Excerpt from A House at the Edge of Tears

The same wind that comes from the sea has run down the same streets for forty years. The rain that used to drench the buildings crosses a field of ruins. At the two extremities of this field: a house where my father conducted a reign of terror and a grave where he found a place not meant for him. He was buried there by chance. War had scrambled the country’s geography: the dead were given up to the closest cemetery.


Two hundred kilometers and one more than thirty villages separate from him my mother, born in a village in North Lebanon. Forty years later, I keep asking myself the same question: how did these two come to hate each other so deeply after having once loved?


I exhume two of my dead and one living-dead: my brother who concentrated within himself all of his father’s ambitions and fury; I want to question them, open their mouths sealed in silence, to root out by force the cause of those rages, as brutal and brief as resin-fires.

In a northern village, the tomb of a Maronite saint has been sweating blood for a century. My father’s grave oozes threats from its stony pores. My mother’s, modest and moss-covered, seeps tears. My mother had only her tears to defend her son. “God, let him be dead!” I would repeat until I was near fainting when my father was late coming home. I dreamed about being an orphan. Only his death would stop my mother’s tears, my brother’s cries of terror, and we three girls from trembling.

On the sixth of December 1950, Father, why did you throw your wife and your three daughters out into the street, keeping your son indoors to tie up on the floor like a mummy? Four faces cramped between the window’s bars saw you, puffing and panting in the glimmering light of the lamp placed on the ground as you perfected your work.
--Don’t kill him, my mother begged you.
--The thought of killing him never crossed my mind.
I want to bury him alive.

Your threats, your son’s moans, our sobs have been transformed by time into shame, a shame as penetrating as the rain that soaked the four faces fixed on your slightest movements.


Forty years later, I throw sentences on the page in great shovelfuls, with a noise of falling earth, as I dig into my shame like a grave. Why did my father play the executioner? Why did our mother weep when she should have spoken up?


Neither of the protagonists can respond. Prisoners of their death, speech was taken from them at the same time as life, and their son remembers nothing. An eighteen-year confinement in a mental hospital has diluted his memory. His memories stop at the pomegranate tree that hung over the threshold and splattered the landing with bloody juice when its fruit burst open in the sun.


To each his own tomb: mine is in these pages. Your name, Mother, is black handwriting on a stone covered in snow six months of the year. I call on you, taking care to enunciate the syllables, and you come toward me without using your crutches; you stop behind me, read over my shoulder the sentences that tell your story in a language you never mastered.

You spoke it so badly that your daughter blushed when you spoke up at school parents’ meetings.

Shame at my mother’s “Lebanofrench,” at my father’s rages, which roused our neighbors from their beds and lined them up facing our door. Shame above all at our thwarted love for that man and that woman who are now turning to dust at the two extremities of the country. Shame at displaying my shame on a page for as long as I have been writing books.


I swallow my shame as I once swallowed the food my mother cooked. Her vegetables were shut in a steamer like our cries, her oversalted salads probably seasoned with her tears.

When the dinner hour arrived, she would call us from the kitchen window facing the evening that made the nettles in the garden and the lowest branch of the pomegranate tree shiver. Only these have survived the seventeen years of war. In the razed house, someone is crying within the vanished walls. The six protagonists curse and insult one another across the disappeared window bars. The father and the son within, the mother and three daughters outside. I ask the two dead, the living-dead, and the three survivors to pick up their cues, speak their lines where they left them forty years ago. I wait for words and I hear sobs. My mother weeps in the evening, in the morning, in winter and in summer, weeps on my hand as it writes.

Pitying looks from the neighbors the next morning. Their children avoid us on the way to school and tell their friends about our cries in the night, your martyrdom and your mother’s entreaties.
--Don’t kill him, she kept repeating.

I didn’t take part in the other children’s games, that day or the days after. I stopped playing at the age of nine. Shame nailed me to the ground. Recess—that was for normal children. I made the excuse that my knees were weak, limped to prove my good faith, still limp out of habit.

From A House at the Edge of Tears by Vénus Khoury-Ghata.  English language translation copyright 2005 by Marilyn Hacker. All rights reserved.