Beirut Blues Page 12

  “But you’ve got half brothers, so Naima told me,” interrupted Juhayna.

  “Three of them.”

  “Is it true that your mother stole Afaf’s shoes when she was staying with you in Beirut?”

  “What if she did?” answered my grandfather with a laugh. “I remember them. They were red and shiny.”

  Juhayna came towards us and pulled me away from him. “Come on, let her get dressed. Ruhiyya’s waiting for her.”

  My grandfather put his other arm around her and drew my face close to his again. “Take me with you to see Ruhiyya,” he begged. Then he asked me in a serious tone, “Please tell me, apart from you and your mother, have you ever seen anyone as beautiful as Juhayna?”

  I turned my face away. “Grandfather, you’re suffocating me.”

  “Let go of me,” shouted Juhayna. “Do you want me to bite you?”

  I was surprised at the way she talked to him, and had the sudden feeling that they were like two people of the same age. Old or young? I went into my room to change, overwhelmed with joy at being in the village and not in Beirut, and felt a rush of longing because I was going to see Ruhiyya. I went out into the hall and stared into the familiar old mirror. It was covered by a layer of dust and seemed to have abandoned its role. I couldn’t see myself properly. When I wiped it clean, gray semicircles remained like little birds here and there. In it I saw your calm reflection, looking as if you were still ours.

  My Dear Billie Holiday,

  I think about you once I am used to walking and can no longer hear my heavy breathing as I try to keep up with Juhayna.

  It could be that I haven’t walked as far as this for a long time. I watch my feet as they hit the ground.

  The war stopped us from walking with our arms swinging freely: instead we clutched them to our chests. We thought about whether what we were wearing would be suitable in the eyes of the passersby and the armed men; as well as the actual visible barricades, there were barricades in our minds which were far more powerful.

  I am feeling relaxed and happy. Nothing can touch me now, not the occupiers of our lands, nor my grandfather’s anguish. Your face appears, smiling at me, and I think about how you were no longer able to walk properly towards the end of your life. The drugs activated your mind and made it float and fly but left your body behind and made your legs useless. I no longer walked in Beirut; it wasn’t because the sidewalks were almost nonexistent, the streets all potholes and refuse, but a street should take you into a different atmosphere, to see different people, and the places where this was likely to happen nowadays could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Thinking about being able to walk doesn’t remind me of you now, but of Ruhiyya, because I’m going to visit her, and of what’s growing in front of me, behind me, to my right and to my left: the green cannabis plants whose pungent aroma fills the air. If you had used hashish, you would have ridden the horse and still been alive, but the horse of heroin controlled you instead and you stopped understanding where it was taking you.

  Cannabis and opium poppies grow on the plains in the sunshine as far as the eye can see and even at the sides of the road; green, scarlet, and white plants swaying gently, looking for all the world like tomatoes and beans. A hose winds over the earth and dry grass like a snake; an earthenware jug lies by the road next to a tin can. A dog begins to howl, and others join in. “That’s all we need,” snaps Juhayna impatiently. “Filthy mongrels watching everything we do.”

  She bends down and picks up a handful of stones and throws them at the dogs, swearing.

  We see some cows drowsing at the roadside, nice and calm, and Juhayna comments that they have developed a taste for cannabis.

  Again she bends down, picks up some stones, and throws them at the cattle. They merely stare at the horizon, moving their heads from side to side. “They’d have a job to stand up.”

  The smell of the cannabis had begun to have an effect on me. Juhayna laughed. “My little brother wrote in his essay on spring that it has a beautiful perfume and looks like a lovely carpet of green silk brocade.”

  It had started to grow everywhere in the village. Juhayna pointed out the house of an old woman who had died without realizing that her land had been planted with it right up to her front steps. “It isn’t like broad beans, bless its heart. Wherever you plant it, it springs up at once. My sister planted a seed and it had come through within a day. It’s like a ball bouncing up at you. It’s wicked stuff! It would even flourish on the coast.”

