Beirut Blues Read online

  “Surely reading and interpreting the Qur’an correctly only teaches you how to be closer to God and His Messenger?”

  My grandmother won, and books and writing became the most important things in her life, rather than women’s talk restricted to the tree producing fruit, or the cow miscarrying, or the latest wedding. She began studying late into the night, turning up the kerosene lamp, and discovered that being able to solve the riddle of words gave her power; she refused to eat sitting on the mat and put her food out on a little table. When her father threw his huge, worn-out shoes away, she rescued them and put them on and felt the power springing from them.

  On my grandfather’s land, she lowered her eyes from the sky and fixed them on her father. She wept, saying she needed to see the sky and breathe the air every day, not just on rare occasions. But his thoughts were elsewhere, as he looked all around him, ensuring the spot he had chosen was quiet except for the sound of loneliness and the horse shifting restlessly between the shafts of the cart which he had stopped on the level ground. When he was certain nobody could see his daughter, he heaved a sigh of relief. But there was someone there, and he was watching her. My grandfather could see part of her face as she spoke, and he sighed to himself, and fell in love with her.

  My grandfather’s name eventually became known in Beirut, having become part of the fabric of the country like the Beydouns and Sursuqs and other families with areas named after them. His name was given to varieties of apples and pears and a new kind of fruit he produced by grafting an apple onto a guava. The feel of it was somewhere between the sweet smoothness of an apple and the rough porous texture of a quince, and it tasted like a mixture of orange flower water and cherries. I heard its name everywhere, especially on the lips of street vendors.

  Although my grandmother traveled away from you, you had taken root in her, and so she only half gave herself to the city: one eye, nostril, hand. Everything connected with Beirut was temporary, or if not temporary, always peripheral.

  She did not express her taste in furniture, as she did in clothes, and bought it haphazardly, remaining in the car and delegating Ali to buy whatever was available. She never tried to mix with her Beirut neighbors or even to accommodate to the city itself. We continued to live as if we were close to you, eating off an assortment of dishes with brass spoons which were turning rusty. We consumed large raw pieces of meat and offal, unconcerned about the liquid floating in the tureen and the flies hovering around the milk, sometimes falling in.

  I adapted to Beirut in the same way as she did, but you were there in front of me every time I came home and saw wooden crates piled up in the entrance, or rode in Ali’s car and sat next to a box of eggs, a heap of slaughtered chickens, or a pail of milk.

  As soon as the war spread outside the city, it penetrated right inside you, where you were moist and bursting with life, and when the seeds were fertilized, they produced the fires of battle.

  The Palestinians were the first to occupy you, taking over a rocky, uncultivated area known as the wilderness, and my grandfather made sure that anybody with the remotest connection to the Palestinians knew how he felt about this. Eventually he went to the man in charge, who had been to visit him on a previous occasion to ask permission to use the area for maneuvers. My grandfather had refused, not because he feared it would give the Israelis an excuse to attack, but because he and my grandmother were possessive to the extent that if a bee or a butterfly moved onto one of their trees, they believed the creature automatically became their property. They wanted everyone, even the cattle, to know that a particular stone marked the beginning of their land, and not a single cow would reach its head out over this boundary to graze. There was no barbed-wire fence or wall surrounding you. Anyone was free to look at you, but there was a solid mental boundary which sent an electrifying quiver through those who crossed it intending harm. The fear was not of the two of them, but of all they had: the house, the trees, the car and its driver, the house in Beirut and the guests who called on them; the pilgrimages to Mecca and the holy places, the prayer beads they had brought back from Mount Arafat, the water from the sacred well of Zemzem; and the limitless supplies of food which appeared to be the source of their power.

  My grandfather began making for the “wilderness” to observe the fedayeen night and day as they carried out imaginary operations, rolling down the slopes, taking cover, practicing firing, and letting out exuberant cries as they roasted a snake for their evening meal. He used to imitate them dancing, waving his hands in the air and bringing them down to his sides, and produced a centipede from a jar and went through the motions of biting it in front of them. He would ask them from a distance, “What do you want? How many liras to see the back of you?”

  He had no faith in politics or the struggle, and they finally lost patience with him, for every time he heard a shot he would call out, “It sounds as though somebody’s had too many beans.”

  If you were my grandfather’s reason for living, then mankind was my grandmother’s. It was not that she loved her fellow human beings, but she felt that she derived her lifeblood from dominating them. When she lost the wilderness, it was as if she had lost the wings which enabled her to fly. She tried to preserve a certain permanent image of herself, my grandfather, and his ancestors in the Palestinians’ eyes by convincing my grandfather that he should agree to lend them the wilderness, even curry favor with them, so that when she sat cross-legged in gatherings, she could say carelessly, as if waving away a fly, “We gave them charity, so they have to do as we say.”

