Hotel Dieu


Today makes one year to the day. 

I arrived at Beirut via Rafik Hariri International. It was a late flight and I was on my way to tend to my sister in law Rabab who was in Hotel Dieu (God Hotel) in Beirut. 

She had metastatic breast cancer. It had spread to her brain, her bones and her liver. I had known for a year that she was terminal but she was not told. It is common in other cultures to fear telling the person about their situation. I always believed though that somewhere inside her heart, she knew the end of her life was near.

She'd already had rods put in her neck because the cancer had invaded her vertebrae. She suffered excruciating pain during that time...must have lasted over a year. She couldn't even lift herself out of bed sometimes and her personality started changing.

Our Rabab who was the life of the party so to speak...a muslim party with a devout muslim looks more like her making your favorite dish and calling you over for a shin dig involving jokes (mostly at her expense...we always liked teasing her to try to ruffle her extraordinarily dignified character), involving the kids playing and just sitting in her presence enjoying hospitality from the heart.

She began to feel a bit more angry at life. But Rabab's anger wasn't like anyone I have ever known as a registered nurse. It was highly controlled, and mostly she worried about her three young boys. This was what truly bothered her the most. The idea that they would be left without her to guide them in life, in their Islam, in the world so full of challenges and hardships and joys.

I was not aware by the time I boarded the plane in Tucson on my way to Beirut that the cancer had spread to her brain. At that time, I was only told about her liver and knew that was the call I had to attend to. The call I had to follow.

I was not a good friend to Rabab in the many months of her disease process. Not at all. I will never claim I was her support, her confidante or even a good advisor in the years before her death. All I know is that she loved me and if she could, she would go to the end of the earth to bring me whatever I asked for and as an RN I only hoped to get there to help with her death because I knew she was dying, I knew that the death process is best managed with friends by your side, children outside playing in the yard and wanted desperately to get her out of a hospital and into her father's home in the south of Lebanon. I knew that it might not turn out that way if I just sat around in the US and watched from afar. I believed that I had something to do there but in the end I benefitted far more from my attendance. Far more.

I reached Beirut at about 8 in the evening. It was a slow day at the airport, I think it was a Monday and I'd been en route far too long already. I knew she'd had her liver tapped for fluid and with that goes internal bleeding because the liver is failing.

I handed my passport to the immigration clerk and his face changed. He said to me, "one moment please". He turned his computer off and went into the glass office where I could see another traveler conversing with the immigration head at the airport.

He reminded me of Kamal Ataturk. All such foreign officials in the Middle East seem to have sprung from the loins of that infamous secularist who marched thousands of Armenians to their deaths in the 20th century. That portrait (Ataturk)decorates the walls of every Turkish police station, most of the restaurants, the majority of hotel lobbies and no doubt people's the nightmares of the Turkish population night to night. I met that portrait in a Turkish police station outside of the hidden cities of Cappadoccia and it still brings me to tears. He looks like a Vampire and perhaps he was.

After a brief conversation between the two officials, I was told to enter the glass office and sat on the flea bitten couch in front of the chief's desk. There was a young woman and she was trying to explain something about her passport. My Arabic is limited but what I gathered was hers was expired but it was Lebanese and she was given a free pass to leave but would have to go to the immigration to fix the matter before she would be allowed to leave the country again.

II

No one is more surprised than me. 

There he is with his Qibla. I am fixated on the girl next to him, she couldn't be more than 18. She is adjusting her head cover, fixing it the way hijabi girls do when they are interested. Pushing hair in while pulling it out, eyes up and then down again, no one noticing the way their lithe bodies twist toward the object of their affection.

There is clapping and a bride and groom. The most beautiful bride a person could imagine. Her groom sits attentively near and love is revealed in its small moments. Ruths rule the castles of other people.

It is so.

I watch it over and over, stop, replay. A child wanders in and out of the frame, belongs to no one. The young woman cannot resist another look over and another. The cameras of heaven between Qibla and Qibla.

The two wests, the two easts under the pleasant lights . Tulsa. The way cities look from 35,000 like giant lava flows. The world is ancient.

And there she is, Rabab. Her heart beating inside the camera, her steady hand is on the wheel, and pushes him away and toward the person who with steady hand and that awful eye, one terrible eye and the other shut, packages memories.

How many angels were there? Two? Seventy-two?

She enters from the right side of his Qibla. Did she know I'd be watching her now six years ahead? How many treatments had been completed? In the beginning she used to wear ice caps but by the time I reached her after six days of one person after another entering Adlieh, entering Babdaat, it was clear that ice had not worked to prevent the theft of hair, the stolen color of her skin.

He is throbbing and glowing. His mind awash with houris. Taking his risik* before its time, playing the part of Sultan to his crew. The man of the hour and a child wanders into the frame, belongs to no one. The girl straightens her head cover, pushes hair in in order to pull some out. It is so. Take a walk on the Wild Side.

And Rabab turns him Qibla-ward, she is there forever looking at me saying: wake up.