Beirut Blues Read online

  Oh, Mother, Mother! Look at my red and swollen eyes!

  How can you let me go?

  Who will grind the wheat for you and make you macaroni?

  “I don’t need anyone to grind the wheat, and I don’t like macaroni,” answered her mother. “The biggest favor you can do me is to go away and find yourself a husband. Then I can eat faraka made with the best meat.”

  “Tomorrow you’ll sigh and complain and only the walls will reply. It’s all over now. The mother raises the child and grows old and the daughter flies the nest,” chanted Ruhiyya.

  She tried to escape from her husband, hiding in the vineyards, behind the water cistern, in her uncle’s house, and she managed to evade him for a whole month. But one morning when she was going out, her mother and her uncle’s wife blocked her path and grabbed her by the hands and feet. Although Ruhiyya was strong, she did not put up much of a struggle, believing that her husband would never throw himself on top of her with her mother and aunt there, and so she waited calmly with them. When she saw him approach her like a hungry dog who had found a bone, she felt both curiosity and desire.

  “When he rode me, I didn’t know what had happened to me. I began to call out, ‘Get him off me. There’s a fire burning me.’ My mother and my aunt turned their faces to the wall, crying because they thought I would die from the pain of refusing him. They had got used to me shouting, ‘No. No. No. I don’t want to marry him. I don’t know why.’ Then I began to scream that I was being stung by a hornet.”

  I asked her what she meant by the hornet and the fire when she first told me the story. She had burst out laughing and laughed until the tears ran down her face. Then she clapped her hand to her mouth. “God! I ought to put pins in my mouth. You’re still a child and I’m corrupting you. The things I tell you! But we mustn’t tempt fate! I forget you’re still a child. I talk to you as if you were twenty.”

  In the end she was glad she had married him. She discovered that he liked her voice, her forceful tongue, the way she always argued, her sighing, her moods. He told her he preferred her smell of cigarettes to the smell of newly washed bodies or perfume, and admired her because she was the only woman in the village who dared to smoke in public. She didn’t automatically answer the door to everyone who came knocking; sometimes she claimed to be tired or under the weather, preferring to be alone with him and distract him from his work so that he would come and sit beside her. But he kept goading her to tell him why she had refused him at first, and she acted coy, lied, and avoided answering, until one day she came out with the truth—that she had been in love with her cousin in Beirut.

  When I visited her, she would smell me and say, “Please let me smell Beirut, the place, the people.” I asked her if she knew it and she sighed. “It’s where I lost my heart.”

  She had known the city since she went to her maternal aunt’s there to help with the housework in exchange for board and lodging, while she learned sewing with a seamstress who turned out to be more interested in making her peel garlic than teaching her a trade. She put up with it all because she had fallen in love with her cousin, who was aware of how badly his family was treating her and had whispered in her ear one day, “It’s a shame this body only wears clothes from the market and those lovely legs don’t have better quality shoes to set them off. You should use a toothbrush and toothpaste on those pearly white teeth instead of rubbing them with salt like my mother does.”

  To hide her emotion, and because he had pinpointed her weak spot, she burst into tears. “Where would I get the money to buy a toothbrush?” she wailed, striking her face.

  The next thing she knew he was holding out his handkerchief to her and saying very tenderly, “I’ll give you one. Never mind. Don’t cry.” Then, as if he regretted his tone or was scared of what it meant, he went on in a louder, harsher voice, “I’ll get you a toothbrush. That’s enough now. Stop crying.”

  He bought her a toothbrush, and a notebook and pencil; and he began teaching her how to tell the time, dial a telephone number, and other things.

  She was in love with her cousin, but she perceived as she studied the words he dictated to her that there were things keeping them apart: for example, the huge books he carried under his arm, whose pages he delved into at night. She took some of them with her one day when she was delivering her uncle’s lunch to him at work. Holding them in her lap on the streetcar, she felt different from all the other passengers. She was certain that these books, and his tennis racket, white tennis balls, thick white socks, and especially his white tennis shoes were what divided them. That same evening she told her aunt that she wanted to enroll at the state school near the house, and she could see herself coming home in her black school smock with the white collar on which she had embroidered a green cedar tree.

  But her aunt startled her by immediately broaching another topic: that of her return to her village. “Beirut’s a heap of ruins,” she began. “You know how to hold scissors and a needle, and there are men lining up to marry you back home.”

  Ruhiyya blocked her ears and carried on dreaming. She begged her aunt to enroll her in the government school and her aunt replied, “You’re seventeen years old and you’ll be doing the elementary certificate. How can you study with girls younger than you? The girls here are clever. They’ll laugh at you and say you’re old and stupid, the biggest moron they’ve ever seen.”