  The Palestinians left the wilderness after an Israeli reconnaissance aircraft was seen circling above the village and the surrounding area on several occasions, acting on information received from a spy in our village, it was said at the time. My grandfather went to survey his territory joyfully, hurling the whitewashed stones which had been used to mark out the camp boundaries onto the rocks below. With my grandmother, he considered whether to plant fields there and cultivate the wilderness or to burn off the wooded slopes and leave them fallow for a time. But the village youths did not leave him undecided for long, as they occupied it one dawn, at the moment when the watchful eye dozes, confident that the night and its dark terrors are dispersing, because the first signs of morning and clarity are only a hair’s breadth away.

  My grandfather rushed from the house, shouting, “I’ve been raped by my sons! I’ve been raped by my sons!”

  He raced along, his shirt hanging over his trousers, and my grandmother ran after him, holding out his belt to him and crying, “A man without a belt has no restraint, and a man who runs gives the impression he has no sense and no dignity.”

  When my grandfather saw Mustafa and the rest of the youths in the wilderness, a blood vessel burst in his eye.

  “Mustafa? Abu Mustafa’s son?” he was shouting as he came around from the anesthetic. “His mother was packing fruit when she went into labor and they brought her to our house to give birth to this thug.”

  He wouldn’t be quiet even though the doctor warned him that he’d burst another blood vessel.

  He thought he had sorted the matter out with the young men’s families, some of whom had promised to help and been extremely upset about what had happened, but their sons made plans to leave the wilderness and occupy the orchards: the idealists among them thought the orchards would be a source of income; then they would not need to be committed to any political party, individual or state, and the cash would enable them to start up a new party, independent of all the others. Meantime, my grandfather, who still had one eye bandaged, swore to have his revenge, not only on them but on you—the earth and the trees that had accepted another master. He vowed to set you alight, but he was like a little child crying in pain, and needed someone to calm him down all the time in the hospital; my grandmother and his brother only made things worse and he began to scream again, like the child refusing to play any of the games suggested to him. “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” urged my
grandmother. “We should form a militia. A gang of thugs—or fighters, as they call them—who look ferocious enough to make a lion stand up on its hind legs and beg for mercy.”

  “A militia?” shouted my grandfather, overwhelmed. “Shooting and getting shot? What’s the matter with you? You’re the wisest, most sensible, most intelligent woman I know. How can you think about having a militia?”

  “My body is on fire!” she screamed. “I feel as if somebody’s hung me up by the eyes on a fishhook. You think it’s reasonable for some thugs to push us off our land? Off our ancestors’ land? Reasonable that we should let godless people surround this house, whose walls have been purified by all the prayers I’ve prayed in it?”

  “They’re all communists, with no religion, no breeding,” put in my great-uncle soothingly, “but a militia, Umm Fatima? Are we thugs too?”

  “You’re right, we’re not,” she answered contemptuously, “but one has to change. If we protect our lands in the only way open to us and they call us thugs, then perhaps we are. If the politicians are, then, yes, so are we.”

  The idea of starting up a militia had been like a seed planted in her heart in the earliest days of the war. She had watered it and slowly it had grown and matured. She stood there defiantly. “What do you say?” she demanded, deliberately addressing the question to my grandfather, because she knew that his brother would not give him any encouragement, and also because she felt, as she always had done, that the family consisted solely of her and my grandfather.

  “Whom would you want to carry guns, my dear?” inquired my grandfather. “Abu Karki and his wife, Hussein, Abu Mustafa, father of the ringleader, or Fadil?”

  We all burst out laughing, as my grandfather had chosen the oldest, the most decrepit, the most naïve of the local people, or else those who were still loyal to our family purely because their sons were abroad or in Beirut.

  My grandmother stopped laughing abruptly, regretting her frivolity. “No. Do you think I’m so shortsighted and stupid? No, not at all. Did no one hear me saying that the militias were bullies and thugs who love the color of money and the taste of power? They’re vigilantes, bullies, but you just agree to what I’m saying and I guarantee you’ll have everyone under your feet like cockroaches.”

  My great-uncle spoke this time, prepared for the storm his words would provoke, but feeling there was only one solution to the problem and he would state it whatever happened: “You have to have an agreement with the family you won’t name.”

  “My wife has gone mad, and it looks as if you have too,” said my grandfather, “but luckily I’m still sane. Drag our name through the mud for the sake of a lot of wild hooligans who’ve rebelled against their families because it’s time they got married?”

  “It seems the years have played tricks with your mind,” remarked my grandmother to my great-uncle, not looking in his direction. Then, disregarding his proposal and returning to her original train of thought, she went through the families she knew who had militias. “Even the Albino has a militia. That makes about twenty in all.”

  “So who have you got around here?” reiterated my great-uncle. “Listen! Talk to the family you won’t name and they’ll put some of their bandits at your disposal to protect your land. You won’t lose as much as an onion skin. On the contrary, you’ll stand to gain—when they’ve recovered your land for you, they’ll be glad to work with you.”

  I don’t remember a time when we ever mentioned the name of the unnamed family. We called them the Birdseeds, the Shitshovelers, the Nasties, the Unmentionables, the Nameless.

