Always Coca-Cola Read online

  I didn’t say one word of this to Yasmine, though, because I knew she wouldn’t listen to me.

  All this talk of menstruation reminded me that my period was also due today and that since yesterday I’d been feeling that it was just about to come on: my breasts swelled up so that my bra almost couldn’t hold them and they’d gotten rock hard. I had also started to feel a slight pain low down in my now swollen belly.As time passed, this pain grew increasingly serious and by the time we got to Starbucks it had become acute. I decided to take painkillers as I always do, but I realized that I’d forgotten them at home because I was so distracted by Yana’s pregnancy. I also forgot to bring sanitary pads. Now this really upset me, because that sharp pain is the sign that the blood will flow out of me at any second—and it will flow violently, like water pouring out of a broken faucet that you can’t stop! I had to find a pad to protect my underwear as soon as possible, so that the blood wouldn’t leak out onto my clothes and leave a stain on my rear end!

  But finding a sanitary pad was no simple matter, since there isn’t a single store nearby where I could buy them and my two girlfriends are of no use to me in this. They don’t carry pads in their purses because they use tampons. But I figured that it doesn’t hurt to ask, even if it doesn’t help, so I asked if either of them had an Always (we call all pads “Always,” even though it’s the name of a specific brand).

  Yasmine’s answer was exactly what I expected: she said that she hadn’t used Always for a long time. Then she added that when she did, she felt as though she were wearing diapers! Yana agreed and added that using sanitary pads was actually unsanitary, because blood-filled pads are the dream-come-true of all bacteria; they’re like a luxuriant heaven for germs. On top of it all, pads give off an unbearable odor that can be smelled distinctly from meters away! When she walks down the street, Yana said, she smells many unpleasant odors, but sanitary pads give off the most disgusting smell of all—she can tell just by smelling whether a woman walking by is wearing one!

  Yana followed up by asking me how I could stand the filth of sanitary pads, but before I could answer, Yasmine commented that she does not understand how I can use them today, because using them in this day and age is like riding a camel down a road intended for cars!

  I replied to these questions jokingly, “But I always use Always!”

  We all burst out laughing, but then instantly grew silent when a café worker came over to our table and asked for our order, something that Starbucks workers don’t usually do. He addressed his question to Yana alone, looking only at her. He disregarded Yasmine and me as though we were nonexistent, nothing but a mere “mirage” appearing before him.

  What a jerk! I said to myself.

  I grumbled to express my annoyance at this jerk, but he didn’t even notice me and kept staring at Yana, who smiled at him and asked for three pieces of cake as though nothing were wrong. When he asked her if she wanted to drink something, she hesitated. She said that she was afraid to drink coffee in the evening because it would make her anxious all night long, and the only drinks that Starbucks offers are various coffees and one kind of lemon juice that she really hates. He told her that he would bring her a soda even though the café’s rules forbade it; he would put it in a coffee mug so that no one would notice. She was open to the idea and he asked her what kind of drink she wanted, but before she could answer he suggested, “Pepsi?”

  She shook her head no, saying, “Surely not Pepsi—Coke!”

  At that moment I said in English in a loud voice, “Always, always Coca-Cola!”

  My joke cracked my girlfriends up because they knew about my urgent need for an Always pad. The server, who didn’t get the loaded meaning of what I said, didn’t laugh at all—he thought that I was just repeating the slogan emblazoned on every single Coca-Cola product. He went right away to bring Yana her order.

  When he was a reasonable distance away from our table, Yasmine suggested that I use a tampon as she and Yana do, instead of a sanitary pad. She didn’t give me the least opportunity to offer an opinion or objection but instantly produced an open box of tampons from her purse, shoving it at me until it practically touched my nose. The tampons were lined up in the box just like cigarettes lined up in a packet and I imagined that she was offering me a cigarette and not a tampon. But I declined to take one, despite her insistence, and she said, “Please don’t tell me that you’re afraid it’ll pop your cherry if you put it inside yourself!”