  Ruhiyya didn’t give up. She even thought her cousin would help her prepare for the certificate exam, but he was not consistent in teaching her or buying books for her. He was changing. There was no longer the same tenderness and he did not seize the opportunity to be alone with her when she told him his mother had gone off to visit a relative. He only showed up in the evening, when she’d been sitting there all day waiting for him, thinking thoughts that made her pulse race. Ridiculous thoughts crowded in on her and images flashed before her eyes. She saw herself stretched out in front of him with no clothes on, pulling him to her, taking him by force, and becoming pregnant by him. Then she saw the sheikh performing the marriage ceremony and herself sitting in their new home with a white telephone at her elbow.

  A few months later her aunt was reading her coffee cup. “The person you’re thinking about is going to marry his friend’s sister. I see a truck taking a Singer sewing machine to the village, and money in your pockets, and my sister buying meat and having faraka for dinner.”

  Ruhiyya simply shrugged her shoulders, pretending not to care, but she felt as if she was choking at the meaning implicit in her aunt’s words.

  “Why don’t you go to the village on Friday, and I’ll come too?” said her aunt.

  Ruhiyya began to cry and beg her aunt to convince her son that he should marry her. Her aunt sighed deeply. “There’s nothing I’d like better. You’re like a daughter to me, but force doesn’t work these days.”

  Ruhiyya did not know how another two years went by. She waited so long that time ceased to exist. She was waiting for him to look tenderly at her. She occupied herself with sewing and her aunt bought her a sewing machine and she made curtains and a cover for the radio and another for the television, chair covers, bedding for the family, underpants and shirts for her cousins. As she moved her foot up and down on the pedal, she sewed sentences in her head, all ending up in the same melody. Every time she sang it within earshot of the neighbors she heard them laughing and realized she had not stitched her words together well, especially the time she screamed them at the top of her voice:

  “I love you to death, my family

  Pray God to grant you success.

  But why did I forsake the ABC

  Just because of you

  My joints seize up whenever I remember

  How you did me wrong

  And all I have to say to you is

  May God forgive you.”

  Ruhiyya didn’t give up hope even when he finished his studies, graduated, and was engaged and then married to a Beirut girl. She danced at his wedding to the song “
Beat the Tambourines, Good People, Come,” and in her head she changed the words to “Beat my head with stones, good people, come.”

  All the same, she never stopped thinking up verses and songs, and when she recited them, she felt close to him and her sorrow increased, but afterwards it abated. She did not return to the village until he took up a highly paid post abroad and traveled away. For the first few months she talked about Beirut as if she knew it like the back of her hand, dressed smartly and wore high-heeled shoes, which got holes in them when she walked on the stony ground. The first thing she always looked for in the newspaper, which she still bought from time to time when she went down to the village square, was news of the country where her cousin was. She refused all the men who asked her to marry them. Most were schoolteachers in neighboring villages and one was a man from Beirut whom she had already met while she was living with her aunt. But she wanted someone like her cousin, or at least someone with the same kind of job. After a while people stopped asking her. Her voice took on a huskier note and she sang folk songs and laments, rolled cigarettes, coughed and hawked up phlegm like a man, didn’t care what people around her thought, and laughed and joked with people much younger than her. In particular there was her younger cousin Jawad, who discovered when he was an adolescent that his cousin Ruhiyya, who used to dress him in his school uniform and buckle his shoes for him, had made a lasting impression on him. He began coming to visit her in summer vacations and hanging around in her house with his friends.

  So her house swarmed with adolescents who were fascinated by her. She joked with them, criticized them, advised them, and sometimes found herself caressing their hair and singing to them.

  A firefly kept me company one night

  I thanked the Lord for sending it

  Even though it was bite-size

  At least it lit the darkness

  But when I got thirsty

  And had a drink

  Tarzan the firefly swung down

  And leapt into my mouth.

  Ruhiyya opens the wooden door into the garden and the light floods in, revealing her furniture, looking the same as ever. I follow her over the doorstep down into the hanging gardens, as she calls it, or alternatively “my little patch of earth,” in the middle of which is a single pomegranate tree with fruit growing right to the tips of its branches.

  “Food from God, Asma. You sit on the step and I’ll peel some for you.”

  She laughed and reached out her hand and rested it on my knee. “What’s going on, princess?”

  I answered like a polite schoolgirl. “Nothing. Everything’s fine.”

  “Come on! You can’t tell me you’re looking so nice for nothing!”

  Thoughts of Simon, the press photographer, even of Ricardo, went through my mind. I shrugged my shoulders. “Everyone asks but you. Marriage and all that stuff. But who wants to fall in love or get married? I work only one day in ten. So I oil my hair, wash it in chamomile, put zucchini ends on my face, coconut milk in the bath. That’s all.”

  She laughed. “I know you’re waiting for my cousin Jawad. Why don’t you go and visit him abroad? When he sees you he’ll go wild. I swear my name’s not Ruhiyya if I don’t get you two together.”

  I felt embarrassed. I knew how Ruhiyya’s mind worked, and she was looking at my breasts.

  We heard Juhayna shouting from the street. “What’s this? Danger? No entry?”

  We laughed at the way she expressed herself. Ruhiyya hurried delightedly to unlock the door. “It’s all right. It’s someone perfectly respectable.”