  The animosity towards this family was not because they smuggled hashish and cocaine (one of their sons had a degree in mechanical engineering from a leading university in the States, and when he came back, he designed a small wooden aircraft for the family to use for short runs into Syria). It was because they had risen to prominence in the course of the war and had a lot of influence, although my grandparents did not publicly acknowledge their existence.

  My grandfather could not forget how this family had expanded and become one of the richest in the area, when their forefathers had been reduced to living on their wits, transporting sand and gravel on their pack animals until, thanks to their shrewd instincts, they became big tobacco smugglers, graduating to hashish in the war. In no time at all they began to throw their money about, acquiring big American cars, new villas, and gilded furniture. They forbade their women to collect camel and cattle dung to feed the fire and actually gave up the outside oven and the tin sheets for bread baking when they had an asphalt path laid and planted flower beds on either side of it.

  One of their sons married a much-married actress who had posed in a bathing suit with a bottle of perfume held up to her breasts and the caption “It’s good to be warm even in a heat wave.” Instead of criticizing them, local people admired them more than ever, proud that they came from the Bekaa, and were particularly impressed when the family became involved in politics, took hostages and kidnapped those who got in the way of their business activities. Bullies and vigilantes gathered around them, until eventually they had a militia protecting them, their routes, and their men, whose methods of communication with the outside world had begun to command the greatest respect. They had acquired walkie-talkies, and a private international telephone line stretching above the sunflowers and telegraph poles and running by the streams. They had even introduced new methods of preparing hashish, processing it, and making it ready for shipment. All the young men in the village and the surrounding area had aspirations to join their circle, enticed by the private helicopter overhead, their Presley haircuts, the gold and diamond rings on their fingers, their genuine crocodile belts.

  The confusion inside my grandmother’s head increased as she understood that, for the first time, she was powerless to act. When the armed men gathered and advanced right up to her boundaries, she hurried to visit the houses in the village, one by one, houses where she never set foot except when someone died or gave birth. It escaped her notice, she who never failed to notice even the color of someone’s eyelashes, that the people were scared of her visiting, scared that their children would be as rude to her as they had been to them. For they had already tried to persuade them to leave the land, either by shouting and threatening or by recounting stories of our family’s generosity in an attempt to bring them around and make them see the light. Their talk was weighed down with the past, unlikely to strike any chords with their children, who knew nothing of the time before the war, had learned about nothing but the different types of arms in circulation, wanted nothing but to dress in combat gear. Their families’ intervention only served to make the children more alienated, more irritated, for they had never understood why their parents were so well disposed towards a big landowning family like ours, and they accused them of fearing the past and continuing to be dominated by it.

  My grandmother sent Naima out to reconnoiter and gleaned from her hesitant reports that the people would rather she visited them in the morning. My grandmother swallowed as if her mouth were full of pins, recalling the past when she had never had to inquire about the best time to visit, because their houses were open to her all year round, and they were pleased at her interest in them. However, she smiled at Naima and said, “Never mind. The morning is a good time to go.”

  She toured around listening to the echo of her words, for the rooms were almost bare except for cupboards and mattresses, and the pin-cushions and woven straw mats on the walls. She guessed that people were no longer as upset as they had seemed in the past when they heard that the land had been occupied, even though they cried in front of her and bent to kiss her respectfully on the shoulder, disowning their children or swearing to punish them, promising to do whatever they could. But my grandmother sensed that a change had occurred in these houses: it was the feeling of tranquillity, as if the parents had become subservient to their children. She reproached them for abandoning their authority.

  She was wearing a
dress she hadn’t worn for ages which was beginning to cut into her a little around the waist, but she loved the velvet trimming on the sleeves. Over it she wore the coat whose color had faded, but which she still liked all the same. She smelled of amber essence and had remembered to put a few drops on her prayer beads. Despair had no power over her: it was as if she had given her mind a protective coating, reinforcing it with arguments taken from history, from received wisdom, even from the daily papers, and it had started to creak because she had polished it so much. Her listeners were ill at ease, watching the door. My grandmother began deliberately putting off leaving, deciding that she would get more out of the sons than from these evasive folk who swayed from side to side, tutting and repeating, “There is no power or strength except with God,” and “We can’t do a thing unless we put a knife to their throats! We’re willing to do it, we’d do anything for you.”

  She finally stood up when Mustafa entered. He must have heard about her visit when he was in the orchard and have come, not to see her, but to make peace with his father, who had rejected him publicly from the minaret of the local mosque. My grandmother had pinned her remaining hopes on her final visit to Mustafa’s father’s house; despite his frail build, his eyes gave off sparks. Your trees only seemed to bear fruit when he touched them and your soil only responded to him watering it; however, the folk song which his father had bawled out as a kind of oath of allegiance to my great-grandfather was the sole reason he was as pliable as dough in my 2 grandfather’s hands.

  My lord, O my lord

  You are the cow and I am the fly

  Consider me a fly under your tail

  I’m going to keep a close watch on the peasants

  Who see you as provider and protector