  She said this very loudly and I asked her to lower her voice because I was afraid that someone sitting nearby would hear us, then I whispered to her that using a tampon would for sure devirginize me—this is a fact that no one can disagree with!

  After a moment’s quiet, I then added in an almost inaudible voice, “But this is the least of my worries!” Yasmine said, “Then take one and stop making such a show of your chastity!” She pushed the box toward me a second time and when no comment emerged from me, she took one out to give me, at which point I noticed that it looked a lot like a suppository!

  But I didn’t take it from her—at that very instant I remembered that there’s a machine that sells sanitary pads on the wall of the café’s bathroom. I got up immediately and headed towards it—just as the hero in an American film who’s in the middle of the desert heads for an oasis that’s suddenly appeared to him just one or two seconds before he dies of heat exhaustion and dehydration. The oasis that I was heading for—i.e., the Starbucks bathroom—also crossed my mind at just the right time, i.e., just a few minutes before my period began.

  The moment I entered the oasis/bathroom I went up to the machine and put a coin in it, so that in exchange it would spit out a sanitary pad and I could relax. But the machine didn’t spit anything out; instead it spat in my face because it was broken! I said to myself, what I thought was an oasis was merely a mirage! So what should I do now? Should I wait for an Always pad to fall from the heavens like rain, or a white dove, flapping its wings that keep the moisture from leaking out onto my clothes?

  But I decided to take some initiative, and so I hit the broken machine with my fist, hoping that would make a pad come out without my having to put in a coin. But the indifferent machine didn’t respond to my hitting it; the only result was a sharp pain in my hand. While I was rubbing my hand to alleviate this pain, I noticed two more machines that I hadn’t seen in there before, hanging on the wall near the one for sanitary pads.

  On one of them was written: Tampons 500 LL.

  And on the other: Condoms 1000 LL.

  Seeing the second machine really disturbed me, but I was distracted from it by other more pressing and urgent concerns. At that moment, my period started. I felt a strong spasm in my lower belly and something hot starting to move between my thighs and I went into one of the stalls and discovered a huge bloodstain that had just seeped into my underwear. Fine threads branched off from the blood, looking just like rivers in an atlas, as they split off and flow into lakes. I was worried because I knew when I saw this that it was the harbinger of the coming flood and I had no bulwark against the river of blood that would flow out of me at any moment. But then all of a sudden I thought—all rivers must stop at the sea, and I sat on the toilet seat so that the blood would flow into it and not onto my clothes. Then I realized that I was stuck and could no longer get off of the seat to secure a sanitary pad, and after a few long minutes I felt that my rear end had been soldered onto the toilet and couldn’t be detached.

  My seat was directly across from the toilet door, which was covered in lots of scribbles that girls who had been here before me had written on it. Most of these were names and dates, or expressions of eternal love, and even sometimes other kinds of love, like the one written in English:

  Dany fucked me!

  This particular expression was painted on the door in nail polish that had not yet dried, so it must have been written just a few minutes earlier. I wondered: Who could have written it? But at that moment the pain in my uterus increas
ed and I wondered instead: Will some relief come so I can get out of here?

  After a few minutes this relief did come. When one of the girls from the café came into the bathroom, I opened the door of the toilet stall, stretched my head outside it and asked her for a sanitary pad even though I didn’t know her. She gave me a pad, I attached it and then left immediately, wondering the whole time: Will she write something on the toilet door too when she’s all alone in there?

  Walking the short distance between the bathroom and our table, I tried to work out the identity of the person who wrote those words on the bathroom door. I stared at the faces of all the girls as though I expected this to be stamped in huge letters on the forehead of the one responsible, but it was the opposite of what I thought, all of their faces were free of any signs of their owners’ actions or intentions. They all wore light foundation so their faces looked like clean pages, free of any letters or marks; they were as immaculate as the cleanest, clearest purified water.