  I looked towards the horizon and the rocky hills stretching as far as the eye could see. They were almost bare of vegetation, and so was some of the agricultural land. I could make out a narrow track going up the mountainside. My grandfather used to point to it insisting that it was going to become a tram line and I believed him. As we walked I saw the peasants’ one-room houses, always white, whitewashed walls, with vine trellises at the side clinging to the window bars. At the entrance to one house was an American car parked next to a gigantic cannabis plant, as big as a tree. A woman standing with her husband asked about my mother and Beirut, and wanted to know if the people had electricity. When she withdrew her hand from mine and placed it on her chest, I saw that her fingers were blackened and dry. This was Umm Kamil, who had developed a passion for growing cannabis and was always regretting the past. “If only we’d found out about hashish long ago. We were crazy to grow zucchini and eggplant.”

  I smiled at Juhayna, wondering where she got her self-confidence from. She behaved as if I were no older than she was, apparently unimpressed by my family and my education, not to mention the way I dressed. Her confidence undermined my own. I must seem old to her; she thinks I’ve missed the boat, which means my family must have missed any number in her eyes.

  Inspired by my grandmother, who would get revenge by holding forth on any subject that occurred to her, I remarked, “It’s the dry weather that makes the opium and cannabis grow so well.”

  “As if the Almighty’s deep in the heart of them.”

  Her answer silenced me and I turned aside and picked a white poppy. I was surprised by the number of butterflies and bees on the flowers. To my astonishment Juhayna pounced on them and began picking more. “One flower! What’s one going to do for you? But watch out for your grandfather, for God’s sake. If he saw this, he’d eat you alive.”

  There seemed to be new villages on the horizon, and the paths had changed. I saw black patches on the earth and rocks. Juhayna noticed where my eyes were focusing. “That’s what the Palestinians left behind.”

  “What about the other parties?” I asked her.

  “They went to eat in people’s houses, or their families brought them food,” she answered, laughing.

  When we climbed up onto the plains, heading for the higher parts of the village, the colors sang out to us. Although Juhayna was still walking fast, I found myself slowing down, enjoying what I saw, even the Syrian tank with its soldiers drowsing on top of it. I wondered how yesterday I could have wanted to return to Beirut, instead of being grateful that I was far away from Hizbullah and Amal and could bathe in water warmed by the sun beating down on the pipes, and take deep breaths of fresh air.

  The moment I was in Ruhiyya’s arms, I saw your face smiling at me again. Since I first became addicted to you, you have reminded me of Ruhiyya. It’s not only your skin and teeth and your eyes with their permanently reproachful expression, but your personalities and voices. Both of you seem to have been created from deep in the earth. Cotton plants and thistles grow in your land; Ruhiyya’s is made of rocks and stones and red sand. You were nourished by sun and moisture, Ruhiyya by dry blazing heat, and both of you were shaped by the earth’s tumult and grief, by your longing for sweet rain and the light at the surface, and then you both discovered the reality there, loving men passionately from an early age. You heard the blues played again and again on records rising and falling and spinning like globes in circular seas, and Ruhiyya hears them from minarets and in the songs of
the Shia martyrs’ passion plays.

  Neither of you resorted to the pen, to writing your thoughts about your thoughts. Dealing with the surface and all that goes on there is hard, and instead you sing the reality you live.

  Sometimes your voice rises drowsily from your throat when every other part of you is asleep. And Ruhiyya’s voice? I won’t repeat myself. It’s the same as yours.

  Ruhiyya let out a welcoming trill of joy even before she opened her battered wooden door. She seized hold of my face, called me her beloved, light of her eyes, her beauty. I felt embarrassed at being the object of so much genuine affection and struggled to look at her. I saw her intelligent eyes, soft as if a transparent mist covered the surface of them, her deep brown skin, her thick lips, and then her teeth, which had changed dramatically. She turned to Juhayna: “What did I tell you? Didn’t I say that Asma’s different from anyone else in the world? There’s no one like her. People talk about her family, but she’s the one for me. Oh, Asma, my dearest. Why have you been away so long?”

  Apparently this effusive welcome made her want to smoke. From her pocket she took a small tin containing rolling papers and tobacco, rolled a cigarette, lit it, and inhaled deeply. “There’s nothing left but cigarettes. God’s taken everything away from me, but He’s left me them. Do you want one?”

  “No. A pomegranate,” I replied, laughing.

