She had learnt about war in school like it was a trivial matter. Like it was a history lesson.
She had observed the teacher write on the blackboard key events and dates. Ones to remember for the exam. When she had learnt about war, it had a start and an end date. It had an end date. As if it could ever be over. As if the people who have gone to war and the ones who have been caught in it can resume living like before. As if before can ever come back. We treat war as something with a beginning and an end. Because the people who talk about war, who write about war, who teach about war have not gone to war. They have no idea that it cannot be over, that it leaves an indelible mark on the heart, the soul and the personality of those who have experienced it.
The first time Nona fled on a boat was in the 1950s. She wasn’t Nona then; she wasn’t even Maman; she was just Marie-Louise.
Marie-Louise had sat on the deck of an uncomfortable boat, leaving Alexandria, her heart shattered into a million pieces. She had never considered, never imagined that one day her life would mean losing everything. She hadn’t known it was possible to lose your country—watch it transform into a place you no longer recognize, where you are no longer welcome. How strange. How terrible. As she watched the Egyptian shore shrink into the distance, the pain she felt gave way, just for a moment, to a creeping fear of the future ahead.
Amira didn’t enjoy playing as a child and spent a lot of time alone.
She didn’t fit in with other kids and had very few friends. She had a wild imagination and escaped the daily in dreams of something that fit her more. She had never liked Beirut.
She often dreamt of Paris. One day, she’ll go there and study art. There, everything was sophisticated. Life was orderly and reasonable. There, culture was bubbling out of every conversation. Stores were filled with beautiful objects. Restaurants were refined. People were polite, respectful, highly civilized. In Paris, she was alike to most people, she could be understood, she could live the life she wanted to live.
Had she grown up there, she would have fit in. One day, she’ll go there. In the meantime, she dreamt and drew about another life where things were less loud, more subdued, and more like her.
By a vicious twist of fate, she was forced to flee her reality to the place she had dreamt up. In her dream, leaving home had been a choice. She had left and it had stayed intact. It didn’t explode, it didn’t disappear under the bombs.
She didn’t relate to her world, but she had never wanted to erase it all. She still wanted it to be there!
She didn’t want to go to Paris anymore. She wanted to stay and hold her home together. Stay with her family. What would she find over there? It didn’t seem so appealing anymore.
Nothing more vile can be done to a dream than to make it touch reality. She was only 18 and in just a few months, both her reality and her dreams had simultaneously shattered.
She was 17, and her adult life spread open ahead of her with the overwhelming freedom of choice. She could choose the easy, comfortable route and stay in Paris, live the life she knew, amongst people she knew, in a familiar environment. She could stay French, with a touch of Lebanese and grow to be a normal person in the social circles she knew. She would meet other French friends. She would meet a French boy. Fall in love. She would marry him and have a wedding in France, with all her French friends.