  Juhayna came in full of confidence, laughing too. “Of course it is. I came back for Asma’s sake. Come on, I want to take her for a walk. To show her the hairdresser’s and the café. She asked me about them this morning. Didn’t you, Asma?”

  Having left the hilly parts of the village behind us, we walked along down on the plain, the hot air striking us in the face. I liked the feel of it and wished we could have a long spell of hot dry weather. In place of the winding arid streets were villas, apartment houses, and big cars standing out in the sun. All that in the space of two years? The café-restaurant had a neon sign which probably flashed on and off at night. A delicious smell of grilled meat floated up our noses. Smoke drifted over the tables and chairs and hovered above a line of washing which was visible in one corner despite efforts to hide it with an arrangement of dried grasses and straw. I suggested to Juhayna that we should have lunch there. She hesitated, then said that most of the customers at this time of day were men; the girls came later on in the afternoon. We went on around the café towards the door and saw Samira grilling meat over the stove. She rushed to kiss us both, and urged us to eat with her in her house. When Juhayna indicated that I wanted to sit in the restaurant, Samira shook her head dismissively. “I couldn’t possibly let you,” she said.

  I tried to convince her that I had difficulty believing there was really a restaurant in the village at all and was curious to eat there to prove it to myself. She seemed to be the only person in the whole place apart from us, then we heard the sound of a car pulling up. “I hope that’s my husband,” she said. “I could do with some help.”

  But it was an enormous black Cadillac and Juhayna rushed out calling to the driver to give us a lift. Samira waved the smoke away from her face, smiling, and said Juhayna had been a good girl and taken care of my grandfather while we were away. “You came back yesterday, didn’t you? I really must go and say hello to your grandmother.”

  Juhayna rushed back in. “Come on. Shauqi’s going to give us a lift home.”

  Samira didn’t object; apparently she’d forgotten inviting us to eat, and I fancied a ride in this monstrosity of a car. I could hardly believe that girls had become bold enough to take lifts with men. When I was in my teens, ours had been the only private car around here, and then the family without a name had bought one. I stopped myself thinking like this; it brought it home to me that I’d truly left the village behind and become thoroughly immersed in life in Beirut.

  Shauqi opened the door for us, and I followed Juhayna into the car. I said hello to the round face brimming with sweaty well-being. The chaos which prevailed in the luxurious interior did not surprise me—plastic cartons, cigarette packs, a kaffiyeh—but the high-quality paintbrushes attracted my attention. I asked who the artist was, certain it couldn’t be the driver. Juhayna seized the packet of brushes and opened it. “God, does the martyrs’ painter really use a brush like this?”

  “Why? Do you expect him to use a broom?” Shauqi retorted.

  I laughed loudly. Pleased at my response, he repeated the joke. “What does she expect me to say? Do people normally paint with brooms?”

  His square, solid head shook with laughter.

  “Yes. Painter to the martyrs. He gets down and does these paintings as if he’s working the land. He goes from village to village. Comes back with these photos and starts painting any old how. He finally got lucky. He was never any good at anything. And now his paintings are hanging in every house.”

  It was his brother Abdullah who was the artist. He got to know the fighters in Hizbullah and Amal before they died, and painted them after their death. I expressed a desire to see these paintings, and Shauqi said I was more than welcome.

  “Now? In the heat of the day?” gasped Juhayna.

  “It’s not as if you’ll be outside,” he retorted. “We have air-conditioned rooms these days.”

  Then he inquired after my grandparents’ health. “God give the old man strength,” he added, making me tremble with rage. As if they were ill or frail! Suddenly I pictured them through the eyes of the villagers who used to come to the house to ask after their health or discuss work in the orchards, and then sit tongue-tied in their presence.

  This luxurious car and the gold key ring must make him think he was superior to me. But my anger vanished when I saw the “air-conditioned rooms,” whose furniture still amounted to no more than a few mattresses and cushions around the
walls. His mother was very welcoming, and couldn’t believe it was really Asmahan getting out of her son’s car and coming into her house so informally. She went into the other room and I heard her swearing by Imam Ali that I was here in their house. Three women and a man crowded into the room. I was shocked by the man’s appearance as he came up and shook my hand. I remembered him as the youth we used to call the elephant man. “You’re the most famous person in these parts,” teased Juhayna. “People are coming from Beirut to see you. Asmahan only arrived yesterday and she’s come rushing to look at your paintings, you sexy thing.”

  I was annoyed by Juhayna’s loud voice, and the way she tried to act as if she were in charge of me, but I acquiesced.

  “Just for you, then,” replied the artist.

  If I hadn’t been used to his facial tics and twitches, I would have thought he was making fun of us.

  His mother shouted that he should bring the martyrs into the living room rather than taking me to that garbage dump.

  The artist replied defensively that artists’ studios were always in a state of chaos and I should know that. He spoke with a pronounced stammer. I stood up encouragingly. “If we may?”

  “It’s the ladies that gi-gi-gi—”

  “Give the orders,” his mother finished for him as he led us into his studio.