  Ruhiyya roared with laughter. Like you, she used to be beautiful, and now she no longer was. Her teeth were the color of tobacco and some of them were missing. Her lips were still full and brown, with a dark blue tattoo on the lower one like a Gypsy’s. Blowing out smoke, she asked me for news of Beirut, my grandmother, my mother, Fadila. But she changed tack when she realized I was reluctant to answer. “Never mind. Everyone’s fine. It’s tiring to talk. Everyone’s fine. If they’re not six feet under, they’re doing great. But where’s lover boy?”

  Before I could smile in response to her remark, she turned away to talk to Juhayna: “I knew when Asma came you’d keep quiet about what you’re up to. See how you’ve turned into her little pet dog.” She laughed loudly, gasping and coughing, the cigarette clamped firmly between her lips the whole time. “Never mind,” she managed to splutter out. “It’s natural for people to want a better life, to want to sip tea and eat cookies!”

  I didn’t understand immediately what she meant, although I sensed she was telling Juhayna off. But Juhayna was yelling back at her, and her tone of voice made me think there was more to it. Before I had time to take it all in she was at the door, accusing Ruhiyya of being crude.

  Seconds passed, and Ruhiyya seemed to regret upsetting Juhayna. “Where are you going, my beauty?” she said affectionately.

  When Juhayna showed no signs of coming back in, Ruhiyya got to her feet to go after her, with me behind her, but Juhayna hurried on out. “Come back in here,” called Ruhiyya. “Come on, let’s be friends. People like a joke every now and then, for heaven’s sake.”

  But Juhayna was gone. “She’ll come around after a while,” remarked Ruhiyya, closing the door.

  “It’s her and my grandfather, isn’t it?”

  Ruhiyya laughed. Her mouth looked enormous and all her teeth and the veins in her neck were visible.

  “You’re priceless. You smell things out like a dog, even from a distance. You knew what they were up to from the very beginning, you sly thing!”

  I was sweating all over and my heart was beating furiously. Ruhiyya talked so simply about my grandfather’s relationship with Juhayna, as if it were a reality. Maybe she wouldn’t have if she could have seen my grandmother as clearly as I could and pictured the effect this would have on her. I put the image out of my mind. I knew my grandfather better than Ruhiyya and Juhayna did. What was between him and Juhayna was nothing more than a bit of fun.

  Ruhiyya was trying to remember the last time we met. “It was ages ago. He started teasing you and I had a go at him and told him he was bothering you. Do you remember? I feel ashamed now. I was like a police agent. Or Atatürk.”

  I nodded my head. I knew at the time she was cross with her husband because she was jealous when he flirted and wanted to touch my hair.

  “I deserve to be punished! How cruel I was to him. And now I’m suffering for it.”

  She stood up suddenly, one hand high in the air. Waving it to left and right, she chanted,

  “We are widows and our sorrow’s deep inside

  We are widows and our sorrow’s deep inside.”

  The she stopped abruptly as if doing so cost her some effort. Wiping her face with the palm of her hand, she changed the subject. “What’s the nicest thing I can give you to drink, apart from my lifeblood?”

  I laughed, but she wailed, “Didn’t I shed my last drop of blood over him when he died? If it wasn’t for these cigarettes, I’d have been abstinent for months out of respect for him. I even took tablets so that I didn’t have periods and could fast constantly. But I can’t give up these damn things.”

  Looking at her cigarette, she stands up and goes over to the door and bolts it on the inside.

  “He knew he was dying. That’s what was driving me crazy. Every time he took one of his anti-drink pills, he’d say, ‘You’re killing me, you’re killing me,’ and his eyes bulged like a frog’s.”

  Taking her face in her hands, she wept.

  “It was his brother that upset me. He wouldn’t agree to have the funeral at his place. He said his son was at the university and people would give him the evil eye. What an awful mentality! We held it here. Some people sat in the garden and some stood out in the street. You just hope for the best. You know how people feel about death. Not about life, though. My mother was right. She always said, ‘Put your trust in God and your store cupboards.’ She meant your cupboards have things in them which are worth cash.”