  When I arrived back at our table, Yasmine had already left and Yana was sitting alone, lost in thought. She didn’t notice me until I asked her what she was thinking about. She answered that she had decided to tell her boyfriend about the pregnancy; she had called him while I was in the bathroom and asked him to come to see her right away. We left the café in a bit of a hurry so that Yana wouldn’t be late to meet him, and when we reached the entrance to her building, she asked me to come up to her apartment with her. She didn’t wait for me to answer but grabbed my hand and dragged me behind her, keeping hold of me until we had arrived at the landing in front of her apartment, at which point she had to let go of my hand to open the door.

  The tiles in Yana’s apartment were all torn up; this was one of the manifestations of the extreme transitional phase that it was passing through. She had decided to renovate it completely as soon as her husband moved out and left it to her. The apartment wasn’t suitable for habitation because everything in it was old and damaged, beginning with the worn out, rusted pipes, which Yana was now replacing with new ones, up to and including the Arabic-style toilet, which she had never liked because of the foul smell that emanated from it. She was replacing it with another Western-style toilet and bidet, since she didn’t consider it civilized for people to take care of their needs in a hole in the ground.

  This renovation process was nowhere near completion six months later: the apartment was still full of piles of rubble and debris; it wouldn’t be ready to emerge from all this mess for a long time still.

  A few minutes after we entered the apartment, the doorbell rang and Yana opened the door to her boyfriend. This was the first time I had met him. The very moment I laid eyes on him, I thought: He’s not suited to Yana, nor is she suited to him. They are absolutely different in every way; they are as different as parsley and lemon, or tomato and bulgur wheat! They can never be compatible because mixing them will create a poisonous substance—as deadly as the tabbouleh mixture is for Yana!

  I don’t know exactly what it was that made me think this the second I saw him.

  As for him, he didn’t see me when he first entered the apartment because he immediately drew Yana toward him and started kissing her passionately. After a few moments, Yana freed herself from his arms and came over to me, to introduce us. The second he knew who I was, he said that I could start work at the Coca-Cola Company in two days, no problem. I was really surprised, I wasn’t expecting things to happen so quickly or easily! I thought to myself: Yana should start an employment agency rather than wasting her time with modeling!

  I thanked him, asking myself if I hadn’t seen him somewhere before. Every time I caught a glimpse of him, this feeling that I had seen him before increased. But before I could figure it out Yana linked her arm in his and quickly bustled him into the bedroom.

  The bedroom in Yana’s house is really strangely located because it opens directly onto the house’s main entrance; this layout is completely different from what I am used to seeing in Beiruti residences, where the bedrooms are hidden behind solid walls in the depths of the houses. And Yana liked to leave her bedroom door wide open day and night.

  She even left it open today when she went into the room with her boyfriend, something that really embarrassed (and even enraged!) me because I could easily hear everything that was happening between the two of them. Yana was flirting with her boyfriend in English, dropping in “habibi” and “hayati,” “my darling” and “my life,” after every other word. She had learned these two words after hearing them repeated constantly in the Lebanese songs she was always listening to, making them easy for her to memorize. But despite the number of times that she had heard these two words, she could not pronounce them correctly. Her native Romanian does not have the sound of the Arabic letter “h,” making it impossible for her to pronounce it. Therefore, she always substituted it with “kh,” a sound common to the two languages, and thus called her boyfriend “khabibi” and “khayati.”

  When I heard her, I thought that this small error in pronunciation could at times make a dreadful difference in meaning and lead to embarrassing results. Yana doesn’t know how to pronounce the word “hurra,” for example, and this is one of the words that she uses all the time. Whenever she doesn’t want to answer a question, she says, “Ana hurra, I am free!” But given that she pronounces the “ha” as “kha” and that she cannot pronounce the shadda to double the “r” sound, in her mouth this expression becomes “Ana khara, I am shit!”

  Yana understands very well the difference in meaning between these two words—free and shit—but she hasn’t been able to do anything to improve her pronunciation, however much she’s tried.

  I laughed when I thought about this but just as quickly stopped laughing because right then I remembered where I had seen her boyfriend before. I saw him one day when I went to a job interview in a hotel, he was entering the reception area accompanied by a woman with blonde hair and they were holding hands. I tried to remember if this was before Yana had met him or after they had already met, but I couldn’t.

  Meanwhile, the activities in the bedroom had started to heat up, increasing my embarrassment, so I decided to get away from that room and went to the kitchen, where I locked the door in order to isolate myself properly, like someone setting up a quarantine to be protected from the avian flu.

  The kitchen was the only room in the house where the renovations were completed, and Yana had made a place in it for her caged parrot. This bird imposed his sovereignty over the place and would start cursing at anyone who crossed over the official border into his “territory”—that is to say, the stretch of space between the door, the stove, and the refrigerator. The moment that I crossed this border, he showered curses down upon me like rain... acid rain, of course! After the parrot had exhausted all of his ammunition, he grew silent and started observing my every movement, like a surveillance camera in one of Beirut’s security zones.

  When Yana bought the parrot, she didn’t notice that all he could say were the most shocking curse words, because her knowledge of Arabic was extremely limited back then. In fact, she was really happy because she thought that she had purchased an “Arab” bird, who spoke the language fluently. When she discovered that he didn’t recite poetry as she had thought but rather was a master in composing vulgar obscenities, she was really disappointed. But she got used to hearing these curses, so much so that she no longer was able to distinguish between these and other Lebanese expressions. She wasn’t shocked if someone called her “sharmouta,” for example, as some guy walking down Hamra Street did one day!

  I can’t forget this incident because it truly bothered me. I actually keep on remembering it and replaying the scene over and over again in my head, trying to understand the cause behind it.

  We were walking down Hamra Street in front of a building known for renting out furnished rooms. No doubt the person who sidled up to us and cursed at Yana thought that we were leaving that building, which everyone knows by the huge sign that
covers an entire wall and actually means the opposite of what it says. Written on it in conspicuous innocence are the words: “Rooms for sale or rent, at reasonable prices!”

  But this artificial innocence doesn’t fool anyone. I know this because one day when I was walking from Yana’s house to the university, early in the morning before the people of the neighborhood were awake, I noticed a change painted on the sign—someone had scratched out the word “rooms,” and written “whores” in its place so that the sign read, “Whores for sale or rent, at reasonable prices!”

  Yana must be the only person who doesn’t know what goes on in that building! This is truly bizarre, since it isn’t that far from her house and she passes by it several times a day. How could she not notice? No doubt she thinks that the building is just as innocent as its sign pretends! Yana tends to take things exactly as they appear, and I’ve tried to caution her about the danger of this: I’m always invoking a saying that means something like, “Things are seldom what they seem, skim milk masquerades as cream” or “Always acting so naive, makes you easier to deceive.”

  Yana never sees that it is actually skim milk cleverly hiding itself behind its guise as cream. She is so naïve that she is always shocked when even the tiniest indication of deception comes to light. On that day, for instance, she had a shock after informing her boyfriend that she was most likely pregnant. After he left the house, she came into the kitchen with the signs of stupefaction still on her face. She flung herself onto me, wailing, “He doesn’t want to see me anymore!”... and then burst into tears.

  “Shut up, sharmouta!” the parrot told her.

  But Yana didn’t shut up; in fact her wailing increased violently and she kept on like that for a long time. After she had finally calmed down, she apprised me in detail about everything that had happened between her and her boyfriend.

  Her boyfriend was direct and clear. He gave her only two choices, no more: either she gets rid of the baby right away—if she wants to continue their relationship—or she keeps it and he’s out of her life completely!