By Sarah-maria Khoueiry, November 2024
Georges is moving the furniture in the living room—again. This is something he is used to, never mind the fact that he is over 80 years-old and almost completely blind. He pushes a couch to the side and drags the swivel chair from behind the desk next to it. He puts one of the armchairs next to it, and the other on the opposite wall. The one-bedroom is small-too small to accommodate everyone he’s expecting, but he has done this for the past 15 years, and he will keep on doing this until his last breath. He moves wooden chairs from around the matching table, and pulls it away from its corner up to the middle of the room. He unfolds a red picnic table and places it to the side of the wooden one. The remaining chairs go around the makeshift banquet table. It’s Sunday, and he is expecting his family for lunch. He stands back to look at the new arrangement—nothing more than vague shapes and muted colours—and decides one of the armchairs would fit better at the head of the table.
Nour watches from the back of the kitchen as he struggles around the Tetris of mismatched seating arrangements and tables. She turns back to the stovetop where she stirs a sauce and checks on her small spinach hand pies in the oven. She hears Georges muttering behind her and smiles to herself. She knows it’s no use telling him to stop. She knows he will end up with the same configuration he always does. She knows he will only get more frustrated if she tries to help. He’s a stubborn man and in 60 years of marriage, she has learned to let him be for a while. Besides, she doesn’t have time to argue with him about interior design; it’s Sunday, and 17 family members of all ages are expecting her to feed them. The TV screen is out of her eyesight. It’s loud with the sound of voice actors dubbing a Turkish soap opera. Nour has seen it already, but nothing else is on, and it keeps her company while her husband occupies himself with seating charts. She listens carefully to their voices to make out the different characters, and, if she closes her eyes long enough, she can imagine herself as one of the heroines. She convinces herself of having lived through a love story grand enough to span several years and eccentric characters. She sees herself in a wedding gown, walking down the aisle, only for some long-lost first love to object to the union. She becomes a servant, eavesdropping on the wealthy landowner. She shares the gossip with her fellow maids in the kitchen. She is a mother-in-law, disapproving of her daughter’s star-crossed love affair with the village farmer.
Nour lives a thousand lives without leaving her kitchen. By the time she finishes chopping the vegetables for the salad, she has forgotten about her husband mumbling under his breath and her children. She has forgotten about the mundane, the ordinary, the usual. She has forgotten about her real life, the one that requires her to care for a difficult husband, the one that requires her to stand hours at a time in the cramped kitchen of a too-small apartment. She longs for the days of her youth when she could have married anyone, when she could have stayed in her country, when she could have studied at university and made a different life for herself. She thinks of when she could have run away, when she should’ve run away. She lives vicariously through fake characters, building a fake life inside of her head. She makes up stories and confuses them with her own. She tells them to anyone who will listen.
The end credits roll and the morning news segment starts playing. A reporter in a helmet and a vest appears. She doesn’t turn the TV off.
Georges and Nour have settled in their weekly routine, her laboring in the kitchen for two days straight then, and him walking to the supermarket three times a day to supply her with everything she needs, then moving around the furniture. They have gotten used to this slow life, in their small apartment, away from everything they know. In a couple of hours, their children will ring the doorbell. They will help spread the dishes on the tables. Their great-grand-children will ask for sodas and complain about their friends. Nour will think of the friends she shared her secrets with. Those who knew about her dreams, fantasies, and aspirations. She will wonder about what they would say if they saw her now, living the same life that her mother had, the life she thought she’d never had. The chairs will fill, the reporter’s voice will get drowned out in lively conversations and light banter. They will share knowing glances when they hear Georges and Nour argue about missing place settings and cold rice. Georges will sit at the head of the table, on the armchair he put there. Behind him, the sun shines through the balcony’s sliding door. His tomato plant withers in the cold, but he still asks his wife to check on it every other day. Nour will put food on everyone's plates. She will look around the table to her guests, her children, people she had raised and wish she hadn’t. She will wonder then, like she does every Sunday, how different it could all be, if only she was Turkish. If only her story was written by someone else. If only her voice was translated in a language she could understand. If only she could watch her life through another’s eyes, and wish it was hers.
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