  Ruhiyya’s husband was addicted to alcohol: arrack, beer, cognac, whiskey, then methylated spirit and cologne, anytime of the day or night. This addiction of his made her shut her mouth and draw her head in like a tortoise. She couldn’t bear being in a dark well, no longer performing her unbridled laments for anguished mourners, increasing and assuaging their suffering in equal measure. She didn’t think that she had a right to sing in the Passions of Hasan and Husayn, once everyone knew about her husband. Every year she used to re-create the tragedy of Husayn’s martyrdom in her sad, tremulous voice, recalling humanity’s eternal thirst, yearning to moisten the dry mouths. Her voice was the light in her life. She had discovered that she could do more with her mouth than eat and exchange trivial gossip, and that it distinguished her from all the other women. It was her genitals, her sex. And yet she had to curb it now, because she was no longer free to speak out and have her revenge. Thorns pricked her tongue every time she tried to sing.

  “God, it’s my fault! It was me who gave him a taste for drink. You know, I used to drink arrack secretly. From the time he found out that I’d turned him down because I was in love with my cousin, he went crazy. He no longer wanted to come near me. I said, ‘Have a glass of arrack.’ I thought it would make him high and relax his mind so that his body would get moving. Ah! There will never be anyone else like him. His mouth tasted sweeter than the sweetest fruit juice.”

  Then her face brightened again and she laughed at me: “I ought to keep my mouth shut. Why am I singing love songs to someone six feet under, when you’re right here in front of me?

  “Oh, Asma. Oh, Asmahan. Your name’s always on my lips

  I love you blindly, I pray my wishes will come true

  And I’ll see you here in a wedding dress

  Before the oil in the lamp runs out

  I want to ring the bells for you

  And fire a round of bullets in the sky

  In celebration.”

  Laughing in embarrassment, I tried to change the subject. “Have you planted hashish or opium?”

  Her mouth opened wide as a cave again. “Do you want some? It’ll be ready for you tomorrow.”

>   I had kept up my friendship with Ruhiyya in spite of the difference in our ages. It made my grandmother and Zemzem jealous and confused the local people. Whenever she visited me in Beirut, the whole village knew about it as she made different kinds of bread and cream cheese balls in oil, picked pomegranates, and practiced her new songs. I was always delighted to see her, took her with me to the university, the movies, the café, and made her spend the night with me rather than going to one of her relations; I even introduced her to Hayat and my university friends, and then to Naser in the war years. I had been attached to her since childhood, when I used to sit beside her while she did the washing, and wish I could stay there forever, watching her hands rubbing and squeezing the clothes in the big bowl as she sang. She talked to everything around her, including a passing lizard. Drinking coffee in preference to tea, she would sit beneath the pomegranate tree once she had sprayed the earth with water to cool us down.

  Year after year Ruhiyya kept me informed about her life; as a result, I found out unconsciously why I had been drawn to her when I was nine or ten years old. How did she work out that I was worthy of her trust and friendship when I was so young? How did she put up with my daily visits when she had so much to do, and her mother was still alive, being awkward and demanding? I had been fascinated by her since I watched her singing the Passion of Husayn at the feast of Ashura, in particular the part where she wept as she depicted Husayn’s thirst. I had tears in my eyes too; I really believed it was Ruhiyya herself who was thirsty and I wanted to fetch her a glass of water. The dust of Karbala which she sang about seemed to have settled on her lips and temples. I began to sob out loud. The girls of my own age sitting near me thought I had a fit of the giggles, as one of us usually did when we were squashed in with the older girls and women at the passion plays. To us these occasions were a night out, like a visit to the movies. We regarded the women, especially the old ones who wept and wailed, as comic characters, and would giggle hysterically, our faces buried in our hands. Most of the time there was a break in Ruhiyya’s voice, but she usually suppressed the tears and kept control of her vocal cords. Her sad image would not leave me and I decided to visit her the next day to prove to myself that she was a normal human being who did not spend her daily life on the verge of tears but sat eating fried eggplant off a wicker tray like everyone else. But I was right; she was not like the others: she hadn’t been putting on the sorrow. She was suffering. She had lived through painful experiences which had scarred her soul. When they found a husband for her, she was in love with her cousin and had tried to resist marriage in a song: