Trans. Michelle Hartman
‘Always Coca-Cola’, Alexandra Chreiteh’s debut novel, was described by Words Without Borders as “a razor-sharp commentary on how young women in Beirut today are buffeted by the alternately conflicting and conspiring forces of hegemony, capitalism, and patriarchy.” Abeer Ward, the novel’s narrator, belongs to overlapping and contradictory social circles: a mainstream conservative family, a circle of adventurous young friends, Beirut’s communalism, and global consumerism. In the excerpt that follows, Abeer is with her family.
When I finally reached the landing in front of the apartment I was panting from exhaustion and my shirt was damp under the arms with perspiration, producing an odor like a fishmonger’s shop at noon. I planned to wash as soon as I entered the house, but the women sitting on the living room floor detained me. I had to shake their hands, each woman one by one, and kiss each one three times on her cheeks, then ask each one about her health—even though I knew that the health of every single one of them was good and nothing was wrong with any of them! This process of delivering greetings lasted a long time because, as usual, there were a large number of women present. They successfully exploited their numbers to increase the productivity and speed of lunch preparation and had divided the discrete tasks involved amongst themselves.
This process was now reaching its climax: my mother Hiba and my grandmother Naziha were preparing balls of kibbeh, and my father’s sister Nahid and her three daughters were chopping tomatoes and parsley, and my father’s other, recently en-gaged, sister Nuha was peeling onions and crying because they were so strong, and my father’s third sister Niemat and her two daughters Zaynab and Hala were peeling potatoes, which my father’s brother’s wife Hanadi cut up to fry in oil later. As for Dareen, the wife of my father’s other brother, and her daughter Ulaa, the two of them were drinking coffee with Ru’aa, the fiancée of my father’s third brother, and also with my grandmother’s neighbor Siham, and her son’s wife, whose name I tried to remember but couldn’t.
These women had brought their children along to my grandmother’s house, just as they do every Friday, and the number of kids in the apartment was approximately the same as the number of inhabitants in a small village.
Today this village was packed into a three-room apartment—it has an entry hall, a living room, and a bedroom. The population density had reached a level that would shock the United Nations bureau responsible for the world’s overpopulation problem. But the overcrowded numbers of children wasn’t the worst of it—the worst was the roar emanating from them, loud enough to wake the Companions of the Cave from their deep slumber. Despite their desperate mothers’ attempts to calm them, the children were jumping and screaming and running through the house without stopping or tiring. It was as though inside them they had limitless energy, exactly like the Duracell battery that keeps on going and going and going…
<blockquote>I reminded her that it’s not she who’ll feel embarrassed in either place anyway, because her son’s the one who’s buying the pads for her.</blockquote>This roar had gone on for much longer than the mothers could stand, their anger toward their children exploded and was incarnated in my uncle’s wife Hanadi, who got up from the floor where she was sitting to impose some order. She found that she could only conquer by dividing and so she split the kids into two groups. She sent the first to the shop on the ground floor of the building owned by my grand-mother’s elderly neighbor, telling her oldest son, whom she appointed as the group’s leader, to buy her sanitary pads, “Buy some Always!”
“Always?” I asked her curiously, after the first detachment of children had marched off to execute her order.
She replied that she’s embarrassed to buy them herself from the mini-market near her house because she’s too shy to speak of such intimate things in front of the three young men who work there. So she prefers to buy them from an old man, like the one who owns the shop on the ground floor of my grandmother’s building. I reminded her that it’s not she who’ll feel embarrassed in either place anyway, because her son’s the one who’s buying the pads for her.
But Hanadi didn’t hear me because she was busy with the second group of children; she had ordered them to sit in a row on the sofa and keep silent—under threat of getting smacked with a slipper that she had taken off and waved right in their faces to assure them that she wasn’t joking.
And just like that, the noise died down; I could no longer hear anything but the women’s chatting, the loudspeaker on the minaret of the nearby mosque and the sound of the television, which was broadcasting a song called “Tannoura” (Oh, Why Does She Shorten her Skirt?). But my grandmother wasted no time in turning off the song after the azaan started, causing a group mobilization of the women sitting in the living room, who instantly suspended their activities and headed all together to the apartment’s one sink to do their wudu‘.
Now I myself had intended to head toward the very same sink just seconds before the azaan started so that I could wash my armpits and get rid of the smell of rotting fish radiating from them. But I didn’t get there in time for two reasons: firstly, as soon as the women heard the azaan they rushed to the sink like cars speeding down the highway, cutting me off with blows from their hips and elbows, practically crushing me; secondly, at that moment, my cousin Hala grabbed my right arm and dragged me away into the bedroom.
In the bedroom, she told me in a whisper, “Abeer, I don’t want to get married!”
Stupefied, I asked her, “What did you say?” For it had really shocked me—in fact it shocked me a great deal more than it should have—I felt as if she was saying to me, “Abeer, I’m actually a man!”
Even though she hadn’t given her reasons for her lack of desire to marry, I immediately connected her statement to a possible confusion about her sexual orientation—something that I had wondered about for a long time, without ever openly saying anything to her. My evidence for this was her longstanding refusal to get married.
This refusal has really infuriated her family, but for a different reason—Hala had already reached thirty years of age and thus was only a few steps away from the point of no return from the hell they call spinsterhood. This caused her mother acute pain and embarrassment and everyone took part in adding to this pain and this embarrassment, first and foremost my aunt Nahid, who had married off all her daughters a long time ago and who always says to Hala’s mother,
“Isn’t it a shame that this flower will wilt before any-one’s inhaled its fragrance?”