May vanishes
Publication Date: 2025
Publisher: Dar al adab
Country of Publication: Lebanon, Beirut
Pages: 224
Ghaybet May
An old lady in a traditional Beirut apartment spends her days in quiet solitude. The only people she regularly interacts with are the super, Yusef, a Syrian refugee; her longtime family doctor; and Shamili, the Sri Lankan caregiver who visits every Saturday to clean the house, cook for her, and bathe her gently and thoroughly. Apart from these interactions, May is accompanied by her memories—fond recollections of her father, who raised her alone after the death of his wife, and of his sisters who played with her as if she were a doll. She also remembers her kind, deceased husband, particularly his beautifully graceful feet. However, her memories of her children during their young years remain vague. She recalls two loud, boisterous toddler twins who terrified her, and whom she found too exhausting to care for; at that time, she often felt absent-minded, both physically and mentally drained…
May has a cat that lives on her balcony, a creature she deeply dislikes. Yusef tricked her into adopting it, believing it would provide her with companionship, but May stubbornly clung to her aversion for the poor animal. Little did she know that the illness, agony, and eventual death of the cat would awaken deep emotions and buried memories within her.
In “May Vanishes,” Barakat delivers a nuanced portrait of this elderly woman, highlighting her rigidity, her toughness, her sensitivity, and her loneliness, along with her peculiarities. As always, expressing a keen interest in the marvels of human psychology, Najwa Barakat poses the question: What could have happened in this woman’s life that left her so damaged that she could not bond with her own children, and drifted through their childhood like a ghost?
Structured in three distinct parts, akin to three acts, “May Vanishes” tells the story of an ostensibly ordinary old lady who, in her twilight years, confronts the most painful chapters of her life—an era she has somehow managed to erase from her consciousness: a passionate love story with a brutally abusive man. Each part provides a different facet of May’s character. Part 1 is narrated from May’s perspective. Part 2 is conveyed through the voice of a mysterious visitor, uncovering the buried memory of the actress and playwright May once was. Part 3 features Yusef’s perspective.
By Luke Leafgren
The bathroom. I sometimes go there to be alone–even though the house has finally been vacated by everyone living here. I love this little room with no light and no window apart from a little hole leading to a skylight that gives no light because it is walled in on all sides. I go in, but I don’t turn on the light. I close the door behind me to luxuriate in utter darkness. As though I’ve entered a womb. I feel my way to the toilet. I lift the lid and sit down to empty my bowels and my head alike. I close my eyes. I open them. It’s the same. I see nothing. I hear nothing. I’m in a spaceship the size of my own body, swimming in the purity of black, the serenity of nothingness. Gravity is nonexistent, and I float free, invisible and extinguished.
“I’ve prepared the bath, madam!”
Shamili is calling me. We old folks don’t like taking baths because it strips us of our clothes and reveals the devastation that pervades our parts. It exposes us and shows our incapacity to use our own limbs, to raise them high enough to reach the dirt, or to pick up any little thing. As you get older, the dirty spots multiply and spread: in the nose and the veins, under the nails and between the toes, in the corners of the eyes, inside the ears and behind them. That unattractive crust that covers the skin looks thick as fish scales, or an alligator’s. No wonder we don’t like to bathe or have any stranger’s hand fondle our parts. We hate this whole abominable ritual, from first to last. Water and soap, cold and hot, as though someone were carting us from the cellars of hell into cold storage and back.
That is, until Shamili came.
She gently took me by the arm, smiling not just at me, but at the whole world and everything in it. Then she brought me into the bathroom and lit a rose-scented candle she had brought with her. She sat me down on the bath stool after throwing a thick, warm towel over it to protect me from the worst of the cold from the hateful plastic. She loosened the bun of my long gray hair, and for a moment I felt myself tremble as a shudder passed through my body. She reached quickly for the tap of hot water and turned on the spray nozzle to warm the air with steam, at the same time filling a bucket for to soak my feet and get them ready for scraping. She took a comb and began running it through my hair, humming to me, as though we were two lovers sitting on the bank of a river, enjoying the tranquil beauty around us.
“Mahita lagama damatina, huru bamaka balatina…”
She sang to me in her sonorous Sinhalese. I felt myself melting without resistance between her soft hands. Tears gathered in my eyes, though unaccompanied by any burning or distress. They fell on my hands, which rested on my naked thighs. That did not stop her singing or change the rhythm of the comb moving in her hand, as if my tears were a natural occurrence and nothing that called for any inquiry or reaction.