhythm of Asmahan’s voice coming from the corner of the room. I begin a game of the body, separate from the memory of true love. In the absence of the man I love, I think that I will surely adapt to the situation that I myself consented to when I left Beirut. I let myself share pleasure with a man whom I don’t love even though he is filled with desire and tries to please me.
    When he starts flirting with me I always fantasize that he is Georges, or Joe, the man I met in an Italian restaurant in South Africa. I carried on a brief affair with Joe; it only lasted a year, during which I visited Cape Town seven times to meet him in some random hotel room. My Austrian friend Eva used to leave deliberately when the phone would ring for me in the hotel room, telling me before she shut the door behind her that we didn’t have much time—she just has to go back to the market once more. She’d hug me, leaving her arms around my body for a long time as though she feared losing me, mumbling words from which I understand that she can’t say anything. Then she’d walk backward, looking at me the whole time and leave. Eva only hugged