Beirut 39 by Samuel Shimon

Author:Samuel Shimon [Shimon, Samuel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781408815601
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2010-09-05T22:00:00+00:00

Translated by Rowan al Faqih

The Path to Madness

Mansoura Ez Eldin

I watched my neighbour take her first steps down the path to madness: the same trudging pace at which she put the rubbish bags out in the morning; the same painstaking manner in which she cooked those delicious-smelling meals that tempted me each time I walked past her flat, directly below mine.

When she moved into the building, I didn’t notice anything strange or unusual about this woman in her early thirties. She was an energetic housewife and single mother who went a little overboard with her three kids, the eldest of whom, she told me, was nine.

She smiled at me each time we passed each other on the staircase as I was on my way to or from work. Her voice was faint, and her diminutive frame went together with her little face. Although she covered herself all over with a gown and headscarf, she was quite generous with compliments about my hairdo or my dress or even the smell of my perfume. ‘How lovely,’ she’d say, her gleaming eyes expressing an eagerness to communicate with others.

I was usually quite guarded when she spoke, and would then feel guilty about it afterwards. From the very beginning, I had been keen to keep a decorous distance between my neighbours and myself. With my lifestyle, I can’t afford to waste time talking to people I have nothing in common with. To them, I’m a strange sort of woman, who treats her home as nothing more than a place to sleep, leaving at one in the afternoon and not coming back until around midnight.

It was not a familiar sight, a woman like me, over thirty and living on her own, no husband, no children, no family. But this lady seemed happy to disregard all the preconceptions my neighbours had about me. I saw in her eyes a kind of yearning to communicate with me. I put that down to how different we were. To her, I was like the stranger you meet when travelling far from home, to whom you spill out your deepest secrets because you know you will not see them again.

Maybe I’ve read too much into the way she looked at me, but I was certain that this petite lady with the delicate features had something she wanted to tell me.

Something that confused me was her daily screaming, interspersed with loud sobbing, as she punished her children. How could the gentle, fragile lady that I bumped into from time to time on the staircase turn into this hysterical creature who would make my mornings hell with her constant yelling at her children, causing me to get up early even on my days off?

I can’t remember exactly when, but she started to come out on to the landing and call out to the doorman’s wife at the top of her voice, telling her to go and fetch some things from the shops, even though there was an intercom from which she could have placed her order without raising her voice or leaving her flat.

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